Where the News Ends

...Although Karpovich was deeply Russian in tastes and sympathies, although uprooting from one's native country is always painful, there can be no doubt that he was happier here than he could have been in the Soviet Union...

...I have never been able to analyze why this group possessed certain characteristics that seemed to set it off, in some degree, from educated men and women in America and Western Europe...

...it stresses the unlimited aims of international Communism...

...Dimitri von Mohrenschildt...

...During twenty years of association with him on the Russian Review I cannot recall his ever being angry or losing his temper...

...In his view of Russian and world history he was a rationalist and a pluralist, inclined to reject all extreme and one-sided interpretations, skeptical of doctrines of historical predestination...

...I only know, from personal experience, that the Russian intelligentsia did possess certain most attractive traits: breadth of outlook and interest, love of knowledge for its own sake, absence of sham, greed and affectation, fondness for disinterested intellectual communion, simplicity and directness in personal relations, a high and sensitive regard for intellectual honesty...

...As our own age has the best reason to realize, fanaticism, however noble in purpose, too often becomes the parent of a tyranny that mocks every ideal for which the fanatics fight...

...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Michael Karpovich: Man and Scholar WITH IRONICAL appropriateness, Michael Karpovich, great as a teacher, scholar, and luminous liberal humanistic personality, died on the 42nd anniversary of the Communist Revolution that robbed him of his native country and denied all the civilized values by which he lived...

...Two of Karpovich's former students, now well-known scholars in their own right—Philip Mosely and Martin Malia—analyze his career and thought, and there are more personal tributes from some of his former associates...

...Karpovich was the very incarnation of these humanistic, liberal (in the broadest and truest sense of that much-abused word) traits of the Russian intelligentsia...

...To me the friendship of Michael Karpovich was especially precious because it represented a continuation of what I most prized during my years in Russia: the fellowship of some of the surviving members of the pre-war Russian intelligentsia...

...elicited an ovation from his students and widespread tributes from scholars and specialists in Russian, a surprisingly large number of whom had received their training under Karpovich...

...He was inclined, with some reservations, to admire Peter the Great and to discount heavily the idealized picture of patriarchal pre-Petrine Russian publicized by the Slavophiles...

...In his reaction to later, more dogmatic and extreme revolutionaries, to the regicides of the Narodnaya Volya, Karpovich, while recognizing their courage, devotion and dedication, had his doubts and misgivings...

...professor of Russian civilization at Dartmouth and an old friend of Karpovich, expressed the essence of the latter's personality very well: "Mikhail Mikhailovich was that rarest phenomenon among Russians—an even-tempered, well-balanced man of moderate views...

...Karpovich's retirement from his position as professor of Russian history and literature at Harvard in the spring of 1957, when he was 69...

...I have seldom known anyone who had his rare ability to bring out the best in people...

...But interesting additional material about this modest yet eminent historical scholar appears in the current issue of the quarterly Russian Review, to which Karpovich had been an important contributor...

...In personal sympathy he perhaps felt closest to some of the early voices of reform in Russia, to thinkers like Granovsky and Stankevich, who began to achieve the synthesis of German and European philosophy and culture with the ripening Russian intellectual renaissance of the 19th century...

...His transparent honesty and inward nobility communicated themselves and one simply couldn't be mean or petty in his presence...

...The ideal of individual liberty always enjoyed a top priority in Karpovich's scale of values and this made him a moderate Westerner in his reactions to Russian history and intellectual trends...

...Michael Karpovich and others like him who transplanted the seeds of Russian humane liberal scholarship to the United States and other Western countries are an inspiring example of the indestructible quality of the human spirit...

...One of Karpovich's very characteristic essays, which originally appeared in THE NEW LEADER, rejects, for instance, the view that Soviet foreign policy is merely a continuation of Tsarist imperialism...

...His mellow, mature scholarship—his ability, in the words of the French thinker, Remy de Gourmont, to see "the six sides of the cube"—never made him soft or flabby when fundamental issues of liberty were involved...