Abstract
The paper considers a fictive-religious actant of General Samsonov, one of the main characters in August 1914, Knot I of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic The Red Wheel. It examines the convergence between the cultural consciousness of the general, as manifested in the last days of his life, and that of his peasant troops. Formative to both, as this analysis demonstrates, are patterns of profoundly archaic thought which were typical at the time for the majority of the Russian population, with fateful consequences for the nation’s fate. Special attention is paid to the concluding scene in the Samsonov chapters, where the general takes his own life. This episode is interpreted as a depiction of an ethically exalted “justified suicide”, a rare but religiously licit act within the Orthodox tradition. The paper also explores the conceptual tensions underpinning Solzhenitsyn’s employment of archaic and innovative forms in the epic, and the roots of this intellectual conflict in his consciousness.
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