Hermione Lee
ISAIAH BERLIN WAS A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER, a historian of ideas and, in his own way, a biographer, a narrator of lives. He believed in genius and in the power of individuals to change and influence history. He wanted to understand and describe how exceptional people behaved, thought and affected the world. He was fascinated by charisma and intellectual energy. He was intensely curious, gregarious and observant. He relished personal anecdotes, the more idiosyncratic the better. One of his favourite quotations, from Kant, was ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.’1 And one of his life’s concerns was to work out how the movements of history grew out of ‘ideas in people’s heads’.2
The pleasure he took in knowing remarkable individuals has often been noticed. His friend the philosopher Alan Montefiore said of him: ‘He enjoyed the peculiarities of people who were, not necessarily larger than life, […] but people who in some way or another stood out. He had a great taste for eccentricities.’3 His biographer, Michael Ignatieff, said that ‘he rejoiced in worldliness […]. He was always fascinated by celebrity, by character, by larger-than-life figures.’1 In his letters, and in his much reported, legendary conversational flow, this fascination could come across just as gossip – though gossip is an art, too, of which he was a very skilled practitioner. In these published pieces, some written to order for memorials and obsequies, some written long after the encounters they describe, there is a more serious, public and lasting intention. In essence what this book does is to play variations on the theme of moral virtue.
What makes a great man, he asks? (It is, nearly always, a man, though Virginia Woolf, Lydia Keynes, Salome Halpern and Anna Akhmatova make riveting exceptions.) If these pieces can sometimes feel repetitive, it is because – though they deal with a wide variety of people and show a remarkable range of sympathies – they keep pressing on that question: how an individual’s force and quality of character – as a leader, or a politician, or a thinker, or a teacher – express themselves and have their effect.
Berlin’s approach to his subjects is to get at character by slathering them with adjectives. Noel Annan, in his urbane introduction of 1980 to the first edition of Personal Impressions (reprinted here as an ‘Afterword’), calls this a form of pointillism, comparing Berlin’s prose-style to a Seurat painting. It might also be called impasto, laying it on with a trowel. In these adjectival flourishes, three key words keep coming through: ‘gaiety’, ‘charm’ and ‘fearlessness’. ‘Spontaneity’, ‘warmth’, ‘vitality’, ‘kindness’, ‘sweetness’ and ‘candour’ are also important. These are the qualities that allure and excite him. Often he detects these qualities in personalities which others might not find at all charming or sweet – and that is part of the book’s interest.
Berlin compares these pieces to the eighteenth-century genre of éloges, ‘addresses commemorating the illustrious dead’.1 They are celebrations and acts of love: ‘I was completely charmed, and remained so for the rest of my life’ (Yitzhak Sadeh). ‘I knew him, loved and admired him, and mourn his passing, and the world of fantasy which vanished with him’ (Auberon Herbert). ‘He was charming to me, delightful to be with, indeed literally fascinating, and certainly the cleverest man I have ever met in my life’ (Maynard Keynes).2 He rarely has anything bad to say about his subjects, though he also enjoys making you see how impossible some of them could be, while explaining why he admires them. The historian Lewis Namier was a ‘a man of genius’ and also ‘an appalling bore’.3 Hubert Henderson could never give up an argument.4 J. L. Austin was a terrifyingly ruthless teacher.5 Maurice Bowra had a ‘craving for recognition’.6 Edmund Wilson could be astonishingly rude and was ‘prey to wild fantasies, to absurd conjectures, to irrational hatreds and loves’.7 He loves them all, and sees what is good and remarkable at the heart of these difficult characters.
In this the essays are unlike his letters, which can shimmer with vitriol. There is nothing here like his remarks about Oxford colleagues such as A. L. Rowse (‘grows more & more impossible & awful daily’), Warden Smith of New College (‘fundamentally frivolous and careless of the feelings of others’), A. J. P. Taylor (‘a very worthless man [… a] moral and emotional [cripple]’), or left-wing Balliol historians such as Christopher Hill: ‘piously atheistical persons, solemn, self-conscious, inferiority-ridden, and deeply resentful of almost all forms of spontaneity & life’.8
Here, the enemies are unnamed, and are exposed only by inference, in sidelong references to what his admired heroes have to contend with. These inimical forces include Communist leaders (‘swarms of political locusts’); violent despots and extremist revolutionaries; ideologists driven by ‘abstract principles and general theories’;1 fanatics; tyrants; anti-Semites; humbugs and pedants; the vain, the self-important, the self-deceiving and the humourless. Berlin understands how compromise and self-deception work in the public sphere, how, for most statesmen, ‘personal motives were inextricably connected with, at the lowest, conceptions of political expediency and, at the highest, a pure and disinterested public ideal’.2 He knows that clever academics can be ‘sensitive to status, and [suffer] from fears that their own might not be adequately recognised’.3 But the people he admires are not like that.
