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To the Finland Station

by Edmund Wilson, Louis Menand (Introduction)

4.02 of 5 stars 4.02 · rating details · 447 ratings · 59 reviews

Edmund Wilson's magnum opus, To the Finland Station, is a stirring account of revolutionary politics, people, and ideas from the French Revolution through the Paris Commune to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. It 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 p...more

Paperback, 507 pages

Published April 30th 2003 by NYRB Classics (first published 1940)

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Jan 15, 2013 Hadrian rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, nonfiction, politics-and-foreign-policy, essays

An interesting but flawed history of the intellectual and historical origins of socialism. Wilson makes the interesting decision to frame the ideas through the lives and biographies of their earliest practitioners.

The most interesting chapters are those in the very beginning, where Wilson recognizes the importance of the historical cycles of Giambattista Vico, and then traces them through the historians of the French Enlightenment, Michelet, who defined the Renaissance.

After him, we have Renan,...more An interesting but flawed history of the intellectual and historical origins of socialism. Wilson makes the interesting decision to frame the ideas through the lives and biographies of their earliest practitioners.

The most interesting chapters are those in the very beginning, where Wilson recognizes the importance of the historical cycles of Giambattista Vico, and then traces them through the historians of the French Enlightenment, Michelet, who defined the Renaissance.

After him, we have Renan, who was among the foremost rationalist critics of Christianity and nationalism, then Taine, one of the first 'scientific' analysts of history, then the novelist Anatole France, who poked fun at the Church with a story about the baptism of penguins, and the Revolution with The Gods Are Athirst.

The origins of Socialism itself come from the French Revolutionary Babeuf, a sort of anarcho-communist, and Saint-Simon, a founder of a sort of technocratic sect, and his follower, Enfantin, who was among the first to theorize 'free love', some 130 years before the American counterculture. There are also brief sketches of American experiments, including Robert Owen, and the planned Oneida Community.

The bulk of the book, some two hundred pages, is devoted to the dual biographies of Marx and Engels, and some brief sketches of their theory. The biographical portions are superb, the theoretical analysis devoted to one or two lonely chapters. We see, briefly, 1848, the Paris Commune, the fiery Nechayev, and the Anarchists: Bakunin, Proudhon and Kropotkin. Wilson does recognize the chief tenets of Marxist thought as the Labor Theory of Value and Dialectical Materialism, and does fairly question them both.

The last chapters of the book are the most disappointing. The chapter on Lenin seems to be based almost wholly on early Soviet propaganda, and the Trotsky chapter is charming in its naive praise for him, solely arising from the fact that he is not Stalin. Although Wilson at least recognizes these mistakes in judgment in a tacked-on endnote.

What happens after this? What is the fate of the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat? Trotsky's early judgment of the Soviet Union as a 'deformed bureaucratic state' seems to endure, and what undercurrents seem to best survive (again based on my very limited experience) are democratic socialism, anti-plutocracy, anti-globaliztion, anti-'scientific management', and the offspring of some Maoist 'Third-Worldism' socialism, which (justly) protests the abusive treatment of the Global South by the richer nations.

Although Wilson's overly high estimation of the fate of the revolution is misplaced, his most correct assertion on socialism may be this:

"Socialism by itself can create neither a political discipline nor a culture [...] Only the organic processes of society can make it possible to arrive at either. And it seems today as if only the man who has already enjoyed a good standard of living and become accustomed to a certain security will really fight for security and comfort. But then, it appears, on the other hand, that from the moment he has acquired these things, he is transformed into something quite other than Karl Marx's idea of a proletarian.

