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PARTISAN REVIEW
the airport, our guide mentioned that MGIMO University had been cre–
ated in
1944,
a year before the end of World War
II,
as Russia's elite for–
eign policy institution, I got worried, since I expected to talk about the
"history of
Partisan Review."
When on the following day I was shown
around this buzzing university, which I was told has around four thou–
sand students and teaches fifty-one languages, I got more and more ner–
vous-especially when the director of its museum proudly pointed to its
Soviet medals, decorations, uniforms, photographs and other
paraphernalia.
After an elegant lunch with MGIMO's deputy rector, the jovial, cos–
mopolitan Ivan Tyulin, I nearly panicked when he escorted me into the
formal seminar room: more than twenty professors sat around a long
table, equipped with individual microphones and name plates; and
about as many students sat on chairs behind them. That two video cam–
eras began to roll and follow me to the opposite end of the room only
added to my apprehension.
Nevertheless, I started to talk about the lack of contact between
Russian and American intellectuals in the
J930S;
of the American Com–
munist Party's (CP) expectations that William Phillips and Philip Rahv
fill
Partisan Review's
pages with socialist realism, whereas they
expected to print "the best in new writing, and in literary and political
criticism"; and of their break with the CPo While I briefly outlined the
editors' disagreements about whether or not the United States should
enter World War
II,
which was very much determined by their personal
stances to what Hitler and Stalin might be up to, and about the chances
of a socialist revolution in the United States, one of my Russian hosts
interrupted, saying that they didn't want to hear about the past, but
were eager to know about our present problems.
"Some of us were reading your magazine over the years," this pro–
fessor stated.
"It
wasn't easy to get a copy of
PR,
not for political rea–
sons, but because it was in circulation in special departments in our
lib rary."
I soon realized that Professor Shestopal, on my left, would be tightly
guiding this seminar and would be calling on one after another of the
professors-introducing them and their achievements and credentials,
in typically academic fashion. Now, he stated that nearly all of them had
belonged to "the
1968
generation" and had been reading PR-which
"was popular and provided them with topics to discuss." At the time,
and throughout that century, he reminisced, they had been enthusiastic
about foreign countries, but as they got older had become less opti–
mistic, given their concern about solving the problems posed by terror-
