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EMMA GOLDMAN: A GUIDE TO HER LIFE AND DOCUMENTARY SOURCES
Candace Falk, Editor and Director Stephen Cole, Associate Editor Sally Thomas, Assistant Editor
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
THE WORLD OF EMMA GOLDMAN
In 1969, nearly sixty years after it first appeared, Dover Publications published a paperback edition of
Emma Goldman's Anarchism and Other Essays. A quarter-century later Dover still sells fifteen hundred
copies annually, and its 1970 paperback edition of her autobiography, Living My Life (1931), also
remains in print--testimony to the continuing interest in Goldman's life and ideas. With the publication
of the microfilm edition of The Emma Goldman Papers, researchers will be able to supplement these
volumes and other collections of Goldman's work with facsimiles of her correspondence, government
surveillance and legal documents, and other published and unpublished writings on an extraordinary
range of issues.
The purpose of this essay is to assist users of the microfilm who are unfamiliar with Goldman's historical milieu by alerting them to books--secondary sources identified in the course of the Project's fourteen years of research--that will provide context for the documents in the collection. It is not intended to be a comprehensive bibliography; it is confined for the most part to books, excluding, for example, articles in scholarly journals as well as anarchist newspapers and pamphlets. Included, however, are accounts by Goldman and her associates of the movements and conflicts in which they participated that are essential for an appreciation of the flavor of their culture and of the world they attempted to build. Over the years, many of these sources have been reprinted; others have remained out of print for decades (for example, Alexander Berkman's Bolshevik Myth ). Wherever possible the fullest publishing history has been provided to aid readers in locating books that, despite occasional reprintings, can still be difficult to find.
For more extensive bibliographies, readers should consult Paul Nursey-Bray, Jim Jose, and Robyn Williams, eds., Anarchist Thinkers and Thought: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1992); the unannotated compilation by Robert Goehlert and Claire Herczeg, Anarchism: A Bibliography (Monticello, Ill.: Vance Bibliographies, [1982]); and the catalogue of the anarchist collection at the Institut Français d'Histoire Sociale, Paris: Janine Gaillemin, Marie-Aude Sowerwine-Mareschal, Diana Richet, and Helene Strub, eds., L'Anarchisme: Catalogue de livres et brochures des XIXe et XXe siècles , 2 vols. (Paris and New York: K. G. Saur, 1982-1993). An especially thorough bibliography can be found in David DeLeon, The American as Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous Radicalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Of historical interest is one of the earliest bibliographies of anarchism, compiled by the anarchist historian Max Nettlau, a frequent correspondent of Goldman's. See Bibliographie de l'anarchie (Brussels: Bibliothèque des "Temps Nouveaux," 1897; rpt. ed., New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), with a preface by Elisée Reclus. Finally, always valuable are the bibliographies in the books by Paul Avrich (see below).
GOLDMAN'S WRITINGS
The starting point for anyone interested in Goldman is her thousand-page autobiography, Living My Life , 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931; rpt. ed., Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing Company, 1934), which covers her life thoroughly through her departure from Soviet Russia in 1921 but devotes comparatively little space to her activities during the 1920s. Three years in the writing, Living My Life did not sell as many copies as Goldman had hoped, a victim of the depression and the high price of $7.50 for the two volumes. Still, Goldman was buoyed by the generally favorable reviews of her work. Friends compared the book to Rousseau's Confessions ; reviewers saw her life's story as an antidote to complacency. The central theme of the book is the passionate intensity of Goldman's commitment to her "beautiful ideal" of anarchism and her parallel quest for love and intimacy. When the book appeared, however, some readers and reviewers were shocked by Goldman's candor in discussing her personal life, missing its centrality to her political convictions. Her attempt to reconcile the personal and political, however, found a strong resonance in the revitalized women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Living My Life has been reprinted many times. A two-volume paperback edition is still in print (New York: Dover Publications, 1970). Other modern reprints include a two-volume edition, with an introduction by Sheila Rowbotham (London: Pluto Press, 1986); a one-volume unabridged edition, with an introduction by Candace Falk and a remembrance by Meridel Le Sueur (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1982); a facsimile reprint of the 1931 Knopf edition (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970); and a one-volume abridged edition that ends with Goldman's deportation from the United States in 1919, edited with an afterword and bibliographical essay by Richard and Anna Maria Drinnon (New York: New American Library, 1977). The editors of this edition performed an especially useful service by compiling a new and far more comprehensive index to replace the hopelessly inadequate original.
