by
Louis Menand
The idea for “To the Finland Station” came to Edmund Wilson while he was walking down a street in the East Fifties one day, in the depths of the Great Depression. Wilson was in his late thirties. He had established himself as a critic and reporter with the publication of “Axel’s Castle,” a study of modernist writers, in 1931, and “The American Jitters,” a collection of pieces based on visits he made to mines and factories, in 1932. His ambition, though, was to write a novel. (An early effort, “I Thought of Daisy,” had appeared in 1929; it was not a success.) So he was a little surprised to find himself contemplating an ambitious history of socialist and communist thought, from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution. But he plainly saw something novelistic in the subject. “I found myself excited by the challenge,” he said later, “and there rang through my head the words of Dedalus at the end of Joyce’s ‘Portrait’ ”—“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” He took the title from a novel, Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.”
Wilson had been witness to the condition of workers in Appalachia and Detroit—after bringing relief supplies to striking miners in Pineville, Kentucky, he was run out of town by the local authorities—and although he was suspicious of the Communist Party, he welcomed the Crash as a portent of the death of capitalism, and he embraced Marxism. He voted for the Communist candidate, William Z. Foster, in the 1932 presidential election; the same year, he signed a manifesto calling for “a temporary dictatorship of the class-conscious workers.” He was never a Communist, but he did believe that only the Communists were genuinely trying to help the working class. In 1935, after he began work on “To the Finland Station,” he tried to persuade his friend John Dos Passos, whose radicalism had begun to cool, that Stalin was a true Marxist, “working for socialism in Russia.”
Soon afterward, Wilson went to Russia himself. He published his journal of the visit, along with material about travels in the United States, in a book pointedly entitled “Travels in Two Democracies.” In fact, he had had to censor his diaries in order to conceal evidence of the fear and oppression he had seen in the Soviet Union. By 1938, he had stopped pretending. “They haven’t even the beginnings of democratic institutions; but they are actually worse off in that respect than when they started,” he confessed to a friend. “They have totalitarian domination by a political machine.” He understood the implications for the book he was writing. In October, 1939, he sadly informed Louise Bogan, “I am about to try to wind up the Finland Station (now that the Soviets are about to annex Finland).”
“To the Finland Station” was published by Harcourt Brace in September, 1940. It was not the best moment for a book whose hero is Vladimir Lenin. A month earlier, in Mexico, Leon Trotsky had had his head split open with an ice axe. A year before that, the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, effectively allowing Hitler to invade Poland. For five years before that, Stalin had systematically liquidated political opposition within the Soviet Union. The purges were preceded by a program of collectivization that led to the death of more than five million people. By 1940, disillusionment with Communism was well established among intellectuals in the West. André Gide, George Orwell, and Dos Passos had written firsthand accounts of the brutality and hypocrisy of contemporary Communism—Gide and Dos Passos after visits to Russia, Orwell after fighting for the Loyalists in Spain. Partisan Review had already become the organ of the anti-Communist left.
By January, 1947, “To the Finland Station” had sold only 4,527 copies. Doubleday took over the rights and reprinted it that year, but sales continued to be slow. The book did not begin to attract readers until it came out in paperback, as one of the first Anchors, in 1953. It sold decently in the nineteen-sixties, and 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.’ ”
This didn’t entirely meet the difficulty. Wilson did know what was going on in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-thirties, as his pages on Stalin in “To the Finland Station” make clear. The problem wasn’t with Stalin; the problem was with Lenin, the book’s ideal type of the intellectual as man of action. Wilson admitted that he had relied on publications controlled by the Party for his portrait of Lenin. (Critical accounts were available; for example, the English translation of the émigré Mark Landau-Aldanov’s “Lenin” was published, by Dutton, in 1922.) Lenin could create an impression of selfless humanitarianism; he was also a savage and ruthless politician—a “pail of milk of human kindness with a dead rat at the bottom,” as Vladimir Nabokov put it to Wilson in 1940, after reading “To the Finland Station.” In the introduction to the 1972 edition, Wilson provided a look at the rat. He did not go on to explain in that introduction that the most notorious features of Stalin’s regime—the use of terror, the show trials, and the concentration camps—had all been inaugurated by Lenin. “To the Finland Station” begins with Napoleon’s betrayal of the principles of the French Revolution; it should have ended with Lenin’s betrayal of European socialism. Wilson believed that he was writing about the success of ideas in action, about the translation (in the spirit of Stephen Dedalus) of the imagined into the real. But the story he chose was a story of failure.
