ERNEST J. SIMMONS is an authority on Russian writing and a frequent visitor to the U.S.S.R. He did research there before World War II, and his monumental biography of Leo Tolstoy, as well as his fine critical work RUSSIAN FICTION AND SOVIET IDEOLOGY, is the result of working on firsthand sources. He is now completing a biography of Chekhov which promises to be as definitive as his life of Tolstoy.
The Soviet educational system, which in 1958 produced twice as many engineers as did the United States’s, is now undergoing a complete revision, as directed by Premier Khrushchev. For an account of this reorganization we have turned to ERNEST J. SIMMONS, an authority on Russian writers and a frequent visitor to the U.S.S.R.
Six times in the past thirty years, ERNEST J. SIMMONS has visited the U.S.S.R. He did research there before World War II, and his two big books, LEG TOLSTOY and RUSSIAN FICTION AND SOVIET IDEOLOGY, are the result of working on firsthand sources. Last summer he returned to Russia for his most recent surrey.
For an evaluation of the most important novel to come out of Russia in many years, the ATLANTIC has turned to ERNEST J. SIMMONS, the author of LEO TOLSTOY and RUSSIAN FICTION AND SOVIET IDEOLOGY. Mr. Simmons was engaged in research work in Russia before World War II. He laught at Harvard and Cornell, and in 1946 he became chairman of the department of Slavic languages at Columbia, where he is also professor of Russian literature at the Russian Institute.
Leo Tolstoy was the fourth son of Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a Russian nobleman whose family had been elevated and enriched during the reigns of Peter I and Catherine II. He knew little of his mother, who died before he was two, and not much more of his good-natured but ineffectual father, who died when Leo was eight. Leo’s golden age was spent with his three brothers, Dmitri, Sergei, and Nikolai, on the huge family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, with its thousands of acres and hundreds of serfs. But for the future novelist — supersensitive, vain, foppish, intensely passionate, an indifferent student and a social misfit, obsessed with an ideal of perfection that he could never approach — the road to the palace of wisdom lay through the valley of excess. He joined the army in time to command a battery in the heroic defense of Sevastopol, and in his spare Lime during that action he began to write in a dugout the sketches that brought him immediate fame.
Leo (Lyovochka) Tolstoy was the fourth son of Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a Russian nobleman whose family had been elevated and enriched during the reigns of Peter I and Catherine II. The boy hardly knew his mother, for she died before he was two, five months after the birth of his only sister, Marya (Masha). Leo’s golden age was spent on the huge family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, with its thousands of acres and several hundred serfs. There he played with his three brothers, Dmitri (Mitenka), Sergei (Seryozha), and Nikolai (Koko), and with them banded together into the Ant Brotherhood: there he acquired some rudimentary German from their tutor, Fyodor Ivanovich; there he felt the religious zeal of Aunt Alexandra, listened while Auntie Tatyana played the piano, and imbibed what little knowledge he was ever to have of his good-natured but ineffectual father.