Isaiah Berlin
MALRAUX, THE RUSSIANS OF THE THIRTIES,
AND MANY OTHER THINGS
When, in
1967,
Andre Malraux visited Oxford he stayedwith the Berlim. In
the following, Isaiah Berlin talks with Martine de Courcel about his impres-
siom ofMalraux.
Berlin:
Malraux was, of course, very tired when he came
to
this house after
(
his lecture. I felt that he thought he had an amplifier in front of him at
the Sheldonian Theatre, whereas it was in fact a tape recorder. And so he
talked in a low voice, in French-in Oxford not many (including myself)
understand rapidly spoken French-and he suddenly realized that the
whole thing was not going well, and became depressed, and stopped-it
seemed to us all-halfway. I cannot remember what he said, only that
it seemed original and interesting, and referred to classical attitudes to
beauty, history, and death; but he seemed to become bored with his own
remarks and came to a sudden end. After the lecture he was driven to my
house, and he was very tired, and then he had a drink ...
Courcel:
And then it was
I'amour fou.
When we had lunch in London you
told me that Russia was the link between you and Malraux. What did
you mean by that?
Berlin:
I don't know about
I'amourfou,
but he then began talking about all
kinds of subjects, and I asked him what his journeys to Russia in the thir-
ties were like, whom he had met, and what did he feel-and he came to
life in the most remarkable fashion .
It
was quite clear that he had been
absolutely fascinated by his experiences in the Soviet Union
in
the thirties,
when he came across many writers who had not yet been crushed by Stalin
-at least, not yet crushed completely-and he talked in the most vivid
and fascinating fashion about his experiences and about the works of
these various people, particularly Pasternak and Olesha, both of whom
he met and liked, and a celebrated journalist who had reported the
Spanish Civil War and was later liquidated. It was clear that he felt that
he had entered into a new world in Russia of people who were in some
way fresh and original and not encumbered by the conventional kind of
literary talk of the West. He found in Russia what I found when I went
there many years later, although of course the number of people even a
non-Communist foreigner could talk to then was perhaps greater. These
