cover image Arc of Utopia: The Beautiful Story of the Russian Revolution

Arc of Utopia: The Beautiful Story of the Russian Revolution

Lesley Chamberlain. Reaktion, $29.95 (256p) ISBN 978-1-78023-852-4

British writer and historian Chamberlain (A Shoe Story) charts the 127-year-long intellectual and philosophical history of the Russian revolution in this brief, heady volume. She situates the revolution’s origins in the moral imagination born of the French Revolution, which influenced German philosophers Kant, Hegel, and Schiller. They in turn inspired major Russian thinkers such as Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin. Chamberlain argues that Russian revolutionaries, in addition to planning to abolish inequality, also sought to capture what Bakunin referred to as “our beautiful Russian life”—an ambitious vision that fused politics and aesthetics. Chamberlain impresses with her innovative approach to this much-covered topic, but her account is weighed down by awkward, overstuffed sentences that contrast dismally with the eloquence of the philosophers she quotes. Her glosses of the lives and positions of philosophers can seem simplistic. Chamberlain’s defense of the relevance of her project––a history of the ideas that engaged only a tiny fraction of the Russian elite—does not come across as fully formed, especially amid offhand references to the major historical and material disturbances that actually catalyzed the revolution. Leftists seeking lessons from a people’s revolution will be underwhelmed, but academics may find this account of lesser-known intellectual history engaging. (Nov.)