In addition to its serialization in Yiddish in the Forward in 1931 (see reel 52 of The Emma Goldman Papers microfilm), Goldman's autobiography has been published in other languages: for example, in German as Gelebtes Leben, 3 vols., trans. Renate Orywa and Sabine Vetter (Berlin: Karin Kramer Verlag, 1978-1980); in an abridged French edition, Epopée d'une anarchiste: New York 1886-Moscou 1920, trans. Cathy Bernheim and Annette Lévy-Willard (Paris: Hachette, 1979); in Spanish, Viviendo mi vida , 2 vols., trans. Antonia Ruiz Cabezas (Madrid: Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo, 1995); and in Italian, Vivendo la mia vita, 3 vols., trans. Michele Buzzi (Milan: La Salamandra, 1980-1986).
Goldman's monthly magazine, Mother Earth, which she published in New York from March 1906 to August 1917, is an important source for those interested in her ideas and the anarchist movement of the period. Often the day-to-day operation of the magazine was in the hands of others, most notably Max Baginski and for many years Alexander Berkman, freeing Goldman to spread anarchist ideas, build a readership, and raise money for the magazine through nationwide lecture tours. But Mother Earth bore
publisher attempted to rectify the situation by publishing the omitted chapters as a separate volume: My Further Disillusionment in Russia (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1924). The complete text in one volume, with an introduction by Rebecca West, appeared the following year: My Disillusionment in Russia (London: C. W. Daniel Company, 1925). With the resurgence of interest in Goldman in the 1960s and 1970s, a new edition of the complete text, with Frank Harris's biographical sketch of Goldman from his Contemporary Portraits (see below), was published (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, Apollo Editions, 1970).
A useful anthology of Goldman's essays and speeches drawn from the entire span of her career, arranged topically under "Organization of Society," "Social Institutions," "Violence," and "Two Revolutions and a Summary," is Alix Kates Shulman, ed., Red Emma Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches by Emma Goldman (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), which has been reprinted (New York: Schocken Books, 1982).
Two collections of Goldman's letters from her years in exile from the United States have been published. Richard and Anna Maria Drinnon, eds., Nowhere at Home: Letters from Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), is an outstanding, often moving collection of letters. Arranged thematically--under "Communism and the Intellectuals," "Anarchism and Violence," "Women and Men," and "Living the Revolution"--the letters are distinguished by the candor and passion with which their authors engage issues and by the deep bond of affection between two lifelong comrades. David Porter, ed., Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution (New Paltz, N.Y.: Commonground Press, 1983), includes letters on all aspects of the anarchist struggle in the Spanish civil war. The historical context is established by extensive introductions and commentaries, and the texts of the letters are thoroughly annotated.
