Book Notes: "Lenin on the Train" by Catherine Merridale

Lenin carpet, In the National Museum (formerly Lenin Museum) in Bishkek (2007) via Wikimedia.

Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was an interesting history of the Russian Revolution and Lenin's trip from exile in Switzerland via train through Germany and on to Petrograd. The work covers (loosely) the time period from February (Julian Calendar) 1917 and the overthrow of the Tsar, and culminating in the Bolshevik's overthrow of the Provisional Government, led by Lenin, in October (Julian) 1917. This is quite a scholarly work with excellent referencing and suggestions for further reading. The level of detail filled in so many blanks in my historical knowledge by focusing rather narrowly. I was grateful for this focus, but I was also left with no clear end-point for the historiography. No sooner had Lenin's train arrived and he suddenly appeared in the mausoleum in the present day having his suit tailored (after killing millions of people). This sets the work up nicely for a historical sequel, but given the level of detail up until Lenin's arrival, the subsequent lack of detail was somewhat disappointing. Nevertheless, I found it hard to put this book down, and I learnt many new things. In particular, whenever I have read inside cover biographies of W. Somerset Maugham, I discovered he worked in propaganda during the Great War. But I did not know how involved he (or Hugh Walpole for that matter) was involved in Britain's spying on the Russians at the time. I also discovered that much of Maugham's backstory is sitting on my bookshelf in the as-yet unread Ashenden. Walpole's book, The Dark Forest, is about this time period and was mentioned in Hemingway's short story The Three-Day Blow, which I read just before this book. I discovered Merridale's work as a result of an interesting Twitter project where Lenin's revolution, one hundred years later, is being covered day-by-day via tweets. See: "Relive the Revolution". Now, I really do not like Twitter but if it could be more often like this I would be hooked! I recall discovering this book after I had discovered Russia Today, a Russian English-language news service. RT's animation of Lenin's journey provides a helpful recap of the book's chronology, see: #Lenintracker, it is a blast! So an interesting journey comes to a close, 100 years ago for Lenin, and just today for me. My next steps will be to read Maugham and then some Hugh Walpole. Moreover, I shall dig up some G.K. Chesterton, who, incidentally, was not only mentioned by Hemingway in The Three-Day Blow, but was also connected with Maxim Gorky and wrote the foreword to Creatures That Once Were Men. A fruitful experience overall, even if a review of this book in The Spectator reckons that the twentieth century would have turned out better if Lenin was left, cranky, and without a train, in the Swiss Alps.

View all my reviews

Book Notes: "The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories" by Ernest Hemingway

Mount Kilimanjaro (1938) via Wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0

The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is drawn from other works and I have read all of the stories several times before either online or in other collected works. Rather than read in awe of the master, this reading had me feeling sorry for the depressing note to all things. While this makes the short stories art, it also hints at a fragility, but not of manhood, as Hemingway's critics often suggest, but of the absurd. And yet Hemingway had no time for the absurd, or at least, Malcolm Cowley with:

...a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement...

Yet here, in this collection, I couldn't help but think of the meaninglessness of life and Hemingway's enunciation of the absurd, building over and over in a collection put together, not by Hemingway, but by others. I suspect this is worth looking into further and a few re-reads of Hemingway's major works might benefit from a view through this lens.

View all my reviews

Book Notes: "Utopia" by Thomas More

 Abraham Ortelius' Map of Utopia (1595) via Wikimedia

Utopia by Thomas More

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Yet another of the books for which I could provide a synopsis but have never read cover to cover (until now). There is much to Sir Thomas More's communist (note my use of a lowercase "c") essay that surprised me. One can see the little twists to insure against More being burned at the stake (the Utopians were ready to receive Christ as they had more or less self-discovered Christ's communal teachings - but it didn't prevent him having his head cut off for refusing to succumb to its antithesis) along with it being presented in the form of a dialogue in Book I (as per Plato, Machiavelli, et al.). A few things made me think it might be more socialist than communist, if one accepts that communism attempts to abolish the state in order to achieve equality, whereas socialism aspires to the same aim but through governmental or formal institutional arrangements. The founder of Utopia, "King" Utopus, suggested the limitations of More's imagination, and had me thinking of modern Bhutan. But the notes on the translation point out that Ralph Robinson, the translator, had added his own interpretations of the original Latin that added kings and princes where none was intended. The introduction by Richard Manus explains the reasons for keeping the original translation and for that I was pleased. The focus on religion and the idea of bondsman doing all the unpalatable work for the commonwealth brings to the fore many of the problems of communism in it twentieth century practice. Aside from the obvious problems where the dictatorship of the proletariat has never ended in its practical forms, communism has never really obtained that level of freedom, particularly in terms of occupations or individuals becoming "Renaissance" men or women, whereas, and despite its reliance on the "Metroplesque" underground to make it practicable, this is achieved, along with a six-hour work day, in Utopia. The interesting use of mercenaries in warfare and foreign relations and the stigmas attached to precious metals and pearls (for bondsmen and children respectively) point to the absurdity of surviving ideas about value and money. The use of Plato suggests a reinvention of the Commonwealth of centuries before, whereas Jonathan Swift, too, draws on the folk tradition to protect himself from his own political commentary, albeit over a century later, but relying on similarly strange peoples with startlingly homogeneous cultures. But, taken in its times, More seems to have done a good deal of the theorising for Marx to arrive and merely iron out the shortcomings. Despite my familiarity with the work, there is much fruit to be harvested by taking the time to read thoroughly what one has previously learnt second-hand. Yet I am pleased that our education system is remarkable in that, despite its secondary-source nature, the synopses I (at least) have received are true to form, if otherwise lacking in detail.

View all my reviews