Volume 45, Number 18 · November 19, 1998
What Follies and Paradoxes!
By John Bayley
Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance
by Aileen M. Kelly
Yale University Press, 400 pp., $35.00
We all know the story of the man who observes, looking backward at some failed experiment, 'Well, you know, it seemed like a good idea at the time.' He may have been a scientist, a political theorist, or a repentant fanatic. He may also well have been a Russian, for practically everything that has happened in Russia since the time of Peter the Great has happened because some man of power once thought it a good idea. And an idea in Russia exists to be implemented by the means of power, even though it may have been conceived in abstraction, barren argument, apparent helplessness.
Review, 3447 words
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