From the ideas of the early nineteenth-century socialists to the thoughts of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, Edmund Wilson traces the development of the political and intellectual movements that culminated in the Russian Revolution. TO THE FINLAND STATION is a work of history on a grand scale, at once sweeping and detailed, closely reasoned and passionately argued, that succeeds in painting an unforgettable picture - alive with conspirators and philosophers, utopians and nihilists - of the making of the modern world. 'The first thing that strikes us about To the Finland Station is the vastness of its scope...It is easily, equally at home in the philosopher's study, in the prisoner's cell, on the steppes, in the streets, melancholy in great country houses, choking in fetid industrial slums...It can remind us that our history is alive and open and rich with excitement and promise' New York Times Book Review

From the ideas of the early nineteenth-century socialists to the thoughts of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, Edmund Wilson traces the development of the political and intellectual movements that culminated in the Russian Revolution. TO THE FINLAND STATION is a work of history on a grand scale, at once sweeping and detailed, closely reasoned and passionately argued, that succeeds in painting an unforgettable picture - alive with conspirators and philosophers, utopians and nihilists - of the making of the modern world. 'The first thing that strikes us about To the Finland Station is the vastness of its scope...It is easily, equally at home in the philosopher's study, in the prisoner's cell, on the steppes, in the streets, melancholy in great country houses, choking in fetid industrial slums...It can remind us that our history is alive and open and rich with excitement and promise' New York Times Book Review

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) is widely regarded as the preeminent American man of letters of the twentieth century. Over his long career, he wrote for Vanity Fair, helped edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wilson was the author of more than twenty books, including Axel's Castle, Patriotic Gore, and a work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County.

2008-01-29 A difficult book to review

Edmund Wilson is a great stylist, and if the quality of the prose were the only factor under consideration, this would surely be among the best non-fiction titles I've ever read.

Furthermore, as a whistle stop tour of revolutionary lives and ideas, in which every idea and every story is painted in big, bold, exciting brush strokes, this is also a wonderful book. Wilson rushes through the stories of Jules Michelet, Gracchus Babeuf, Marx and Engels, Michael Bakunin, Lenin and Trotsky, in such a way as to leave the reader with a very profound and strong feeling about each of those men, and some sense of the personal as well as the ideological differences between them.

But it is let down by a literateur's reading of political theory. While Wilson is insightful, provocative, and interesting, some of his interpretations of Marxist theory are unfortunately innacurate and rely on arguments from 'error theories', rather than taking the arguments seriously. He makes rather too much of an out of date interpretation of the Hegelian dialectic, and blames a crude application of it on Marx.

The book is also let down by the old Bolshevik's lingering hagiography of Lenin, sitting uncomfortably with the final rejection of Marxism. When read in the light of careful histories of post-1917 Russia (such as Brinton's The Bolsheviks and Workers Control), as well as Lenin's own political writing, Wilson's romanticisation of Lenin seems simply implausible, and a little false. He never, really, tackles the defects in Lenin's politics, and seeks to imagine their relation to the deteriation of Russian politics after Lenin arrives at the Finland Station.

All this would not matter so much if the book were not so highly respected and well known. The reader might really believe they are getting a definitive history of revolutionary ideas. And in fact, they are getting a lovely and stimulating book. But it cannot substitute for reading the writers - especially Marx and Engels - first hand. And it cannot substitute a reading of the political history of revolutionary struggles, the Bolshevik project among them. Nonetheless, it remains an excellent outline for a reader who wants to join some of the dots between the theory and practice of the thinkers already listed - though it is a great omission we don't hear anything much about Rosa Luxemburg.

In the end Wilson lost his Bolshevik faith, and lapsed, as so many did, into a sort of well-meaning social democracy - a fact attested to well enough by the epilogue to this volume. Perhaps its enduring popularity is caused by those who have some sympathy for the raw power of the revolutionary project, but are happier being told that, in truth, it is dead and buried. That conclusion is all well and good. But if it is to be reached, it deserves a more rigorous, though no less enjoyable, consideration than this.