TROTSKY
357
tion. And in 1939, when an agent of the Russian GPU drove an
ax into Trotsky's skull, the murderer gained access to his victim's
study on the pretext of discussing an article.
With full, almost naive conviction Trotsky believed in the
creative possibilities of the word. But he believed in them not as
most Western intellectuals have: not in some ironic or contempla–
tive or symbolic way. The common distinction between word and
deed Trotsky scorned as a sign of philistinism, worthy-he might
have added--of liberal professors and literary dilettantes. He re–
garded his outpouring of brilliant composition as the natural privilege
of a thinking man, but more urgently, as the necessary work of a
Marxist leader who had pledged his life to socialism. The heritage
of the Russian writers of the nineteenth century is stamped upon
his
books, for he took from them the assumption that to write
is
to
engage in a serious political act, a gesture toward the redemption or
recreation of man.
Trotsky's life is interwoven with the complexities and tragedies
of twentieth-century experience: the Marxist theoretician and scath–
ing
polemicist; the great historian; the organizer of the Bolshevik
seizure of power and leader of the Red Army; the literary man
devoted to the Russian classics while alert to the novelties of French
prose; the defeated but unyielding critic of the Stalin dictatorship,
resisting with his pen a worldwide apparatus of terror and lies; the
founder of the Fourth International trying vainly, at the end of his
life, to rebuild a revolutionary movement-these are but some of
his
public roles.
At the age of eighteen, in the tradition of sacrifice that had been
established by the Russian radicals of the nineteenth century, Lev
Davidovich Bronstein-as he was then called- chose the life of a
professional revolutionary. What such a life could mean has been
eloquently described by Edmund Wilson in
To The Finland Station:
Whoever has known the Russian revolutionaries of these pre–
war generations at their best has been impressed by the effec–
tiveness of the Czarist regime as a training school for intellect
and character in those who were engaged in opposing it.
Forced to pledge for their conviction their careers and their
lives, brought by the movement into contact with all classes of
people, driven to settle
in
foreign countries whose languages
