Of Special Note
"Once a man standing in front of father suddenly drew a revolver out of his pocket and pointed it straight at his chest. My father [P. A. Stolypin] threw open his overcoat and facing the mutinous crowd said loudly, 'Shoot.' The revolutionary dropped his hand and the revolver fell."
Such first-hand information about violence before and during the Russian Revolution of 1917 has remained generally inaccessible with much internal history still a closed book because the Kremlin archives have remained relatively inaccessible.
Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, Professor Emeritus of Russian History and Literature at Dartmouth College, now Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, has edited The Russian Revolution of1917: Contemporary Accounts, which confronts a reader with 23 original accounts and analyses by participants and eyewitnesses. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. 322 pp. $8.95.)
Some reports are by ordinary citizens caught in the revolutionary chaos; Others, by major actors in the drama: Lenin, Trotsky, Chernov, Tseretelli, Golovin, Miliukov, Kerensky, Stalin, and General Wrangel. The political spectrum is wide: Bolshevikis, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, Cadets, Octobrists, and loyal monarchists.
To quote Mr. von Mohrenschildt in his introduction, "Whether ... memoir, a commentary, or an analysis of a specific event or revolutionary phase, most of the accounts ... can be considered as primary sources, the raw material of history." Thus this volume helps a general reader to understand more fully the complexity, drama, and passionate controversies before and during 1917.
Bantam Books has issued a paperback edition of Matthew Early, the novel by Alexander Laing '25, originally published by Duell, Sloan, and Pearce in 1957.
More orchids for Francis Steegmuller '27. He has won the National Book Award in the Arts and Letters category, and his picture appears in various news media. In the March 13 issue of The New Yorker, his boot Cocteau is reviewed by Naomi Bliven, who describes it as beyond her ability to praise though she tries. "The author has surmounted innumerable difficulties, and, with efficacious, unobtrusive candor, constructed an absorbing, instructive narrative." She ends the review by saying that Cocteau "is a near-perfect account of a fascinating, imperfeet being."
McGraw-Hill Book Company has published a second edition of Anatomy andPhysiology by Harold M. Kaplan '30, Department of Physiology, Southern Illinois University.
