Henderson provides a dogged account of Lenin’s years in London, in the course of which he provides a great overview of the strange half-life of the Russian revolutionary movement. Reading about these insular figures, who had very little interaction with local culture, be it in London, Paris or Geneva, it seems astonishing that they would change the world beyond recognition. The accident of the Russian Revolution or the Marxist inevitability? It’s hard to imagine who might be their contemporary equivalents, or imagine a society which is any way developed or contained within the geopolitics of the modern world succumbing to the kind of revolutionary zeal of Lenin and his contemporaries. Who might now be sitting in the British Library, seeking to bring about the downfall of political structures as we know it?
No comments:
Post a Comment