Haruki Murakami 's personal reading guide: "The Armed Prophet, Trotsky 1879-1921"

Haruki Murakami selects 51 books from his bookshelf that he can't put down, along with his personal reading guide.

Photo: Keisuke Fukamizu / Text: Haruki Murakami

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"The Armed Prophet, Trotsky 1879-1921"

Trotsky was our shining hero alongside Che Guevara.

The trilogy, "The Armed Prophet," "The Unarmed Prophet," and "The Exiled Prophet," is a biography of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

At one time, Trotsky was a shining hero of ours, on a par with Che Guevara. At the time, the Japanese Communist Party was extremely critical of "Trotskyists" and hated them like the plague, but we rowdy young people read through Trotsky's lengthy works, though I barely remember any of them now.

Trotsky's real name was Lev Bronstein, but when he escaped from Siberia, he adopted the name of his prison guard, "Trotsky," as a pseudonym, and kept that name until his death. Thus, the name of the (originally nameless) Siberian prison guard became known in history.

Come to think of it, I seem to have written some random episode in my first novel about Trotsky on the run and his faithful reindeer, though I can't remember what it was.

"Trotsky, the Armed Prophet 1879-1921" by Isaac Deutscher

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