The Soviet Mind

Russian Culture under Communism

Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780815709046
• eBook ISBN: 9780815796336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Isaiah Berlin's response to the Soviet Union was central to his identity, both personally and intellectually. Born a Russian subject in Riga in 1909, he spoke Russian as a child and witnessed both revolutions in St. Petersburg in 1917, emigrating to the West in 1921. He first returned to Russia in 1945, when he met the writers Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. These formative encounters helped shape his later work, especially his defense of political freedom and his studies of pre-Soviet Russian thinkers. Never before collected, Berlin's writings about the USSR include his accounts of his famous meetings with Russian writers shortly after the Second World War; the celebrated 1945 Foreign Office memorandum on the state of the arts under Stalin; his account of Stalin's manipulative 'artificial dialectic'; portraits of Osip Mandel´shtam and Boris Pasternak; his survey of Soviet Russian culture written after a visit in 1956; a postscript stimulated by the events of 1989; and more. This collection includes essays that have never been published before, as well as works that are not widely known because they were published under pseudonyms to protect relatives living in Russia. The contents of this book were discussed at a seminar in Oxford in 2003, held under the auspices of the Brookings Institution. Berlin's editor, Henry Hardy, had prepared the essays for collective publication and here recounts their history. In his foreword, Brookings president Strobe Talbott, an expert on the Soviet Union, relates the essays to Berlin's other work. The Soviet Mind will assume its rightful place among Berlin's works and will prove invaluable for policymakers, students, and those interested in Russian politics, past, present and future.

INDEX

Compiled by Douglas Matthews

Russian names are given in the form used in the Glossary, which gives further information on selected individuals.

Abakumov, Viktor Semenovich, 66

Acmeists (poets), 41, 43, 77

Adamists (poets), 41

Adamovich, Georgy Viktorovich, 74

Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna: achievements, 4; Annensky influences, 41; appearance and manner, 71; autobiographical poetry, 86; awarded prize in Italy, 80; convictions, 83; Dublin Review article on, 38, 71; evacuated from Leningrad in siege, 35, 65; friendship with Pasternak, 65, 78; health, 82–3; IB meets (1945), xv, xx–xxii, 32, 70–9, 84; Leningrad home, 38n; and Mandel′shtam photograph, 46; officially denounced, 76–7; in Oxford, 79–80; on Pasternak's conversation, 62; on Pasternak's defence of Mandel′shtam, 64n; popularity, 9–10, 55; rehabilitation, 120; translating, 78–9; views on writers, 59, 69–70, 76–7, 79–81; war poems, 8–9, 55; Cinque, 79; The Green-Eyed King, 77; Poem without a Hero, xv, 76, 79, 82; Requiem, 55, 75–6; A Visit to the Poet, 77

Aksakov, Sergey Timofeevich, Ivan Sergeevich and Konstantin Sergeevich, 61

Aldington, Richard, 38

Aldridge, (Howard Edward) James, 12, 38

Aleksandrov, Georgy Fedorovich, 10, 103

Alekseev, Mikhail Pavlovich, 120

Aleksis Shimansky, Patriarch, 34 & n

Andrea (writer), 50

Andronikova, Salome, 74

Annenkov, Pavel Vasil'evich, 168

Annensky, Innokenty Fedorovich, 41, 61, 78, 81, 83

Anrep, Boris Vasil'evich von, 73–4

Anti-Fascist Congress, Paris (1935), 57

Aragon, Louis, 68

Archilochus, xiii

architecture, 24

Arkhipenko (Archipenko), Aleksandr Porfir′evich, xxxv, 53

Armstrong, Hamilton Fish, xxviii–xxix, xxxii, xxxiiin, xxxiv–xxxvi

artificial dialectic, xv, 107, 114, 145, 149, 156

arts and artists: post-Revolutionary movement, 53; preoccupation with social and moral questions, 2; and Soviet popular taste, 158; under Communism, 130–8

Ascoli, Max, xxviii–xxx

Aseev, Nikolay Nikolaevich, 4, 61, 82

Ataturk, Mustapha Kemal, 116n

Auden, Wystan Hugh, 42, 60; The Orators, 49

Averbakh, Leopold Leonidovich: fanaticism, 3; repressed, 6; revolutionary eloquence, 141

Babel′, Isaak Emmanuilovich, 4, 6, 57

Bagritsky, Eduard (pseud. of Eduard Georgievich Dzyubin), 2, 4

Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 147

Balfour, John (Jock), xxi

ballet, 19–20, 30

Bal′mont, Konstantin Dmitrievich, 6

Balzac, Honoré de, 158

Baratynsky, Evgeny Abramovich, 61, 82

Barmine, Alexander Gregory (Aleksandr Grigorevich Barmin), 99

...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• The Arts in Russia Under Stalin
• A Visit to Leningrad
• A Great Russian Writer
• Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak
• Boris Pasternak
• Why the Soviet Union Chooses to Insulate Itself
• The Artificial Dialectic: Generalissimo Stalin and the Art of Government
• Four Weeks in the Soviet Union
• Soviet Russian Culture
• The Survival of the Russian Intelligentsia
• Glossary of Names
• Further Reading
• Index
• Back Cover