To the Finland Station (New York Review Books Classics) | Edmund Wilson

To the Finland Station (New York Review Books Classics) | Edmund Wilson | Takes time to read it, but pays off tremendously

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To the Finland Sta...

	To the Finland Station (New York Review Books Classics) Edmund Wilson NYRB Classics, 2003 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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 picture--alive with conspirators and philosophers, utopians and nihilists--of the making of the modern world.

Become a fly on the wall

of Marx's study. That's how this book makes you feel. Wilson's mastery of prose, artistry of language and clarity of vision draws you into the lives of his subjects so you feel you're there. You can almost smell the smoke from Marx's pipe as he writes, feel the boils on his butt, and hear his grandkids whinning on his knee as he plugs away at Kapital.
And this is just one of his subjects. Wilson has given us a living, breathing history that reads like an epic novel. One of the, if no THE best histories I've ever read. Once you dip in you won't be able to pull yourself out.
Allow me now to address a previous review which says Wilson just skims over Marx's "most important" idea of value. That being that value is determined by the amount of labor that goes into an item. Wilson clearly states the idea and dismisses it. Rather than being a great contribution to the world of ideas it's one of Marx's most obviously flawed ideas. You can spend a million man-hours making something no one wants and it'll be worthless. Marx overlooks Demand (as in supply and demand) in his analysis, as Wilson points out. For those interested in a more detailed critique of Marx's ideas I refer you to Karl Poppers "Open society and its enemies" part II about Hegel and Marx.
But Wilson's aim wasn't so much to critique the ideas as it was to present them clearly and give the reader a riviting understanding of the environments from which they sprang.
Also, the reviewer complains of Wilsons sympathetic approach towards Lenin. Finland station was written in the 30's. Wilson had travelled in the Soviet Union but of course accurate materials concerning Lenin were not made available to him. Thirty years after writing the book he addressed his Lenin chapter in a prolog. But even so the Lenin material is riviting. One reads along with Wilson, arriving at Finland Station with Lenin in the wee hours of the night and through Wilsons lense one can almost feel history unfolding, the fate of Russia (and the world) feels palpable.
The reviewer also complains that Wilson didn't go into the revolutions of 1848 et al enough. Once again this misses the point of the book. Wilson is exploring the personalities and lives of the men behind the ideas that shaped the movements. He is not writing to analyse the tactics or outcomes of the Hungarian or Italian or French or polish revolts circa 1848. There are many other books whose intent are just that, but not this one.
This is about the lives of individual men who shaped history and Edmund Wilson with his literary sensibility has done us an astonishing service by creating a port of entry for us into their lives and times.
History that reads like a novel that you can't put down. You can eat it with a fork but use a spoon, you'll want to get every drop. Thank You Edmund!!

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Takes time to read it, but pays off tremendously

It has been several months since I finished To the Finland Station, and I'm still in awe of the scope of this book and its sensitive author. To the Finland Station is a world-class work of scholarly non-fiction. It reads like a novel partly because there are no endnotes or footnotes--though a handy index--but largely because the highly-perceptive writer, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), mastered three elements of the novelist's craft: the narrative arc or rising and falling action, the reader's need for sensory language which shows the characters in action, and the relationship of geographic location to action and character. Through Edmund Wilson, we "see" Karl Marx courting his wife, the daughter of the Baron von Westphalen, in Trier, Germany; we "see" Lenin in a harsh Siberian winter, we "see" the cast of hundreds of thousands oppressed under absolute monarchies.

Keep in mind that the subtitle of To the Finland Station is "A Study in the Writing and Acting of History." This book is just as much about the historical actors as it is about Edmund Wilson's ability to trace the history of an idea. In order to understand the later chapters on Marx and Engels and Lenin, one must understand this "idea"--the main character of the book--and why Wilson begins his narrative with Jules Michelet and Giambattista Vico. Quite simply, Wilson wrote a modern history with which the world should now be familiar: that idea is that the development of democracy is inevitable, particularly because industrialization enabled people to organize based upon their economic class, which was partly determined by their relationship to industrial development. Edmund Wilson says that Michelet, who loved to read and write, was looking for a way of writing history that would account for how people feel about their lives, how industrial life, and the new, ugly slums affected the formation of nations--as well as the individual person. In a phrase--though I'm being very brief--thinkers from Michelet to Marx and Lenin were looking at ideas of human progress: how can people improve themselves, become better people, have justice served, what is the capacity for human beings to govern themselves, and what stands in the way of human development? What I'm writing here can't give you the beauty of Wilson's succinct prose, his ability to capture the essence of human history.

All my questions were answered by To the Finland Station: What were the working conditions for factory employees such that they had to revolt? How did rich people respond to these conditions? Was it inevitable that the Czar of Russia and his family be executed in 1917? What was Lenin trying to do that was perverted by Stalin? How or why was Communism different in Russia than in England or Germany? What is the difference between Communism and Socialism? Why do the people of France still seem proud of their 19th-century revolutionary history? How might Europeans today think of their history with each other such that the United States would be affected?

If you are not a specialist in 20th-century history, and do not have time to consult the original documents written by everyone Wilson mentions--from Giambattista Vico and Hegel, Jules Michelet, and Robert Owen to Karl Marx--To the Finland Station sorts it all out and sheds light on so much.

Months after I finished reading this book, I'm still typing up my notes on the sections where I left little x's in the margins to note areas of critical, topical concern. But knowing bits of To the Finland Station is more than about being conversant in American and European history; it's about knowing who we are and have been and where we are going. Wilson concludes: "To accomplish such a task will require of us an unsleeping adaptive exercise of reason and instinct combined."

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At once an excellent and dismal overview of socialism

The American critical writer Edmund Wilson attempted in this book to give an overview of the historical development of socialism, or rather the many socialisms, until the 1930s. However, the result is a very mixed bag: sometimes Wilson reaches great heights, but sometimes it is bare nonsense too.

The best description I can give of the nature of the work is that it is very much a literary overview of socialism rather than a political-historical one. Wilson concentrates in all mini-biographies of early socialists as well as the pieces on Lenin, Marx & Engels on the particulars of their life. Larded with many details and amusing anecdotes revealing the personality of the main socialist leaders, this book is very much at its best when describing the human interactions between various socialists and the world around them, and in portraying how their ideas were formed by their life experiences.

The big downside to this book is, however, Wilson's complete lack of understanding of any theory whatever. He clearly has neither knowledge of nor interest in any of the real tenets of socialism, Marxist, Lassallean or otherwise, and has not taken any trouble to look it up either. The result is that the passages which mean to give quick overviews of the Marxist or Leninist positions on certain issues are almost invariably simplistic, confused and wrong. The worst example of this (as a prior reviewer also mentioned) is the chapter on the dialectic, which immediately reveals to the reader that Wilson didn't have the slightest idea what dialectics is, and the childish simplicity of his view on it makes one think he probably got his information from a dictionary or something equally useless.

For these reasons, it is hard to say whether the overall result is positive or negative. If you are looking for a good insight on the development of the theoretical aspects of socialism or the political issues of those times, absolutely do not rely on this book. If you are however interested in the personalities and life histories of the main socialists until WWII, then Wilson's book will be a high-quality, pleasant and sympathetic guide. If there were a 3.5 star rating, I would give it that; but I will err on the side of a positive review here since I suppose most people reading popular literature about socialism are not going to be interested in the the technical details of the theory, unless they are socialists themselves - in which case they should read Marx & Engels directly anyway.

One final word of warning: the introduction by Louis Menand is terrible, and is best skipped altogether.

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Overrated 'great man history', fun, not useful for activists

For 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.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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