His characters fall into four broad types, scholars, leaders, writers and adventurers. The first kind are mostly Oxford dons. Berlin was rooted in the Oxford world for most of his life. He was a Fellow of All Souls College from 1932 to 1938, from 1950 to 1967, and from 1975 until his death. He was an undergraduate at Corpus, taught at New College from 1932 to 1950, and founded Wolfson College in 1966, where he spent nine years as President. There is a lot here about Oxford academic life – its habits, its plots and feuds, its personalities. This can be historically intriguing: his accounts of All Souls feel at times like descriptions of life in a medieval village in which the inhabitants do nothing but talk about philosophy and plot over appointments. But it can also feel arcane and parochial. His piece about being an undergraduate at Corpus in the 1920s, an edited transcript of an interview conducted for a College history, assumes an Oxford audience who will be familiar with terms such as ‘classical Mods’, ‘set essay’, ‘Gentlemen Commoners’ or ‘getting a Blue’, who will nod knowingly at the thought of how ‘Corpus men notoriously failed to get firsts in Greats’, find accounts of drunken behaviour at a ‘bump supper’ hilarious, and know what it means to receive ‘a row of undeserved betas’.1
But Berlin’s Oxford is a world as well as a village. Many great thinkers pass through it, and it is a good testing-ground for character. The same kind of hypocrisies and hostilities operate there as in the political arena. In terms of moral integrity, it matters just as much how a person behaves or what judgements he makes in a common room as in a cabinet or a war office. For instance, whether his Oxford colleagues in 1933 liked or disliked the visiting American professor of law, Felix Frankfurter, seemed to Berlin ‘a simple but not inadequate criterion of whether one was in favour of the forces of life or against them’.2 Many of the people he writes about do nothing but teach, think, write and talk, but Berlin makes us understand their importance and even their heroism. He will use the same terms of praise for an Oxford philosopher as for a world leader.
In whatever context, his heroes are the people who oppose despotism and believe in individual liberty. He is drawn to romantic mavericks like the flamboyant Yitzhak Sadeh or the quixotic adventurer Auberon Herbert. He admires the Zionist founding fathers of Israel, and speaks of them with admiration, burying his own increasingly mixed feelings about the State and its future. He thinks of Chaim Weizmann, in particular, as a kind of genius, and writes about him with eloquence and deep feeling. He is fascinated equally by the kind of politicians who ‘possess antennae of the greatest possible delicacy’ and the kind who rule through ‘concentration of willpower, directness and strength’.3 Franklin D. Roosevelt is his shining example of the first type, Churchill of the second. His pieces on these politicians are panegyrics. Churchill is his hero, and – to the dismay of many of his readers at the time – he chooses not to criticise him.4 What fascinates him above all about Churchill is the rhetorical performance. He sees him as being like ‘a great actor – perhaps the last of his kind – upon the stage of history’,1 with a magical capacity to embody his powerful historical vision in compelling oratory.
Berlin loves a compelling act, and was himself a magnetic performer, whether as a lecturer, conversationalist or writer. He holds himself back in these essays, and mostly puts others centre stage. But his own life’s performance can be read through the lives of others, and one of the pleasures of this book is that it forms a fragmentary autobiography. He is often laconic and funny about himself, as in the remarks about having been indolent as an undergraduate (‘and remained so for the rest of my life’),2 or about his being ‘far from taciturn’.3 He does not comment on the attractive fact that some of his closest friendships are with people he disagrees with. Sometimes you hear, as if in conversation, what it would have been like to be entertained by him, as in a remark about Portofino: ‘The inhabitants of that portion of the Ligurian coast are not given to exaggerated idealism.’4
But there are many places in the book where he reveals himself with the utmost seriousness. This can be in passing, as in his brief account of witnessing the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in Petrograd in 1917, which filled him ‘with a permanent horror of any kind of violence’.5 Berlin was born into a Russian-Jewish family in Riga in 1909, and he writes about his family and his ancestors, without mentioning himself, in the section on the Jews of Riga in his essay on Yitzhak Sadeh, or, writing about Weizmann, on the Russian-Jewish communities of the late nineteenth century. Here and in the autobiographical pieces, his roots, his intellectual history, his education, his sense of his Jewishness, his Anglophilia and his moral and aesthetic preferences are vividly on display.
