This is a study of the men and women who pioneered socialist and Marxist ideas among the Poles in the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, and the dramatic history of the underground party, 'Proletariat', which they formed. It opens with an outline of the state of Polish society after the final defeat of the 1863 uprising against Tsar, which caused the eclipse of the gentry as the leading elite of the nation. There follows an account of the assimilation by the new urban intelligentsia of ideas coming from the west, which turned some of them into pioneers of the capitalist and...