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Lenin in Zürich: Chapters
English, Russian (translation)
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1975
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About the author
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
284 books4,078 followersalso known as
Alexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)
Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)
Works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), of Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, exposed the brutality of the labor camp system.
This known Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian best helped to make the world aware of the forced Gulag.
Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn fathered of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksan...
Alexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)
Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)
Works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), of Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, exposed the brutality of the labor camp system.
This known Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian best helped to make the world aware of the forced Gulag.
Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn fathered of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksan...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews
February 5, 2012
19
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Lenin in Zurich originated as a spin off compilation of "knots" that formed the core of his final project, The Red Wheel, a series of books about the fall of the czar's regime and the rise of the Soviet State.
What are "knots"? They seem to be narrative focal points that Solzehenitsyn deemed critical to his historial/fictional style of writing, which he didn't willingly subjugate to the term "novel."
In this case, Solzhenitsyn had written some knots about Lenin, found himself an exile in Zurich, and decided he would expand the knots to form, more or less, a novel about Lenin's time in Zurich just before entering the famous closed train that returned him to the Russia and the revolution he ultimately dominated.
The book--let's call it that--is a psychological study of Lenin as a frustrated emigre revolutionary who had missed the action in the abortive Revolution of 1905 and finds himself holed up in Zurich, willfully keeping pace with his revolutionary monomania by writing, reading, and corresponding with other revolutionary socialists, ultimately to be known as communists.
Here's a taste of it: "His whole career, twenty-three years of uninterupted militant campaigning against political stupidity, vulgarity, opportunism, his whole grim life uner a constant hail of hatred, had brought him--what? Only isolation."
Sometimes the narrative moves along as an interior monologue, sometimes scenes are remembered, full of dialogue and scheming, sometimes Lenin allows himself a drop or two of nostalgia about losing touch with the woman he loved, Inessa Armand.
But what's really important about the book is the portrait of Lenin's relentless determination to expose soft revolutionaries (those who would not start with violence and emphasize violence in revolution above all other initial measures) and bring down the czar.
How does one survive decades of failed conferences, idiotic alliances, betrayals, theoretical debates, detailed research into the history of revolution, and so forth? Well, one has to be relatively iron-willed and not a little monomaniacal.
There's little evidence I know of that contradicts Solzhenitsyn's portrait of Lenin. He was a bully and a schemer who reminds me of the negotiating style of one Washington potentate I knew: you get your way in a negotiation by being the first to break it off...as soon as possible...and making the other party come back to you in astonishment, asking why you did that.
The almost unimaginable horror Lenin, followed by Stalin, unleashed on the Russian people, isn't really present in the book because it ends before he takes power, but there's no mistaking his belief in violence, his constant counsel and measuring stick. Are you willing to shoot, club, start fires, bomb, and create mayhem? If not, goodbye. If so, let's conspire together.
In a way it was an odd approach, given Lenin's basic nature as an intellectual, not a hunter, a fighter himself, or anything of the sort, but he had come to this conclusion intellectually, and it is a constant theme throughout Solzhenitsyn's book.
Of course Solzhenitsyn, who suffered under communism, must have hated Lenin, and yet with artistic fortitude and imagination, grounded in substantial research, he portrays the bald little man with the slits for eyes with compelling fidelity and in disturbing detail. This is something of a Shakespearian or Dostoevskian performance: the man you loathe is as interesting a literary subject to you as the man you love.
What "we literary types" and many "journalistic types," too, often lack is an appreciation for politics as endless, grubby, conversation-by-conversation, argument-by-argument, failure-by-failure work. Solzhenitsyn excels here in decompressing the refined image of Lenin at the barricades and letting us see his endlessly disciplined, boring, often fruitless efforts to get to those barricades. He does it by staying so close to this repugnant man, mastering his twisted relations with his fellow revolutionaries and rivals, and recreating an epoch that, until it occurred, seemed like it might never occur--that instead of the barbaric thing that became Soviet communism might have taken shape as some kind of parliamentary leftism, social democratic style.
I discovered the pleasures of writing about miserable rulers when I took on Herod the Great in my novel, The Man Clothed in Linen. True, some of them are beyond characterization in their banality (Hitler, curiously enough, was just such a personal nothing when lacking an audience; he was as much a mirror as a man) but the Herods, the Lenins, the Maos, and a host of other power-mongering demons give the writer something to rejoice in: contradictions, pathos, spleen, pride, and self-defeat. Power is coarsening, the lust for it is coarsening, but men and women who seek it often are riveting. That's the case in this book.
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Lenin in Zurich originated as a spin off compilation of "knots" that formed the core of his final project, The Red Wheel, a series of books about the fall of the czar's regime and the rise of the Soviet State.
What are "knots"? They seem to be narrative focal points that Solzehenitsyn deemed critical to his historial/fictional style of writing, which he didn't willingly subjugate to the term "novel."
In this case, Solzhenitsyn had written some knots about Lenin, found himself an exile in Zurich, and decided he would expand the knots to form, more or less, a novel about Lenin's time in Zurich just before entering the famous closed train that returned him to the Russia and the revolution he ultimately dominated.
The book--let's call it that--is a psychological study of Lenin as a frustrated emigre revolutionary who had missed the action in the abortive Revolution of 1905 and finds himself holed up in Zurich, willfully keeping pace with his revolutionary monomania by writing, reading, and corresponding with other revolutionary socialists, ultimately to be known as communists.
Here's a taste of it: "His whole career, twenty-three years of uninterupted militant campaigning against political stupidity, vulgarity, opportunism, his whole grim life uner a constant hail of hatred, had brought him--what? Only isolation."
Sometimes the narrative moves along as an interior monologue, sometimes scenes are remembered, full of dialogue and scheming, sometimes Lenin allows himself a drop or two of nostalgia about losing touch with the woman he loved, Inessa Armand.
But what's really important about the book is the portrait of Lenin's relentless determination to expose soft revolutionaries (those who would not start with violence and emphasize violence in revolution above all other initial measures) and bring down the czar.
How does one survive decades of failed conferences, idiotic alliances, betrayals, theoretical debates, detailed research into the history of revolution, and so forth? Well, one has to be relatively iron-willed and not a little monomaniacal.
There's little evidence I know of that contradicts Solzhenitsyn's portrait of Lenin. He was a bully and a schemer who reminds me of the negotiating style of one Washington potentate I knew: you get your way in a negotiation by being the first to break it off...as soon as possible...and making the other party come back to you in astonishment, asking why you did that.
The almost unimaginable horror Lenin, followed by Stalin, unleashed on the Russian people, isn't really present in the book because it ends before he takes power, but there's no mistaking his belief in violence, his constant counsel and measuring stick. Are you willing to shoot, club, start fires, bomb, and create mayhem? If not, goodbye. If so, let's conspire together.
In a way it was an odd approach, given Lenin's basic nature as an intellectual, not a hunter, a fighter himself, or anything of the sort, but he had come to this conclusion intellectually, and it is a constant theme throughout Solzhenitsyn's book.
