Suchergebnisse

In March 1963 Isaiah Berlin asked David Caute what "in principle should disbar a man from holding a senior academic post." It was, he explained, Deutscher he had in mind, a man "peddling pernicious myths" and "falsifying evidence—deliberate falsification!" He was "not fit to teach," indeed "dangerous." Deutscher, author of the three-volume life of Trotsky, one of the great biographies of our time, was applying for a teaching post at the University of Sussex. There was unanimous enthusiasm in the faculty for appointing Deutscher, and Berlin was asked by Lord Fulton, the vice-chancellor of the university, to participate in the committee to appoint a new chair in Soviet studies. In the archives, Caute has found Berlin's reply containing these sentences: "The candidate of whom you speak is the only man whose presence in the same academic community as myself I should find morally intolerable…. I think there is a limit below which lack of scruple must not go in the case of academic teachers…. The man in question is the only one about whom I have any such feeling—there is literally no-one [else], so far as I know, to whom I would wish to urge such objections." Deutscher's appointment was effectively vetoed.

Is Russia somehow different from other powerful nations? For Westerners, it has generally been an unpredictable country, and therefore an interesting one for travelers and scholars. Books by intellectuals who have traveled there and promised to explain its peculiarities are a well-established tradition. Such texts have been written by, among others, Denis Diderot, Madame de Staël, Adolphe de Custine, John Reed, Anatole France, André Gide, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Is Russia Somehow different from other powerful nations? For Westerners, it has generally been an unpredictable country, and therefore an interesting one for travelers and scholars. Books by intellectuals who have traveled there and promised to explain its peculiarities are a well-established tradition. Such texts have been written by, among others, Denis Diderot, Madame de Stael, Adolphe de Gustine, John Reed, Anatole France, Andre Gide, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Adapted from the source document.