BIOGRAPHIES OF GOLDMAN
There are now a number of scholarly biographies of Goldman. The earliest, Richard Drinnon's Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961, 1982), remains indispensable and has been reprinted (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970); and (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). For full documentation of his sources, see "Emma Goldman: A Study in American Radicalism" (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1957). Two biographies explore the intersection of Goldman's public and private lives. Candace Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984; rev. ed., New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), offers a challenging view of the theory and practice of anarchism, and Goldman's relation to it, through the prism of her personal life. (Published in German as Liebe und Anarchie & Emma Goldman: Ein erotischer Briefwechsel; Eine Biographie, trans. Dita Stafski and Helga Woggon [Berlin: Karin Kramer Verlag, 1987].) Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984)--reprinted as Emma Goldman in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986)--which covers Goldman's career through her deportation in 1919, and Wexler's second volume, Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), concentrate especially on the character of Goldman's anarchism. A brief survey of Goldman's life focusing on the American years with little attention to her years in exile is John Chalberg, Emma Goldman: American Individualist (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). Martha Solomon, Emma Goldman (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), focuses on Goldman as a writer and rhetorician. Marian J. Morton, Emma Goldman and the American Left: "Nowhere at Home" (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), leans heavily on secondary works, intending to place Goldman's activities in the context of the broader Left during her lifetime. Fuller coverage of Goldman's work on behalf of the Spanish anarchists during the civil war can be found in a biography by veteran anarchist and chronicler of the movement Jose Peirats. See Emma Goldman:
Anarquista de ambos mundos (Madrid: Campo Abierto Ediciones, 1978); reprinted as Emma Goldman: Un mujer en la tormenta del siglo (Barcelona: Editorial Laia, 1983). An issue of the journal Itineraire: Une vie, une pensée (no. 8, 1990), published in Chelles, France, is devoted to Goldman and her circle. Other issues of the same journal have focused on Peter Kropotkin, Rudolf Rocker, and Errico Malatesta.
ALEXANDER BERKMAN
Anyone interested in Goldman must also consult works by Berkman, her "chum of a lifetime." Their friend and comrade Mollie Steimer described them as "inseparable emotionally and spiritually. Neither of them ever wrote a major article or a book without consulting the other." Berkman's editorial skills were considerable, as evidenced by his work on Mother Earth and in the substantial contribution he made to shaping Living My Life. Berkman was also a writer of grace and power, as his three major works testify. Regrettably, he never wrote an autobiography, though in the early 1930s he sketched an outline for one through 1919. See Drinnon and Drinnon, eds., Nowhere at Home, xxv-xxviii.
Writing his first book, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1912), introduction by Hutchins Hapgood, finally enabled Berkman to slay the ghosts that had haunted him since his release. It has been reprinted, with a new introduction by Paul Goodman (New York: Schocken Books, 1970); and in another edition with an afterword by Kenneth Rexroth (Pittsburgh: Frontier Press, 1970). An account of his fourteen-year imprisonment for attempting to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, the book is a classic of the genre of prison writing, chronicling the brutality of the prison regime and the evolution of his attitudes toward his fellow prisoners--including a sympathetic discussion of homosexuality--with compelling honesty. The book also appeared in Yiddish: Gefengenen erinerungen fun än anarchist, 2 vols., ed. M. Katz and R. Frumkin (New York: M. E. Fitzgerald, 1920- 1921).
Berkman loaned Goldman the diary he kept in Russia to help her write My Disillusionment in Russia, though he always believed that her free use of it detracted considerably from the impact of his subsequent account of the two years they spent in Russia, published as The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920- 1922) (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925). The publisher rejected the final chapter of his manuscript "as an 'anti-climax' from a literary standpoint," prompting Berkman to publish it separately as The "Anti- Climax": The Concluding Chapter of My Russian Diary, "The Bolshevik Myth" ([Berlin]: n.p., [1925]). The complete work has recently been republished, with a new introduction by Nicolas Walter (London: Pluto Press, 1989). Berkman's earliest essays on Russia were published in three pamphlets-- The Russian Tragedy , The Russian Revolution and the Communist Party, and The Kronstadt Rebellion in Berlin in
- They have been collected and reissued as The Russian Tragedy (Sanday, Orkney: Cienfuegos Press, 1976), with an introduction by William G. Nowlin, Jr.