Of course Solzhenitsyn, who suffered under communism, must have hated Lenin, and yet with artistic fortitude and imagination, grounded in substantial research, he portrays the bald little man with the slits for eyes with compelling fidelity and in disturbing detail. This is something of a Shakespearian or Dostoevskian performance: the man you loathe is as interesting a literary subject to you as the man you love.
What "we literary types" and many "journalistic types," too, often lack is an appreciation for politics as endless, grubby, conversation-by-conversation, argument-by-argument, failure-by-failure work. Solzhenitsyn excels here in decompressing the refined image of Lenin at the barricades and letting us see his endlessly disciplined, boring, often fruitless efforts to get to those barricades. He does it by staying so close to this repugnant man, mastering his twisted relations with his fellow revolutionaries and rivals, and recreating an epoch that, until it occurred, seemed like it might never occur--that instead of the barbaric thing that became Soviet communism might have taken shape as some kind of parliamentary leftism, social democratic style.
I discovered the pleasures of writing about miserable rulers when I took on Herod the Great in my novel, The Man Clothed in Linen. True, some of them are beyond characterization in their banality (Hitler, curiously enough, was just such a personal nothing when lacking an audience; he was as much a mirror as a man) but the Herods, the Lenins, the Maos, and a host of other power-mongering demons give the writer something to rejoice in: contradictions, pathos, spleen, pride, and self-defeat. Power is coarsening, the lust for it is coarsening, but men and women who seek it often are riveting. That's the case in this book.
November 19, 2021
I find this book really entertaining, and probably also for those who enjoy learning about Marxism and Soviet history. “Lenin in Zürich” is an extended work consisting of a few chapters from Solzhenitsyn’s “The Red Wheel” which chronicles the passing of Imperial Russia and the birth of the Soviet Union. I have yet to read the four books of “The Red Wheel” in their entirety, but the chapters included in this book paints an interesting depiction of the life of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov or better known to the world as Vladimir Lenin during the period of his exile in Zürich, Switzerland. And it should be noted here that Solzhenitsyn does not try to write a biography here, since the story in this book is a fictionalised account backed with archives and historical accounts from other books or materials.
Solzhenitsyn organises this book into three knots: Knot I from “August 1914” consisting of Chapter 22; Knot II from “October 1916” consisting of Chapter 38, 44-45, and 47-50; and Knot III from “March 1917” consisting of Chapter L-1 to L-3. The materials were written while Solzhenitsyn was still living in the Soviet Union, but he gained additional materials after his exile that finally made Lenin’s story possible to be written as a standalone book. It sounds befitting for Solzhenitsyn who was exiled by the Soviet government to write about Lenin who was exiled by the Tsarist government. The structure allows the information gap to bring improvisation from Solzhenitsyn in his writing, using the factual account as the basis for the story, while building emotions and tensions in the story by adding additional characterisations and literary devices to make it enjoyable as expected of Solzhenitsyn.
I think Solzhenitsyn’s intention while writing this book was not to make us sympathise fully with Lenin The Man, but rather to bring a more objective account of the eventualities that bring Lenin and the Bolsheviks who lived in exile to finally return triumphant in 1917. Solzhenitsyn brings realistic characters to Lenin, something which was probably unknown to most people living in the Soviet Union at that time, such as his brief affairs with fellow Bolshevik member Inessa Fyodorovna Armand which was born initially out of comradeship but turned to be vital to Lenin’s struggle as a socialist living in exile. His alienation and difficult dealings with Izrael Lazarevich Parvus are also described vividly here, along with the dark thoughts that plagued Lenin The Man with his alienation from the actual underground movement that he needed to conceal in order to retain his prestige among the Swiss and German socialists. Besides that, it also shows Lenin’s extreme thoughts without any sugarcoat, such as when he frequently addressed the need to arm the working classes and start a civil war even in Switzerland which at that time was a neutral country in the First World War.
Apart from the fact that much of what is written in this book is fiction, it’s interesting to see how Solzhenitsyn viewed Lenin The Man. As a work that retells the story of the birth of the Soviet Union, this is a rich depiction despite the fact that Solzhenitsyn faced limitations with the limited number of archives or books that he could access at that time and the turndown from the Soviet government. This book is complementary to be read with Doctor Zhivago which provides the story of the Russian Civil War in the background.
Solzhenitsyn organises this book into three knots: Knot I from “August 1914” consisting of Chapter 22; Knot II from “October 1916” consisting of Chapter 38, 44-45, and 47-50; and Knot III from “March 1917” consisting of Chapter L-1 to L-3. The materials were written while Solzhenitsyn was still living in the Soviet Union, but he gained additional materials after his exile that finally made Lenin’s story possible to be written as a standalone book. It sounds befitting for Solzhenitsyn who was exiled by the Soviet government to write about Lenin who was exiled by the Tsarist government. The structure allows the information gap to bring improvisation from Solzhenitsyn in his writing, using the factual account as the basis for the story, while building emotions and tensions in the story by adding additional characterisations and literary devices to make it enjoyable as expected of Solzhenitsyn.
I think Solzhenitsyn’s intention while writing this book was not to make us sympathise fully with Lenin The Man, but rather to bring a more objective account of the eventualities that bring Lenin and the Bolsheviks who lived in exile to finally return triumphant in 1917. Solzhenitsyn brings realistic characters to Lenin, something which was probably unknown to most people living in the Soviet Union at that time, such as his brief affairs with fellow Bolshevik member Inessa Fyodorovna Armand which was born initially out of comradeship but turned to be vital to Lenin’s struggle as a socialist living in exile. His alienation and difficult dealings with Izrael Lazarevich Parvus are also described vividly here, along with the dark thoughts that plagued Lenin The Man with his alienation from the actual underground movement that he needed to conceal in order to retain his prestige among the Swiss and German socialists. Besides that, it also shows Lenin’s extreme thoughts without any sugarcoat, such as when he frequently addressed the need to arm the working classes and start a civil war even in Switzerland which at that time was a neutral country in the First World War.
Apart from the fact that much of what is written in this book is fiction, it’s interesting to see how Solzhenitsyn viewed Lenin The Man. As a work that retells the story of the birth of the Soviet Union, this is a rich depiction despite the fact that Solzhenitsyn faced limitations with the limited number of archives or books that he could access at that time and the turndown from the Soviet government. This book is complementary to be read with Doctor Zhivago which provides the story of the Russian Civil War in the background.