Marx could recognize as worthy of survival only those who had been unjustly degraded and those who rose naturally superior through intellect and moral authority. He had no key for appreciating the realities of a society in which men are really to some degree at liberty to make friends with one another indiscriminately or indiscriminately to bawl one another out - in other words, in which there is any actual approximation to that ideal of a classless society which it was the whole aim of his life to preach. And we must remember - unless we are willing to accept it as a simple act of faith in Scripture, as the people of the year 1000 expected the world to come to an end - that Karl Marx's catastrophic prophecy of the upshot of capitalist development, the big short circuit between the classes, is based primarily on psychological assumptions, which may or may not turn out to have been justified: the assumption that there can be no possible limit to the extent to which the people who live on profits will continue to remain unaware of or indifferent to the privations of the people who provide them. The Armageddon that Karl Marx tended to expect presupposed a situation which the employer and the employee were unable to make any contact whatever. [...]

In other words, Marx was incapable of imagining democracy at all."

But once again, we are seeing economic stratification, even in our democracies - or at least in the American education, health care system, living habits, taxation system. Neo-liberalism and financial conservatism have seen to that. Perhaps the Prophet staggers out of his grave once again.(less)

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Nov 01, 2009 Eric rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: peteredout, history

I’m leaving this unfinished for now, breaking off (or merely just pausing) before the portrait of Lenin that concludes this varicolored chronicle of European socialisms. Wilson concedes, in the 1971 preface, that those final chapters are full of starry-eyed bullshit. Wilson’s radiant image of Lenin as the Second Coming, after a slumberous century under the snows of bourgeois reaction, of 1789’s spirit of Liberty (and surely not 1793’s spirit of Terror!), was the major bone of contention in his e...more I’m leaving this unfinished for now, breaking off (or merely just pausing) before the portrait of Lenin that concludes this varicolored chronicle of European socialisms. Wilson concedes, in the 1971 preface, that those final chapters are full of starry-eyed bullshit. Wilson’s radiant image of Lenin as the Second Coming, after a slumberous century under the snows of bourgeois reaction, of 1789’s spirit of Liberty (and surely not 1793’s spirit of Terror!), was the major bone of contention in his epistolary sparring with Nabokov over the meaning of the Russian Revolution. Nabokov’s stateless aestheticism should not make us miss the fact that he was as obsessed by The Russian Destiny as any other Russian writer, but in his own cool, Apollonian, Pushkinian kinda way. So while I’m curious, I still don’t want to vex myself with said bullshit right now. Scrawling testy, indignant marginalia makes me feel like my father.

Wilson's method with Marx is strange amalgam of disabused, warts-and-all portraiture and propagandistic hagiography. Illusionless portrayal alternates with fulsome special pleading. Wilson shows Marx as victim of the usual revolutionary contradiction, as the humanitarian who loves The People, but doesn’t like people--an insufferably haughty Herr Doktor, a cantankerous, biting, paranoid, misanthropic pain-in-the-ass who had difficulty getting along with anyone except Engels, a worldly bon vivant who submissively exchanged a “sketching” prose style of humane raconterie for an hermetic cackle much like Marx’s. Marx’s insolent demeanor and sneering style (conversational and literary) are well suited to anarchist dandies like the young Baudelaire (who during the 1848 revolutions helped loot a Paris gunsmith, and then, after outfitting himself to his sartorial standard, cutting quite a bella figura with a handsome hunting rifle and leather cartridge belt, mounted the nearest barricade and began exhorting the now well-armed mob with “We must go and shoot General Aupick!”—-his hated haute bourgeois stepfather), but less so to anyone wishing to make alliances and build organizations. To scenes of this brilliantly cold-eyed literary understanding Wilson then tacks on drooling apologia. Wilson prefers to interpret a crank’s angry irascibility as the Old Testament sternness of an essential prophet. Forgive me if I laugh. I’m too constitutional a cynic to see a given personality as anything other than an engine of self-defeating folly. Wilson shifts abruptly from Marx as Balzac or Flaubert would have written him to Marx as he appeared on a Soviet poster. I didn’t really mind this arrangement, though, because it kept the two sides of Wilson (portraitist and propagandist) easily segregated. When Wilson is really writing, applying his literary talents to picturing the past, the result is a Marx who is human and self-contradictory and real. The sufferings of his family, trapped in the dingiest Dickensian nightmare London had to offer (bailiffs, pawnbrokers, dead newborns), provoke genuine pity; and Marx’s resistance to the Prussian monarchy during the 1848 revolutions was so fearless and manly as to ward-off the eyebrow-arching contempt that usually seizes me whenever I examine his “patchwork of weaknesses.”