And yet “To the Finland Station” is, if not a great book, a grand book. It brings a vanished world to life. When you undertake historical research, two truths that sounded banal come to seem profound. The first is that your knowledge of the past—apart from, occasionally, a limited visual record and the odd unreliable survivor—comes entirely from written documents. You are almost completely cut off, by a wall of print, from the life you have set out to represent. You can’t observe historical events; you can’t question historical actors; you can’t even know most of what has not been written about. What has been written about therefore takes on an importance that may be spurious. A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance—even though they are merely the bits that have floated to the surface. The historian clings to them, while, somewhere below, the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight.
The second realization that strikes you is, in a way, the opposite of the first: the more material you dredge up, the more elusive the subject becomes. In the case of a historical figure, there is usually a standard biographical interpretation, constructed around a small number of details: diary entries, letters, anecdotes, passages in the published work that everyone has decided must be autobiographical. Out of these details a profile is constructed, which, in the circular process that characterizes most biographical enterprise, is then used to interpret the details. Yet it is almost always possible to find details that are inconsistent with the standard interpretation, or that seem to point to a different interpretation, or that don’t support any coherent interpretation. Usually, there’s a level of detail below that, and on and on. One instinct you need in doing historical research is knowing when to keep dredging stuff up; another is knowing when to stop.
You stop when you feel that you’ve got it. The test for a successful history is the same as the test for any successful narrative: integrity in motion. It’s not the facts, snapshots of the past, that make a history; it’s the story, the facts run by the eye at the correct speed. Novelists sometimes say that they invent a character, put the character into a situation, and then wait to see what the character will do. The historian’s character has to do what the real person has done, but there is an uncanny way in which this can seem to happen almost spontaneously. The “Marx” that the historian has imagined keeps behaving, in every new set of conditions, like Marx. This gives the description of the conditions a plausibility as well. The person fits the time; the world turns beneath the character’s marching feet. The past reveals itself to have a plot.
This may seem a fanciful account of the way history is written. It is not a fanciful account of the way history is read, though. Readers expect an illusion of continuity, and once the illusion locks in, they credit the historian with having brought the past to life. Nothing else matters as much, and it is hard to see how the reader could have this experience if the historian had not had it first. The intuition of the whole precedes the accumulation of the parts. There is no other way, really, for the mind to work.
This is why historical research is an empirical enterprise and history writing an imaginative one. We read histories for information, but what is it that we want the information for? The answer is a little paradoxical: we want the information in order to acquire the ability to understand the information. At some point, we need the shell of facts to burst, and to feel that we are inside the moment. “Tell me about yourself,” says a stranger at a party. You can recite your résumé, but what you really want to express, and what the stranger (assuming her interest is genuine) really wants to know, is what it is like to be you. You wish (assuming that your interest is genuine) that you could just open up your mind and let her look in. Information alone doesn’t do it. A single intuition of what it was like to be Marx, or Proust, or Gertrude Stein, or the ordinary man on the late-modern street, how they thought and how the world looked to them, is worth a thousand facts, for when we are equipped with the intuition every fact becomes sensible. A residual positivism makes fact and intuition seem to be antithetical terms: hard knowledge versus subjective empathy. This has the priorities backward. Intuitive knowledge—the sense of what life was like when we were not there to experience it—is precisely the knowledge we seek. It is the true positive of historical work.
Wilson had a gift for getting inside the writers he liked (though he had no gift at all for getting inside the writers he didn’t like). Getting inside a historical moment was more difficult. In “Axel’s Castle,” he attempted to create a narrative about modern literature; in “Patriotic Gore,” he attempted to create one about the United States during the Civil War and its aftermath. Neither book successfully transcends its parts. This was because Wilson had a journalist’s queasiness about big ideas. Abstraction is the reporter’s natural enemy, and Wilson favored nice, low-concept metaphors: the pendulum theory of literary history, in “Axel’s Castle” (realism swings to symbolism, and back); the wound theory of artistic creation, in “The Wound and the Bow” (art as compensation for psychic pain); the sea-slug theory of history, in “Patriotic Gore” (the Civil War as a case of the universal tendency of the larger entity to consume the smaller). These are premises that kill contexts; they reduce everything to a single-term explanation. Wilson could get inside Proust and Joyce, in “Axel’s Castle,” and inside Abraham Lincoln and Oliver Wendell Holmes, in “Patriotic Gore”; but those books read more like a series of portraits than like a narrative.
