page_title: The Revolutionist
section_title: Publication history and background
hierarchical_section_title: The Revolutionist / Publication history and background
caption_attribution_description: Agnes von Kurowsky in Milan
context_page_description: "The Revolutionist" is an Ernest Hemingway short story published in his first American volume of stories In Our Time. Originally written as a vignette for his earlier Paris edition of the collection, titled in our time, he rewrote and expanded the piece for the 1925 American edition published by Boni & Liveright. It is only one of two vignettes rewritten as short stories for the American edition.
  The story is about a young Hungarian magyar communist revolutionary fleeing the Hungarian White Terror to Italy. There he visits museums, where he sees some Renaissance paintings he likes, while declaring his dislike for the painter Mantegna.
  "The Revolutionist" has received scant attention from literary critics with only a cursory examination of the art mentioned in the short story. Literary critics have speculated whether Hemingway's intended meaning in his allusion to Mantegna's Dead Christ is meant to highlight the importance of realism as opposed to idealism, or whether it is a reminder of the character's pain and perhaps the pain suffered by an entire generation.
context_section_description: The piece was probably written in 1923 or 1924, when Hemingway lived in Paris with his first wife Hadley Richardson. A year earlier all of his manuscripts were lost when Hadley packed them in a suitcase that was stolen. Acting on Ezra Pound's advice that he had lost no more than the time it took to write the pieces, Hemingway either recreated them or wrote new vignettes and stories.
  "The Revolutionist" was included as a vignette (Chapter 11) in the 1924 Paris edition of in our time published by Bill Bird's Three Mountain's Press. Of the 18 vignettes contained in the volume, only two were rewritten as short stories for the American edition, published in 1925 by Boni & Liveright. "The Revolutionist" was one; the other was "A Very Short Story". 
  It has autobiographical allusions to Milan. In 1918, at age 19 Hemingway recuperated for six months at a hospital in Milan after suffering a mortar hit on the Italian front. There, Hemingway met and fell in love with Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky. Although seven years his senior, Hemingway loved her deeply and the two were to marry on his return to the US at the end of his recuperation. However, after Hemingway went home, he was devastated when Kurowsky broke off the romance in a letter, telling him of her engagement to an Italian officer.
  The background of "The Revolutionist" is based on the 1919 Hungarian White Terror, caused when Communist iconoclasm resulted in a bloody and violent backlash leading to a period of severe repression, from which the young Magyar revolutionist flees.
caption: Agnes von Kurowsky in Milan, 1918
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