Nowhere is this more true than in his moving and beautiful essay on ‘Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956’, particularly the section on his now legendary encounter with Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad.1 This raises acutely some of the problems inherent in the title word ‘impressions’. Several of these essays are written twenty or thirty years after the encounters or events described, and display a remarkable memory of long-ago events. He will say of a visit from Edmund Wilson in 1954, described in verbatim detail in an essay of 1987, ‘I remember his words.’2 Or, of a friendship with Lewis Namier going back to the 1930s, and written about in 1966: ‘This account […] is based upon no research and is written purely from memory.’3 One of the longest time-gaps in the book is that between the meeting with Akhmatova in 1945 and the writing up of the meeting in 1980. Yet it is also one of the most historically vivid and dramatically convincing pieces in the book. I will dwell on it here as, in my view, the essay which encapsulates the strengths and qualities of Personal Impressions.
We know more about this encounter than the essay reveals, and it requires some historical context. Berlin did not spend his whole life in Oxford. In 1940, in the States, he was appointed by the Ministry of Information to report on American political opinion as part of the attempt to persuade America to enter the war. In 1942 he was moved to the British Embassy in Washington in an expanded version of this role, drafting weekly reports on behalf of the British ambassador; and in 1945 he was sent from Washington to Moscow in the official role of ‘Temporary First Secretary to the British Embassy’ to write a despatch about post-war American–Soviet–British relations, before returning to academic life in Oxford. His visit to Russia in 1945 was his first return since his childhood.4 He was then thirty-six. He talked to politicians, writers, composers, critics and bureaucrats. He got to know Boris Pasternak well, and was excited and stirred by this encounter with genius.
In November 1945 he went by train with a British Council staff member, Brenda Tripp, to Leningrad, the Petrograd of his childhood. It was not long since the horrors of the thousand-day siege, and everywhere in the city, as well as vivid reminders of his childhood, there were marks of ruin, destruction, hunger and deprivation. Berlin wanted to know what had happened to the great flowering of talent and genius which had briefly flourished after the Revolution, and had then been ruthlessly crushed and purged under Stalin. Almost as soon as he arrived, he and Miss Tripp found their way to the Writers’ Bookshop on the Nevsky, managed by Gennady Rakhlin, who made the bookshop a meeting-place for writers (and who, as it later transpired, was a police spy).1 At the bookshop, Berlin talked to a critic and historian called Vladimir Orlov, and asked him about the fate of Leningrad’s writers. Was Akhmatova still alive? ‘Why yes, of course’, Orlov replied, ‘She lives not far from here in Fontanny Dom [Fountain House]. Would you like to meet her?’ ‘It was if I had suddenly been invited to meet Miss Christina Rossetti; I could hardly speak; I mumbled that I should indeed like to meet her.’2
Anna Akhmatova, born in 1886, was then fifty-nine, and was the most popular and the most censored of Russian poets. She was one of the pre-revolutionary literary circle known as the Acmeists, and one of the great quartet of writers (with Osip Mandel′shtam, Marina Tsvetaeva and Pasternak) who had come to adulthood in the early twentieth century at a time of war and revolution. Her friend Mandel′shtam had been killed during Stalin’s years of terror. Tsvetaeva had committed suicide. Her first husband, the poet Nikolay Gumilev, was killed on Lenin’s orders in 1921. Her second (ex-)husband, the art historian Nikolay Punin, would die in prison in 1953. Her son, the historian Lev Gumilev, had been in prison since 1938, and had only just been released. Publication of her work had been banned for decades. She had not been to Europe for thirty-four years. She lived in bleak and deprived circumstances in a room next to her ex-husband’s in Fountain House, a large, run-down eighteenth-century palace on the banks of the Fontanka canal, pockmarked with shells, with nothing on the wall except a drawing of her done by Modigliani in Paris in 1911, little furniture, little privacy and little to eat. Here she was writing her long Poem without a Hero.
