Lenin in Zürich

This psychological development of an historical figure is a defining work that illustrates why the 'bildungsroman' is more apt in transmitting understanding than the typical biography. Having spent some time reading other material on the social setting of the Russian troubles, I found Solzhenitsyn's dramatization of Lenin's thoughts in Zurich a sort of 'screwtape letters' of the anarchist.

Definitively Russian literature, in the mode of Dostoyevsky in particular, this work further reveals Russian literature, like its musical counterpart, developing on the nineteenth century line rather than growing from a modernist seed as most of art in the west.