June 30, 2019
Secondo volume del ciclo "La ruota rossa". Il personaggio principe è lui, Vladimir Il'ič Ul'janov, durante il suo esilio-soggiorno nella tranquilla, neutrale, borghesissima Zurigo negli anni 1916-17. Una vita piccolo borghese fatta di studio, letture giornali passeggiate in montagna, e discussioni politico-organizzative a non finire, arrabbiature, stroncature, scomuniche di dissidenti, odi, asti, veleni... e organizzazione, teorizzazione politica, lettere a non finire, istruzioni, ordini, stroncature, assistito con devozione dalla moglie-segretaria Nadežda Konstantinovna Krupskaja. Una mole di lavoro impressionante, un dispendio gigantesco di energia, volontà, intelligenza, per dirigere un partito rivoluzionario minuscolo, fatto di fedelissimi disciplinati, selezionati, devoti, votati alla causa rivoluzionaria e al culto del capo... costretto a girare a vuoto, a pestare acqua, inutilmente, in un susseguirsi di litigi, frazionamenti, cacciate. Finché, finché, attesa ma inaspettata, non ancora prevista ma portata dalle sconfitte russe e dai patimenti dei soldati russi, arriva Lei, la vergine amatissima e tanto sognata: la Rivoluzione. E con essa l'odioso, disprezzabile, equivoco ma genialissimo rivoluzionario Parvus (Izrail' Lazarevič Gel'fand), con le mani in pasta in ogni losco genere di affari, immanicato con lo stato maggiore di Ludendorff, e con lui il treno piombato tedesco e l'arrivo di Lenin nella Russia rivoluzionaria.
Grande romanzo e opera storica di ampio respiro e di tutto rispetto.
Grande romanzo e opera storica di ampio respiro e di tutto rispetto.
March 26, 2014
Solzhenitsyn's prose is the main reason that I gave this three stars. It's unfinished, but it still feels too chaotic. I've read unfinished books before (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, The Love of the Last Tycoon), but this one feels disorganized. I like the insight S. gives into Lenin as a person, his quirks, thoughts, fears, compulsions, and obsessions. The story itself jumps around. I couldn't tell if I was reading something happening "now" or something that had happened in the past of the book itself. It's interesting to get an inside view of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but I wish that it was a clearer view.
I can't really recommend this book, only because it doesn't feel like a book to me. It feels like a compilation of notes on a subject that the author wasn't really sure he wanted to write about.
I can't really recommend this book, only because it doesn't feel like a book to me. It feels like a compilation of notes on a subject that the author wasn't really sure he wanted to write about.
May 20, 2018
Upon finishing this novel from Solzhenitsyn's 'Red Wheel' cycle, I went and watched an address he gave at Harvard to the budding imperial bureaucrats of 1976, and it not only illuminated an aspect of the pathology present in his writing but revealed a surprisingly hardline, neo-conservative crank - overflowing with contradictions, bad-faith history, and a possibly cynical use of his role as favoured anticommunist mouthpiece of the 70s; yet also showed a man sincere and articulate in his spiritual philosophy (sort of late Tolstoy-as-puritanical warhawk). To an extent this highlights my stark ambivalence about the novel.
I have a lot of time for Solzhenitsyn's prose, even as he interpolates his nuanced and sensitive psychological study with obtusely dense historical nitty-gritty. This is of a piece with his take on Lenin - a man whose head is almost literally splitting from an internal whirlwind of ambitions, failures and constraints.
I was neither expecting nor hankering for a hagiography, but it becomes evident once you're into the woods here that Solzhenitsyn's M.O. is to expose Lenin as a pathetic hypocrite and malicious fraud.
Unfortunately, so delicate is his writing at times that he inadvertently begins to flesh out a sympathetic character with human frailty; and by the time we come to the damp-squib final chapter which counts on the reader's sense of myopic nationalism to generate outrage, well, the author has descended into petty asides that undermine the potential power of any deeper critique.
It's almost as if he was on his way there, but just couldn't help digging the knife in at inopportune moments. This is especially tragic as the scope of Solzhenitsyn's research and insight into the period is frequently impressive, if sometimes erring on the side of seemingly transcribing his notes.
The author of the seminal (and sometimes contested for its contextual emphasis) Gulag Archipelago was understandably always going to have profound opposition to post-revolutionary Russia, yet I expected Solzhenitsyn's overarching analysis of the pre-revolutionary, pre-Stalinist period to be far less conflated than this... And whenever there threatens to be something to the almost nihilistic cynicism concerning the chaotic, frequently ad hoc and vain machination of ideologues, Solzhenitsyn will do something frustrating, like go and dedicate most of a chapter to fawning over Alexander Parvus and his financial acumen (nonetheless a fascinating character I was glad to learn of).
I'm obviously coming at this with my own political principles. I am not an apologist for the intractible vagaries of history, nor even the Soviet Union's utterly mangled (and infinitely worthy of study) socialist experiment, but with this I had quite hoped for a Russian exile's nuanced take to abet my non-fiction reading. What transpires with Lenin in Zürich, though, is an at-times tantalisingly eloquent account by a writer whose bitterness undermines what part of him was clearly striving to execute.
Solzhenitsyn clearly has a superlative insight and understanding of the Russian Revolution. He just seems to have hated it and everything it stood for.
For all that, the book prodded me into deep reflection, and has some educational value: containing a fantastic glossary of names, events and obscure political organisations.
I have a lot of time for Solzhenitsyn's prose, even as he interpolates his nuanced and sensitive psychological study with obtusely dense historical nitty-gritty. This is of a piece with his take on Lenin - a man whose head is almost literally splitting from an internal whirlwind of ambitions, failures and constraints.
I was neither expecting nor hankering for a hagiography, but it becomes evident once you're into the woods here that Solzhenitsyn's M.O. is to expose Lenin as a pathetic hypocrite and malicious fraud.
Unfortunately, so delicate is his writing at times that he inadvertently begins to flesh out a sympathetic character with human frailty; and by the time we come to the damp-squib final chapter which counts on the reader's sense of myopic nationalism to generate outrage, well, the author has descended into petty asides that undermine the potential power of any deeper critique.
It's almost as if he was on his way there, but just couldn't help digging the knife in at inopportune moments. This is especially tragic as the scope of Solzhenitsyn's research and insight into the period is frequently impressive, if sometimes erring on the side of seemingly transcribing his notes.
The author of the seminal (and sometimes contested for its contextual emphasis) Gulag Archipelago was understandably always going to have profound opposition to post-revolutionary Russia, yet I expected Solzhenitsyn's overarching analysis of the pre-revolutionary, pre-Stalinist period to be far less conflated than this... And whenever there threatens to be something to the almost nihilistic cynicism concerning the chaotic, frequently ad hoc and vain machination of ideologues, Solzhenitsyn will do something frustrating, like go and dedicate most of a chapter to fawning over Alexander Parvus and his financial acumen (nonetheless a fascinating character I was glad to learn of).
I'm obviously coming at this with my own political principles. I am not an apologist for the intractible vagaries of history, nor even the Soviet Union's utterly mangled (and infinitely worthy of study) socialist experiment, but with this I had quite hoped for a Russian exile's nuanced take to abet my non-fiction reading. What transpires with Lenin in Zürich, though, is an at-times tantalisingly eloquent account by a writer whose bitterness undermines what part of him was clearly striving to execute.
Solzhenitsyn clearly has a superlative insight and understanding of the Russian Revolution. He just seems to have hated it and everything it stood for.
For all that, the book prodded me into deep reflection, and has some educational value: containing a fantastic glossary of names, events and obscure political organisations.
March 7, 2012
Originally published on my blog here in June 1998.
