Portrait of a Polymath

...He was an honorary editor of Slavic Review, the quarterly journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, where several of his articles appeared...

...Max Hay ward, the brilliant Oxford Russian expert (and future co-translator of Doctor Zhivago), was then in Moscow with the British Embassy and witnessed the scene...

...In 1920 his family fled from the Bolsheviks to Vienna, where as a teenager he met his future wife, Erica...

...It focused on the intriguing activities (in more than one sense) of Moe Berg, a not too sparkling player for the Boston Red Sox, who could speak a dozen languages "and couldn't hit in any of them," as someone quipped...

...Throughout the biography we are given countless examples of his Javert-like pursuit of many paths of intellectual inquiry...

...Subsequently Dawidoff says of Shura: "Much as he may have intended to be an Archilochean hedgehog, to master one big thing, he was by instinct a fox with an insatiable desire to know many things...

...Foreign languages were among his persistent quarries...

...Wasps, his favorite adversaries, he "fought with baby blue swatters, explaining that such an innocent color lured them into letting down their guard...

...His road to Cambridge, Massachusetts, led through Berkeley, California, and Washington, D.C...

...I also read about his work and his times...

...In 1974, when he received an honorary degree from Oxford and was credited with knowing four languages, he "became visibly agitated...

...The title of Dawidoff's book refers to Gerschenkron's "arsenal of swatters...

...Someone yelled "Give us the 66th...

...But a fellow economist dissuaded him by pointing out that it was more prestigious for him to remain an economic historian and an avocational Slavicist...

...He was aware of its flaws, but here was "the old Russian language in all its pristine glory, emerging unreduced and unweakened from the long years of its bewitched sleep...

...used to protect the porch [of his New Hampshire summer home] from winged invaders...

...As Nicholas Dawidoff demonstrates in this loving biography of his grandfather "Shura" (a Russian nickname for Alexander), the label was well-deserved...

...When I visited Moscow in 195 9,1 was struck by the irony of those famous lines engraved at the base of the statue of Pushkin a few yards from the offices of Izvestiya, the principal Soviet government newspaper...

...In 1994 Dawidoff wrote about another polymath in his first book, The Catcher Was a Spy...

...Even prominent American experts like Yale's Victor Erlich conceded that Gerschenkron "knew more about Russian literature than many professors of Russian literature...

...Dawidoff does not identify the quotation from Shakespeare's 66th sonnet, but undoubtedly his grandfather knew it and was aware that Pasternak had translated it a few years earlier...

...Gerschenkron might have gently chided his "Nicky Boy" for not providing the Russian text...

...Gerschenkron wrote that Pasternak "refused to be made 'tongue-tied by authority' and fearlessly proclaimed that creative genius and freedom are as inseparable as human life and human breath...

...He combined both skills in analyzing Soviet novels of Stalin's era and showing how they unwittingly exposed the defects of industrialization...

...In addition to his fluency in the major European languages, he taught himself Old Bulgarian and Icelandic, and learned Yiddish so he could read Isaac Bashevis Singer's short stories in the original...

...He became active in the Social Democratic Party, and after the Nazis took over Austria he escaped to the United States with his wife and young daughters...

...Dawidoff reports that "he was brought up as a Russian Orthodox Christian by a pair of freethinkers who packed him off to the synagogue whenever his pious Jewish aunts came for a visit...

...Dawidoff portrays the many facets of his grandfather's complicated personality with remarkable objectivity...

...Gerschenkron, says his grandson, regarded Boris Pasternak's novel as "no less than a miraculous revival of the great Russian literary tradition so long dormant under the Soviets, a mournful work of deep feeling that existed as an elegy to his doomed country...

...If he has access to a celestial computer and can download (or perhaps upload...

...Berg was smart enough to be a frequent guest on the old radio quiz show "Information, Please...

...Gerschenkron would sprinkle his writings with foreign phrases without translating them, arrogantly one-upping his readers...

...Nicky Boy's moving tribute, he must be proudly savoring every word— that is, when he isn't busy playing chess or debating other polymaths...

...But he never managed to produce "Za Beeg Büke," as he pronounced it in his thick Russian accent...

...Impressed by his innovative research on the Soviet economy for the Federal Reserve Board and the RAND Corporation, Harvard hired him in 1948...

