To the Finland Station

A Study in the Acting and Writing of History

By: Edmund Wilson

Narrated by: Stephen L. Russell

One of the great works of modern historical writing, the classic account of the ideas, people, and politics that led to the Bolshevik Revolution

Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station is intellectual history on a grand scale, full of romance, idealism, intrigue, and conspiracy, that traces the revolutionary ideas that shaped the modern world from the French Revolution up through Lenin's arrival at Finland Station in St. Petersburg in 1917. Fueled by Wilson's own passionate engagement with the ideas and politics at play, it is a lively and vivid, sweeping account of a singular idea—that it is possible to construct a society based on justice, equality, and freedom—gaining the power to change history.

Vico, Michelet, Bakunin, and especially Marx—along with scores of other anarchists, socialists, nihilists, utopians, and more—all come to life in these pages. And in Wilson's telling, their stories and their ideas remain as alive, as provocative, as relevant now as they were in their own time.

©1972 1940, 1968, 1972 by Edmund Wilson (P)2024 Tantor Media

Better than it should be

I don’t know what possessed me to try this book in the first place but it was fascinating. I didn’t think I would ever care to learn anything about the history of socialism and communism-dustbin of history so who cares?

And yet Edmund Wilson made it so entertaining. He sharply examines the historical figures with a sense of admiration but also provides a cool critique of their shortcomings….until he gets to Lenin anyways. Those chapters about Lenin read as though Soviet monitors were watching over his shoulder while in the old stone house in Talcottville. Wilson provided a later introduction (included in this version) where he acknowledges that he took it easy on him and blames it part because he says he only had access to official state sources. Even if that were true it doesn’t explain why his healthy sense of skepticism is suddenly suspended with Lenin. Anyways even those chapters are worth reading. Also, the narrator is really good.