“To the Finland Station” is different. The structure is simple: the decline of the bourgeois revolutionary tradition after the French Revolution, as Wilson sees it reflected in the writings of Jules Michelet, Ernest Renan, Hippolyte Taine, and Anatole France; the emergence of revolutionary socialism, seen through the writings of Saint-Simon, the communitarians Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, and Marx and Engels; the triumph of Communism, illustrated by the careers of Lenin and Trotsky. There are things Wilson minimized that would have complicated this narrative: the persistence of a non-Communist socialist ideal in Western Europe; the liberal tradition in Russian politics (to which Nabokov’s father belonged); the success and failure of the Mensheviks, of whom Wilson did not make much. And, of course, if the book were being written now, the vicious side of Marxist and Leninist thought, mostly a subtext in Wilson’s account, would guide the narrative, and the story would touch down in Siberia or Berlin rather than at the Finland Station.
But we don’t read “To the Finland Station” as a book about the Russian Revolution anymore. What draws us now is the subtitle: “A Study in the Writing and Acting of History.” History is the true subject of Wilson’s book, and what he evokes is what it felt like to believe—as Vico and Michelet, Fourier and Saint-Simon, Hegel and Marx, Lenin and Trotsky all believed—that history holds the key to the meaning of life. The evocation is successful because when Wilson began writing “To the Finland Station” he believed in history, too. He thought that history had a design, and that the Depression was an event fully comprehensible within the context of that design: it was the long-predicted collapse of the capitalist order. “To the Finland Station” is valuable as a window on the nineteenth century, but it is also a poignant artifact of the nineteen-thirties, a time when many people thought that history was something you could get on the right side or the wrong side of. It was an idea indistinguishable from faith, and Marx was one of its prophets.
Marx was a man of the eighteen-forties—like Dostoyevsky, Herzen, Bakunin, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Wagner, and Mazzini. All of them were shaped by the promise and the collapse of the European revolutions of 1848. They had dreamed that the world was about to turn a corner, a corner it had tried to turn once before, at the time of the French Revolution, and that nothing would ever be the same; and when they awoke the old order was still there—in many ways more reactionary and more philistine than ever. This is the story that Flaubert told in “Sentimental Education,” and it is what Marx was referring to in the famous phrase in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”: “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
In the decades that followed the failure of the 1848 revolutions, the North Atlantic states underwent an industrial and technological growth spurt that completed the process of modernization and established capitalism as a complete social and economic system. Capital became the great solvent in everyday life; change was the new constant. This was the world of which Marx aspired to be the champion analyst. “Uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation” was the way he described it. The words were written on the eve of the 1848 revolutions. They are, of course, from “The Communist Manifesto”: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Marxism was a consolation for this condition. It said that, wittingly or not, the individual performs a role in a drama that has a shape and a goal, a trajectory, and that modernity will turn out to be just one of the acts in that drama. Change is not arbitrary. It is produced by class conflict; it is faithful to an inner logic; it points toward an end, which is the establishment of the classless society. Marxism was founded on an appeal for social justice, but there were many forms that such an appeal might have taken. Its deeper attraction was the discovery of a meaning, in which human beings might participate, in history itself.
The thinker standing behind the Marxian idea of history was Hegel, and Hegel gave Wilson the most trouble in writing his book. “My great handicap, I find, in dealing with all this is my lack of grounding in German philosophy,” he confessed to his old Princeton teacher Christian Gauss in 1937. “Dialectical materialism, which was in revolt against the German idealistic tradition, really comes right out of it; and you would have to know everybody from Kant down to give a really sound account of it. I have never done anything with German philosophy, and can’t bear it, and am having a hard time now propping that part of my story up.” He never did get it figured out.
The dialectic was just the sort of high-theory concept that Wilson reflexively avoided. At the same time, he was not a man quick to concede his ignorance, and he devoted a chapter of his book to explaining that the dialectic is basically a religious myth (a characteristic exercise in journalistic debunking). Wilson had no idea what he was talking about. The two-paragraph explanation he gives of the term at the beginning of the chapter on “The Myth of the Dialectic”—the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model—is not the dialectic of Hegel. It is the dialectic of Fichte. And Marx and Engels did not name their method “dialectical materialism.” That was a term assigned to it by Georgi Plekhanov, the man who, after Marx’s death, introduced Marxism to Russia. Engels referred to the method as historical materialism.
