Subject
He eviscerated Vladimir Nabokov for ineptly translating Pushkin
From
Date
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EDITOR's NOTE. The First Wave of Russian emigres included many
brilliant figures who were to make their mark in Europe and the U.S.
Gerschenkron who, like Nabokov, was to teach at Harvard, was among
those who could meet and match his fellow emigre.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: He eviscerated Vladimir Nabokov for ineptly translating Pushkin
...
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 22:29:05 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
To: chtodel@gte.net
CC:
washingtonpost .com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20766-2002Jun20.html
Biography
A Genius for Living
'The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World' by
Nicholas Dawidoff
Reviewed by Trevor Butterworth
Sunday, June 23, 2002; Page BW13
THE FLY SWATTER
How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World
By Nicholas Dawidoff
Pantheon. 353 pp. $26
Biographies of brilliant minds traverse a starry arc of accomplishment;
their tale can induce a sinking feeling -- ruefully caught by poet
Patrick Kavanagh: "And I believed that my stumble/ Had the poise and
stride of Apollo/ And his voice my thick-tongued mumble." To the
consternation of Alexander Gerschenkron's Austrian professors, the
young, handsome Russian exile had such a thick-tongued grasp of German
that what wasn't incomprehensible was often inadvisable. "When he said
uhren (watch), for instance, it came out huren (whore)," recounts his
grandson, New Yorker contributor Nicholas Dawidoff.
Gerschenkron never lost his Russian accent. He did, however, acquire and
master some two dozen languages over the course of his life. And if that
kind of achievement is bewildering, think only that he was not
considered to be the one in his family with a real talent for language.
Despite such relentless, dizzying overachievement, The Fly Swatter is
certain to charm away the idle hours of summer. For unlike the hard,
gemlike flame of a Ludwig Wittgenstein, the genius of Alexander
Gerschenkron burned in an irrepressible delight in life. It was thus
that an economic historian who disabused the world of the Soviet
economic miracle, who worked as a wartime shipyard welder and who proved
the untranslatability of Hamlet could also charm Marlene Dietrich into
giving him her phone number.
With a rapier wit hewn in pre-revolutionary Odessa and burnished in the
Stammtische -- the coffeehouse debating circles -- of pre-Nazi Vienna,
Gerschenkron exulted in argument and in one-upping his interlocutors. A
typical day at Harvard, where he taught economics, would find him
arguing "over who had the breech-loading and who had the muzzle-loading
rifle in the Franco-German War of 1870-1871. (After that disagreement,
finding himself vaguely deficient in his ordnance expertise, he quickly
read a four-volume treatise on the history of warfare and armed the tip
of his tongue with two hundred years of munitions.)"
Such disagreements were not always jocund, high-table affairs. Gifted
with a memory that savored expertise, Gerschenkron took to intellectual
feuding with all the moral fervor of Cyrano de Bergerac clamoring for
his plume. He eviscerated Vladimir Nabokov for ineptly translating
Pushkin , pummeled the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn with quotations
effortlessly memorized from Das Kapital and excoriated Herbert Marcuse
for impudently preaching dogma hostile to the very freedom he was
enjoying in the United States.
Indeed, when it came to the question of liberty -- a trigger for the
repressed grief over all that had been lost in Europe, and a source of
avid belief in the United States -- Gerschenkron gave no quarter.
Dawidoff recounts the rhetorical fate of one old friend, whom his
grandfather considered to have floundered, irretrievably, in the
illiberal madness of the 1960s. The setting was MIT, and the thrust
began, innocently enough, with Gerschenkron recalling a recent visit to
see a his old pal, the former Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams.
" 'Williams, you know, is nobody's fool,' my grandfather said smoothly.
'In fact, Williams is an extremely literary man, and it also turns out
that he has a real interest in economics.' All of the economists looked
very pleased. 'But,' my grandfather continued, it is a characteristic of
William's mind that he tends to express his opinions in baseball terms.'
The economists looked very puzzled. 'And,' my grandfather said, 'as it
happens, I can provide you with an example. Do you know who came up
during our conversation?' Nobody knew. 'John Kenneth Galbraith did! And
at the mention of his name, Williams said to me, "Oh Galbraith!
Certainly Alex. I know all about him. A high fly ball to shallow left
field." ' "
As amusing as such anecdotes are, there is more to The Fly Swatter than
a leisurely stroll through Cambridge obiter dicta. For Dawidoff, in
charting his grandfather's escape from Russia to Austria and thence to
America, also renders a moving social and cultural history of those who
loved their countries but found themselves powerless to stop their
countries from hating them. It is the story of a philistine
conflagration that, after setting Europe's thin veneer of liberal
culture alight, would not stop burning.
Gerschenkron turned his panoptic mind toward the task of understanding
the economic causes of these horrors. His forensic analyses of Nazism
and Bolshevism, which are abbreviated here, were seminal and remain
unsurpassed; yet, for all his brilliance, his relative obscurity reminds
us that such gifts are not always penalty-free. Intellect can be so
dazzled by an empyrean grasp of complexity that it soars endlessly among
the library stacks instead of settling down into print. Driven by such
exacting standards, Gerschenkron became, in the words of Harvard
colleague Peter McClelland, "a prisoner of his erudition" and failed to
create a popular legacy equal to ones left by colleagues of lesser
academic ability.
But what a prison! Like the protagonist in Italo Calvino's The Baron in
the Trees (a novel he loved), Gerschenkron was quite happy to dwell
among the stacks, nourishing an ambition to read all 3 million volumes
in Harvard's Widener Library, while lamenting to his grandson that fate
would force him to settle for a lot fewer.
"He was not a fast reader, he explained, and was condemned to finish
only five thousand books in his lifetime. But, he said, I could aspire
to do better. Once he handed me a copy of Trevelyan's History of
England, pulled out a stopwatch, and clocked me to see how many pages a
minute I could manage. It is no small trick to acquaint yourself with
Ethelred the Unready while an animated man with a strong Russian accent
is shouting out time splits. When the minute was up, my grandfather gave
me a quiz on what I just read. He asked a question and I answered it.
Without letting me know whether I was right or not, he asked me another
question, and another. Then he yelled out 'The boy can do it!' and I
jumped."
In the end, Gerschenkron calls to mind Tennyson's restless Ulysses -- a
"spirit yearning in desire/ To follow knowledge like a sinking star/
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought." Few have ever journeyed so
far, and Dawidoff has surely exceeded his remit with this exquisitely
written and ennobling epitaph. ?
Trevor Butterworth is a research fellow at the Center for Media and
Public Affairs.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: Click Here
<http://g.msn.com/1HM1ENUS/c156??PI=44364>
brilliant figures who were to make their mark in Europe and the U.S.
Gerschenkron who, like Nabokov, was to teach at Harvard, was among
those who could meet and match his fellow emigre.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: He eviscerated Vladimir Nabokov for ineptly translating Pushkin
...
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 22:29:05 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
To: chtodel@gte.net
CC:
washingtonpost .com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20766-2002Jun20.html
Biography
A Genius for Living
'The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World' by
Nicholas Dawidoff
Reviewed by Trevor Butterworth
Sunday, June 23, 2002; Page BW13
THE FLY SWATTER
How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World
By Nicholas Dawidoff
Pantheon. 353 pp. $26
Biographies of brilliant minds traverse a starry arc of accomplishment;
their tale can induce a sinking feeling -- ruefully caught by poet
Patrick Kavanagh: "And I believed that my stumble/ Had the poise and
stride of Apollo/ And his voice my thick-tongued mumble." To the
consternation of Alexander Gerschenkron's Austrian professors, the
young, handsome Russian exile had such a thick-tongued grasp of German
that what wasn't incomprehensible was often inadvisable. "When he said
uhren (watch), for instance, it came out huren (whore)," recounts his
grandson, New Yorker contributor Nicholas Dawidoff.
Gerschenkron never lost his Russian accent. He did, however, acquire and
master some two dozen languages over the course of his life. And if that
kind of achievement is bewildering, think only that he was not
considered to be the one in his family with a real talent for language.
Despite such relentless, dizzying overachievement, The Fly Swatter is
certain to charm away the idle hours of summer. For unlike the hard,
gemlike flame of a Ludwig Wittgenstein, the genius of Alexander
Gerschenkron burned in an irrepressible delight in life. It was thus
that an economic historian who disabused the world of the Soviet
economic miracle, who worked as a wartime shipyard welder and who proved
the untranslatability of Hamlet could also charm Marlene Dietrich into
giving him her phone number.
With a rapier wit hewn in pre-revolutionary Odessa and burnished in the
Stammtische -- the coffeehouse debating circles -- of pre-Nazi Vienna,
Gerschenkron exulted in argument and in one-upping his interlocutors. A
typical day at Harvard, where he taught economics, would find him
arguing "over who had the breech-loading and who had the muzzle-loading
rifle in the Franco-German War of 1870-1871. (After that disagreement,
finding himself vaguely deficient in his ordnance expertise, he quickly
read a four-volume treatise on the history of warfare and armed the tip
of his tongue with two hundred years of munitions.)"
Such disagreements were not always jocund, high-table affairs. Gifted
with a memory that savored expertise, Gerschenkron took to intellectual
feuding with all the moral fervor of Cyrano de Bergerac clamoring for
his plume. He eviscerated Vladimir Nabokov for ineptly translating
Pushkin , pummeled the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn with quotations
effortlessly memorized from Das Kapital and excoriated Herbert Marcuse
for impudently preaching dogma hostile to the very freedom he was
enjoying in the United States.
Indeed, when it came to the question of liberty -- a trigger for the
repressed grief over all that had been lost in Europe, and a source of
avid belief in the United States -- Gerschenkron gave no quarter.
Dawidoff recounts the rhetorical fate of one old friend, whom his
grandfather considered to have floundered, irretrievably, in the
illiberal madness of the 1960s. The setting was MIT, and the thrust
began, innocently enough, with Gerschenkron recalling a recent visit to
see a his old pal, the former Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams.
" 'Williams, you know, is nobody's fool,' my grandfather said smoothly.
'In fact, Williams is an extremely literary man, and it also turns out
that he has a real interest in economics.' All of the economists looked
very pleased. 'But,' my grandfather continued, it is a characteristic of
William's mind that he tends to express his opinions in baseball terms.'
The economists looked very puzzled. 'And,' my grandfather said, 'as it
happens, I can provide you with an example. Do you know who came up
during our conversation?' Nobody knew. 'John Kenneth Galbraith did! And
at the mention of his name, Williams said to me, "Oh Galbraith!
Certainly Alex. I know all about him. A high fly ball to shallow left
field." ' "
As amusing as such anecdotes are, there is more to The Fly Swatter than
a leisurely stroll through Cambridge obiter dicta. For Dawidoff, in
charting his grandfather's escape from Russia to Austria and thence to
America, also renders a moving social and cultural history of those who
loved their countries but found themselves powerless to stop their
countries from hating them. It is the story of a philistine
conflagration that, after setting Europe's thin veneer of liberal
culture alight, would not stop burning.
Gerschenkron turned his panoptic mind toward the task of understanding
the economic causes of these horrors. His forensic analyses of Nazism
and Bolshevism, which are abbreviated here, were seminal and remain
unsurpassed; yet, for all his brilliance, his relative obscurity reminds
us that such gifts are not always penalty-free. Intellect can be so
dazzled by an empyrean grasp of complexity that it soars endlessly among
the library stacks instead of settling down into print. Driven by such
exacting standards, Gerschenkron became, in the words of Harvard
colleague Peter McClelland, "a prisoner of his erudition" and failed to
create a popular legacy equal to ones left by colleagues of lesser
academic ability.
But what a prison! Like the protagonist in Italo Calvino's The Baron in
the Trees (a novel he loved), Gerschenkron was quite happy to dwell
among the stacks, nourishing an ambition to read all 3 million volumes
in Harvard's Widener Library, while lamenting to his grandson that fate
would force him to settle for a lot fewer.
"He was not a fast reader, he explained, and was condemned to finish
only five thousand books in his lifetime. But, he said, I could aspire
to do better. Once he handed me a copy of Trevelyan's History of
England, pulled out a stopwatch, and clocked me to see how many pages a
minute I could manage. It is no small trick to acquaint yourself with
Ethelred the Unready while an animated man with a strong Russian accent
is shouting out time splits. When the minute was up, my grandfather gave
me a quiz on what I just read. He asked a question and I answered it.
Without letting me know whether I was right or not, he asked me another
question, and another. Then he yelled out 'The boy can do it!' and I
jumped."
In the end, Gerschenkron calls to mind Tennyson's restless Ulysses -- a
"spirit yearning in desire/ To follow knowledge like a sinking star/
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought." Few have ever journeyed so
far, and Dawidoff has surely exceeded his remit with this exquisitely
written and ennobling epitaph. ?
Trevor Butterworth is a research fellow at the Center for Media and
Public Affairs.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: Click Here
<http://g.msn.com/1HM1ENUS/c156??PI=44364>