"Roll over Derrida: Literature and Revolution is back in print. Nothing in the postmodern canon comes close to the intellectual grandeur of Trotsky's vision of art and literature in an age of revolution, or his extraordinary meditations on the popular ownership of culture."--Mike Davis "Re-reading Trotsky on literature 40 years later is a delight."--Tariq Ali Leon Trotsky penned this engaging book to elucidate the complex way in which art informs-- and can alter--our understanding of the world. Features new reader-friendly explanatory notes. Leon Trotsky was a leader of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and is the author of My Life . William Keach is a professor of English at Brown University. He is editor of Coleridge's Complete Poems .

The Real Situation in Russia, first published in 1928, contains three of Trotsky's harshest rebuttals of Stalin's takeover of the Russian Revolution following the death of Lenin. The first part contains a defence of the 'Opposition Platform' against the Stalinist denunciation; the second details Trotsky's view of the precise nature of the Stalinist program, as well as its disastrous consequences for Russia; and the third demonstrates the unashamed falsification of the history by Stalin with regard to the beginning of the Revolution. Including a sympathetic, but nonetheless astute, introduction to Trotsky's argument by the translator, The Real Situation in Russia will prove to be of value to all students of twentieth-century Marxism, and in particular to those interested in the Russian Revolution - not only its origins and early development, but also, perhaps, the reasons for its ultimate failure.