To the Finland Station

First edition (publ. Harcourt, Brace)

To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History is a book by American literary critic Edmund Wilson, first published in 1940. The work presents the history of revolutionary thought and the birth of socialism, from the French Revolution through the collaboration of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to the arrival of Vladimir Lenin at the Finland Station in Saint Petersburg in 1917.

Content

The book is divided into three sections.

The first spends five of eight chapters on Jules Michelet and then discusses the "Decline of Revolutionary Tradition," referencing Ernest Renan, Hippolyte Taine, and Anatole France.

The second deals with Socialism and Communism in sixteen chapters. The first four chapters discuss the "Origins of Socialism" vis-à-vis Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Robert Owen, and Enfantin as well as the "American Socialists" Margaret Sanger and Horace Greeley. The second group of twelve chapters deal mostly with the development of thought in Karl Marx in light of his influences, partnership with Friedrich Engels and opposition from Lassalle and Bakunin.

The third spends six chapters, dealing two each on Lenin, Trotsky, and Lenin again. Important writings addressed include Lenin's "What Is to Be Done?" and Trotsky's Literature and Revolution, My Life, biography of Lenin, and The History of the Russian Revolution.

The book also mentions Eleanor Marx, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Annie Besant, Charles Bradlaugh and Georgy Gapon.

Publication history

External videos
Presentation on the life and work of Edmund Wilson with Louis Menand, April 28, 2003, C-SPAN

Harcourt, Brace & Co. first published this book in September 1940. Doubleday's Anchor Books imprint published a paperback edition in 1953. In 1972, the last year of Wilson's life, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published a new edition with an introduction by Wilson reassessing his interpretation of Soviet Communism. "This book of mine," he explains, "assumes throughout that an important step in progress has been made, that a fundamental 'breakthrough' had occurred, that nothing in our human history would ever be the same again. I had no premonition that the Soviet Union was to become one of the most hideous tyrannies that the world had ever known, and Stalin the most cruel and unscrupulous of the merciless Russian tsars. This book should therefore be read as a basically reliable account of what the revolutionists thought they were doing in the interests of 'a better world.'" The New York Review of Books published a new edition in 2003, with an introduction by Louis Menand.

To the Finland Station was one of the first four books ever published by major Brazilian publisher Companhia das Letras. The book's Portuguese translation proved to be a successful seller.

Reception

According to Louis Menand, To the Finland Station was published at a disadvantageous time "for a book whose hero is Vladimir Lenin." Trotsky had just been assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had recently divided Poland according to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and many Western intellectuals had become disillusioned with Communism. The book had sold only 4,527 copies by January 1947, but it gained more readers after the publication of the paperback edition in 1953 and sold well in the 1960s.

In 1940, a reviewer writing for Time said:

Because it makes Marxist theory, aims and tactics intelligible to any literate non-Marxist mind, To the Finland Station is an invaluable book. It is an advantage that, like Milton with the character of Satan, Author Wilson is half in love with the human side of the curious specimens he describes.

Novelist Vladimir Nabokov, then Wilson's friend and collaborator, wrote to Wilson in December 1940 that the book is "beautifully composed" and "so entertaining" and that the author is "extraordinary unbiased although here and there I did notice two or three thistles of conventional radicalism sticking to your freely flowing gown." Nabokov criticized some parts of the book, particularly Wilson's depiction of Lenin, which, in Nabokov's view, "faithfully and fatally followed" the official communist biographies. In the introduction to the 1972 edition, Wilson stated that the criticism that his depiction of Lenin had been too positive "has been made not without some justification" but that he had very little source material to rely on besides the official accounts. Louis Menand writes in his introduction to the 2003 edition that this is not true; Mark Landau-Aldanov's Lenin had been published in English translation in 1922.

In his review of the 1972 edition, Marxist philosopher Marshall Berman calls the book "the last great 19th-century novel" and writes that it is "far more original and more powerful than its first generation of readers could have known." He praises the work's enormous scope and writes that the book "interweaves philosophy, sociology, psychobiography, literary criticism, economic analysis, political history and theory, always in complex and sophisticated ways—and yet, for all this, the human narrative hardly ever flags, but sweeps us breathlessly along." Berman also lauds Wilson's depiction of historical figures, calling his characterization of Marx "brilliant and probably unsurpassable, almost Shakespearean in its tragic grandeur and anguish." He writes, "To the Finland Station,' a work of the historical imagination at its most creative, puts us in touch with the revolutionary dreams and visions of our past. If we read it well, we can use it to teach ourselves how to keep the dreams alive in the present, and maybe even, in the future, how to make the visions real."

Menand writes that To the Finland Station is "if not a great book, a grand book. It brings a vanished world to life." He states that Wilson "was justified in arguing, in the introduction to the 1972 edition, that his book constituted 'a basically reliable account of what the revolutionists thought they were doing in the interests of a 'better world.'" Menand also writes that the book has value as "a poignant artifact of the 1930s."

In his 2017 review of the book, historian Andrew Hartman writes that To the Finland Station "is beautifully written, imaginatively constructed, sweeping in scope, and smart in many of its judgments—though it gets some important things wildly wrong" and describes the work as a "classic work of intellectual history." Hartman criticizes what he views as Wilson's improper understanding of the Hegelian and Marxist dialectic.