Memoirs of a revolutionist

P. KROPOTKIN. 1906.
Photo. by Lavender, Bromley, Kent.
MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST
BY P. KROPOTKIN
WITH A PREFACE BY GEORGE BRANDES AND A PREFACE TO THIS EDITION BY P. KROPOTKIN DEALING WITH EVENTS IN RUSSIA UP TO 1906
WITH PORTRAIT
LONDON SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., Ltd. 25 HIGH STREET, BLOOMSBURY 1906
This book would not probably have been written for some time to come, were it not for the kind invitation and the most friendly encouragement of the editor and the publisher of the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ to write it for a serial publication in their Review. I feel it a pleasant duty to acknowledge here my very best thanks both for the hospitality that was offered to me, and for the friendly pressure that was exercised in order to induce me to undertake this work. It was published in the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ (September 1898 to September 1899) under the title of ‘Autobiography of a Revolutionist.’ Preparing it now for publication in book form, I have considerably added to the original text in the portions relating to my youth and my stay in Siberia, and especially in the Sixth Part, in which I have narrated my life in Western Europe.
P. K.
October, 1899.
The Autobiographies which we owe to great minds have in former times generally been of one of three types: ‘So far I went astray, thus I found the true path’ (St. Augustine); or, ‘So bad was I, but who dares to consider himself better!’ (Rousseau); or, ‘This is the way a genius has slowly been evolved from within and by favourable surroundings’ (Goethe). In these forms of self-representation the author is thus mainly pre-occupied with himself.
In the nineteenth century the autobiographies of men of mark are more often shaped on lines such as these: ‘So full of talent and attractive was I; such appreciation and admiration I won!’ (Johanne Louise Heiberg, ‘A Life lived once more in Reminiscence’); or, ‘I was full of talent and worthy of being loved, but yet I was unappreciated, and these were the hard struggles I went through before I won the crown of fame’ (Hans Christian Andersen, ‘The Tale of a Life’). The main pre-occupation of the writer, in these two classes of life-records, is consequently with what his fellow-men have thought of him and said about him.