As the title suggests, Lenin in Zurich is Solzhenitsyn's novelisation of the time spent by Lenin in Switzerland during the First World War, before he returned to Russia in 1917 to begin the revolution. The book follows on from August 1914: The Red Wheel - I, to become part of a series examining the origins of the Soviet Union.
The major part of the novel comprises chapters from a longer work, which means that you start with chapter 22 and it is followed by chapter 49 - a little disconcerting. I'm a little surprised it was printed in this form, as it is quite a short novel (around a fifth of the length of August 1914). The missing chapters do not make you feel any lack of continuity except for the jumps in chapter numbers.
I didn't enjoy the book, and the main reason for this was that Solzhenitsyn is totally unwilling to concede that any of the originators of the revolution might have had a pleasant, non-hypocritical thought. He writes the character of Lenin himself in the first person, and most of the thoughts he ascribes to him are contemptuous of the masses, of the aristocrats and of the bourgeois. His driving urge is seen to be to increase his personal standing by breaking up any movement within the socialists which looks toward anyone other than himself. The other leaders - of whom Lenin is also contemptuous - are not portrayed in any better light. Surely at least some of these people must have believed in what they were doing; surely at least some of them must have felt that a revolution would help people?
I have felt that Solzhenitsyn's standards went down after he moved to the West - or before that, when his output became more documentary in style rather than novelistic. Nothing that I have read in his output matches One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward or The First Circle. He has allowed himself to be overcome by his bitterness, and a one-sided writing style results. (In the earlier books, the non-prisoners are just as much victims as the prisoners, and this makes everything work much better.)
As the title suggests, Lenin in Zurich is Solzhenitsyn's novelisation of the time spent by Lenin in Switzerland during the First World War, before he returned to Russia in 1917 to begin the revolution. The book follows on from August 1914: The Red Wheel - I, to become part of a series examining the origins of the Soviet Union.
The major part of the novel comprises chapters from a longer work, which means that you start with chapter 22 and it is followed by chapter 49 - a little disconcerting. I'm a little surprised it was printed in this form, as it is quite a short novel (around a fifth of the length of August 1914). The missing chapters do not make you feel any lack of continuity except for the jumps in chapter numbers.
I didn't enjoy the book, and the main reason for this was that Solzhenitsyn is totally unwilling to concede that any of the originators of the revolution might have had a pleasant, non-hypocritical thought. He writes the character of Lenin himself in the first person, and most of the thoughts he ascribes to him are contemptuous of the masses, of the aristocrats and of the bourgeois. His driving urge is seen to be to increase his personal standing by breaking up any movement within the socialists which looks toward anyone other than himself. The other leaders - of whom Lenin is also contemptuous - are not portrayed in any better light. Surely at least some of these people must have believed in what they were doing; surely at least some of them must have felt that a revolution would help people?
I have felt that Solzhenitsyn's standards went down after he moved to the West - or before that, when his output became more documentary in style rather than novelistic. Nothing that I have read in his output matches One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward or The First Circle. He has allowed himself to be overcome by his bitterness, and a one-sided writing style results. (In the earlier books, the non-prisoners are just as much victims as the prisoners, and this makes everything work much better.)
September 5, 2018
6 Aug. 2018 - I read this 40 years ago, but remember the thrust pretty clearly, since it was when I was driving back from DC to Chicago, the fuel pump solenoid on my Rabbit diesel broke on the freeway and I had to have it towed to a local VW dealer to be fixed, so I was stuck there for a couple days, with little to do. So I read the whole book in just a few days.
I found the book fascinating and very historically insightful about the character of Lenin, what he was doing in Zurich during WWI in preparation for the Russian Revolution. How he treated his wife, the few supporters and followers he had in the city, and how he worked with a sympathetic Russian businessman to get an agreement with the German government to provide a sealed train passage from Zurich across Germany to get to St. Petersburg to make the Bolshevik Revolution happen.
40 years is a long time to remember too many details, but what stuck is: if you have an interest in communism, Lenin, the Russian Revolution, or Solzhenitsyn, this book is highly recommended. Not all that long, and quite gripping history, though I have read reviews that say it is a fictionalized account.
I found the book fascinating and very historically insightful about the character of Lenin, what he was doing in Zurich during WWI in preparation for the Russian Revolution. How he treated his wife, the few supporters and followers he had in the city, and how he worked with a sympathetic Russian businessman to get an agreement with the German government to provide a sealed train passage from Zurich across Germany to get to St. Petersburg to make the Bolshevik Revolution happen.
40 years is a long time to remember too many details, but what stuck is: if you have an interest in communism, Lenin, the Russian Revolution, or Solzhenitsyn, this book is highly recommended. Not all that long, and quite gripping history, though I have read reviews that say it is a fictionalized account.
July 6, 2023
Enjoyable if you have a particular interest in this period of history, and Lenin's place in it.
January 6, 2020
This psychological development of an historical figure is a defining work that illustrates why the 'bildungsroman' is more apt in transmitting understanding than the typical biography. Having spent some time reading other material on the social setting of the Russian troubles, I found Solzhenitsyn's dramatization of Lenin's thoughts in Zurich a sort of 'screwtape letters' of the anarchist.
Definitively Russian literature, in the mode of Dostoyevsky in particular, this work further reveals Russian literature, like its musical counterpart, developing on the nineteenth century line rather than growing from a modernist seed as most of art in the west.
Lenin takes the case of the sentimentalist turned hard core pragmatist to its result in the mental life of one who takes on the call for action, determined to cause the next phase in universal revolution. Our hero is a megalomaniac to the point of eradication of himself, an idealist to the point of extreme cynicism, a social healer bearing poison. Paradoxes form the battleground of Lenin the revolutionary, exiled to Switzerland. In Zurich, Lenin has freedom of activity precisely because of the bourgeoisie tolerance of its economics and the neutrality of the state during the Great War. He hates both realities, finding them useless for the purposes of radical change, but fears leaving this womb because of the danger of his essential powerlessness in the face of the storms raging beyond the Swiss border. Lenin fulminates as he convinces himself that Switzerland is the ideal place for the rising of the proletariat, mistaking his hatred for immanence. He is a frustrated man who thinks himself a god.
Definitively Russian literature, in the mode of Dostoyevsky in particular, this work further reveals Russian literature, like its musical counterpart, developing on the nineteenth century line rather than growing from a modernist seed as most of art in the west.
Lenin takes the case of the sentimentalist turned hard core pragmatist to its result in the mental life of one who takes on the call for action, determined to cause the next phase in universal revolution. Our hero is a megalomaniac to the point of eradication of himself, an idealist to the point of extreme cynicism, a social healer bearing poison. Paradoxes form the battleground of Lenin the revolutionary, exiled to Switzerland. In Zurich, Lenin has freedom of activity precisely because of the bourgeoisie tolerance of its economics and the neutrality of the state during the Great War. He hates both realities, finding them useless for the purposes of radical change, but fears leaving this womb because of the danger of his essential powerlessness in the face of the storms raging beyond the Swiss border. Lenin fulminates as he convinces himself that Switzerland is the ideal place for the rising of the proletariat, mistaking his hatred for immanence. He is a frustrated man who thinks himself a god.