The essay tells the story of their meeting, though the whole story, and its aftermath, has to be pieced together from other sources too. The phone call was made, and that afternoon Berlin went with Orlov and was received in the bare upstairs room by a woman he described (as did others) as looking like a ‘tragic queen’. She would have seen a dark, portly, short, bespectacled man in a dark suit, with an intensely eloquent and intelligent face, and a deep, distinctive, extremely rapid, almost stammering voice. There was an ‘academic lady’ with her. They began to talk, and then Berlin heard his name being shouted from the courtyard downstairs. At first he thought it was an illusion, then went to look out, and saw the unlikely figure of Randolph Churchill (son of Winston), behaving like a ‘tipsy undergraduate’. Churchill provides a comic, if somewhat sinister, interlude in this encounter. He had just arrived in Leningrad on a newspaper assignment and was staying by chance at the same hotel as Berlin. He spoke no Russian, and needed a translator so that he could get someone to put the caviar he had just bought into a fridge. He had met Brenda Tripp, who had told him where to find Berlin. Because Churchill was undoubtedly being tailed by the secret police, Berlin went down and hastily got rid of him. He then went back to the bookshop and rang Akhmatova to apologise, asking whether he could come back later. Perhaps unwisely for her, she said yes.
When he did return, at nine that night, he learnt that her companion, still with her, was an Assyriologist, who stayed until nearly midnight, asking Berlin boring questions about English universities. After all these false starts, only at midnight did the conversation with Akhmatova really begin. It was interrupted once again, at about three in the morning, by her son, Lev Gumilev, living down the hall, who offered to cook them a dish of boiled potatoes – it was all they had.
Otherwise, Berlin and Akhmatova talked all night alone. This remarkable conversation covered a great range of subjects of intense interest to both of them. First they talked about mutual friends, some of whom she had not seen for years. She told him about her time in Paris before the war and her friendship with Modigliani, about her childhood and her first husband and his terrible fate. She recited some of Byron’s Don Juan to him, in an unintelligible accent, which at once moved and embarrassed him. She spoke some of her own poems, then broke down in tears, then resumed with the unfinished Poem without a Hero. ‘Even then’, he noted, ‘I realised I was listening to a work of genius.’ It was a memorial to her life as a poet and ‘to the past of the city, St Petersburg, which was part of her being’ (and of his, though he does not say so). She described the years of Stalin’s terror, the ‘fate of loved ones’, the ‘torture and slaughter of millions of innocents’. She talked of Mandel′shtam and Aleksey Tolstoy. Then, after eating the boiled potatoes, they began to speak of other writers. Berlin reports Akhmatova’s opinions as if he had a tape-recorder in the room with him, and has then translated her words into an English which is, as a translation from the Russian might well be, slightly formalised and unidiomatic.
The talk became increasingly personal. She quizzed him about his private life and he would later say that he told her about the person he was currently in love with (Patricia de Bendern), about his childhood and his family. She talked at length about music, especially Beethoven. She described her ‘loneliness and isolation’ and said that her ‘sustenance’ came from ‘literature and the images of the past’, and from translating. He summed up her intellectual stance towards poetry and art as ‘a form of nostalgia, a longing for a universal culture, as Goethe and Schlegel had conceived it’. She spoke, he said, ‘without the slightest trace of self-pity, like a princess in exile’. As the night wore on, Berlin smoked his miniature Swiss cigars, and the cigar smoke filled the room. He was longing to pee, but did not want to go down the hall to the lavatory in case it stopped her talking. Outside they could hear the frozen rain falling on to the Fontanka. For him, it was (as Ignatieff describes it) an intense passage of validation: ‘Here was the greatest living poet of his native language talking to him as if he had always belonged to her circle, as if he knew everyone she knew, had read everything that she had read, understood what she said and what she meant.’ For her it was meeting ‘a messenger between the two Russian cultures – one in external exile, the other in internal exile – which had been split apart by the Revolution’.1 Berlin left Fountain House at about eleven in the morning, and went back to his hotel room, where Brenda Tripp in her diary recorded him falling on to his bed and saying ‘I am in love, I am in love.’ Almost at once, Akhmatova began to write him into Poem without a Hero as the ‘Guest from the Future’, the revenant from Europe, the messenger from another more hopeful world. She also started to transform the visit into an idealised encounter in a lyric sequence of poems called Cinque. Before he left Russia, in January 1946, Berlin went back for a shorter visit, and she gave him one of these poems.