...A fellow professor said, "He wanted to know things for their own sake, not because he needed a footnote...

...Dawidoff succinctly characterizes his grandfather's approach to the world around him: "He walked into a day and instinctively shaped it with his sensibility, charging the most ordinary events in his life with conspicuous moment...

...His comprehensive Notes and Acknowledgments include a list of almost 300 persons he interviewed, many of whom represent the elite of the academic world and range far beyond the specialized discipline of economic history...

...The head of each stick had a different color, depending on the type of insect destined for extinction...

...His lifetime spanned almost threequarters of what he called "our unhappy century...

...But that's another story...

...Upon the retirement of his friend Roman Jakobson, the world renowned Harvard Slavicist, Gerschenkron was offered the university chair in Slavic languages, although he was nominally a senior member of the economics faculty...

...Gerschenkron often missed, but when he was successful there was "much jubilation (from us) and lengthy disquisitions on swatting technique (from him...

...The author has amassed a wealth of evidence from his own boyhood memories and from interviews with family members, friends, colleagues, and students who fell under the spell of Shura's prodigious mind and magnetic personality...

...Grandfather Shura may be spending most of eternity in heaven's reading room, devouring all the volumes he regretted having missed in Harvard's Widener Library...

...The poet boasts that he will "long be loved by the people/ for awakening kind feelings with my lyre," and because "in a cruel age I celebrated freedom/ and called for mercy for the fallen...

...When Doctor Zhivago was smuggled to the West in 1957, his review in Modern Philology was declared by Berlin to be a "masterpiece...

...Here it was, a great tribute to his scholarly life, and he had been underestimated...

...Gerschenkron probably would have seethed at the juxtaposition, since he despised the regime and agonized over the repression of its citizens...

...His father was Jewish, his mother was Russian Orthodox...

...The pink one, for instance, had supple pounce and was better for keeping up with the shifty turns and sudden swoops of the hornet...

...His beloved mother tongue gave him a lifelong intimacy with the masters of Russian poetry and prose, above all Pushkin and Tolstoy...

...The author also uses as an epigraph for one of his chapters a quotation from Gerschenkron's close friend and fellow Russian émigr...

...If my grandfather can be said to have lived for anything, he lived for books," Dawidoff concludes, "and as I tried to get to know him retrospectively, I read the books he most cared about...

...Reviewed by Gene Sosin Author, "Sparks of Liberty: An Insider's Memoir of Radio Liberty" Alexander Gerschenkron, the distinguished Russian-born Harvard economic historian, was considered a polymath...

...He appeared with moderator Clifton Fadiman and regular panelists John Kieran and Oscar Levant before he became an OSS agent during World War II, assigned to determine Germany's atomic bomb capability...

...In his 1977 essay on Pasternak, he wrote that the meeting was "developing into an unheard-of public demonstration," so perhaps it was fortunate that Pasternak "did not recite [the sonnet], which so perfectly defined the general state of affairs, and his own situation in particular/'Thepoet's predicament would have stirred Gerschenkron...

...There follows a staggering list of 150 authors and titles...

...The ethical center of his childhood," writes Dawidoff, was Pushkin's short eulogy to himself, "I Built a Monument Not Made with Hands...

...Gerschenkron may not have known, however, that early in 1948, at a rally of Soviet poets summoned to protest against Western "warmongers" and the nascent NATO, Pasternak courageously limited himself to reciting some prewar poems, which were greeted with tremendous applause...

...Dawidoff's new book describes Gerschenkron's childhood in his native Odessa, "Russia's most cosmopolitan city," where he was born in 1904 and grew up in a prosperous middle-class family...

...When he forgot a line he was prompted from various parts of the hall, and requests were shouted for other poems...

...Dawidoff tells us that the invitation "appealed to Shura as a way of certifying his otherness...

...The green was a duller stick, but supplied thumping impact, making it the weapon of choice for cruising houseflies and bumblebees...

...At the University of Vienna he majored in economics, hoping thereby to improve the human condition...

...he handled 10, possibly 20, and was fiercely proud of his knowledge...

...Sir Isaiah Berlin of Oxford, who called Tolstoy (quoting the Greek poet Archilochus) a "fox" (who knows many things) rather than a "hedgehog" (who knows one big thing...