![]() “The novel is our daily bread,” Trotsky once remarked. When all was said and done, Trotsky argued, Gogol was the “father of Russian comedy and the Russian novel,” the first “truly national writer.” In an appreciative essay devoted to Nikolai Gogol in 1902, on the 50th anniversary of the writer’s death, Trotsky defended the author of Dead Souls from fellow radicals who found Gogol’s social criticism too timid. The young radical stood up for literary tradition. While in exile, he became a regular contributor to the Irkutsk paper Eastern Review. Trotsky began writing literary criticism in 1900 in the midst of a two-year exile in the Irkutsk region of Siberia, imposed by the czarist government for his role as a member of the South Russia Workers’ Union. Order Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary at a discount from the BC Bookstore. ![]() Bertrand Patenaude’s website, from the Hoover Institution. ![]()
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