Still, Hegel’s dialectic was part of Marx’s way of doing philosophy, and the use of the dialectic as a historical method is the strongest element in Marxist theory. In the broadest terms, it is a way of treating each aspect of a historical moment—its art, its industry, its politics—as being implicated in the whole, and of understanding that every dominant idea depends on, defines itself against, whatever it suppresses or excludes. Dialectical thinking is a brake on the tendency to assume that things will continue to be the way they are, only more so, because it reminds us that every paradigm contains the seed of its own undoing, the limit-case that, as it is approached, begins to unravel the whole construct. You don’t have to be an enemy of bourgeois capitalism, or believe in an iron law of history, to think this way. It’s just a fruitful method for historical criticism.
Wilson was not drawn to dialectical thinking—he mocks “the Dialectic” in nearly all his writings on Marxism—in part because thinking dialectically is something that American intellectuals don’t naturally do. John Dewey was one of the few who did, and Dewey was trained as a Hegelian. American critics tend to prefer a binary analysis: thumbs up or thumbs down, right or left, tonic or toxin. It is difficult for them to see that most cultural products work in several ways at once. It is even harder for them to see that each element in a cultural system depends for its value on all the others—so that to alter one element is to alter every element. Their overpowering impulse is, like Wilson’s, to isolate and to simplify. “To the Finland Station” stands out from the rest of Wilson’s work because it succeeds in representing history as a reciprocal interaction between individual agency and social force. And, whatever Wilson’s hopes and intentions, it does expose in Marxism the seeds of its own undoing.
What is most characteristic in American criticism is something that Wilson had plenty of. He was a literalist and a skeptic. He believed, when he started his book, that Marx and Engels were the philosophes of a second Enlightenment. The notion appealed to him because he himself was, in many respects, a man of the eighteenth century (and liked to say so in later life). The pose of seeing through other people’s fancy phrases was part of this persona. Empiricism and common sense—Hume and Johnson, the reporter and the critic—were all the philosophy that Wilson required. What he most admired about Marxism was the practical side: people were suffering under the conditions of industrial capitalism, and something needed to be done for them. He thought of the theory as simply an interesting example of the use of ideas as a spur to action.
By the time Wilson came to the end of his book, though, he had become wary of the idealization of history that he saw as endemic to Marxism. He describes this as the notion that history “is a being with a definite point of view in any given period. It has a morality which admits of no appeal. . . . Knowing this—knowing, that is, that we are right—we may allow ourselves to exaggerate and simplify.” After describing Trotsky’s speech to the Mensheviks following the Bolshevik seizure of power—“You are pitiful isolated individuals. . . . You are bankrupt; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on, the rubbish-can of history!”—Wilson observes, mildly:
There sometimes turn out to be valuable objects cast away in the rubbish-can of history—things that have to be retrieved later on. From the point of view of the Stalinist Soviet Union, that is where Trotsky himself is today; and he might well discard his earlier assumption that an isolated individual needs must be “pitiful” for the conviction of Dr. Stockman in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People that “the strongest man is he who stands most alone.”
This grim independence was something Wilson admired in Marx, and something he might have wished to feel true, with some justice, of himself.
The more one thinks about Wilson’s headstrong character and his antipathy to systematic thought, the more remarkable his devotion of so many years of his life to this book—which required him to learn both German and Russian. Possibly it can be explained by saying that, in the end, Wilson was a writer, and he thought he had found a good story. The stubbornness and independence also help to explain why, unlike most American intellectuals of his generation, Wilson did not rebel against the politics of his youth. He renounced Communism and the Soviet Union, but he did not become an anti-Communist crusader. One of his later books, “The Cold War and the Income Tax,” was an attack on anti-Communism and American foreign policy, and a book so intemperate that it was received as virtually anti-American. Around the same time Wilson published it, he set out to create an “American Pléiade”—the project that has now been realized as the Library of America. He chose to be a patriot on his own terms.
Among other surprising things, “The Cold War and the Income Tax” disclosed how little money Wilson had made from his writing. His sense of vocation was too urgent for him to calculate the impression he might be creating. In the last decades of his life, he shuttled between Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, and Talcottville, in upstate New York, indifferent to almost everything but his story of the moment: Russian writers, the literature of the Civil War, the Dead Sea Scrolls. He resembled the great isolatoes he had brought to life in the pages of “To the Finland Station,” Michelet, Babeuf, Saint-Simon—above all, Marx himself, writing ceaselessly, his books selling few copies, his wife ill, his children crawling all over him, the rent collector at the door, and his inner gaze fixed raptly on history, the courtesan of every ideology.
Credits: This article was originally published in 2003 in The New Yorker.
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