To the Finland Station is subtitled “a study in the writing and acting of history,” and it starts with Michelet discovering Vico, which is nice. This book piqued me to think more about the philosophy of history and to spend an hour reading Pushkin’s fragmentary Peter the Great’s Blackamoor, his experiment in fabulous genealogy and historical meditation (Pushkin was official historiographer in the court of Nicholas I) on the meaning of Peter’s cultural innovations—-of which Pushkin’s black ancestor was a symbol and a vessel—-for the future of Russia. Marx’s philosophy of history and predictions of the “inevitable” movements of economics and culture have a slippery vagueness of detail, an utopian avoidance of the crucial questions of psychology and sociology that make him seem a less than serious thinker; then again, he wanted to “change” the world, not just “interpret” it. But even uncontemplative empire builders like Peter the Great are rarely able to change the world directly or intentionally; "worldly philosophers" like Marx even less so. A body of political theory purposefully stripped down for use and action, as his was, turns out to be a pretty poor agent of its author's will, principally because of that purposeful vagueness. The blanks spaces Marx left in his idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” for instance, came to be fleshed out by later revolutionaries, and not in ways that did credit to Marx's reputation. The unpredictable details of politics determine the human shape of abstract systems; the peculiarities of a given culture can alter any theory beyond recognition. Political theory never survives its first contact with politics. (Pushkin asks: what fruits will Peter the Great’s commitment to Westernization bear? It turns out that notable among those fruits were not just worldly prestige and power for Peter’s dynasty, but the intellectual currents that helped topple that dynasty, Marxism, yes, but also the British-style constitutional liberalism of Vladimir Nabokov’s father, author of the abdication letter the last Czar’s brother signed and Minister of Culture in the Provisional Government Lenin later overthrew.)

That Marx became a banner-boy in Russia, a country he regarded as an eternal stronghold of Absolutism, even if its rulers were to become socialists (Marx hated Bakunin for this reason); that Marx became the patron saint of a regime more murderous and soul-destroying than any he opposed in his life of agitation (much as parts of Nietzsche were claimed by the German nationalists he loathed in life) is testimony to the fact that history is not a discoverable Hegelian unfolding of the Absolute Idea, something that only makes sense to Germans anyway, but is instead “a context in which we achieve the contrary of our aspirations, in which we disfigure them unceasingly”—-as E.M. Cioran bottled the tonic awareness that Frenchmen have always dispensed, since Montaigne probably, or perhaps since Tacitus--Nietzsche did say that no literature is more connected to the cold candor of antiquity than French.

(less)

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Jun 15, 2007 Conrad rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: owned, philosophy, history

This and Russian Thinkers would make a perfect introduction to leftist revolutionary thought of the 19th century. Not finished with it yet, but so far it's good, though I have some quibbles. [ETA: finished; loved it.] It corrects the common perception that Communism was an invention of mostly Marx and partly Engels by detailing the movement's antecedents in Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owens, and others, most of whom were inspired in turn by the French revolution. I hadn't realized that in the case of...more This and Russian Thinkers would make a perfect introduction to leftist revolutionary thought of the 19th century. Not finished with it yet, but so far it's good, though I have some quibbles. [ETA: finished; loved it.] It corrects the common perception that Communism was an invention of mostly Marx and partly Engels by detailing the movement's antecedents in Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owens, and others, most of whom were inspired in turn by the French revolution. I hadn't realized that in the case of both Marx and Engels, it really did take a village. The sense of genealogy goes a long way toward removing early Communism from the drawing room and planting it in the streets, and also makes Marx look a little less original, but considering his sophistication compared to the lunatics who inspired him, it makes him look smarter, too.

