To the Finland Station

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.

Praise

“In an age of historical amnesia, To the Finland Station can remind us that our history is alive and open and rich with excitement and promise.”—Marshall Berman, The New York Times Book Review

“Every so often, you come across a book of nonfiction that is more gripping in its plot and richer in its understanding of human beings than a thousand novels put together. One such book is Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station.”—Aravind Adiga, NPR

About the Author(s)

Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) was among the foremost American men of letters of the twentieth century. A literary critic, novelist, memoirist, playwright, journalist, poet, and editor, he was the author of more than twenty books.