I am back from five days as a Hoover Media Fellow where – among many interesting and valuable encounters with other fellows – I got to meet one of my personal heroes, Robert Conquest, age 91.
I am pleased to report the author of that seminal work on Stalinism The Great Terror has, as the cliché goes, all his marbles at his advanced age. Ed Driscoll and I visited him and his third wife Liddy at their home in Stanford faculty housing on Friday to make a short video. Sharp as he may be mentally, the historian/poet is quite feeble, his voice weak, but we still found his stories of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, etc., riveting. This is a man who has been at the very center of the intellectual conflicts of the Twentieth Century. After reading Conquest, you can never look at GB Shaw, JP Sartre and numerous other Stalin apologists with the same unbridled admiration.
Conquest answered a few questions for us and even read some of his poetry, including a translation he did from a long battlefield poem by Solzhenitsyn (Prussian Nights). The Russian author asked Conquest to translate it when they met in Zurich in 1975 after Solzhenitsyn had been finally expelled from the Soviet Union. The raw footage of our video has been uploaded to our servers and will appear in edited form on Pajamas TV next week.
Conquest on the Great Purge should be read not just as history, but as what happens again and again.
Hey, enjoyed reading your blog. Am an avid mystery fan and teach at Auburn University. Live in Ross Thomas’s hometown and recently had the pleasure of interviewing his cousin Kathryn Dean for her alumni magazine. Can you help me with a bit of trivia? Which or Ross’s novels made mention of Diddie, Dumps & Tot?
David
david story, Ross was one of my best friends and extraordinary person in every way. But I am sorry to say I know nothing of Diddie, Dumps & Tot (though it certainly sounds like a Rossism – Love live Otherguy Overby!)
And I have an entire pile of Ross Thomas books, because I re-read them again and again!
I will check to see if Diddie, Dumps and Tot appears in any of them.
My last comment has not appeared, so I’ll try again with a judicially placed asterisk:
When his publishers approached Robert Conquest about a new edition of “The Great Terror” and said a new title might be appropriate, Conquest suggested “I Told You So You F*cking Fools”.
(When “The Great Terror” was first published, it was almost universally condemned by academics and intellectuals and Conquest was vilified as a McCarthyite and fascist tool, which shows how degraded intellectual life was even in the mid-sixties.)
Um, that was supposed to be “judiciously”.
In the introduction to Robert Conquest’s “Reflections on a Ravaged Century”, he writes:
“In a story by the science fiction writer Hal Clement, when an extrastellar fugitive’s miscalculation has led to his death, the comment is made, ‘Live and learn, they say…but the difficulty seems to lie in living while you learn.’ Over this century the human race has survived experiences that, to put it mildly, should have been instructive…Have the lessons been learned?”
Surveying today’s academic, journalistic, and intellectual circles, I would have to answer “not very well.”
Surveying today’s academic, journalistic, and intellectual circles, I would have to answer “not very well.”
Who could argue, pst314?
“Who could argue, pst314?”
Some the academics I’ve known.
“Into the distance disappear the mounds of human heads.
I dwindle–go unnoticed now.
But in affectionate books, in children’s games,
I will rise from the dead to say: the sun!”
–from a poem by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, published after he was murdered by Stalin for writing a politically incorrect poem.
I had the high and very unexpected honor of meeting Mr. Conquest at the Hoover Institution. I went there with my older son, shortly after I had returned from spending a year in Russia working on a health care reform project. Asking about “someone working on Russia”, the receptionist called upstairs, and soon my son and I were having a delightful (how could it be otherwise) conversation with this legend. I have met other famous people in my life, but none more gracious, and certainly none I admire more. Vive Robert Conquest!