April 23, 2014
I read this as a follow-up to his August 1914, as it contains the missing (censored) Chapter 22.
Solzhenitsyn applies his in-depth studies of Lenin to give an insight into the thinking of the man, dramatized for us. Invaluable for those of us who know little of the incestuous world of revolutionary socialism.
Quote:
"Slyly, slit-eyed, Lenin watched Parvus erecting fences for his vanity, and was in no hurry to interrupt. This damned muddle over permanent revolution was another reason why he, Parvus and Trotsky had quarrelled. As though they riding behind each other on a merry-go-round, they had all at different times moved to this position, and as each of them emerged from its shadow he had insisted that the other two were wrong. The other two were always somewhere ahead or still far behind." p.130.
Solzhenitsyn applies his in-depth studies of Lenin to give an insight into the thinking of the man, dramatized for us. Invaluable for those of us who know little of the incestuous world of revolutionary socialism.
Quote:
"Slyly, slit-eyed, Lenin watched Parvus erecting fences for his vanity, and was in no hurry to interrupt. This damned muddle over permanent revolution was another reason why he, Parvus and Trotsky had quarrelled. As though they riding behind each other on a merry-go-round, they had all at different times moved to this position, and as each of them emerged from its shadow he had insisted that the other two were wrong. The other two were always somewhere ahead or still far behind." p.130.
August 11, 2022
Alexander Solzhenitsyn introduces Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the key character of his planned multi-volume chronicle of Russian revolutionary history, in his new novel, Lenin in Zurich. Solzhenitsyn explores and illuminates the important years 1914-17, drawing a gripping psychological portrait of the man who was the architect of the Revolution, with unrivaled knowledge of the events and individuals. From his arrest in Cracow and subsequent flight to Zurich at the outbreak of World War I to his departure for Russia in 1917 in a sealed train protected by the German government, Lenin in Zurich chronicles Lenin's frustrating exile in Switzerland, years in which he stood alone, without support from the deeply divided European socialist movement and isolated from his fellow revolutionaries. Solzhenitsyn investigates the private individual as well as the public figure.
June 22, 2016
I enjoyed this, although it was a bit disjointed and possibly a little biased (Though Solzhenitsyn is usually an immaculate researcher). Not a brilliant storyline but a fascinating insight into the life on one of the most important men of the 20th century.
July 29, 2024
Lenin w Zurychu siedzi głównie w bibliotece urządzonej w dawnym gotyckim kościele. Mili szwajcarscy bibliotekarze znoszą mu stosy literatury, potrzebnej mu do pisania kolejnych rozpraw wymierzonych w kapitalizm. Zrzyma się na pełne witryny sklepów, pomstuje na nic - jego zdaniem - nie rozumiejących miejscowych esdeków. Chodzi po górach. Wynajmuje kolejne skromne mieszkania. Spotyka się przy piwie z kilkoma zwolennikami. Zdrowie się sypie. Gdyby nie żona - Nadieżda Krupska - nie poradziłby sobie (ech, te żony poetów...). Aż go normalnie żal.
Ale Parvus działa (dlaczego nigdy wcześniej nie czytałem o tej absolutnie niezwykłej i kluczowej dla rewolucji postaci?! Izrael Łazariewicz Parvus, z Berezyny, potem Odessy - co za postać! Jeden z przywódców rewolucji 1905 w Rosji). Nawiązał stałą współpracę z niemieckim sztabem generalnym, pozyskuje od niego miliony marek na finansowanie rewolucyjnej roboty. We właściwym czasie jego praktyka i teoria Lenina połączą się. Ale o tym Sołżenicyn już nie napisał. Jego opowieść pisana w trzeciej osobie, ale przeważnie z perspektywy Lenina, urywa się, zanim pierwsza grupa rosyjskich rewolucjonistów wsiądzie do wagonu, który przewiezie ich przez Niemcy do Rosji.
Książka pasjonująca, kapitalnie napisana. Nie umiem przeprowadzić jej historycznej krytyki, ale literacka wizja Sołżenicyna (który podaje główne źródła historyczne, na których się oparł) do mnie przemawia potężnie.
Ale Parvus działa (dlaczego nigdy wcześniej nie czytałem o tej absolutnie niezwykłej i kluczowej dla rewolucji postaci?! Izrael Łazariewicz Parvus, z Berezyny, potem Odessy - co za postać! Jeden z przywódców rewolucji 1905 w Rosji). Nawiązał stałą współpracę z niemieckim sztabem generalnym, pozyskuje od niego miliony marek na finansowanie rewolucyjnej roboty. We właściwym czasie jego praktyka i teoria Lenina połączą się. Ale o tym Sołżenicyn już nie napisał. Jego opowieść pisana w trzeciej osobie, ale przeważnie z perspektywy Lenina, urywa się, zanim pierwsza grupa rosyjskich rewolucjonistów wsiądzie do wagonu, który przewiezie ich przez Niemcy do Rosji.
Książka pasjonująca, kapitalnie napisana. Nie umiem przeprowadzić jej historycznej krytyki, ale literacka wizja Sołżenicyna (który podaje główne źródła historyczne, na których się oparł) do mnie przemawia potężnie.
January 5, 2025
Dastardly dude does Zurich.
Alexander Helphand [Parvus] helps him.
Germany lets the train through.
Czarist Russia collapses.
Hell on earth ensues.
Alexander Helphand [Parvus] helps him.
Germany lets the train through.
Czarist Russia collapses.
Hell on earth ensues.
July 24, 2022
As much about the man as about the revolutionary. Surrounded only by petty-bourgeois Swiss socialists and a few useful idiots, you are left with an impression of the frustration and despair he must have felt in his years sequestered away in neutral, stifling Switzerland while war rages on around him in Europe. Despair, not because of the war, but because of the prospect that he would not manage to guide it towards the International Class war foretold by Marx. One gains a sense for the state of anxiety a professional revolutionary experiences on the day to day, and the restlessness with which he must approach his life and work. The winds of change only blow from the left. Lenin knew this and was committed to this inspite of doubts and despair, whether it involved giving speeches in front of thousands or rousing a few useful idiots in the Skittle Club.
Whether or not Lenin really had these thoughts, doubts and idiosyncrasies, we can't know. But Solzhenitsyn has a way of making you forget that we don't have a window into the inner workings of his mind. It dawns on you while reading, that this is moreso a work of historical fiction than a biography of the straight and narrow kind. The creative liberties he indulges in are paid back in full by a lively and human portrayal of a man of mythical proportions. All things considered, Solzhenitsyn makes it all seem like a rather plausible, if not downright convincing, intrusion into the mind of the revolutionary, and of the man.
Whether or not Lenin really had these thoughts, doubts and idiosyncrasies, we can't know. But Solzhenitsyn has a way of making you forget that we don't have a window into the inner workings of his mind. It dawns on you while reading, that this is moreso a work of historical fiction than a biography of the straight and narrow kind. The creative liberties he indulges in are paid back in full by a lively and human portrayal of a man of mythical proportions. All things considered, Solzhenitsyn makes it all seem like a rather plausible, if not downright convincing, intrusion into the mind of the revolutionary, and of the man.
