Dartmouth Authors
Douglas L. Wheeler '59. RepublicanPortugal: A Political History, 1910-1926. University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. 340 pp. For a scant 16 years between the end of the monarchy and the advent of dictatorship in 1926, Portugal was a democratic republic. Using hitherto unavailable Portugese archives and his own interviews with pre-1926 politicians, Wheeler writes the first account in English of those short, tumultuous years in which 45 successive governments rose and fell. Clearly, he concludes, the First Republic failed less from its own ineptitude than from incessant attack by its military leaders and its domestic enemies. "Against the intransigents of the far Left and far Right, who had no use for a true democracy, and against the misguided partisans, who mistook insurrection for rebellion, Portugese moderates perhaps had little chance to maintain a regime of liberty." Wheeler is professor of history at the University of New Hampshire.
Stephen T. Cochrane '64. The Collaborationof Necaev, Ogarev and Bakunin in 1869:Mecaev's Early Years. Wilhelm Schmitz Velag in Giessen, 1977. Softcover. 365 pp. Anticipating the first complete biography, which remains to be written, Cochrane gathers under one cover the hitherto scattered materials on the formative years of the 19th-century Russian revolutionary-anarchist Sergei Necaev (1847-1882). Called by Berdayaev the "Ignatius Loyola of revolutionary socialism" and used by Dostoevsky as the prototype of a major revolutionist in ThePossessed, Necaev was a revolutionary fanatic, Cochrane writes, who became "the most famous villain of Russia." Captured in Switzerland after "the greatest manhunt by tsarist agents in the West," he was returned to Russia in 1872, tried and sentenced for murder, and died a political prisoner in Peter Paul Fortress in 1882.
David-Hillel Ruben '65. Marxism andMaterialism: A Study in Marxist Theory ofKnowledge. Humanities Press, 1977. 199 pp. In this book designed "to be a book of Marxist philosophy, both in the sense that it is about Marxist philosophy and in the sense that it is itself meant to be an instance or example of Marxist philosophy," Ruben argues that to understand Marxist materialism "we must think ourselves back into the philosophical context which Marx inherited." Thus he examines the "epistemologieal inconsistency" which he finds in the thought of Kant, traces the result of that inconsistency through the work of Hegel and Feuerbach, develops his version of Marx's reflective theory of knowledge, and examines the specific formulation of that theory by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. David-Hillel Ruben is the pen name of Donald Ruben. He holds his Ph.D. from Harvard and is lecturer in philosophy at University of Essex in England.
William Mills Todd III '66, ed. Literature andSociety in Imperial Russia, 1800-1914. Stanford University Press, 1978. 306 pp. A collection of nine essays by Western scholars exploring various aspects of Russian literature in its social context. Using many of the more esoteric post-New Criticism theories of literary criticism such as the German Rezeptionsasthetik. and the French textual semiotics, the writers seek to reintegrate literature with the social and historical realities amid which it was. created but from which the New Criticism tended to divorce it. Among the major 19th-century pre-Revolutionary riters examined are Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky. Mills is associate professor of Russian and comparative literature at Stanford.
Robert Kegan '68. The Sweeter Welcome.Voices for a Vision of Affirmation: Bellow,Malamud and Martin Buber. Humanities Press, 1976. Softcover. 169 pp. A curious amalgam of literary criticism, neo-hasidic theology, metaphysics, and mysticism which defies the categories. Though his vehicle is ostensibly a study of four novels, two each by Malamud and by Bellow, in the light of the thought of the modern mystical theologian Martin Buber, Kegan achieves an eloquent paean to spiritual affirmation and wholeness in the midst of our world of alienation and fragmentation. The author says it best himself: "The sweetness of community after the lean loneliness of its absence: that is what this book is about. We have withstood the winter long enough. We are near to enshrining this modern life, this modern literature of icy estrangement. This book spreads rumors of a thaw: of another kind of lettering, another philosophy - of modern folk to tell of a life of affirmation, human welcome, of community and embrace."
