… a scholar of Russia whose glorious prose style and deep aesthetic, social, and historical understandings created essays like this one — it introduces his edition of the Edmund Wilson / Vladimir Nabokov letters — has died.
A couple of excerpts:
While some in the West could mourn for Nicholas and Alexandra and romanticize all Russian émigrés as genteel aristocrats who had lost their fortunes, and others could acclaim Stalin’s U.S.S.R. as “the first truly human culture” and a triumph of true Marxist socialism, there was simply no place in the Western view of Russia and Russians for a liberal faction that was opposed both to tsarist regime before the Revolution (and had, in fact, brought about its downfall), and to the theocratic police state founded by Lenin.
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Wilson’s assertion in his reply to Nakobov’s critique of his portrait of Lenin that he had steered clear of official biographies and had based his view on “family memoirs, Trotsky’s writings, Lenin’s own works, and the memoirs of people like Gorky and Clara Zetkin,” who were all “trying to tell the truth,” makes one think of a historian of Christianity who is sure that his account is factual because all his information comes straight from the Vatican.
July 30th, 2009 at 9:41AM
The first paragraph you excerpt above truly marks Karlinsky’s essay as a product of its time. One of the most significant developments in pre-revolutionary Russian history of the last 25 years has been its exploration and celebration of Russian civil society (obshchestvennost’, obshchestvennoe dvizhenie). Pharmacists, nurses, military officers, businessmen–you name it, somebody has looked at professionalization and self-organization, whether as glass-half-empty or glass-half-full. The segment of fellow travelers is moving rapidly towards retirement. Reflexive advocacy of the tsarist regime is more-or-less gone in the West, though it’s making a resurgence in Russia itself.
Karlinsky was even making a bit of an overstatement for the period in which he was writing–though the essay just before the paragraph above qualifies his claim by mentioning popular views of Russia. The founders of Russian history in the United States were generally Russian emigres, and NOT from the right-wing branch: figures like Michael Florinsky, George Vernadsky, Marc Raeff, Alexander Kerensky