To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History

Edmund Wilson's magnum opus, To the Finland Station, is a stirring account of revolutionary politics, people, and ideas from the French Revolution through the Paris Commune to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. It is a work of history on a grand scale, at once sweeping and detailed, closely reasoned and passionately argued, that succeeds in painting an unforgettable picture--alive with conspirators and philosophers, utopians and nihilists--of the making of the modern world. Presents the history of revolutionary thought and the birth of socialism, from the French Revolution and the 1824 rediscovery by Jules Michelet of the ideas of Italian political philosopher Giovanni Vico about the perfectibility of man, through the 19th-century collaboration of Marx and Engels, to the 1917 arrival of Vladimir Lenin at Finland Station, Saint Petersburg, to lead the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution.--Adapted from Wikipedia. ONE DAY in the January of 1824, a young French professor named Jules Michelet, who was teaching philosophy and history, found the name of Giovanni Vico in a translator's note to a book he was reading.