In Search of Isaiah Berlin by Henry Hardy

Author:Henry Hardy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

III

Through all the years I have been writing about, financial worry was never far beneath the surface. Most of the benefactions that enabled me to work full time on Berlin’s writings were more or less short-term, and I had conveyed to Berlin my anxiety about the future. In December 1995 he decided that all his royalty earnings should be transferred to Wolfson to support my work. This was the first step towards the setting up of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust the following year. His royalty income was not enough by itself to pay my salary, but it would make a huge difference, and I was bowled over by his generosity. From that day to this his royalties have been paid into the Wolfson College fund that paid for my work until my retirement, and then for the work of my successors, Mark Pottle and (until June 2018) Nicholas Hall, on Berlin’s legacy, literary and otherwise.

On 4 April 1996 Berlin wrote to me about one of a number of attempts to refute the identification of himself as Akhmatova’s ‘guest from the future’.29 His letter shows how much he cared about this vexed issue:

I enclose a copy of Voprosy literatury 1995, issue 6, in which V. Esipov seeks to show (pp. 57–85, ‘In the Days of Vespasian …’)30 that the dedi­cations of Akhmatova’s various poems to me, and my role as ‘the guest from the future’ in Poem Without a Hero, are mistaken; he nominates various other dedicatees as more likely on grounds of date, meaning, circumstances etc.

I have no intention of replying, stating what I know to be the truth (the author makes various mistakes of fact which I do not, either, propose to correct), claiming the dedications etc. – which I know on many grounds, most of all Akhmatova’s own words to me in 1964 (he says 1965),31 to be so.

But I wonder whether you, in your zeal to collect this and that about me, would want to see this, and get it roughly translated […].

Of course, if someone else wrote a thunderous refutation, e.g. if Anatoly Naiman32 […] would like to do it, I should not be displeased. But I don’t want to suggest it to him – on the other hand, you might.

There is only one other ‘attack’ on my identity in Akhmatova, by a man called Kralin,33 who has written a good deal about this, but who is regarded by most reputable Russian critics as somewhat crazy and not to be taken notice of – except that he is by the author of this article. […] Goodness! How Brodsky wd have expostulated in not v. parliamentary language.

On 5 September 1996 I sent Berlin an advance copy of The Sense of Reality, observing:

I haven’t forgotten that you hated going through the essays when they were in typescript: but I hope very much that the reception of the resulting book turns out to compensate for this agony to some degree. I hardly need to say, perhaps, that it

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