Without Lifting A Finger

V.I. Lenin (in wig and cap), Finland, August 11, 1917 [From Wikimedia Commons] [Winston Churchill--from The Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill , edited by  Richard Langworth]

Wilson re Trotsky: History, then, with its dialectical Trinity, had chosen Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky to disillusion the middle class, had propounded revolutionary conclusions which it had compelled Father Gapon to bless, and will cruelly discredit and destroy certain Pharisees and Sadducees of Marxism before it summons the boiling lava of the Judgment. These statements make no sense whatever unless one substitutes for the words history and the dialectic of history the words Providence and God . And this providential power of history is present in all the writing of Trotsky. John Jay Chapman said of Browning that God did duty in his work as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection and preposition, and the same is true of History with Trotsky. Of late, in his solitude and exile, this History, as austere spirit, has seemed actually to stand behind his chair as he writes, encouraging, admonishing, approving, giving him the courage to confound his accusers, who have never seen History...

P1100475 , a photo by mmmmngai@rogers.com on Flickr. Lenin's Birthplace (now a museum)

Just started the third and final section (I know, it's taking me forever). Wilson writes very sympathetically--almost to the point of Nabokov's take on "poshlust"--re Lenin's childhood. He also writes as though he'd actually been to Lenin's birthplace (turned into a museum) in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk). Apparently he had: [From "'Edmund Wilson': American Critic" by Colm Toibin, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/books/review/04TOIBIN.html?pagewanted=all ] *   Note : Apparently the birthplace/museum is still in operation: http://www.russiancities.org/ulyanovsk-%E2%80%93-lenins-birthplace/   Though, perhaps, the museum is no longer getting its former respect: http://www.iol.co.za/news/world/lenin-s-birthplace-becomes-stripper-s-den-1.282853 

Sandwiched between sections dominated by Marx and Engels, we find two sections titled "Historical Actors." The first is Historical Actors: Lassalle . Though Wilson labels Lassalle the "great spokesman of the next phase of German socialism," both Wilson and Marx agree that he's intellectually inferior to Marx. Marx considers Lassalle's written works--e.g., the Workers' Program --bad vulgarizations of his own works, but, at least according to Wilson, Lassalle was a force to reckon with: He had also begun talking to the liberals in terms of Marxist social dynamics: constitutional questions, he told them, were "not legal questions but questions of power"; they could never get themselves a constitution by filling up a sheet of paper with words, but only by changing the relationships of power. * Good to a point. However, the cynic in me sees only a somewhat Viconian and unending exchange of "power" with "power." * Ferd...

   This conflict has been productive of more paradoxes and absurdities perhaps than any other aspect of radical thought--Shaw's defense of the British policy in South Africa on the basis of the backwardness of the Boers; the position of those American socialists who approved the participation of the United States in the World War on the ground that in order to achieve socialism it was necessary to save capitalism first; and the contention of their former critics, the Communists of the Soviet Union, that the alliance desired by the Kremlin would somehow contribute to the proletarian revolution which the Kremlin was sabotaging in Spain. So that in contrast to much that has happened since, the handling by Marx and Engels of these problems--and especially in view of the fact that they were pioneers in international thinking--seems remarkably conscientious and sagacious. They did, however, land themselves in some conspicuous contradictions. They denounced the imperialistic designs ...

In the Middle Ages in Germany, he [Marx] was to tell the English Chartists in a speech of 1856, there had existed a secret tribunal called the Vehmgericht "to take vengeance for the misdeeds of the ruling class. If a red cross was seen marked on a house, people knew that its owner was doomed by the Vehm. All the houses of Europe are now marked by the mysterious red cross. History is the judge; its executioner, the proletarian." There is then a higher tribunal for which the working class is only the hangman. There is a nonpersonal entity called "History" which accomplishes things on its own hook and which will make the human story come out right, no matter what you or your opponent may do. * Etymologically Vehmgericht has obscure origins: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehmic_court#Etymology * The Vehmic courts , Vehmgericht , holy vehme , or just the Vehm , also spelt Feme , are names given to a "proto- vigilante " tribunal system of Westphalia ac...

The Germans, who have done so little in the field of social observation, who have produced so few great social novels or dramas, have retained and developed to an amazing degree the genius for creating myths. The Ewig-Weibliche of Goethe, the kategorische Imperativ of Kant, the Weltgeist with its Idee of Hegel--these have dominated the minds of the Germans and haunted European thought in general like great hovering legendary divinities. Karl Marx, in the passage I have quoted above, described the Idea of Hegel as a "demiurge": this demiurge continued to walk by his side even after he imagined he had dismissed it. He still believed in the triad of Hegel: the These , the Antithese and the Synthese ; and this triad was simply the old Trinity, taken over from the Christian theology, as the Christians had taken it over from Plato. It was the mythical and magical triangle which from the time of Pythagoras and before had stood as a symbol for certainty and power which probably ...

