R. F. Foster, _Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923_

THIS WAS PUBLISHED five years ago, to coincide (I assume) with the centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916, so it has something in common with Revolution, the mini-series based on the Rising. Rather like the television series, it takes as primary focus the personalities of and the relationships among participants in the Rising--not in a soap opera way (although Chapter 4, "Loving," has its gossipy passages), but through a deep dive into the archive of the people who hoped for, imagined, planned, and finally brought about the event.

Foster is the leading Irish historian of this period in his generation, most would say, so hardly anyone is better situated to write a book on the rising. It's not (another) day-by-day, hour-by-hour account, though, nor an assessment of its aims, failures, and  ultimate impact. Rather, it is a look at the generation and the culture that produced its principal players, both those onstage and those backstage and those in the alley behind the theater.

From that angle, Vivid Faces puts me less in mind of Revolution than it dioes of another book I am slowly grinding through, Yuri Slezkine's massive House of Government, about the people who brought about the Bolshevik revolution and then tried to create the world's first socialist state. Slezkine, like Foster, looks at what the people read, what they wrote, the clubs they organized, their love lives. And it turns out--keeping in mind all the differences there are between being Irish and being Russian--that the two revolutionary generations had some shared traits, not least a vision of a new, unprecedented world and a willingness to put their lives on the line to bring that world into being.  They share a certain ferocity, a certain idealism, a certain refusal to let the past dictate the bounds of possibility to them.

Foster notes that the comparison already occurred to Irish poet/painter/ visionary George Russell (a.k.a. AE), who published an essay on the topic, "Lessons of Revolution," way back in 1923.

The most grievous of the similarities: both revolutions evolved with startling speed into grim new societies that the revolutionaries would never have sought nor have considered desirable: In Ireland, the cautious, business-friendly, church-friendly Irish Free State of Cosgrave and de Valera; in Russia, Stalinism. All the ardor, argument, and blood sacrifice produce a victory, but the inheritors of the revolution's mantle soon find themselves reconstructing the iron box the revolutionary generation was trying to break apart.