On the other hand, the book necessarily engages its protagonists' ideas in broad strokes. That's OK, but at times Wilson needed to rein it in. We are told that the newly empowered French postrevolutionary bourgeoisie's "ideas" became "vulgar"- excuse me? Wilson is comfortable with the nuts and bolts of the labor theory of value, but as Menand points out in the excellent introduction, he's fuzzier when it comes to dialectic. (Menand observes that Americans are uncomfortable with the both/and nature of Hegelian philosophy, preferring to give things "thumbs up or down." Thus we here are saddled with leftists whose abstemiousness leads them to expect to save the world by buying only organic lettuce.)

Why not start with Hume or Kant or Hegel or Fichte? Because, Menand implies, Wilson liked writing stories about eccentric industrialists more than he liked discoursing on Feuerbach. Who can blame him? It's an unusual intelligence that can assimilate stories about Marx's romance with Jenny von Westphalen but can't bear to muster more than a few sentences on The German Ideology.

The other thing this book lacks is a sense of the complexities of Russian politics. After reading Orlando Figes' book on the Revolution, I was impressed with how many different factions had to fall into place just so during the period 1905-1917 for the Bolshies to win the day. Wilson has nothing but derision for the very important Populist movement and does not even mention the Slavophiles, opinions on whom split the Russian intelligentsia down the middle for such a long time. All in all, Wilson approaches 19th century nationalism as a blip on the radar where most sources today seem to see it as much more influential than that. But this book was written nearly 80 years ago, and if it had said everything I wanted it to then reading it would have been pointless.

Engels comes off better than anyone here. Wilson lovingly details his tireless support of the Marx family despite Marx's insensitive and obnoxious nagging, and manages to make Engels' business dealings consistent with his ideology. This is no small feat. Engels was the convivial one; Marx was the crank, and once Marx died, Engels took to having dinner company over again, remarking that he had been underrated while Karl was alive and overrated after he died. While Karl and the subsequent savageries of Lenin and Josef "Care Bear" Stalin make it hard to read this book with too much sympathy, Engels makes it all seem like it could've worked.

What an astounding work of narrative history, though. I heartily recommend this to anyone with an interest in 19th and 20th century European politics and thought.(less)

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Mar 10, 2013 Erik Graff rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: everyone

Recommended to Erik by: Arthur Kazar

Shelves: history

Edmund Wilson was a polymathic literary critic. While his books on historical subjects--such as this one and those on the Dead Sea Scrolls--are not expert, they do serve as excellent, albeit opinionated, introductions and they are beautifully written.

To the Finland Station begins with the Enlightenment and ends with Lenin and the Russian Revolution. It is basically a chronological survey of the development of socialist ideas. The portrait of Lenin is a bit idealized, but is representative of muc...more

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Jul 27, 2012 Alison rated it 5 of 5 stars

This was really far more engaging than you might think. But then again, I like books in which writers write about other books with clear and almost palpable relish. A very good time for an overview of revolutionary literature.

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Nov 21, 2007 David M. rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, political-theory

Ah, Communism… where the hell did that bullshit come from anyway? Edmund Wilson has followed the footsteps back along the trail in a book that gives appropriate weight and attention to biography, to history, and to philosophy.

So far, the thing that’s made me go “hmmmm…” the most was this bit: “It is a proof of the divergence of the tendencies of the socialist and the bourgeois pictures of history—and from now on there will be two distinct historical cultures running side by side without ever rea...more

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Feb 19, 2008 Bap rated it 4 of 5 stars

The year 1916, the Tsarist regime is shaky. Bread riots erupt in major cities. Kerensky is arguing for a parlaimentry system and to remain in the war. The Germans hustle Lenin from Switzerland and ship him across Europe in a sealed train like some highly contagious disease and have him debark at the Finland Station near St. Petersburg. It has its intended effect. Written in clear, acerbic prose by that curmudgeon Edmund Wilson who knows all about the bolsheviks, the mensheviks, the anachists. Th...more

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Feb 18, 2013 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

