Lesley Chamberlain Explained

Lesley Chamberlain (born 26 September 1951, Rochford, Essex) is a British author who has written in a number of different genres - travel writing, food writing, Russian history, German history, fiction - after beginning as a journalist.

Following her secondary education at Glanmôr Grammar School for Girls, she studied German and Russian at Exeter and Oxford Universities.

After working as a correspondent for Reuters beginning in 1978, she moved to full-time writing; her first of her nine books was published in 1982. She has written for The Independent, The Times Literary Supplement and Prospect magazine.

Chamberlain is married to, a former Czech ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Arc of Utopia (2017)

Chamberlain here starts with Kant's imaginative understanding of the human capacities for self-transformation. She traces the influence of these ideas on subsequent artistic visions of beauty. Such a self-understanding of inherent human creativity then inspired thoughts of revolutionary political change.^[1] Her discussion traces the inspiration's philosophical evolution,^{[2] [3]} and also follows its transplant from Germany to Russia during the long 19th century. From Schiller's plays and Hegel's dialectic it came to Herzen, from Fichte to Bakunin, and by various paths from Schelling, Heine, Feuerbach and Marx to Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Plekhanov. The ultimate destination was the tragic Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and civil war that followed. Unfortunately, the result was not the "new kind of living" sought by some, but instead a "metaphysical disappointment", a "philosophical perversity" that led to a "harshly policed" industrial state.^{[4] [5]}

"The great revolutionary art of 1895-1922" terminated.^{[6] [7]} The "whole utopian journey" became an "abject self parody". The "freedom and openness" of the imagination "was not allowed to last" by the Soviet party and state.^[8]

Select bibliography

• The Food and Cooking of Russia, 1982
• Nietzsche in Turin, 1996
• The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud, Quartet, 2000
• Motherland A Philosophical History of Russia, Atlantic Books, 2004
• Lenin's Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, St Martin's Press, 2007; UK: The Philosophy Steamer Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, Atlantic Books, 2006
• A Shoe Story: Van Gogh, the Philosophers, and the West (Chelmsford: Harbour 2014)
• Arc of Utopia: The Beautiful Story of the Russian Revolution (London: Reaktion 2017)
• Street Life and Morals (London: Reaction 2021)
• Rilke: The Last Inward Man (London: Pushkin Press 2022)

Notes and References

1. Arc of Utopia, pp. 22-33. She refers to Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), pp. 22, 28, 32, 184.
2. Arc of Utopia, p.17. The philosophy of each prior generation was transformed (stood on its head) by the next, Kant's by Schelling and Hegel, that by Marx, then Lenin's revision. Cf. p.167: Plekhanov's dilemma (Kant and Marx).
3. [Isaiah Berlin]
4. Arc of Utopia, p.186 (quotes).
5. Pravda (15 March 1979) stated: "Our party is concerned at heart with the constant enrichment of the spiritual life of Soviet people" and "to further the spiritual potential of this society of ours, which is building communism". Arc of Utopia, pp. 185-186. An aim never realized, not pursued.
6. Arc of Utopia, p.174 (quote).
7. Lesley Chamberlain, "The Arc of Utopia in the anniversary year of Russia 1917". "Suddenly, say 1895–1929, and with that huge upsurge 1905-1922, poetry, painting, philosophy, drama and street art came alive in a way Russia had never seen before; and the style was radically modern and post-bourgeois, in a way that would captivate the more settled West for a century to come."
8. Arc of Utopia, p.191 (quotes); cf. p. 159.