To the Finland Station A Study in the Acting and Writing of History

by Wilson, Edmund

• ISBN13: 9780374533458
• ISBN10: 0374533458
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-04-24
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

One of the great works of modern historical writing, the classic account of the ideas, people, and politics that led to the Bolshevik Revolution Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Stationis intellectual history on a grand scale, full of romance, idealism, intrigue, and conspiracy, that traces the revolutionary ideas that shaped the modern world from the French Revolution up through Lenin's arrival at Finland Station in St. Petersburg in 1917. Fueled by Wilson's own passionate engagement with the ideas and politics at play, it is a lively and vivid, sweeping account of a singular ideathat it is possible to construct a society based on justice, equality, and freedomgaining the power to change history. Vico, Michelet, Bakunin, and especially Marxalong with scores of other anarchists, socialists, nihilists, utopians, and moreall come to life in these pages. And in Wilson's telling, their stories and their ideas remain as alive, as provocative, as relevant now as they were in their own time.

Author Biography

Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) was among the foremost American men of letters of the twentieth century. A literary critic, novelist, memoirist, playwright, journalist, poet, and editor, he was the author of more than twenty books.

Table of Contents

“In an age of historical amnesia, To the Finland Station can remind us that our history is alive and open and rich with excitement and promise.” —Marshall Berman, The New York Times Book Review

“Every so often, you come across a book of nonfiction that is more gripping in its plot and richer in its understanding of human beings than a thousand novels put together. One such book is Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station.” —Aravind Adiga, NPR