To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York Review Books Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Overrated 'great man history', fun, not useful for activists
Review: As a reader looking for insight into the nature of revolutionary struggle this widely-touted book was disappointing. The interlaced series of biographical sketches of communist and socialist figures of the late 19th and early 20th century are engaging, thoroughly researched, and well-written, but often border on caricature. Lenin is painted as a saint, and the anarchists are given short shrift, represented only by a sketch of Bakunin as a vicious nihilist. Wilson gives voice in analyzing his characters to form of ethnic essentialism that is now discredited, starting more than a few sentences with phrases like "Only a Jew...".

The actual details of organizing, strategy, tactics, mistakes, and successes that went into the uprisings of 1848, 1871, 1905, and 1918 are ignored in favor of intellectual history and personal/family anecdotes of the figures involved, which, though understandable given that the writer relies on published writings and personal correspondence to construct his narrative, isn't particulary useful. Marx's labor theory of value, which is to my mind perhaps his most powerful insight, is hastily dismissed by the author, and Wilson's brief attempt to paint America as a virtually classless society seems like naive apologia given the rapidly increasing inequality of wealth in our society.

The first couple chapters, a historiographical analysis of French writers, is boring-- I recommend that those interested start with part 2 of the book.

Rating:
Summary: The history of the revolutionary dream.
Review: I had decided to read TTFS because so many other books that I have read cited it as a good book to read. I have to admit with some shame that I had very little sense what it was about when I picked it up and began. Wilson starts in on Michelet and the history of the historians of the French revolution, and without really being clear what he's doing he drags the reader into the mindset of revolution and reaction that was current at Michelet's time. The great thing is that I didn't need to know what the book was about, I was hooked and willing to follow it wherever it was going to lead after just reading one chapter.

He explains just what he found so great about Michelet as a historian and then happily goes on to write his own history in the same style. As a reading experience, TTFS is by turns sly, informative, moving and funny. Wilson incorporates anecdotes from the lives of his history's characters, but I never had the feeling that he was distracting me with funny stories. I felt like I learned an enormous amount from reading the book, but I never felt lectured to. Best of all was the feeling of Wilson himself leaning over your shoulder commenting on the history-- I liked the tone of the man (critic) that came through as commentary on the people he was discussing. He was definitely present, though not intrusive.

The only thing I missed was footnotes-- the version that I was reading was old (1960) and there wasn't anything in the way of footnotes or bibliography provided. I hope that the newer versions are annotated, because it cost me some time tracking down books which Wilson was referring to.

A must-read.

Rating:
Summary: Omage for a Great Man of Letters
Review: It has been twenty years since I read "To the Finland Station", a story of the rise of communist thinking, from its earliest beginnings to Lenin's triumphal return to St. Petersburg. I don't recall much of it, except this: it is the best work of history I have ever read.

Anyone who wants to know what it means to be a writer should read this book, regardless of his or her interest in the subject. As night follows from day, those who are interested should read it, as well. It is a perfect illustration for one who believes that how a story is told is ever as important as the story, itself, and who wants to study an example where both are exceptional.

The content will prove valuable to anyone concerned with modern world history.

Rating:
Summary: A Signal Book About The Soviet Revolution!
Review: It is a singularly ironic fact that one of the most important books of the 20th century, written and published in 1940 by one of its most perceptive, intellectually gifted, and universally accepted authors, Edmund Wilson, would, until very recently, find itself sadly out of print. To my mind this is a scathing indictment of our current level of intellectual prowess. Or, perhaps it is more properly a reflection of the decreased public and academic interest in communism based on the collapse of the former Soviet Union as well as the curious transmogrification of China into some version of a politically correct socialist state practicing along the margins of capitalism. Yet in truth this book is such a marvel of intellectual achievement and writing skill that it should be read, if not devoured, by anyone with any serious interest in non-fiction writing as an avocation.

