Generation Bubble

The Uncommercial Traveler: A Review of Helen Rappaport’s Conspirator: Lenin in Exile

Upon finishing Conspirator one cannot help but feel a certain admiration for Lenin, even if his politics stand at the very antipodes of Lenin’s own. The unflagging discipline with which Lenin pursues his life in exile reminds one of the real transformative effect devotion to an idea can have, and of the undeniable aesthetic power to be felt from witnessing that transformation unfold. For Lenin, a democratic-socialist Russian state was more than simply an idle dream of bohemian dilettantes; it was an ascesis in precisely Foucault’s sense of the term.“Purity of the heart is to will one thing,” Kierkegaard once wrote. And the fact that Conspirator calls to mind Foucault, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard’s ideas more so than Marx’s attests to the fresh life Rappaport has breathed into the career of one of history’s most notorious figures.