Read
August 2, 2022I have been reading histories that are backgrounders for Putin's war in Ukraine. Have had this title on my shelf for 40 years and decided to re-read it. While Stalin has been denounced from the time of Khruschev, Lenin has still kept his iconic status in Russian communist myth. This book is truly a classic because it was written by Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel prize-winning dissident who exposed the gulags and for some years lived in the United States. The power of his writing is incontestable. Solzhenitsyn knows every detail about the rise of the Bolsheviks in his bones. In a stream of consciousness style, he captures Lenin's single-minded drive, his will and urgency. Lenin was born to make a revolution and never swerved from his goal. Because of his familiarity with all the other players who Lenin displaced, and the intricacies of the internecine politics amongst the would-be revolutionaries from the failed revolution of 1905, Solzhenitsyn weaves Lenin's strategic thinking into the hourly events during the pivotal years that Lenin was in Switzerland. Lenin always set himself apart, never wanted cheap peace during or after World I , kept his eyes on the prize. He is an antihero hero, resembling Dostoevsky's voice in "Notes from the Underground." In some ways, Putin has styled himself as a modern version of Lenin, hoping to be seen as the savior of the Russian idea as a Eurasian empire. No doubt Putin internalized Lenin's legacy and has spent his life trying to find a way back to those heady days of 1917 when boldness and force tore down the Tsarist Russia and unleashed the chaos, destruction and human suffering of Stalinist rule. Had Lenin lived, perhaps some of the violence, famine and terror might have been mitigated although Lenin always believed the ends could justify the means. A good companion to Masha Gessen's "The Man Without a Face," which is her biography of Putin. Not for the faint-hearted.
January 5, 2017
This was my first experience reading literature by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I recommend it as a sampler because it is focused and brief--a monologue inside the head of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) during his Zurich years. Solzhenitsyn based his narrative on extensive research into Lenin's writings from the Zurich period, research of other historic records, and his deep understanding of communism's political philosophy. Solzhenitsyn admits to a certain amount of his own character coloring the Lenin he portrays.
While the book is focused and brief, as many readers have commented, it is not all that CLEAR. Without a background on Solzhenitsyn's other books and on the characters and history of the period, it is not possible to follow all the dialogue. And there is no index. I recommend creating one as you progress through the book. Use the end sheets or add a sheet to the book where you enter new names as encountered, and add pertinent page numbers for reference. Google new characters to get some context for their role in history.
On the other hand, this book will stick with you in a way that historical accounts based on events will not. You see how rag-tag networks of dedicated anarchists can use agitation, organization, propaganda and opportunism to weaken and destroy civil order. Anarchists are a major threat to civil society. Marx and Lenin looked like harmless academics. Both spent most of their lives IN THE LIBRARY; but they inspired Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro ...the list goes on. Civil institutions, however flawed, must be conserved. Society must defend the ideas and ideals that undergird its flawed institutions. Otherwise, radical revolutionaries are poised to destroy without mercy.
While the book is focused and brief, as many readers have commented, it is not all that CLEAR. Without a background on Solzhenitsyn's other books and on the characters and history of the period, it is not possible to follow all the dialogue. And there is no index. I recommend creating one as you progress through the book. Use the end sheets or add a sheet to the book where you enter new names as encountered, and add pertinent page numbers for reference. Google new characters to get some context for their role in history.
On the other hand, this book will stick with you in a way that historical accounts based on events will not. You see how rag-tag networks of dedicated anarchists can use agitation, organization, propaganda and opportunism to weaken and destroy civil order. Anarchists are a major threat to civil society. Marx and Lenin looked like harmless academics. Both spent most of their lives IN THE LIBRARY; but they inspired Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro ...the list goes on. Civil institutions, however flawed, must be conserved. Society must defend the ideas and ideals that undergird its flawed institutions. Otherwise, radical revolutionaries are poised to destroy without mercy.
February 11, 2022
As the title says, the book is about Lenin as an exile in Zurich. He misses the aborted 1905 Revolution but makes it to the 1917 Great October Revolution and the birth of the USSR with him at the helm.
Lenin is followed by Stalin who presides over a reign of terror in the USSR and causes a lot of harm to the country.
This is my second Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn after the Gulag Archipelago.
Lenin is followed by Stalin who presides over a reign of terror in the USSR and causes a lot of harm to the country.
This is my second Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn after the Gulag Archipelago.
February 7, 2012
For me, the attraction of Solzhenitsyn's work isn't necessarily the craft of his storytelling so much as the stories he tells, and surely the story of a revolutionary leader in the dark days leading up to a cataclysmic historical event is a story worth telling. That the retelling of Lenin's time in Zurich is inextricably bound up in Solzhenitsyn's own life story adds extra layers of complexity to the narrative. The presentation of Lenin's interior monologues, while certainly based on a wealth of material, cannot be separated from the political views of the author, and that surely adds to the unflattering portrait.
And yet that portrait rings true, especially to a reader who's spent any time in with contemporary leftists. The self-absorption, despair, arrogance, and refusal to act for esoteric reasons of theory ring all too true. You leave this book with the impression that, had the historical die been cast a slightly different way, Lenin would be no different than the grumbling anarchists I took bonghits with a decade ago. It's a humanizing portrait of Lenin, but one which informs how his cult was established.
And yet that portrait rings true, especially to a reader who's spent any time in with contemporary leftists. The self-absorption, despair, arrogance, and refusal to act for esoteric reasons of theory ring all too true. You leave this book with the impression that, had the historical die been cast a slightly different way, Lenin would be no different than the grumbling anarchists I took bonghits with a decade ago. It's a humanizing portrait of Lenin, but one which informs how his cult was established.
May 17, 2012
Fantastic Read! I want to read all historical Fiction books because of this book, providing some motivations for historical characters turned into normal people
April 10, 2016
Get some context. Once that is done, it is an exciting read about Lenin's last years before returning to Russia and starting the communist Soviet Union experiment.
December 8, 2025
This book is Solzhenitsyn at his most dangerous: a novelist stripping the varnish from one of the twentieth century’s most mythologized figures and revealing the human machinery—cold, obsessive, and astonishingly small—that drove a revolution.
This is not a conventional historical portrait. It is a psychological vivisection, executed with the precision of someone who has spent his life analyzing the moral physics of tyranny.
Solzhenitsyn is not interested in Lenin the icon, Lenin the statue, Lenin the ideological north star; he is interested in Lenin the mind—restless, brittle, calculating, perpetually aggrieved.
Zürich becomes the perfect stage for this anatomy. The city, quiet and orderly, functions almost like a giant terrarium in which Lenin is observed pacing, plotting, rehearsing the intellectual acrobatics that will someday birth a political earthquake.
The contrast is almost comic: a man preparing for global upheaval while living in boarding houses, scribbling in notebooks, and fretting over the smallest ideological impurities.
