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.

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 starts with Kant's imaginative understanding of the human capacities for self-transformation. She traces the influence of these ideas on subsequent artistic visions of beauty. Such a self-understanding of inherent human creativity then inspired thoughts of revolutionary political change.[1] Her discussion moves generally from Germany to Russia during the 19th century, from Schiller's plays and Hegel's dialectic to Herzen, from Fichte to Bakunin, and by various paths from Heine, Feuerbach and Marx to Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Plekhanov. The ultimate destination was the tragic Bolshevik coup d'etat of 1917 then an all-out civil war. The unfortunate result was not the "new kind of living" sought, but a "metaphysical disappointment", a perverse disaster, that led to a "harshly policed" industrial society.[2] The "whole utopian journey" became an "abject self parody." The "freedom and openness" of the imagination[3] "was not allowed to last" by the Soviet party and state.[4]

References

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
• A Shoe Story. Van Gogh, the Philosophers, and the West (Chelmsford: Harbour 2014)
• Arc of Utopia. The beautiful story of the Russian Revolution (London: Reaktion 2017)
• Rilke. The last inward man (London: Pushkin Press 2022).

External links

• Official website

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