I actually read the original 1940 version, not this one. It starts slowly - the first part discusses (I think, it took me a while to get through) the petering out of the original ideals of the French Revolution before the story finally picks up with the development of socialism from the early 19th century onward. The discussions of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky are very interesting but clearly from the framework of a 1940 liberal. WIlson understood that communism was a pipe dream and that Stal...more

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Jul 28, 2010 Joe rated it 5 of 5 stars

Not the definitive history of communism or anything, but Wilson takes us back to the minds who wrote the sentences that built the mindset that gave us the people like Marx and Engels and Lenin who put it all to test. Moves along like all of Wilson's books, briskly and effortlessly, masking the immense scholarship that is its mainstay. Wilson learned Russian and German to write it, just like he learned Hebrew to write The Dead Sea Scrolls, probably my top Wilson selection.
If you can't be bothered...more

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May 07, 2009 Sherwood Smith rated it 4 of 5 stars

Edmund Wilson's second major work, in my view (first being Axel's Castle). It's very readable, and it is interesting as it looks at the history of Communism from the POV of those writers and intellectuals who were young during WW I, who rejected empires, colonialism, and the U.S. equivalents. Only Stalin could erode their high-minded ebullience.

This high-minded lack of perception of how human beings work, how cultures change, and how economics is shaped by same, shows most as the book goes on. W...more

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Jan 02, 2011 Joel Silverberg rated it 5 of 5 stars

To the Findland Station has to be one of the most amazing books I have read. It took history and made it completely alive. The author really makes you feel like you are alive in the time of when he is writing. Another really awesome thing about this book is the depth of the authors intellect! Seriously! If you really take your time (it is after all a very heavy book) you will find ideas and themes that will shatter your ideas of intellectuality - or at least thats what this book did for me. Defi...more

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Nov 08, 2011 Bob rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A college friend claimed this as his favorite book, but I was still surprised by how much fun it was to read. Wilson applies the methods of literary criticsm (at least as it was practiced in the mid-twentieth century) to historic documents and the memoirs of revolutionaries to trace the history of European socialist thought between the French and the Bolshevik revolutions. Though analyzing texts, the treatment makes events and personalities startlingly vivid. Here he is speaking of Stalin:
"We...more

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Sep 11, 2011 John E rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A great study by a litary critic of the literary background to the rise of Marxist-Leninism. It is really a set of character studies of the people who brought the idea of society as a man-created entity to the forefront of modern thought. It is not a history of "Communism" as develped in the Soviet Union, but a much deeper study of how as he points out, "The writings of Marx and Engles lend themselves to being exploited, bery much as the Sciptures have been, to furnish texts for a variety of doc...more

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Apr 22, 2013 Andrew Stewart rated it 5 of 5 stars

A brief history of socialism, from the French Idealists through Marx to Lenin and the Stalin purges in the 1930's and 40's, the time this book was written. Edmund Wilson had traveled in the same circles as other Socialist/Communist writers, but was disgusted by the Spanish Civil War and how the Comintern essentially rigged the entire war to ensure deposits of Spanish gold made it to Soviet banks rather than actually worrying about the Republic. This is an ironic and very dated book, but it also...more

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Apr 21, 2013 Smoothw rated it 4 of 5 stars

I find myself agreeing with the introduction by Menard that this is a grand but not necessarily great book, but the good parts definitely outweigh the bad. Intellectual history is always a tricky genre to make interesting for a non specialist, so its great the parts on the french historians and Marx were both thorough, were excellently written and interesting. The last section, on Lenin, I kind of skimmed over, as it was both far too worshipful of Lenin while not really engaging with his ideas i...more

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Nov 05, 2010 Zack rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2010

Am I right to judge a book not on its limitations but on my own? Is the review I'm writing based on how good I thought the book was, or on how much I liked it? Am I disappointed because I didn't read the blurb on the back of the book closely enough, wasn't prepared for what I was getting myself into? Rhetorical questions all. Just keep them in mind as I write this review.

