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.