To the Finland Station

Max Eastman, who was in Russia in the early twenties, has put on record an eloquent description: “A wonderful generation of men and women was born to fulfill this revolution in Russia. You may be traveling in any remote part of that country, and you will see some quiet, strong, exquisite face in your omnibus or your railroad car — a middle-aged man with white, philosophic forehead and soft brown beard, or an elderly woman with sharply arching eyebrows and a stem motherliness about her mouth, or perhaps a middle-aged man, or a younger woman who is still sensuously beautiful, but carries herself as though she had walked up to a cannon — you will inquire, and you will find out that they are the ‘old party workers’.  Reared in the tradition of the Terrorist movement, a stem and sublime heritage of martyr-faith, taught in infancy to love mankind, and to think without sentimentality, and to be masters of themselves, and to admit death into their company, they learned in youth a new thing — to think practically; and they' were tempered in the fires of jail and exile. They became almost a noble order, a selected stock of men and women who could be relied upon to be heroic, like a Knicht of the Round Table or the Samurai, but with the patents of their nobility in the future, not the past”.

Edmund Wilson

1895 - 1972