First of all, Wilson provides a thorough, dynamic history of the evolution of mainline Socialist thought, from before the Fren...more Am I right to judge a book not on its limitations but on my own? Is the review I'm writing based on how good I thought the book was, or on how much I liked it? Am I disappointed because I didn't read the blurb on the back of the book closely enough, wasn't prepared for what I was getting myself into? Rhetorical questions all. Just keep them in mind as I write this review.

First of all, Wilson provides a thorough, dynamic history of the evolution of mainline Socialist thought, from before the French Revolution up until the Bolshevik one. Karl Marx and his friend, benefactor and collaborator Friedrich Engels are undoubtedly the stars of the book, and there is a lot of fascinating biographical material on both to help the reader place their theories in some kind of context. Bravo, Wilson, for taking these men off their pedestals and portraying them as living, breathing humans (also for featuring a number of important women in your account, who usually seem to be invisible in books of this length and scope).

Unfortunately, if your interest lies in the Russian Revolution, this book is not for you. Or at least, it shouldn't be your go-to for an introduction. There is an awful lot that is assumed to be understood by the reader, or even remembered from personal experience (at one point Wilson perfunctorily mentions the patriotic fervor that swept the industrialized Western nations during the First World War, explaining his omission by saying that most of his readers should be able to remember what that time was like). Also, despite how exhaustive and authoritative this book claims to be, there is quite a bit that the reader should already understand before picking it up. Like what an "International" (noun) is. Or that Mark and Engels didn't really invent Communism. In fact, if you're interested in the history of the Russian Revolution at all it's probably better to read something else first, since the whole upheaval and drama happens off-stage, as it were, behind the lines of the Eastern Front, while Wilson focuses more on Lenin's life in exile elsewhere.

All this focus on Lenin while the great events of the Revolution seem to be happening elsewhere highlights Wilson's approach to historiography, which seems outdated and limiting by modern standards. As you read the book, you get this impression that Socialism is some kind of relay race, a torch being passed along from one Great Mind to the next, from Babeuf all the way through the tumult of the 19th century up to Vladimir Lenin. Sure, the Springtime of Nations in '48 is discussed; sure, the Paris Commune gets a few paragraphs; sure, there are Proudhons and Bakunins and Trotskys that crop up, and their biographies are fleshed out and interesting to read, as well: but most all of this appears as window-dressing, as the necessary context for what is happening inside the head of whoever's got the Flaming Red Torch at the moment. These other great thinkers of the 19th century serve as nothing more than elaborate foils for Marx, Engels, or Lenin. It's almost as if Wilson has ingested too much of the Historical and Dialectical Materialism that he critiques excellently about 3/4ths of the way in.

So yes, if you're interested in the development of Socialist philosophy and of 19th century politics in general, this book is probably required reading for you. And had I started reading this book knowing what I was getting myself into, I'd probably given it a higher rating. Since, however, I was expecting something else, I might not have picked this up in the first place.(less)

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Dec 14, 2007 David rated it 5 of 5 stars

Takes a little effort but very worth it. I very much like the way Wilson writes.

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Mar 20, 2010 Mrfishscales rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: political-non-ficition

Wilson begins by charting the failure of the bourgeois liberal movement in French political history. Michelet, Renan, and Taine grow progressively more detached from the plight of the working classes and hold successively more uncharitable views of the French Revolution and the succeeding 19th century upheaveals that marked the transitions between republics and empires in France.

He then doubles back and chronicles the evolution of socialism, presenting chapters on earlier experimentalists like O...more

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May 07, 2009 Carol rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

First of all, with all the effort it takes to read this book, I hope I've learned something, but there was much that was beyond me, especially economics. Yet, I feel I did learn some of the historical features of the development of dialectical materialism. The book focuses a great deal on Marx and Engels, and the information about these compatible but extremely different figures is incredibly interesting.
I'm about 3/4 through this book and am now at the last part which focuses on Lenin, and thi...more

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Feb 12, 2008 matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: top-shelf, worldly-lit, literary-crit, underrated-lost-classics, historyonics-world, red-menace, recommendations, favorites

Badass. Encyclopedic in the right way. Every few pages tells the story of another character in the drama of European Socialism. The stories are well worth knowing, and reading.