Commissioned by the Jewish Anarchist Federation of New York to prepare a primer on anarchism that would be accessible to the average reader and help dispel the popular myths surrounding the topic, Berkman found the book excruciatingly difficult to write (see his letters to Goldman in the summer and fall of 1927 on reels 18 and 19 of this collection). Nonetheless, Paul Avrich, the leading historian of anarchism, considers Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism (New York: Vanguard Press/Jewish Anarchist Federation, 1929), "a classic, ranking with Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread as the clearest exposition of communist anarchism in English or any other language." A recent republication, with a new introduction by Avrich and Goldman's preface to the 1937 edition, appeared under the title What Is Communist Anarchism? (New York: Dover Publications, 1972). An abridged edition, ABC of Anarchism, first published in London in 1942 and reprinted many times, is still available (London: Freedom Press, 1971), with an introduction by Peter E. Newell.
The execution of the Haymarket anarchists was the catalyst for Goldman's decision to devote her life to their ideal of anarchism. The best account of the affair is Paul Avrich's magisterial The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Still useful is Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American Social-Revolutionary Tradition, 2d ed. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1958). Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986), is an excellent compilation of contemporary accounts of the affair and its aftermath, remembrances, scholarly articles, and illustrations. On the condemned men themselves, see Philip S. Foner, ed., The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs (New York: Humanities Press, 1969). The diversity of the social and cultural milieu of anarchism in Chicago is demonstrated in Bruce C. Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago's Anarchists, 1870- 1900 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988).
On Johann Most, see Memoiren, Erlebtes, Erforschtes und Erdachtes (New York: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1903-1907); Rudolf Rocker, Johann Most: Das Leben eines Rebellen (Berlin: "Der Syndikalist," Fritz Kater, 1924); Heiner Becker, ed., Marxerein, Eseleien & der sanfte Heinrich: Artikel aus der "Freiheit" (Wetzlar: Buchse der Pandora, 1985); and Heiner Becker, "Johann Most," in Haymarket Scrapbook , 137-39.
For a survey of American anarchist thought from the earliest years of the Republic through the mid- twentieth century, see William O. Reichert, Partisans of Freedom: A Study in American Anarchism (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976); Ronald Creagh, Histoire de l'anarchisme aux Etats-Unis d'Amérique: Les origines, 1826-1886 (Grenoble: Editions La Pensée Sauvage, 1981); and Eunice Minette Schuster, Native American Anarchism: A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism, Smith College Studies in History, vol. 17 (Northampton, Mass.: Department of History, Smith College, 1932), which has been reprinted twice (New York: AMS Press,
- and (Port Townsend, Wash.: Loompanics Unlimited, 1983). On individualist anarchists, see James J. Martin, Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827- 1908 (DeKalb, Ill.: Adrian Allen Associates, 1953; rev. ed., Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles, 1970); and Michael E. Coughlin, Charles H. Hamilton, and Mark A. Sullivan, eds., Benjamin R. Tucker and the Champions of "Liberty": A Centenary Anthology (St. Paul: Michael E. Coughlin and Mark Sullivan, 1986). David DeLeon advances the bold thesis that, as manifested in different forms of libertarian radicalism characterized by a hostility to centralized power, anarchism represents the most significant radical tradition in American history. See DeLeon, American as Anarchist.
The intellectual foundations of communist anarchism were laid in the nineteenth century by the Russians Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. Multivolume collections of Bakunin's works have been published in French and German, and most of his major works are available in English translation. Useful anthologies include Sam Dolgoff, ed., Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist-Founder of World Anarchism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), which was reprinted as Bakunin on Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980); and G. P. Maximoff, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953; rpt. ed., New York: Free Press, 1964), with an introduction by Rudolf Rocker and biographical sketch by Max Nettlau. Kropotkin's major works-- An Appeal to the Young, Conquest of Bread, Fields, Factories and Workshops, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, and Mutual Aid --have been reprinted numerous times. The most useful anthologies of Kropotkin's writings are Emile Capouya and Keitha Tompkins, eds., The Essential Kropotkin (New York: Liveright, 1975); Martin A. Miller, ed., Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1970); and Roger Baldwin, ed., Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets: A Collection of Writings (New York: Vanguard Press, 1927; rpt. ed., New York: Dover Publications, 1970). The best biographies of the two are E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (London: Macmillan, 1937; rpt. ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1961); Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); and
George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince: A Biography of Peter Kropotkin (London: T. V. Boardman, 1950; rpt. ed., New York: Schocken Books, 1971). Excellent brief introductions to Bakunin and Kropotkin can be found in the chapters devoted to them in Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
On the dispute in the First International between Marx and Bakunin, see Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); and for the reverberations of that dispute within Russian anarchism as it grappled with Bolshevism, see Anthony D'Agostino, Marxism and the Russian Anarchists (San Francisco: Germinal Press, 1977).