The meeting had prolonged and complex repercussions. Berlin at once wrote two reports, one personal and one formal, drawn from his encounters in Russia, but mentioning his visits to Akhmatova only once, in passing, without naming her.1 In these essays, ‘The Arts in Russia under Stalin’ and ‘A Visit to Leningrad’, he commented on the tragic obliteration of the ‘vast ferment in Soviet thought’2 that had burgeoned before 1928, the witch hunts, the increasing State control, the purges of 1937 and 1938, the appalling conditions under which writers lived, their longing for European books and news and recognition and the silencing of their internal protests. He concluded with a faint hope that even under those conditions, ‘the astonishingly undiminished moral and intellectual appetite of this most imaginative and least narrow of peoples’ might still come through and lead to gigantic achievements in the future.3
In private, he talked endlessly about the encounter with Akhmatova, sometimes to the wrong people. He called it ‘the most thrilling thing that has ever, I think, happened to me’, ‘one of the most moving experiences of my life’. He said it ‘affected me profoundly and permanently changed my outlook’.4 His dedication to liberalism, his commitment to individuals as the agents of history, his profound horror of tyranny and coercion were fuelled by the experience.
For her – though she did not blame him – the results were disastrous. The visit came to Stalin’s attention, who commented ‘So now our nun receives visits from foreign spies?’ The day after Berlin came to say goodbye to her, men in uniform went into her room while she was out and screwed a microphone to the ceiling, leaving the floor strewn with plaster. She was continually spied on. In August she was vilified by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and expelled from the Writers’ Union. She had very little to live on. Her book of poems was pulped. In 1949 her son was re-arrested and the next day she burnt all her manuscripts, having committed all her poems to memory. She was convinced, probably rightly, that these catastrophes were the result of Berlin’s visit, which she continued to turn into rhapsodic poetry. More grandiloquently, she was persuaded that their encounter marked the beginning of the Cold War, and often said so. He felt some guilt and anxiety – ‘qualms of conscience’ – about what happened to her after his visit, but resisted her mythologising, world-changing versions of the encounter.1
They did not meet again for many years. In August 1956, recently married, he was back in Russia with his wife Aline, visiting Pasternak. He tried to arrange a meeting with Akhmatova, but she declined. Her romanticised ‘Guest from the Future’ was not supposed to have done anything so uninteresting as ‘gone and got married in the most ordinary, banal fashion’.2 In 1965 he arranged for her to receive an Honorary Degree from Oxford, just at the time of his fifty-sixth birthday, and a year before she died. The visit went well; but their intimacy was not renewed. She was somewhat satirical of ‘Sir’, in his ‘gilded cage’.3
By this time their meeting had become legendary. Poems, plays, memoirs, biographies, rewrote the story. Because they had spent the night together, the rumour persisted that they had had a sexual liaison; ‘nothing’, Berlin said, ‘is further from the truth’.1 New information in a 2009 book by three Russian writers, That’s How It Was, appeared to cast doubts on Berlin’s story. The authors said that Berlin saw two academic ladies at the Fountain House, both KGB spies;2 that there were five meetings between him and Akhmatova, not two (hence the title, Cinque, of the poem-series); that Berlin must have known Rakhlin the bookshop-owner and known where to find Akhmatova before he went to Leningrad; that the visit might have been pre-arranged; and that Randolph Churchill could not possibly have got into the courtyard of the building. Perhaps Berlin changed the facts to ‘deflect attention from the rationale behind his trip to Leningrad: if not exactly a spy, he was collecting and analysing details about the Soviet Union for the British Embassy’. Or he may have been trying to protect Akhmatova from reprisals. (Or, as Henry Hardy has noted, he may have been trying to protect his own relatives in the USSR.)3
Are, then, the details of this famous encounter to be treated with suspicion – and does that throw a dubious light on some of the other character sketches, drawn ‘from memory’, in this book? The essay is prefaced by this quotation from Akhmatova: ‘Every attempt to produce coherent memories amounts to falsification. No human memory is so arranged as to recollect everything in continuous sequence. Letters and diaries often turn out to be bad assistants.’ And the first footnote to the essay reads:
I have never kept a diary, and this account is based on what I now remember, or recollect that I remembered and sometimes described to my friends during the last thirty or more years. I know only too well that memory, at any rate my memory, is not always a reliable witness of facts or events, particularly of conversations which, at times, I have quoted. I can only say that I have recorded the facts as accurately as I recall them.
