Trotsky's Autobiography

Leon Trotsky's My Life, An Attempt at an Autobiography (Moia zhizn'. Opyt avtobiografii, 1929) was written in the classical autobiographical situation: a man at one point in time looks back over the whole of his life and tries to derive a significance from it. The historical occasion is momentous. Trotsky has been declared an enemy of the Soviet Union, the ringleader of a counter-revolutionary movement, and has been exiled to Constantinople. He considers the charge criminal and submits to the exile only by force. Now, on the island of Prinkipo, he needs to interpret this event, to understand how the course of his life, once brimming with personal power, has come to such a personal defeat. His solution is to minimize the personal. He writes in the Foreword

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