THE AMERICAN YEARS
The period of Goldman's life in the United States when she was at the peak of her influence is well documented in autobiographies and reminiscences by other participants in the radical, labor, and literary movements of the time. Readers should bear in mind, however, that after World War I the radicals who once had cooperated took different political paths. The accounts they wrote of earlier years sometimes reflect a changed political orientation; others took the opportunity to settle old scores. With reference to Goldman, then, the following books should be consulted with care.
William D. Haywood, Bill Haywood's Book: The Autobiography of William D. Haywood (New York: International Publishers, 1929), reprinted many times; and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece: Autobiography of "The Rebel Girl" (New York: Masses & Mainstream, 1955); rev. ed., The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography; My First Life (1906-1926) (New York: International Publishers, 1973), cover the lives of two leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who occasionally worked closely with Goldman. Mary Heaton Vorse, A Footnote to Folly: Reminiscences of Mary Heaton Vorse (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1935); and Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939), are excellent autobiographies by two author/journalists whose sympathies were with the radicals. Both Margaret Sanger, My Fight for Birth Control (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931), and Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938; rpt. ed., New York: Dover Publications, 1971) slight Goldman's role in publicizing birth control ideas and her influence on Sanger. Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Living (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948); and Floyd Dell, Homecoming: An Autobiography (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933; rpt. ed., Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1969), include reflections on their years on the Masses before World War I. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, vol. 3: Movers and Shakers (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936; rpt. ed., Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), is a prolix but irresistible memoir by the woman who confected the most memorable Greenwich Village salon of the 1910s. Margaret Anderson, the founder and editor of the Little Review, includes whimsical but sometimes acute observations of Goldman in My Thirty Years' War: An Autobiography (New York: Covici, Friede, 1930; rpt. ed., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971).
The radical movement in the United States of the World War I era has attracted some outstanding scholarship. For the anarchists, see Margaret S. Marsh, Anarchist Women, 1870-1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981); the relevant chapters in Avrich, Anarchist Portraits; Paul Avrich, An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); the essays in Antonio Donno, ed., America anarchica (1850-1930) (Manduria, Italy: Piero Lacaita Editore, 1990); Roger A. Bruns, The Damndest Radical: The Life and World of Ben Reitman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Carlotta R.
On the IWW, see Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969; 2d ed., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); and Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 4: The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-1917 (New York: International Publishers, 1965). For the anarcho-syndicalist bent of the IWW and its expression in the art and culture of the Wobblies, see Salvatore Salerno, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). See also Peter Carlson, Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983); and Joseph R. Conlin, Big Bill Haywood and the Radical Union Movement (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1969). The spirit of the Wobblies is wonderfully evoked in Joyce L. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964; rev. ed., Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1988).
Goldman and Berkman opposed U.S. entry into World War I and were convicted in 1917 of conspiring to obstruct the draft, one of numerous cases prosecuted under a battery of wartime legislation designed to crack down on dissent. Fueled by the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia, the atmosphere of intolerance did not abate after the war's end, and ad hoc groups and emergency committees formed during the war to protect civil liberties came together in 1920 to found the American Civil Liberties Union. On this period, see Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903- 1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963); Richard Polenberg, Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court, and Free Speech (New York: Viking, 1987; rpt. ed., New York: Penguin Books, 1989); David M. Rabban, Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Peggy Lamson, Roger Baldwin, Founder of the American Civil Liberties Union: A Portrait (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). After Goldman and Berkman were released from prison in 1919, J. Edgar Hoover took charge of the deportation case against them. On Hoover's career, see Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free Press, 1987); and Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).
