Europe in 1618 was riven between Protestants and Catholics, Bourbon and Hapsburg—as well as empires, kingdoms, and countless principalities. After angry Protestants tossed three representatives of the Holy Roman Empire out the window of the royal castle in Prague, world war spread from Bohemia with relentless abandon, drawing powers from Spain to Sweden into a nightmarish world of famine, disease, and seemingly unstoppable destruction.
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The idea that binds all these people in all these times and places together, that animates this book and gives it an organic unity, is the great romantic dream of Revolution… . In an age of historical amnesia, To the Finland Station can remind us that our history is alive and open and rich with excitement and promise. [It can put] us in touch with the revolutionary dreams and visions of our past. If we read it well, we can use it to teach ourselves how to keep the dreams alive in the present, and maybe even, in the future, how to make the visions real.— Marshall Berman, The New York Times Book Review
To the Finland Station (1940), remains vigorous and perceptive.— Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World
In To the Finland Station, Wilson wrote his generation’s great political romance, grounding the history of the communist movement in lucid analyses of its intellectual ancestors, above all Karl Marx. By the time Wilson describes Lenin’s arrival at St. Petersburg’s Finland Station in 1917—the first act of the Bolshevik Revolution—his nearly novelistic sense of character makes it possible to understand how an idea became powerful enough to change history.— Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun
