Armstrong nags gently over the ensuing months, and is rewarded with a script, not totally unrelated to the subject he had suggested, a mere six months later. Its original title had been 'The Present Condition of Russian Intellectuals', but this has been altered, with typical Berlinian understatement, to 'Notes on Soviet Culture'. In his acknowledgement, dated 28 August, Armstrong writes: 'I have accepted your suggestion [presumably in a letter that does not survive] and am running the first six sections under your name, and running section seven as a separate short article, signed O. Utis, under the title "The Soviet Child- Man".' This seems to give us the best of two worlds.'
It is clear from Armstrong's next letter (4 September) that Berlin cabled disagreement about the title of the Utis piece and - lest anyone suspect that he was the author - the re-use of Utis as a pseudonym. Armstrong tells Berlin that it is too late to make changes, as printing of the relevant part of the journal has already occurred. Berlin must have begged or insisted (or both), since on 9 September Armstrong writes that he has now 'made the changes you wanted', adopting 'L' as the pseudonym, which 'puts the article in our normal series of anonymous articles signed with an initial'. To accommodate Berlin he had had to stop the presses, and he withheld the honorarium for 'The Soviet Intelligentsia' as a contribution to the costs involved.
The only sign of what must by this point have been firmly gritted teeth is Armstrong's remark in a letter of 20 September that he 'only didn't quite see why if there was to be no Utis it mattered what Mr L called his article, but doubtless you had a good reason for protecting him too'.
As an example of editorial forbearance this episode would surely be hard to beat. I conclude my account of it with a splendid account that Berlin sends Armstrong (17 December) of the feedback he has received to the pieces:
I have had two delightful letters from unknown correspondents in the USA: one from a lady who encloses a letter she wrote to John Foster Dulles, commenting on his articles in the same issue, and drawing his attention to the deeper truths of mine - so far so good. She goes on however to say that the article by the unknown 'L' seems to her to give a truer picture of some of these things than even my own otherwise flawless work - and wishes to draw my attention to an article from which I have to learn, she hopes she is not hurting my feelings, but she does think it a good thing to be up to date, my own article is somewhat historical, the other article is on the dot and on the whole a better performance altogether. I am oscillating between humbly expressing my admiration for the genius of 'L' and jealously denouncing him as a vulgar impressionist who is trading on people's ignorance and giving an account which no one can check, which is, when examined, no better than a tawdry fantasy, which has unfortunately taken innocent persons like her - and perhaps even Mr John Foster Dulles - in. The other letter is from an Indian at Harvard who praises my article and denounces that of 'L' as a typical American journalistic performance unworthy to stand beside the pure and lofty beauty of my deathless prose. I thought these reflections might give you pleasure.
The Survival of the Russian Intelligentsia
This comment on the post-Soviet situation provides an interesting postscript to the previous essay, recording Berlin's delight and surprise that the intelligentsia had emerged so unscathed from the depredations of the Soviet era, contrary to his rather gloomy expectations. In subsequent years his confidence that the death of that era was truly permanent steadily increased, despite the immense problems of its aftermath, some of them only too reminiscent of those engendered by Communism.
Glossary of Names
Rather than sprinkle the text with possibly distracting footnotes identifying the large number of individuals named by Berlin in these essays, I invited Helen Rappaport, already an expert in this area as the author of Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion,[17] to compile a glossary, concentrating on the Russians, for readers not already familiar with the people referred to. I could not have done this myself, and those who find the glossary invaluable, as I do, are greatly in her debt. Three persons in particular caused problems: the Jewish bookseller Gennady Moiseevich Rahklin in 'A Visit to Leningrad', the Jewish Soviet literary scholar Naum Yakovlevich Berkovsky in 'A Great Russian Writer', and the historian Professor Kon in 'The Artificial Dialectic'; information from readers that would enable us to identify these more fully, and to say whether Rakhlin and Kon survived the Stalinist era, would be gratefully received, as would additional information about Nikolay Osi- povich Lerner and Vladimir Nikolaevich Orlov.
Bibliographical
The sources and original publication details of the pieces I have included are as follows:
'The Arts in Russia Under Stalin' is based on a text held, in the form in which it was printed for internal circulation, in the
British Public Record Office file FO 371/56725. (A copy of the original typescript, dated 27 December 1945, is in the Berlin Papers, MS Berlin 571, fols 328-43.) The version published here incorporates two sets of revisions made by the author - one probably not many years later (including a few references to post-1945 developments), apparently in preparation for a talk; the other in 1992, in response to a request that the memorandum should be published in Russian. A partial Russian translation by Galina P. Andreevna appeared as 'Literatura i iskusstvo v RSFSR' ('Literature and Art in the RSFSR'), Nezavisimaya gazeta, 16 December 1997, in the supplement Kulisa NG No 2, December 1997, 4-5; this was reprinted with the cuts restored, and with an introduction by Nina V. Koroleva, in Zvezda, 2003 No 7 (July), 126-42. A cut version of the English text was published under the present title in the New York Review of Books, 19 October 2000; the cut material was posted on their website. The full English text appears in print here for the first time. The title and the notes (which incorporate information supplied by Helen Rappaport, to whom I am in this case particularly indebted) are mine.
'A Visit to Leningrad' is to be found in the British Public Record Office file FO 371/56724; this lightly edited version appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, 23 March 2001, 15-16.
'A Great Russian Writer' is a review of Osip Mandelstam, The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown, and appeared in the New York Review of Books, 23 December 1965, 3-4.
'Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak' - a shortened version of 'Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956', which was published in the author's Personal Impressions (London, 1980; New York, 1981; 2nd ed. London, 1998; Princeton, 2001) - appeared in the New York Review of Books, 20 November 1980, 23-35, and in the author's collection The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (London, 1997; New York, 1998).
'Boris Pasternak' and 'Why the Soviet Union Chooses to Insulate Itself' have not previously been published.
'The Artificial Dialectic: Generalissimo Stalin and the Art of Government' appeared under the pseudonym 'O. Utis' (from 'outis', Greek for 'no one') in Foreign Affairs 30 (1952). The present subtitle served as its title on that occasion; the main title is Berlin's.
'Four Weeks in the Soviet Union' appears here for the first time.
'Soviet Russian Culture' was published in Foreign Affairs 36 (1957), the first six sections as 'The Silence in Russian Culture' under Berlin's own name, the last section as a separate article, entitled 'The Soviet Intelligentsia', under the pseudonym 'L.'.