Got to lose a star on account of Wilson's having been sucked into taking Lenin to be a better man than he actually was. And for the Russian Revolution to have been better than it actually was.

But. It doesn't really matter. Wilson is mostly a careful scholar and an amazing teller of this gigantic moment in modern history. Y...more

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Oct 19, 2009 Lindsay rated it 4 of 5 stars

I read this in college for a class and promptly forgot everything about it. I decided to reread it, and I'm so glad I did. If you are interested in history and socialism and especially those behind both, this book is a must. History classes don't teach much about the lives of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, but here Edmund Wilson paints an enlightening picture of the men themselves and how the lives they lived affected their ideologies. Call me pinko scum, but I find it all fascinating.

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Feb 27, 2010 HeeJin Lee marked it as to-read

Shelves: on-hold

I've been wanting to read this book ever since I read Aravind Adiga's review of it on npr.org a few months ago. I finally bought and started the book last week, but I've put it on hold for now in favor of novels. Truth is, I've grown weary of non-fiction after reading through two mediocre books that have been touted by the media as the next big things, and attempting to read another one by a prominent scholar which turned out to be utterly dry and unengaging. Hopefully my fiction-kick will help...more

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Jan 14, 2009 Gloss rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfic

I can't believe I still own this -- I ~~borrowed~~ liberated it from my father when I was still in my teens. In later years, Wilson became quite the reactionary blowhard, but this study, written in 1940, is more intellectually generous. Its naive admiration of Trotsky is, in retrospect, almost touching, and it stands as a pretty comprehensive, beautifully written overview of philosophical socialism.

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Feb 09, 2011 Lucy rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was a difficult read, especially the first half dealing with the philosophical forerunners of Marx and Engels. However, the light shone on Marx, Engels and, to a lesser extent, Lenin and Trotsky, was worth the slog. Written by an admirer, the book is nonetheless a warts-and-all look at the founders of modern Communism.

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May 09, 2012 Chris Gager rated it 3 of 5 stars

Well, I was SUPPOSED to read this over the summer during my prep school years when they couldn't leave us alone to enjoy our vacation time. How far I got into I have no idea but I do recall that I at least tried... Date read is approximate.

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Dec 12, 2010 Justin rated it 3 of 5 stars

"the philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world in various ways: the thing is, however, to change it."

...

it was a good book, well written. but it's clearly a text for those well-endowed already with the circumspect of socialist revolution and the characters involved. the book's author, edmund wilson, writes in the style of his legendary letter-ry (if that's a word), and it is effective. however, it still seems dry for a series of matters that seem, it seems dry though wilson alludes t...more

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Dec 24, 2009 alexander rated it 5 of 5 stars

An engaging and comprehensive narrative on the leftist movements of the late 19th and early 20th century. Read the chapters on Marx and Lenin, then read them again. The world will unfold.

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Aug 26, 2009 Mark Feltskog rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The first serious intellectual history I'd read at the time, which engendered in me both a lifelong interest in that discipline as well as a love of Edmund Wilson's sturdy, descriptive prose.

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Jun 30, 2010 Steven added it

An interesting perspective as it was written in the 1950's by Edmund Wilson who was maybe a fellow traveler prior to Stalin's purges of the 30's. Gives great insight into the revolutionary process. The chapters on Marx and Engels theory are slow going but well worth the read.

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Jan 06, 2010 Helga rated it 3 of 5 stars

What I read was very good, but I uust couldn't finish reading this because it was an old, re-bound edition and the print went into the gutter, plus the font had the letters mushed together.

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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/694282.To_the_Finland_Station?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320440378l/694282.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/694282.To_the_Finland_Station?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson[/url]

To the Finland Station

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