My life (trotsky)

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Trotsky: My Life (1930)

My life ( Russian Моя жизнь / Moja schisn ) are memories of the Russian communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky . He wrote the politically motivated script in 1928 after being banned from the Soviet Union . The book was first published in 1929 by S. Fischer Verlag , Berlin.

Origin context and intention to display

Trotsky around 1929

Trotsky wrote the autobiography at the suggestion of Samuel Fischer and completed it in 1929 in exile in Turkey . On September 14, 1929, the author wrote in Prinkipo : “I am compelled to write these lines in emigration, the third in the sequence, while my closest friends, who played a decisive role in the creation of the Soviet republic , their places of exile and prisons to fill."

For the “investigation of the problem of the revolution” Trotsky refers to his more theoretical works and states that he intends to write in the present work to answer those who ask “How did you lose power?”. He clarifies: “This book ... is not a dispassionate photograph of my life, but a part of my life. On these pages I continue the struggle to which my whole life is dedicated. I characterize and evaluate; I defend myself by telling and attack even more often. "

In this sense Trotsky describes his life beginning with childhood and youth, the first politically active activities, exile and stays abroad, activity in pre-revolutionary Russia, through his time in Paris, in Spain and New York, finally as an important actor in the Russian Revolution , then the The time of the consolidation of power, the time of Lenin and his death, and finally the actions of the "epigones" - which he viewed critically.

Within the chronological representation, the narrator sometimes moves decades ahead - for the purpose of substantiating justification in a subordinate clause. In retrospect, the autobiographer has almost nothing to complain about in his own behavior over the decades.

reception

  • Christian Gneuss stated in 1979 about the descriptions of Leon Trotsky in the time : “Private matters only flow into them in vague outlines; Childhood and adolescence are portrayed, but not for their own sake, but only as a preliminary stage, as the entelechy of a future revolutionary. ", And notes in particular:" Almost nothing about his Judaism, (...) Was there (.. .) Really no problems with anti-Semitism for the boy Lev Dawidowitsch Bronstein? "
Regarding the time reference, he judges: “The view of the year of creation determines the selection and accents of the whole book as justification and as accounting at the same time: justification of the consistent, the 'pure' revolutionary and accounting with the 'epigones'. (...) The portraits of Lenin and Stalin remain strangely pale, admiration and hatred also cloud his view. ", On the other hand:" How memorable, on the other hand, is Trotsky able to convey a picture of other people in just a few precise strokes. "
  • The editor of the American follow-up edition of the Fischer edition states in his afterword that Trotsky saw through Stalin several years before Khrushchev's secret speech . The author did not regard the text as his memoir, but as a contribution to contemporary history. The bitterness that can be seen between the lines shows the “great grief of the communist Trotsky”: Driven out of the Soviet Union by Stalin, he had to live in a hostile (capitalist) world for the rest of his life.
  • According to Christoph Koch (Kindlers Literatur Lexikon, 1986), the representation of the Russian Revolution lives from the Trotsky polemics. Trotsky claims that he was the Lenin intimate per se. Trotsky apostrophizes his own work as a continuation, while Stalin's rule as a distortion of Lenin's policy. The objectivity of the presentation of historical events decreases the more clearly towards the end of the autobiography the tragedy of the exile shines through.

German-language editions

  • Leon Trotsky: My life. Attempt an autobiography. Authorized translation based on the manuscript by Alexandra Ramm . 569 pages. S. Fischer Verlag A.-G., Berlin 1929 (first edition)
  • Leon Trotsky: My life. Attempt an autobiography. Translated from the Russian by Alexandra Ramm. 543 pages. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1990 (Licensor: S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main). ISBN 3-320-01574-5

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Trotsky (1990), p. 223, p. 41 and p. 111
  2. ^ Trotsky (1990) in the preface, p. 11
  3. ^ Gneuss: Leon Trotsky "My Life" June 29, 1979
  4. Afterword by the American publisher ( Memento of the original from January 15, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the subsequent edition of the S. Fischer edition, pp. 397–405 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.internationalesozialisten.de
  5. see also reprint ( memento of the original from January 15, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. as 405 pages .pdf @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.internationalesozialisten.de
  6. ^ Zetkin: Entry in WorldCat
  7. Trotsky et le trotskisme: entry in WorldCat
  8. ^ Giusti: Entry in WorldCat