Solzhenitsyn delights in this dissonance. He shows how revolutionary fervour often grows not from grandeur but from claustrophobic rooms, resentment-fed certainties, and fierce loyalty to abstractions that can never love you back.
What makes the book so gripping is its deep psychological layering.
Solzhenitsyn presents Lenin as a man powered by a peculiar combination of ascetic discipline and emotional volatility.
His intellectual rigor is undeniable, but so is the fragility beneath it—the fear of irrelevance, the paranoia about rivals, the near-religious belief that history can be forced into compliance through sheer ideological will.
Solzhenitsyn’s Lenin is not a tragic figure; he is a dangerous one precisely because he mistakes his own obsessions for universal truths.
Stylistically, the work hovers between biography, novel, and internal monologue. Solzhenitsyn weaves in fragments of documentary material, yet the prose is suffused with a novelist’s intuition.
The result is a kind of historical x-ray: the bones of fact illuminated by the light of interpretation. Dialogue crackles with ideological tension, while Lenin’s interior reflections reveal a man perpetually calibrating himself against the imagined expectations of history.
Solzhenitsyn captures the claustrophobia of a mind that cannot stop thinking, cannot stop sharpening itself, cannot stop erasing everything that does not fit into its increasingly severe geometry.
One of the book’s most unsettling achievements is how it reframes the origins of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Instead of portraying it as the inevitable culmination of social forces, Solzhenitsyn highlights the extent to which history can be warped by individuals who possess an almost pathological confidence.
Lenin’s Zürich years become a case study in how revolutions are sometimes incubated in isolation, by people whose detachment from ordinary life frees them to imagine remaking the world entirely.
By the time the book ends, the reader is left with a chilling recognition: the future of millions once lay in the hands of a man who saw human beings not as ends in themselves but as tools, obstacles, or variables.
Solzhenitsyn does not preach this; he reveals it through texture, tone, and the relentless intimacy of psychological scrutiny.
Lenin in Zürich is not simply a portrait—it is a warning.
Most recommended.
This is not a conventional historical portrait. It is a psychological vivisection, executed with the precision of someone who has spent his life analyzing the moral physics of tyranny.
Solzhenitsyn is not interested in Lenin the icon, Lenin the statue, Lenin the ideological north star; he is interested in Lenin the mind—restless, brittle, calculating, perpetually aggrieved.
Zürich becomes the perfect stage for this anatomy. The city, quiet and orderly, functions almost like a giant terrarium in which Lenin is observed pacing, plotting, rehearsing the intellectual acrobatics that will someday birth a political earthquake.
The contrast is almost comic: a man preparing for global upheaval while living in boarding houses, scribbling in notebooks, and fretting over the smallest ideological impurities.
Solzhenitsyn delights in this dissonance. He shows how revolutionary fervour often grows not from grandeur but from claustrophobic rooms, resentment-fed certainties, and fierce loyalty to abstractions that can never love you back.
What makes the book so gripping is its deep psychological layering.
Solzhenitsyn presents Lenin as a man powered by a peculiar combination of ascetic discipline and emotional volatility.
His intellectual rigor is undeniable, but so is the fragility beneath it—the fear of irrelevance, the paranoia about rivals, the near-religious belief that history can be forced into compliance through sheer ideological will.
Solzhenitsyn’s Lenin is not a tragic figure; he is a dangerous one precisely because he mistakes his own obsessions for universal truths.
Stylistically, the work hovers between biography, novel, and internal monologue. Solzhenitsyn weaves in fragments of documentary material, yet the prose is suffused with a novelist’s intuition.
The result is a kind of historical x-ray: the bones of fact illuminated by the light of interpretation. Dialogue crackles with ideological tension, while Lenin’s interior reflections reveal a man perpetually calibrating himself against the imagined expectations of history.
Solzhenitsyn captures the claustrophobia of a mind that cannot stop thinking, cannot stop sharpening itself, cannot stop erasing everything that does not fit into its increasingly severe geometry.
One of the book’s most unsettling achievements is how it reframes the origins of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Instead of portraying it as the inevitable culmination of social forces, Solzhenitsyn highlights the extent to which history can be warped by individuals who possess an almost pathological confidence.
Lenin’s Zürich years become a case study in how revolutions are sometimes incubated in isolation, by people whose detachment from ordinary life frees them to imagine remaking the world entirely.
By the time the book ends, the reader is left with a chilling recognition: the future of millions once lay in the hands of a man who saw human beings not as ends in themselves but as tools, obstacles, or variables.
Solzhenitsyn does not preach this; he reveals it through texture, tone, and the relentless intimacy of psychological scrutiny.
Lenin in Zürich is not simply a portrait—it is a warning.
Most recommended.
August 28, 2018
I was reading Catherine Merridale's "Lenin on the Train" which chronicles the start of the Russian revolution and the machinations which led to Lenin's return through Germany to oversee the budding uprising; and I remembered that I had purchased this at a book sale so I put down the other and started reading this. I was kind of surprised that Merridale didn't use this in her footnotes but I don't know what sources Solzhenitsyn used to gather data for this and maybe the later work used the same.
I had read a negative review of the book here stating that Lenin was portrayed overly negatively. First of all, since this is the man that set things in motion that set up the government that ultimately imprisoned Solzhenitsyn over non crimes, that's kind of understandable. But maybe that's how Lenin was. He doesn't seem markedly different from the portrayal in Merridale's book. There are some quotes near the end that state that Lenin was perfectly ready to have a reign of terror for however long it took to gain power. So yes, I can see why some people claim Lenin is overly portrayed as a really humane guy compared to Stalin, who was there at the onset of all of this and is frequently mentioned by his nickname of Koba.
This was an informative read. It could have been narrated more smoothly (or translated more fluidly) to have gotten five stars but this was still a positive experience and it accomplished what I wanted.
I had read a negative review of the book here stating that Lenin was portrayed overly negatively. First of all, since this is the man that set things in motion that set up the government that ultimately imprisoned Solzhenitsyn over non crimes, that's kind of understandable. But maybe that's how Lenin was. He doesn't seem markedly different from the portrayal in Merridale's book. There are some quotes near the end that state that Lenin was perfectly ready to have a reign of terror for however long it took to gain power. So yes, I can see why some people claim Lenin is overly portrayed as a really humane guy compared to Stalin, who was there at the onset of all of this and is frequently mentioned by his nickname of Koba.
This was an informative read. It could have been narrated more smoothly (or translated more fluidly) to have gotten five stars but this was still a positive experience and it accomplished what I wanted.
July 26, 2021
Lenin decided that he would order the flowers himself...
At times, I was unsure whether I was reading a history of Lenin in exile or an alternative telling of Mrs Dalloway. Rambling to the point of wittering, this disjointed narrative and internal monologue is by turns enthralling and frustrating.
As a history book, it's a bit like trying to type in mittens. There are hardly any dates or solid facts. As a moment in time, with a rich sense of place and personality, it's indispensable. For me, it was a lucky find. I was actually looking for a book about Lenin's time in Switzerland as part of my research on the Dada movement. This book just happened to be on the shelves in the second hand store.
