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

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 scopeIt is easily equally at home in the philosophers study in the prisoners cell on the steppes in the streets melancholy in great country houses choking in fetid industrial slumsIt can remind us that our history is alive and open and rich with excitement and promise New York Times Book Review