A timeless story of rebellion and freedom, revisited through a new cover design.
In these days, a remarkable book is arriving in Italian bookstores — one for which I had the pleasure of designing the cover: Memoirs of a Revolutionary, published by Elèuthera.
“Born into a family that owned serfs, I grew up convinced that it was necessary to command, admonish, punish… But when I began to work alongside men from the most diverse backgrounds, I realized the difference between action based on command and action based on cooperation. The former works perfectly in a military parade, but not in real life, when a goal can only be achieved through the convergence of many wills. At first, I didn’t frame my observations in political terms, but that was when I lost all faith in the discipline of the State. I was ready to become an anarchist.”
Published in 1899, this autobiography—echoing the atmosphere and characters of Turgenev and Tolstoy—is not only the extraordinary story of a Russian prince who renounces his privileges to become one of the most renowned revolutionaries of his time. It is also a collective portrait of a cultural, political, and human ferment that was radically transforming the social order of Europe, starting from Tsarist Russia.
Kropotkin’s journey leads us from the court of the tsars, with its end-of-empire rituals, to the vast expanses of Siberia, where he retreats to escape his family environment and, in a sense, is “reborn”—as both revolutionary and scientist. From that moment on, through conspiracies, arrests, escapes, and research, his life weaves together political thought and scientific inquiry, shaping his unique vision of anarchism as grounded in cooperation and solidarity.
And yet, this is not a book about theories, but about experience—about people, experimentation, and life itself.
Graphic design by Riccardo Falcinelli
Elèuthera, this island of utopia we set sail toward back in 1986 — never really expecting to reach it — has never seen itself as a “normal” publishing house, nor has it ever regarded books as mere “products” whose purpose is to “boost sales.” If that had been the case, the journey would likely have ended long ago, because we would have lost both its meaning and its joy.
Rather, Elèuthera has always considered itself a libertarian cultural project, whose very reason for being is to offer an original and coherent context for the many reflections that, in diverse ways, seek to transform reality through a radical critique of power and the principle of authority.
Pirates, perhaps, more than sailors, in this voyage by sight toward an island that (still) does not exist, we have learned the rules that commercial routes impose — and cheerfully broken them — in a deliberate and fertile imbalance that has kept us from conforming, without making us entirely alien either.
It is not easy to recount years of experimentation, carried forward through trial and error, forays and retreats, detours and returns. Yet we hope that our catalogue manages to draw an intelligible map of the journey we have undertaken — a journey we certainly have not made alone.
Elèuthera, a small cooperative proud of its artisan spirit, has probably not been a milestone in the grand history of Italian publishing, but we hope it has mattered in the individual stories of all those who have shared in this collective reflection.
