Revolution in the Revolution - Lenin, Lukacs, Della Volpe and Lowy

As we move ever closer to the centenary of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, it becomes ever more important to consider it seriously, with sympathy as well as rigour.  In mainstream culture this is not easy to achieve - in Dublin's leading bookstore, Hodges Figgis, the table of books on the Revolution is mostly filled with the work of reactionaries such as Orlando Figes (revealed to have written his own Amazon reviews), or sentimental tracts about the Romanov dynasty.  Worse, the evidence seems to be that in neoliberal Russia there is official interest in a consolidating figure such as Stalin, but not in the great intellectuals of the Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky - this trend is itself merely another form of reaction.

Here are some resources, culled from the Verso website, which open up a plurality of views on the Revolution, and on radical Marxism in its wake:

Georg Lukács During War and Revolution

Lenin's Three Theoretical Arguments About the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

I am still reading - slowly slowly: Nietzsche would be pleased with me - Anna Karenina.  It's always salutary to remember that Marx and Engels themselves, formidably learned in the German classical bourgeois tradition even as they escaped it, greatly admired writers far from their own ideological character, such as Balzac.  So too with Lenin on Tolstoy, and Lukacs, on Balzac and Scott.  Here is Galvano Della Volpe, the greatest Italian Marxist thinker after Gramsci, on literary realism of the kind which reached its apogee with Tolstoy:

Engels, Lenin, and the Poetic of Socialist Realism

And here is Michael Lowy, French laureate of romantic and Utopian Marxism, on a recent brilliant corrective to such thinking: Enzo Traverso's wonderful book Left-Wing Melancholia: 

An Invisible Underground River: On Left-Wing Melancholia

Conor