Lesley Chamberlain

Lesley Chamberlain (born 26 September 1951, Rochford, Essex) is a British journalist, travel writer and historian of Russian and German culture and has published short stories and novels and written about food.

For rugby league footballer of the 1950s and '60s for Wakefield Trinity, Bramley, Hull Kingston Rovers, and Leeds, see Leslie Chamberlain.

Following her secondary education at Glanmôr Grammar School for Girls, she studied German and Russian at Exeter and Oxford Universities.

After becoming a Reuter's correspondent in 1978, she later became a full-time writer; her first book was published in 1982. She has written for The Independent, The Times Literary Supplement and Prospect magazine.

Chamberlain is married to Pavel Seifter, the former Czech ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Arc of Utopia (2017)

Chamberlain here traces the influence of Kant's imaginative understanding of the human capacity for self-transformation through the artist's vision of beauty, as an inspiration for revolutionary change.[1] This notion is traced through Schiller and Hegel to Herzen, through Fichte to Bakunin, through Heine, Feuerbach and Marx to Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Plekhanov, and ultimately to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. The unfortunate result was not the "new kind of living" sought, but a "metaphysical disappointment", a perverse disaster, a "harshly policed" prison.[2] The "whole utopian journey" became an "abject self parody." The "freedom and openness" of the imagination "was not allowed to last" by the Soviet state.[3]

References
  1. Arc of Utopia, pp. 22-33. She refers to Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790).
  2. Arc of Utopia, pp. 185-186. Quote from Pravda re "spiritual life of Soviet people", but contrary results.
  3. Arc of Utopia, p. 191; cf. p. 159.

Select bibliography
  • The Food and Cooking of Russia, 1982
  • Nietzsche in Turin, 1996
  • The Secret Artist: a Close Reading of Sigmund Freud, Quartet, 2000
  • Motherland A Philosophical History of Russia, Atlantic Books, 2004
  • Lenin's Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, St Martin's Press, 2007; UK: The Philosophy Steamer Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, Atlantic Books, 2006
  • Arc of Utopia. The beautiful story of the Russian Revolution (London: Reaktion 2017)
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