Memoirs of a Revolutionist
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), 1899
★ 4.21 from 853 ratings on Goodreads
A prince trained as a geographer gives up court, career and inheritance to organize with workers — and reports on power from both sides of the wall. A plain, hopeful voice carries you through curiosity and danger at a steady pace, with moments of lyrical reflection.
Feels like curiosity and hope. About freedom, power and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy first-person accounts of moral awakening, travel through Siberia, and the workings of power seen from both court and prison. The prose is nineteenth-century and often earnest, and some stretches dwell on geography and political organizing at a slower pace.
Why read it
It shows how a privileged life can be turned toward solidarity, and it gives you a close view of revolutionary conviction without hiding its costs.
Pages from the book
The cost, in someone else's bread, of a life of the mind.
But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a mouldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children? From somebody’s mouth it must be taken, because the aggregate production of mankind remains still so low. Leisure, not intelligence, is what stands between most people and knowledge.
There, on the crest of that immense moraine which runs between the lakes, as if giants had heaped it up in a hurry to connect the two shores, there stands a Finnish peasant plunged in contemplation of the beautiful lakes, studded with islands, which lie before him. Not one of these peasants, poor and downtrodden though they may be, will pass this spot without stopping to admire the scene. Or there, on the shore of a lake, stands another peasant, and sings something so beautiful that the best musician would envy him his melody, for its feeling and its meditative power. Both deeply feel, both meditate, both think; they are ready to widen their knowledge—only give it to them, only give them the means of getting leisure. Noble speeches, and underneath them the quiet arithmetic of self-preservation.
New Year’s Day of 1874, the last I spent in Russia at liberty, is especially memorable to me. The previous evening I had been in a choice company. Inspiring, noble words were spoken that night about the citizen’s duties, the well-being of the country, and the like. But underneath all the thrilling speeches one note sounded: How could each of the speakers preserve his own personal well-being? Yet no one had the courage to say, frankly and openly, that he was ready to do only that which would not endanger his own dovecote. Sophisms—no end of sophisms—about the slowness of evolution, the inertia of the lower classes, the uselessness of sacrifice, were uttered to justify the unspoken words, all intermingled with assurances of each one’s willingness to make sacrifices. I returned home, seized suddenly with profound sadness amid all this talk. Peter Kropotkin.Born a prince of the Rurikid line, Kropotkin served as a page to the tsar, mapped Siberia as a geologist, and escaped from a tsarist prison in 1876.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Memoirs of a Revolutionist for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy first-person accounts of moral awakening, travel through Siberia, and the workings of power seen from both court and prison. The prose is nineteenth-century and often earnest, and some stretches dwell on geography and political organizing at a slower pace.
- What is Memoirs of a Revolutionist like?
- A plain, hopeful voice carries you through curiosity and danger at a steady pace, with moments of lyrical reflection. Feels like curiosity and hope. About freedom, power and memory.
- What should I read after Memoirs of a Revolutionist?
- If you liked Memoirs of a Revolutionist, try I Am Malala (Malala Yousafzai), Educated (Tara Westover) and Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton).
A taste of the feed
The kind of power that never gets called power.
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What an apology can build after it has arrived too late.
You were my child. I should have protected you. I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.
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The moment a wife becomes a stranger in her own kitchen.
Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast, while the other held a lamp. The light, on a level with her chin, drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist-bone of the hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face under its ring of crimping-pins. To Ethan, still in the rosy haze of his hour with Mattie, the sight came with the intense precision of the last dream before waking. He felt as if he had never before known what his wife looked like.
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