Not sure if this was just down to the translation, but it was often difficult to tell who was being written about. Lots of use of "he" in sentences that referred to more than one person. It was often only a couple of paragraphs in that I realised the author was talking about somebody who had been mentioned in passing a few moments ago. It's this failing more than anything that made this a difficult book to enjoy.
Of course, Lenin would never have ordered the flowers himself. He would have got somebody else to ask a third party to order them for him, and denied any knowledge if they weren't gratefully received.
At times, I was unsure whether I was reading a history of Lenin in exile or an alternative telling of Mrs Dalloway. Rambling to the point of wittering, this disjointed narrative and internal monologue is by turns enthralling and frustrating.
As a history book, it's a bit like trying to type in mittens. There are hardly any dates or solid facts. As a moment in time, with a rich sense of place and personality, it's indispensable. For me, it was a lucky find. I was actually looking for a book about Lenin's time in Switzerland as part of my research on the Dada movement. This book just happened to be on the shelves in the second hand store.
Not sure if this was just down to the translation, but it was often difficult to tell who was being written about. Lots of use of "he" in sentences that referred to more than one person. It was often only a couple of paragraphs in that I realised the author was talking about somebody who had been mentioned in passing a few moments ago. It's this failing more than anything that made this a difficult book to enjoy.
Of course, Lenin would never have ordered the flowers himself. He would have got somebody else to ask a third party to order them for him, and denied any knowledge if they weren't gratefully received.
August 15, 2025
I first read this book nearly half a century ago, when it was published in English. At the time, I remember not liking it very much — and I had loved pretty much everything else Solzhenitsyn had written up until that time, including the three volumes of the Gulag Archipelago. After my first visit to Zurich recently, I thought I’d give it another go. I still don’t like it. This novel, which is made up a fragments of what the great Russian author thought Lenin was thinking during his final year of exile before returning to lead the Bolshevik coup d’etat in 1917, doesn’t ring true. Regardless of what one thinks about the Bolshevik leader — and I am not his biggest fan — this Lenin seems to think only in slogans, many of the sentences ending in exclamation marks. He has no friends, is nasty to his wife, insanely jealous of his lover, and burns with hatred for Russia. Not just the tsarist regime, but Russia itself. Solzhenitsyn’s characterisation of the Russo-German Marxist theoretician known as Parvus was widely seen, at the time, as being antisemitic. Reading the book now, I’m not sure about that. But I do think that this book did little to enhance Solzhenitsyn’s reputation as what it demonstrated was how much he disliked Lenin — and how little he understood his thinking.
April 8, 2018
3.5 out of 5 stars. The story of Lenin’s time as an exile in Zurich before the Russian revolution. I enjoyed the author’s writing style and his insights into Lenin’s psyche - a bizarre mix of egotism, compulsiveness, intelligence, madness, insecurity, and sentimentality. I also appreciated the inclusion of a glossary of names with brief biographies of the other players involved in the revolution, which was a helpful tool that highlighted connections and provided context. The book, however, is an abbreviated version of a multi-volume story and can, therefore, seem disjointed at times and cause confusion if the reader does not already possess some historical background on Russia and the socialist movement. Not a story I will soon forget, though, as it not only serves as a cautionary tale about how such groups can take power, but also illustrates that without Parvus’s backing or the combined efforts of countless others, Lenin would have just been another academic or pamphlet-pusher and not the founder and leader he is understood to have been. Good use of imagery and quite interesting.
January 16, 2023
It's quite confusing at first, as it assumes the reader is familiar with the Russian revolution and geography: the novel jumps between timelines, characters, and locations. Prevail; you'll get used to it. It has a very dark humor at times. Like Lenin suggesting that he's glad that he's now living in Switzerland because he'll have access to better doctors and hopefully outlive his rivals stuck with Russian doctors.
Solzhenitsyn holds no punches. Shows Lenin as I actually imagined him: radical, ends justify the means, with little tolerance for even slight ideological deviations, leading a very ascetic life and despising any form of luxury as dictated by his principles, yearning for an unusual romance and muse, sapiosexual in a way, with no idea on how to jump to actual physical actions, remaining cozy behind his desk reading and writing. You can actually hear Lenin screaming at everyone, snubbing everybody as an idiot. Got it for 50 cents (I think) in an estate sale.
Solzhenitsyn holds no punches. Shows Lenin as I actually imagined him: radical, ends justify the means, with little tolerance for even slight ideological deviations, leading a very ascetic life and despising any form of luxury as dictated by his principles, yearning for an unusual romance and muse, sapiosexual in a way, with no idea on how to jump to actual physical actions, remaining cozy behind his desk reading and writing. You can actually hear Lenin screaming at everyone, snubbing everybody as an idiot. Got it for 50 cents (I think) in an estate sale.
April 12, 2020
I don't think this was written as a novel but is instead a set of chapters originally written for Solzhenitsyn's other novels documenting the run up to the Russian revolution. So because of that it doesn't feel like a complete book. However it is, like everything else that I have read by Solzhenitsyn very thought provoking. It tells the story of Lenin's time in Zurich in the years leading up to the revolution and how the German government conspired to fund he and his co-conspirators in order to distract and ultimately overthrow the Russian government at a time when the German military was bogged down on the eastern front. Also this book describes in detail the socialist playbook of how to win power, as relevant today as it was a hundred years ago. Use revolution, subterfuge and coercion instead of persuasion to get their hands on the levers of power.
April 9, 2020
This is a tough one. The writing is great, the research no doubt exhaustive. But let's address the obvious: you're not reading this unless you are a pretty serious russophile.
It's a good enough read to blow through without worrying about all the names and making it a homework assignment in Russian Revolution History 201. But it does raise a few questions. Does the author revere Lenin? Does the author despise Lenin? Am I supposed to be impressed or revolted by how manipulative and obsessive the revolutionary mindset would seem to be? (For me, personally, it was the latter.)
Ultimately, it's... good? But there are many other reads that should rank higher on your list.
It's a good enough read to blow through without worrying about all the names and making it a homework assignment in Russian Revolution History 201. But it does raise a few questions. Does the author revere Lenin? Does the author despise Lenin? Am I supposed to be impressed or revolted by how manipulative and obsessive the revolutionary mindset would seem to be? (For me, personally, it was the latter.)
Ultimately, it's... good? But there are many other reads that should rank higher on your list.
July 7, 2018
I came across this book while reading another work by the same author entitled August 1914 in which there is a chapter missing namely chapter 22. And a little research revealed that this missing chapter resided in Lenin in Zürich.
And so continuing in the same vein as August 1914, Lenin in Zürich is an interesting blend of researched historical record and historical fiction.
The book provides a view of what Lenin was like as a man and also a flavour of the ferment of the revolution in Russia especially as seen from the perspective of exile in Switzerland.
And so continuing in the same vein as August 1914, Lenin in Zürich is an interesting blend of researched historical record and historical fiction.
The book provides a view of what Lenin was like as a man and also a flavour of the ferment of the revolution in Russia especially as seen from the perspective of exile in Switzerland.
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