RUSSIA
Aside from Goldman's and Berkman's own accounts (cited above), three books by Paul Avrich are directly relevant to their experience in Russia. The Russian Anarchists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967; rpt. ed., New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), which includes an excellent bibliography, traces the intellectual origins of Russian anarchism in the late nineteenth century through the 1905 revolution to the anarchists' role in 1917 and their subsequent suppression by the Bolsheviks. The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), a collection of documents, includes writings by many of Goldman's comrades who later were part of the community of Russian anarchist exiles in Germany and France. Kronstadt, 1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) is the fullest account of the rebellion by sailors in the Gulf of Finland against the authoritarian and centralizing tendencies of the Bolsheviks. For accounts of the most sustained anarchist resistance to both Bolshevik power and counterrevolutionary forces during the revolutionary period, see Michael Palij, The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno, 1918-1921: An Aspect of the Ukrainian Revolution (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976); and Michael Malet, Nestor Makhno in the Russian Civil War (London: Macmillan/London School of Economics and Political Science, 1982). An important work in Russian by Peter Arshinov, a participant in the events in the Ukraine, first appeared in Berlin in 1923; an English translation was published as History of the Makhnovist Movement (1918-1921), preface by Voline [V. M. Eikhenbaum], trans. Lorraine and Fredy Perlman (Detroit: Black & Red; Chicago: Solidarity, 1974).
Two accounts by anarchist participants in the revolutionary period are G. P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia (Data and Documents) (Chicago: Chicago Section of the Alexander Berkman Fund, 1940), reprinted in an abridged edition as The Guillotine at Work, vol. 1: The Leninist Counter-Revolution (Sanday, Orkney: Cienfuegos Press, 1979); and Voline [V. M. Eikhenbaum], La Révolution inconnue, 1917-1921: Documentation inédite sur la Révolution russe (Paris: Amis de Voline, 1947; rpt. ed., Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond, 1969), parts of which were published in English in the mid-1950s, with a biographical introduction by Rudolf Rocker, by Freedom Press (London) and the Libertarian Book Club (New York). The complete work was published as The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921, trans. Holley Cantine (New York: Free Life Editions, 1974). Angelica Balabanoff, first secretary of the Third International and an intimate of Lenin, befriended Goldman and Berkman during their years in Russia and remained close to them after she broke with the Soviet leadership. See her memoirs, My Life as a Rebel (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938).
THE EXILE YEARS
Goldman's years in Europe and Canada between her departure from Russia and the beginning of the Spanish civil war were among the most dispiriting of her life, culminating in the death of Berkman in June 1936. During that period she relied on correspondence to stay in touch with family and friends in the United States while she renewed contacts with European associates and exiled Russian comrades and developed new friendships where her work took her.
Friends and family alike among Goldman's American correspondents were connected with the arts, especially the theater. Her favorite niece, Stella, was married to Teddy Ballantine, an actor and occasional director with the Provincetown Players. M. Eleanor Fitzgerald--Goldman's beloved "Fitzi," who occupied many roles at Mother Earth --was the moving force behind the scenes of the Provincetown Playhouse during the 1920s after it moved to New York City. See Robert Karoly Sarlos, Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre in Ferment (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982); and Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, The Provincetown: A Story of the Theatre (1931; New York: Russell & Russell, 1972). Goldman's nephew (Stella's brother) Saxe Commins had a distinguished career as an editor with Liveright and Random House. His most important association was with playwright Eugene O'Neill, much of whose early work was first performed by the Provincetown Players. See Dorothy Commins, What Is an Editor? Saxe Commins at Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); and Dorothy Commins, ed., "Love and Admiration and Respect": The O'Neill-Commins Correspondence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986).