Years later, when asked again about the meeting with Akhmatova, Berlin would say that his account of it was based on ‘a very few notes and an imperfect memory’.1 Yet, for all these warning notes, there are contextual factors which give the anecdote strong plausibility. The encounter took place at a moment when Berlin had just gone back to Leningrad for the first time since leaving it as a child, and he makes a point of emphasising how his memories were rushing in on him even before he went to see Akhmatova. And Akhmatova and Berlin both belonged to a national culture steeped in oral tradition, particularly at a time of censorship, when the memorising of poetry – as Akhmatova memorised her own, and that of Mandel′shtam and Tsvetaeva – was often the only way of preserving it.
Memory plays us false, as we all know. But this meeting has the intensity and dramatic presence of something vividly recollected. As with the accounts of other remarkable personages described in this book – Pasternak, Huxley, Woolf – what leaps off the page is the sound of a voice, remembered through time. Likewise, even readers who never heard Isaiah Berlin speak can hear, when they read these essays, the magnetic, appealing sound of a living voice.
1 Immanuel Kant, ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’ [‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, 1784], Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1900– ) viii 23.22.
2 IB, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (London, 2003; 2nd ed., Princeton, 2013), 1.
3 The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin, ed. Henry Hardy (Woodbridge, 2009), 108.
1 Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London/New York, 1998) (MI), 63, 67.
1 xxxi below (subsequent references to the present volume are by page number alone).
2 262, 194, 220.
3 131.
4 30, 32.
5 165.
6 151.
7 296.
8 IB, Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes (London, 2009), 129, 158, 429, 465, 575.
1 79, 81, 127.
2 80.
3 102.
1 337, 339, 344, 345, 341, 342, 341.
2 103.
3 43.
4 MI 195–7.
1 29.
2 339.
3 187.
4 190–1.
5 211.
1 399–416.
2 287.
3 121.
4 He did visit Riga (in the Russian empire in his childhood there) in 1928, but by then Latvia was independent.
1 IB, The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism, ed. Henry Hardy (Washington, 2004) (SM), 31; cf. xxviii, 400 below.
2 IB, ‘Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956’, in this volume (at 399–401; subsequent unreferenced quotations are from this essay). He also wrote two contemporaneous accounts of his visit to Leningrad, both included in SM: ‘A Visit to Leningrad’ and ‘The Arts in Russia under Stalin’. Other sources for this meeting include: MI chapter 11; Anatoly Naiman, ‘Akhmatova and Sir’, in The Book of Isaiah (xv/3), 62–81; IB’s Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946, ed. Henry Hardy (London, 2004), and Enlightening (xvii/8); György Dalos, The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin, trans. Anthony Wood (London, 1998); Anatoly Nayman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova [Russian edition 1989], trans. Wendy Rosslyn (London, 1991); Amanda Haight, Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage (New York and London, 1976); Josephine von Zitzewitz, ‘That’s How It Was’ – on L. Kopylov, T. Pozdnyakova and N. Popova, ‘I eto bylo tak’: Anna Akhmatova i Isaiya Berlin [‘That’s How It Was’: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin] (St Petersburg, 2009 [2nd ed., 2013]) – ‘Commentary’, The Times Literary Supplement, 9 September 2011, 14–15.
1 MI 156–7.
1 ‘I visited an eminent literary personage at home.’ ‘A Visit to Leningrad’, SM 32.
2 SM 4.
3 SM 27.
4 IB to Frank Roberts, 20 February 1946, in Flourishing (xxii/2), 619; IB to Arthur Schlesinger, 27 August 1953, in Enlightening (xvii/8), 387; 428 below.
1 Dalos, op. cit. (xxii/2), 64. IB to Gleb Struve, 19 July and 24 September, 1971, 6 November 1972, unpublished (Hoover Institution).
2 IB to Lidiya Chukovskaya, 16/17 June 1981, unpublished (Henry Hardy).
3 Dalos, op. cit. (xxii/2), 194.
1 IB to Shirley Anglesey, 13 November 1989, unpublished (Henry Hardy).
2 Antonina Mikhailovna Oranzhireeva (the one who was there in the afternoon) and Soph′ya Kazimirovna Ostrovkaya.
3 Unpublished letter from Henry Hardy to The Times Literary Supplement, September 2011, ‹http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/writings_on_ib/hhonib/ltlsaa&ib.pdf›.
1 IB to Dan Davin, 28 May 1973, unpublished (Henry Hardy).