To the Finland Station
by Edmund Wilson
Original publication: 1940

In 1848 Europe was seized with revolution. King Louis-Phillipe of France was overthrown and replaced by the Second Republic, Hungary was fighting for independence from Austria, and great masses of workers in the German states demanded civil liberties and a parliament. The year also saw the publication of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto. Yet by the end of the year, after months of agitation, speech making, and dodging arrest, Engels was booted out of his parents’ house and found himself alone in Paris. Dissatisfied with how “dead”the city had become, he decided to wander by foot in the general direction of Switzerland, taking his time along the way to enjoy the pleasures of the Loire valley. In a letter to Marx he exuberantly expounded on France’s ideal geography, delectable produce, and, of course, wine—“And what wine!. . . each one of these wines produces a different intoxication, from the mad desire of the Cancan to the fever of the Marseillaise!” And so he went on: “nobody is glad to leave France.”

And in particular, not Edmund Wilson. To the Finland Station, first published in 1940, is Wilson’s most famous work. It is a 466-page journey through Socialist revolutionary thought that begins with early 19th century French historians, proceeds through Marx and Engels, and ends with Lenin’s first speeches after his 1917 return to Russia. Considered a classic of literary criticism, Wilson’s masterpiece examines how 19th century historians viewed their own history and created all new world-historical phenomena, communism being the most notable among them.

He begins his first section by delightfully telling all the details of how Jules Michelet, Ernest Renan, Hypolite Taine, and Anatole France were the first to provide comprehensive, overarching narratives to their histories, something that Wilson considers to be an art. He finds connections between the aesthetics of their styles and their historical theories. Michelet’s prose, he says, “succeeds in dominating history, like Odysseus wrestling with Proteus,”while Renan stays away from emotions so as not to “break up his sweet and even flow.” Wilson needles Taine, who “feeds history into a machine which automatically sorts out the phenomena,”for endlessly categorizing with a forest of Roman numerals the unscientific chaos of the French revolution.

The topics that these four authors addressed were diverse (ranging from the history of France to the life of Jesus), but each built off of the others to create new theories of history and the development of humanity. Wilson, then, writes for us a history of history.

So why leave France? Why make the journey through Alsace to Germany, leaving the land of the Cancan and intoxicating wines for that of Hegel? Though Wilson dislikes the Germans’ scientific approach to history, it is a necessary stepping stone to move from Michelet’s historic artistry to Marx’s Historical Materialism. But even after he leaves behind Michelet & Co., Wilson lingers in France. In fact, he backtracks chronologically.

To the Finland Station’s second section treats us to the late 18th and early 19th century French utopianism—from Babeuf and Saint-Simon to Fourier and Enfantin—that was an essential ingredient to Marx’s thought. In this telling, Wilson’s Francophilia overwhelms all else: the German dialectic (which Wilson calls a “myth”) is dispensed with in one short chapter, and Wilson leaves out English economists (such as Smith and Malthus) altogether. Instead, he moves briskly to tell the biographies of his major actors: Marx, Engels, Ferdinand Lasalle, and Bakunin.

Wilson is lyrical when he finally arrives at Marx. His goal is to find what is literary and poetic in socialism and, by extension, in the march of history. While he is never able to make his peace with the dialectic or find basis for Marx’s labor theory of value, Wilson finds poetry in Das Kapital. For all its technical language and statistics, the work, according to Wilson, is a testament to moral indignation and a cry to change the world. He refers to Das Kapital as art, and to its author as a “poet of commodities.”

When Wilson sees poetry, he becomes poetic himself. In fact, whenever he sees any literary style, he adopts it. Marx apparently had a penchant for mixed metaphors. Wilson, then, treats his readers to a particularly atrocious one about vampires and alchemists—only to tell us that Marx himself criticized his opponents for mixing metaphors. Likewise, Wilson exhorts against mixed metaphors, but then we are treated to some particularly impressive ones of his own making. Referring to Das Kapital, he writes that “outside the whole immense structure, dark and strong like the old Trier basilica, built by the Romans with brick walls and granite columns, swim the mists and the septentrional lights of German metaphysics and mysticism, always ready to leak in through the crevices.”

Wilson copied more than just metaphors, though. At one point he explains that Marx and Engels communicated with a strange hodge-podge of German, English, French, and other tongues. Dutifully, Wilson proceeds to air-drop German and French into his own prose with no translations. Sometimes his English prose even sounds like German in disguise, as seen by his dependent clauses’ verbs migrating east: he writes at one point that Bakunin found himself in Dresden “when the revolutionary crisis there came.”

This is actually the sign of a lively mind, one that is attuned to the literary styles of his subjects. Wilson’s prose is much blander when his subject matter is less fiery. At the start of the chapter on the dialectic, his writing has all the passion of a sophomore’s essay in Contemporary Civilization: “We must now give some more thoroughgoing description of the structure and mechanics of the system which the activities of Marx and Engels assumed.” His matter-of-fact explanation of how a thesis and an antithesis lead to a synthesis sounds like a chapter from a philosophy textbook.

Wilson’s transitions in style bring home the differences between the passionate historians of France, toiling to create their epics by candle-light, and the serious young Hegelians who filled the academic halls of Germany. Straddling these worlds is Marx, who merges the artistic passions of the former with the science of the latter. Marx’s entire historical project is a giant mixed metaphor, one that inspired millions to rise up in revolution. It is Wilson’s project to show how this came to be.

That is the over-arching direction that the book takes, and To the Finland Station assumes the reader can keep up. Often Wilson takes for granted that the reader already knows the basic chronology of events. At one point he simply says it would be too “tedious”to recite all of Lenin’s revolutionary activities. But though the book has a destination in mind—tracing this history and ultimately chronicling Lenin (in oddly soft light)—it meanders along the way. We learn diverse facts: Engels enjoyed riding and fox hunting, Marx’s daughter and son-in-law committed suicide together when their money ran out, Lenin preferred Turgenev’s books to Tolstoy’s, and Trotsky called himself Trotsky because it was the name of his prison warden in Odessa. These bits of information remind the reader that history is made up of real people, even if it can be abstracted to Hegelian theses and antitheses.

All told, Wilson’s work is an epic literary journey through history taken at the pace of a leisurely stroll. The comparison is apt: Wilson is at his best when he literally describes the travels of his peripatetic protagonists, and even the title of the book itself refers to Lenin’s famous train ride back to Russia in 1917. Wilson moves us along geographically and chronologically as history unfolds itself in Europe. So if the reader will permit me, I will finish with a mixed metaphor of my own: Wilson’s book is like a long walk through France. It is lengthy, circuitous, and exhausting. But nobody is glad to leave it.

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MAXWELL COHEN is a senior in Columbia College majoring in Political Science.