Max Nettlau and Rudolf Rocker, two of the most prolific writers in the anarchist movement, became regular correspondents of Goldman during her years in exile. Nettlau devoted his life to chronicling the movement--Rocker described him as the "Herodotus of anarchy"--amassing a huge archive of anarchist materials. Rocker combined activism--with the Jews of London's East End before World War I, in Germany for the International Working Men's Association (IWMA) during the 1920s--with writing and lecturing. Nettlau's and Rocker's works have been reprinted numerous times in many languages. See especially Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, trans. Ray E. Chase (New York: Covici, Friede, 1937); and Anarcho-Syndicalism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938; rpt. ed., London: Pluto Press, 1989). Rocker's three-volume autobiography appeared in Yiddish in 1952; an English translation of the volume covering his years in England was published as The London Years, trans. Joseph Leftwich (London: Robert Anscombe, 1956). See also Mina Graur, An Anarchist "Rabbi": The Life and Teachings of Rudolf Rocker (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997); and Peter Wienand, Der "geborene" Rebell: Rudolf Rocker--Leben und Werk (Berlin: Karin Kramer Verlag, 1981). Among Nettlau's numerous books were biographies of Bakunin and Errico Malatesta and a study of the First International
York: Grove Press, 1963). Although her connections with the French anarchist movement dated from the 1890s--evidenced by her correspondence with Augustin Hamon, editor of L'Humanité Nouvelle -- Goldman never played an active role during her residence in France, largely one suspects for fear of expulsion. Nonetheless, she had contacts with the anarchists, for example, May Picqueray, who for a time also lived in St. Tropez. See May Picqueray, May le réfractaire ([Paris]: Atelier Marcel Jullian, 1979).
Among Goldman's closest friends in England were Paul and Eslanda Robeson. Later in the 1930s her implacable hostility toward the Communists created an unbridgeable gulf between them as Robeson drew closer to the Party. On Robeson, see Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988). Visits from old friends and associates from America always fortified Goldman, but served at the same time as a painful reminder of how much she missed her life there. Still, she was heartened that the movement retained some vitality and was glad to encourage it from afar through correspondence. Among her correspondents was anarchist and ILGWU vice-president Rose Pesotta. See Pesotta's memoir Bread upon the Waters, ed. John Nicholas Beffel (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1944), which has been reprinted with a new introduction by Ann Schofield (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 1987); and Elaine Leeder, The Gentle General: Rose Pesotta, Anarchist and Labor Organizer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
Goldman's influence and bonds of friendship encompassed an extraordinary range of people. She corresponded with Ba Jin (Pa Chin), a young Chinese student who was deeply influenced by anarchism. Ba Jin (the nom de plume of Li Fei-kan) later translated Kropotkin and other Western anarchists into Chinese. But it was Goldman, whom he described as his "spiritual mother," who had the greatest influence on both his fiction and political ideas. He recalled in the preface to his collection of short stories, The General (1934), which he dedicated to Goldman, that he first encountered her essays in 1919 when he was just fifteen years old. Later the experience of reading her autobiography reinvigorated him, and he modeled Hui, the heroine of two of his fictional works, on Goldman. See Olga Lang, Pa Chin and His Writings: Chinese Youth between the Wars (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). In Russia and Germany Goldman renewed her friendship with American novelist and journalist Agnes Smedley, for whom Goldman's career had been a model of courage. By the late 1920s, however, Smedley believed that the Communists offered the best hope to oppressed peoples, especially in China, and chose to end the friendship. On the Goldman-Smedley friendship, see Janice R. MacKinnon and Stephen R. MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Goldman admired and was a regular correspondent of Danish novelist Karin Michaelis, who explored in her fiction many of the themes of women's sexuality that interested Goldman. See especially her novel, The Dangerous Age: Letters & Fragments from a Woman's Diary, trans. Marcel Prévost (London: John Lane, 1912). Another intense friendship that rested mostly on correspondence was with American novelist Evelyn Scott. On Scott, see D. A. Callard, Pretty Good for a Woman: The Enigmas of Evelyn Scott (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985).
