Personal and Political Dimensions: Deutscher’s Biography of Trotsky

The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940
by Isaac Deutscher
Oxford University Press, 523 pp., $9.50

Now the author brings to its sorrowful end the story of Leon Trotsky, the biography begun with The Prophet
Armed, continued with The Prophet Unarmed, and here concluded. As biography, it is an achievement unsurpassed by anything written in this century; as political biography, it is unequalled; and if there are few or meager landmarks in this literary domain to compare it with, this still does not diminish its outstanding merit. Deutscher has brought to his work uncommon advantages. He was active for years in the movements Trotsky once led, first the Communist Party and then the Trotskyist organization, and he gained a feeling for their realities, for which even the best academic research cannot substitute. He has admiration and affection for his protagonist but also critical independence. His knowledge of Trotsky’s ideas is thoroughgoing and, so to say, “professional,” and he is perfectly at home in the spectrum of the radical world. He has studied and portrayed the private life, the family l...