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Lars T. Lih, Lenin

James D. White European History Quarterly 2012 42: 706 DOI: 10.1177/0265691412458504t The online version of this article can be found at: http://ehq.sagepub.com/content/42/4/706.citation

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Gerard and Burke, which, though diverse in many ways, supported the notion of a universal standard of taste. That the standard would have been found in antiquity was predetermined for elite Europeans, who had long assumed the Greco-Roman past to represent a common cultural heritage and were thus schooled in the classics. To nish their education, aristocratic Britons such as the future Dilettanti embarked on the Grand Tour and surveyed the physical remains of a world with which they had had mostly a virtual familiarity. This experience was so formative that it became the raison detre for the establishment of the Society of Dilettanti, Horace Walpole famously describing the group in 1743 as a club, for which the nominal qualication is having been in Italy, and the real one being drunk. The facetiousness of this remark aside, the rst-hand experience of antiquity on the Grand Tour may not only have catalysed the interest of members of the society in classical archaeology, but also inspired some of them to travel to the eastern Mediterranean or sponsor expeditions there. The last section of the book takes up the work of the society from 1786 to 1816, when it continued with traditional activities, such as the funding of books, and, ultimately abandoning a plan to build its own museum, lent two fragments from the Parthenon frieze to the Royal Academy and donated its inscription collection to the British Museum. During this period, one of the societys well known members, the connoisseur and scholar Richard Payne Knight, prompted scandal on two fronts, rst by the publication of his book on the Worship of Priapus, which threatened to revive the reputation of the Dilettanti as libertines, and then by denouncing the Elgin marbles as second-rate. Through its resiliency and determined sponsorship of scholarly projects, however, the Society was able to weather such storms. In addition to its other virtues, Kellys book is meticulously researched, generously illustrated, and handsomely produced. Full of nuanced ideas but historically grounded, it makes an important contribution to the study of culture and sociability and the ways in which they were related in eighteenth-century Europe. Carole Paul, University of California at Santa Barbara
Lars T. Lih, Lenin, Reaktion Books: London, 2011; 235 pp., 62 illus.; 9781861897930, 10.95 (pbk)

In this short biography of Lenin, Lih argues against what he terms the textbook interpretation of Lenins work. This holds that Lenin was worried about the workers, that he was pessimistic about their revolutionary inclinations, and consequently was inclined to give up on a genuinely mass movement. He therefore aimed instead at an elite, conspiratorial underground party staed mainly with revolutionaries from the intelligentsia. According to Lih, however, this was far from the case; Lenin was highly optimistic about the revolutionary potential of the workers. He argues that in What Is To Be Done? (WITBD) Lenin took his cue from Karl Kautskys Erfurt Programme of the German Social Democratic Party

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which propounded the idea that Social Democracy was the merger of socialism with the workers movement. Lih believes that Lenins entire outlook is to be explained not in terms of worry about the workers, but of a heroic scenario based on an enthusiastic condence that the workers would respond to the call of the Social Democrats. His heroic scenario was that the party activists would inspire the proletariat, which would carry out its historical mission by standing at the head of the entire people, leading a revolution that would overthrow the tsar and institute political freedom, thus preparing the ground for an eventual proletarian government that would bring about socialism. These are ideas that Lih expounded in his extensive commentary of Lenins WITBD, Lenin Rediscovered (2006). In the present book the author attempts to apply the concept of the heroic scenario to other major landmarks in Lenins political career. Lihs interpretation gives a mainly positive picture of Lenin, of someone who was driven by high motives and who had a deep concern for the interests of the people at large. This is an original way to look at Lenins biography and the author presents it in a fresh and highly readable fashion. Lih has unearthed a number of overlooked contemporary sources, such as William Wallings Russias Message (1908) and Gregor Alexinskys Modern Russia (1913) which he uses to good eect in placing Lenins views and activities in their historical context. The striking feature of Lihs interpretation is that it is gained at the cost of eliminating or down-playing those aspects of Lenins activities that cannot be explained in terms of the heroic scenario. Thus, although Lih mentions the fact that Lenin was involved in polemics throughout his entire political career, very little space is devoted to the feuds and in-ghting which took up so much of Lenins time and energies. In this connection Lih points out that Lenin was raised above the day-to-day squabbles by the heroic scenario through which he interpreted events (103). Because there is no detailed account of how Lenin conducted himself in these squabbles there is no chance that the reader might get the impression that Lenin could be devious, petty or treacherous qualities that might be taken to dene his character rather than his devotion to lofty ideals. Nor does the heroic scenario interpretation t particularly well any of the episodes in Lenins life with which Lih deals. An obvious example of this is when the author in mentioning Lenins writing of The Development of Capitalism in Russia in 1899 states that: In this book, lled with statistics on everything from ax-growing to the hemp-and-rope trades, he provided his heroic scenario with as strong a factual foundation as he could manage (63). Lih does not venture to demonstrate the necessary connection between Lenins statistics and the heroic scenario, and clearly it is possible to put other constructions on Lenins work. But even the existence of Lenins heroic scenario is not established by Lih, despite the length to which it had been argued in Lenin Rediscovered. One cannot say that it is a matter of either worry about the workers or the heroic scenario; the possibilities for other interpretations are by no means exhausted. For example, a reader of WITBD might well come to the conclusion that what Lenin was

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worried about was not the workers but the intelligentsia. If the workers were so imbued with the revolutionary spirit, what would there be left for the radical intelligentsia to do? WITBD can be regarded as providing the answer to this question and giving the intelligentsia a key role in the workers movement. Lihs book is a stimulating and challenging interpretation of Lenin as a person and a politician. It is well worth reading, especially by those who are familiar with existing works on the subject and who will be able to evaluate Lihs ideas. But if one had to recommend a biography of Lenin to someone completely unacquainted with the subject, Lihs book would not be the rst choice. James D. White, University of Glasgow
Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2009; 280 pp., 11 illus.; 9780230001619, 55.00 (hbk); 9780230001626, 19.99 (pbk)

Martyn Lyons brings decades of expertise to this elegant synthesis of scholarship on the cultural history of readers, books and reading practices. By historicizing the encounter between reader and text, while also tracing the democratization of writing practices, Lyons brilliantly connects the seemingly arcane results of book history to contemporary technological changes. He argues that the computer revolution has proved far more profound than Gutenbergs invention, in that it completely changed the material form of the codex which had been dominant for at least 1500 years. It has also invited an unprecedented involvement of the reader in the text, changing the way we write as well as the way we read (11). Twelve tightly argued chapters follow this introduction, addressing fundamental questions about the relationship between readers and texts since the codex replaced the scroll between the second and fourth centuries CE. One of the books many strengths lies in the authors ability to summarize cogently the major interpretations concerning, for example, the existence of a printing revolution, the revolutionary potential of print within early modern popular culture, the relationship of literacy to schooling, the change from intensive to extensive reading, or the characteristics of a mass reading public. Readers are introduced to the arguments of such scholars as Elizabeth Eisenstein, Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier or Rolf Engelsing, and footnotes allow one to pursue the outlined debates in more detail (a useful index oers another sort of reading). At the same time Lyonss volume makes a strong case for the theses he has defended in his previous scholarship on nineteenth-century France: the history of reading should not be reduced to a history of technological changes. Readers are inuenced by the format of what they read (large in-folios or mass paperbacks), its availability (within monastic libraries or public lending libraries), and the context in which they read (in private or in readings clubs), but such contingent factors are not sucient. The cultural history of reading that Lyons presents pays special attention to the reader as an active agent in the interpretive process, following de Certeaus famous depiction of the reader as poacher. As a result, the book