Unfortunately I couldn't find a photo of the last copy, the "red copy." * The Neue Rheinische Zeitung - Organ der Demokratie ("New Rhenish Newspaper - Organ of Democracy") was a German daily newspaper , published by Karl Marx in Cologne between June 1, 1848 and May 19, 1849. Its name refers to a paper earlier edited by Marx, the Rheinische Zeitung . Joseph Weydemeyer , also a member of the Communist League , was one of its editors. The NRZ was a target of government suppression , which eventually led to its ceasing publication. On 2 March 1849, Prussian soldiers came to Marx's home to arrest one of the writers. Marx refused to turn over the writer, and the soldiers eventually left. On 9 May 1849, Marx was ordered to leave the country within 24 hours, as his documents for legal residency had expired. [1] Due to the threat of arrest or exile of its writers, and in the face of continued government suppression, the NRZ published its last issue on 18 ...

Part II finds Wilson backtracking to explain the Origins of Socialism. I'll shorten this part (no page per person) to the breadcrumb trail of a list: Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, Enfantin, Marx. I've just started on Marx and, as you can guess, he's going to get a lot of ink. If Lenin is the hero of this story, Marx is the scaffold. Who or what is the rope and noose? * Marx quote from Finland : The philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world in various ways: the thing is, however, to change it. 

Anatole France was not a historian but a French writer very much concerned with history (according to Wilson). For Wilson France marks the "decline of the revolutionary tradition." Quotes from Finland re France: Brousson records that, on one occasion, when asked why he was "drawn toward socialism," France had answered: "Better be drawn than driven." To another caller, we are told by LeGoff, he said in answer to a question about the future: "The future? But, my poor friend, there is no future--there is nothing. Everything will begin the same again--people will build things and tear them down and so on forever. So long as men can't get outside themselves or free themselves from their passions, nothing will ever change. There will be some periods which will be more peaceful and others which will be more disturbed; men will go on killing each other and then go back to their affairs again." Anatole France

Taine, a French critic and historian, also gets the space of one chapter. Taine quotes from Finland : . . . to make of history a science by giving it like the organic world an anatomy and a physiology. Man, says Spinoza, is in nature, not as an empire in an empire, but as a part in a whole, and the movements of the spiritual automaton which is our being are governed by laws to the same extent as those of the material world in which it is contained. Hippolyte Taine 

Ernest Renan (1823 - 1892)--French writer, scholar, theorist--does not get as much "play" as Michelet (only one chapter to Michelet's five). Renan quote from Finland : His [Marcus Aurelius'] virtue was based, like ours, upon reason, upon nature. Saint Louis was a very virtuous man and, according to the ideas of his time, a very great king, because he was a Christian; Marcus Aurelius was the most pious of men, not because he was a pagan, but because he was an emancipated man. He was an honor to human nature, and not to a particular religion. . . .  He has achieved the perfect goodness, the absolute indulgence, the indifference tempered with pity and scorn. 'To be resigned, as one passes one's life in the midst of false and unjust men'--that was the sage's program. And he was right. The most solid goodness is that which is based on perfect ennui, on the clear realization that everything in this world is frivolous and without real foundation. . . . Nev...

Wilson's book is a run-down on the important people leading up to the Russian Revolution: from Michelet to Marx to Lenin. Did he leave any out? What about the gaps? Is it as clear and neat as all that? * Jules Michelet: French historian (1798 - 1874). A few Michelet quotes from Finland : The nature of things is nothing other than that they come into being at certain times and in certain ways. Wherever the same circumstances are present, the same phenomena arise and no others.  In that dark night which shrouds from our eyes the most remote antiquity, a light appears which cannot lead us astray; I speak of this incontestable truth: the social world is certainly the work of men ; and it follows that one can and should find its principles in the modifications of the human intelligence itself. Action, action! action alone can console us! We owe it not only to man, but to all that lower nature which struggles up toward man, which contains the potent...

Now I know I've at least two connections to Wilson: 1.) Nabokov; and 2.) Apparently Wilson and I both like to "wave" to Virginia Woolf (according to the forward by Louis Menand Wilson's title was inspired by Woolf's To the Lighthouse ). * One read leads to another: I read Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940 - 1971 a couple summers ago, and that led to Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County (NYRBC). Once I'd dipped into Wilson, I liked him well enough to read some more. * Started reading To the Finland Station a couple days ago. A big swath, for sure (always skeptical of those). As Menand says: "And yet To the Finland Station  is, if  not a great book, a grand book. It brings a vanished world to life." Though the book is flawed (Wilson admits as much in his Introduction, 1971), I suspect I'll learn enough (e.g., I've already learned how Michelet "ironed out" Vico and came up with the view of history...