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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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. Andre 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...
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