Edmund Wilson has suffered the same fate as the book, which is equally as curious. Of course, he was not as notorious as literary figure as one of his 20th century colleagues, H.L Mencken, who is still largely in print and in vogue, but Wilson so towers over all of his contemporaries that it is indeed mysterious that he has fallen into relative obscurity both as a writer and as a critic, as well. Yet Wilson was truly a renaissance figure, a gifted and talented poet, playwright, novelist, historian, and critical reviewer for a variety of magazines and periodicals such as the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The New Republic, a man able to articulate his position with regard to a plethora of social and political issues with great power and verve.

Yet it was in tomes such as this that he achieved his greatest powers of exposition, in this penetrating, quite detailed, and absorbing review of all the chief philosophical, political, social and economic elements of the chief architects of the Soviet revolution. Wilson had been a great student and admirer of the collected works of Karl Marx, and brought his immense intellectual and reporting skills to bear in describing the men, the ideas, and the issues of the so-called October revolution of 1918. It is the single best source of information regarding all of the various components of the massively important revolutionary process, neatly synthesizing the ways in which the various personalities, political circumstances, philosophical predispositions, and historical happenstance combined in the moist unlikely of revolutions in what Karl Marx considered one of the least likely of states, one so rural, so backward, and so vastly composed of uneducated ragged proletariat.

And in this stunning exploration we find new reason to understand and appreciate the power of individual personalities in the historical process, and the way that exceptional figures like Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, and the ways in which various aspects of Marxist theory were used and abused in promulgating what would become Soviet socialism's dogmatic approach to creating a worker's paradise. As we thread our way through the particulars of Marxian theory Wilson is so intricately familiar with, we begin to understand his fascination with both Marx's genius and the subtleties of Marx's exposition. Too many of us forget how bastardized and vulgarized the versions of Marxism promulgated by Stalin were, and how much they worked against the inexorable truths Marx found ticking away in the universal time-clock he saw operating behind history's time.

So, too, is Wilson's examination of Lenin a wondrous thing to read through, with his thoughtful if perhaps too sympathetic explanations of Lenin's goals, motives, and frustrations in trying to set the revolution on course and on-mark with the needs of the modern socialist state he envisioned to grow from the original seizure of power. Unfortunately, he never lived to see the radical experiment through to its fruition, nor the fateful poisoning of the spirit of the revolution accomplished by Stalin in his paranoid and sociopathic manipulations and purges. This is an absolutely magnetic reading experience, one that will illustrate just how powerfully and how memorably a writer with extraordinary gifts and an incredible intellectual acumen can be. I highly recommend this book for anyone aspiring to a serious education about the events of the 20th century, of which the Soviet revolution of October 1918 is certainly an extraordinarily important part. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: One of the best written by the great Edmund Wilson.
Review: This is a dramatic review of the development of the communist movement. It goes in depth in the lives of the movers and shakers of the socialist philosophy. Excellent historical work.

Rating:
Summary: grand intellectual history of an idea for action
Review: This is the story of the journey of an idea - that of engineering a society conceived as an organism - from its roots in the romantic movement with Michelet to Lenin, the ultimate man of action, on the threshold of power. Only Edmund Wilson, whose erudition as an autodidact was unsurpassed in his time, could have pulled this off: the ideas and inspiration pulse with life on every page. You get to know Marx, ENgels, and scores of other characters intimately as they dream of building a socialist order that would fundamentally re-order society and its economy. WHile I was never a sympathiser for communism, this most certainly gave me a feeling for the seductive beauty of the dream. THere is even a forward by Wilson, who admits to being overly optimistic, that what he chronicled with such excitment actually led to "one of the most horrible tyrannies in the history of mankind." THis is intellectual history at its very best, freed in the hands of a master writer from the pedantry and puffery of academia, and unflinching in the audacity of its partisan interpretations. Also beautifully written, it is a window into the hopes and dream of the 20C.

Warmly recommended.