SPAIN
The historical literature on the Spanish civil war is enormous. The most thorough general history of the conflict is Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 3d ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Burnett Bolloten's The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) is an enormously detailed political history of Republican Spain in the civil war period that treats the contributions of the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists more seriously than most standard histories. See also Ronald Fraser's evocative Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).
Spain was the only European country where Bakunin's disciples gained a strong foothold, and anarchism attracted followers in rural areas like Andalusia as well as cities like Barcelona and Valencia. Two important studies of anarchism in a rural context, both of which refute an earlier millenarian interpretation of anarchism, are Temma Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia, 1868-1903 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); and Jerome Mintz, The Anarchists of Casas Viejas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). See also George Richard Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868-1898 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). On the anarchists and the civil war, see Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Civil War, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), reprinted many times; Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868-1936 (New York: Free Life Editions, 1977; paperback ed., New York: Harper Colophon, 1978); John Brademas, "Revolution and Social Revolution: A Contribution to the History of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement in Spain, 1930-1937" (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1953), which has been published only in a revised Spanish edition: Anarcosindicalismo y revolución en España (1930-1937), trans. Joaquin Romero Maura (Barcelona: Editorial Ariel, 1974); and Sam Dolgoff, ed., The Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1939 (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990).
Among accounts of the anarchist revolution and the war in Spain written by participants or sympathizers, see H.-E. Kaminski, Ceux de Barcelona (Paris: Les Editions Denoël, 1937), which describes a 1936 tour Kaminski made with Goldman; the reports by Augustin Souchy, IWMA veteran and director of the CNT's foreign information office in Barcelona, who also accompanied Goldman on some of her visits to anarchist-controlled areas, in Entre los campesinos de Aragón: El comunismo libertario en las comarcas liberadas (Barcelona: Ediciones Tierra y Libertad, 1937), available in English as With the Peasants of Aragon: Libertarian Communism in the Liberated Areas, trans. Abe Bluestein (Sanday, Orkney: Cienfuegos Press, 1982), and Beware! Anarchist! A Life for Freedom: An Autobiography, trans. Theo Waldinger, ed. Sam Dolgoff and Richard Ellington (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1992); two books by Diego Abad de Santillan, an important figure in the CNT-FAI in Catalonia, El anarquismo y la revolución en España: Escritos, 1930-38, ed. Antonio Elorza (Madrid: Editorial Ayuso, 1976), and Por qué perdimos la guerra: Una contribución a la historia de la tragedia española (1940; Madrid: G. del Toro, 1975); José Peirats, La C.N.T. en la revolución española (Buenos Aires: Ediciones C.N.T., 1955), and Los anarquistas en la guerra civil española (Madrid: Ediciones Júcar, 1976); Sara Berenguer, Entre el sol y la tormenta: Treinta y dos meses de guerra (1936-1939) (Barcelona: Seuba Ediciones, 1988); Albert Meltzer, ed., A New World in Our Hearts: The Faces of Spanish Anarchism (Sanday, Orkney: Cienfuegos Press, 1978); and Juan Gómez Casas, Anarchist Organisation: The History of the F.A.I., trans. Abe Bluestein (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986). A classic account of the period is George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938), reprinted many times.
Goldman had close relations with many anarchist women during the Spanish civil war, especially those associated with the journal Mujeres Libres, which has begun to attract the attention of scholars. See, for example, Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); and Mary Nash, ed., "Mujeres Libres": España, 1936-1939 (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1975). See also Lola Iturbe, La mujer en la lucha social y en la guerra civil de España (Mexico City: Editores Mexicanos Unidos, 1974).
LITERARY INTERPRETATIONS OF GOLDMAN
Among the fictional representations of Goldman's life, three stand out. Ethel Mannin, the British novelist and Independent Labour Party member, worked closely with Goldman in London on behalf of the CNT-
