As Solzhenitsyn also observed, most Westerners making this charge had not even read the offending passages, since the novel had not yet been translated. When The Washington Post, which had published these accusations, commissioned John Glad to translate the passages suspected of being anti-Semitic, it “was obliged to mention that he had ‘found no grounds for accusing [Solzhenitsyn] of anti-Semitism.’” Still more telling, when a translation of the expanded August 1914 finally appeared, the accusers fell silent: “All those critics seemed, in an instant, to have lost their memory.”
Despite its relentless focus on political events, The Red Wheel paradoxically instructs that politics is not the most important thing in life. To the contrary, the main cause of political horror is the overvaluing of politics itself. It is supremely dangerous to presume that if only the right social system could be established, life’s fundamental problems would be resolved. Like the great realist novelists of the nineteenth century, Solzhenitsyn believed that, as he stated in Rebuilding Russia,
“political activity is by no means the principal mode of human life…. The more energetic the political activity in a country, the greater is the loss to spiritual life. Politics must not swallow up all of a people’s spiritual and creative energies. Beyond upholding its rights, mankind must defend its soul.“
In Between Two Millstones he repeated: “Political life is not life’s most important aspect…a pure atmosphere in society cannot be created by any juridical legislation, but by moral cleansing.” Commenting on The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn explains that “no matter what depths of evil the narrative has plumbed, this must not be allowed to warp the soul of either author or reader—you must arrive at a harmonious contemplation.”
The central passage of March 1917 concerns not a historical figure’s political ruminations but the fictional Varsonofiev’s assessment of his life, with all its irretrievable mistakes and erroneous judgments that seemed so right at the time. Remembering his fervent hopes for revolution and the republic that would make life sublime, Varsonofiev now asks rhetorically:
“What could the daily political fever change for the better in the true life of men? What kind of principles could it offer that would bring us out of our emotional sufferings, our emotional evil? Was the essence of our life really political?… How could you remake the world if you couldn’t figure out your own soul?“