Motherland

Lesley Chamberlain, novelist, traveller and historian of ideas, has been pondering the enigma of Russia for over thirty years. She finds that over the last two centuries Russian thinkers have tried to answer two fundamental questions: 'what makes a good man?' and 'what is the right way to live?' The nineteenth-century ideal of a happy man living in a just society became, in Russia, a quest to effect wholesale transformation of society. Chamberlain shows how this moral passion, manifesting itself in philosophy and literature, existed in both pre- and post-revolutionary Russia. She reveals that 1917 did not represent the watershed we once thought, and shows how the dream of a plain and simple life reached its negative apotheosis under Lenin.

Author: Lesley Chamberlain

Publisher: Atlantic

Released Date: 2004

ISBN: 9781843542858