Arc of Utopia

The French Revolution of 1789 had grand humanitarian aims that would one day inspire the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Russians took the French revolutionary agenda and reinforced it with sturdy German philosophy to form a beautiful vision in which remnants of theology combined with the power of art as a force for change. The Arc of Utopia offers a fresh look at the German philosophical origins of the Russian Revolution. Lesley Chamberlain relates how the influential German philosophers Kant, Schiller and Hegel were dazzled by contemporary events in Paris, and how art and philosophy exploded on the streets of Russia, with a long-repressed people uniquely reinventing the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. Some of the greatest names of nineteenth-century Russia, from Alexander Herzen to Mikhail Bakunin, Ivan Turgenev to Fyodor Dostoevsky, defined their visions for Russia in relation to the German enthusiasm for revolutionary France. Published to tie in with the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, The Arc of Utopia provides an original view of the Revolution that links the final upheaval of October 1917 with an astonishing period in art, street drama and poetry.