LETTERS Loseff on Liberty
Sir: While in London for a short visit, I was shown the article by Christopher Hitchens, `Liberty for Jew baiters' (1 March). I cannot comment on most of the article, because unlike Mr Hitchens I do not write about what I have no first-hand knowledge of, but I want your readers to know that the section of the article in which my name appears is plain wrong.
To begin with trivia, my name is not Losev but Loseff and I am not an anti- Semitic commentator for Radio Liberty but a Russian poet and critic and professor of Russian literature at Dartmouth College in the USA. I also happen to be a Jew who had to leave Russia due in great measure to officially sponsored anti-Semitism. All this one could easily find out in the course of a few telephone calls to the editors of Rus- sian emigre journals, to the Russian service of the BBC, or to any Slavicist in the field of modern Russian literature.
My contacts with Radio Liberty are limited to a couple of interviews which I gave its correspondents in the summer of 1984. In one of the interviews I was asked about a long article I wrote on Solzhenit- syn's epic The Red Wheel. The interview was accompanied by reading of some excerpts from the article.
Had Mr Hitchens checked his facts, he would know first of all that nowhere in the article do I offer my own views of Russian history, only Solzhenitsyn's. More impor- tant, he would see that the whole thrust of the article was to show that Solzhenitsyn's interpretation of the tragic episode of 1911 was not, as some charged, anti-semitic at all. Solzhenitsyn's task was difficult in- deed, for Stolypin's assassin, Bogrov, him- self claimed Jewish nationalist motives for his deed. But with great artistic tact Sol- zhenitsyn shows that Bogrov's heinous crime was in fact the child of his terrorist, not Jewish, mentality.
It is difficult to discuss in a brief letter or newspaper article the complex structure of a novel like Solzhenitsyn's but I must say that when the Radio Liberty controversy was discussed in the American press, the majority of writers managed to preserve balance and maintain objectivity. Even in the New York tabloids I did not see such distortions as in Mr Hitchens's cavalier article.
But who and why would mislead Mr Hitchens? Probably, people who do not care a damn about Jews or Gentiles, history or literature. My very impressionist- ic sense of Radio Liberty after three days spent there is that the station is a typical overstaffed and badly managed govern- ment organisation. Such organisations tend to have feuding parties. 'Anti-Semitism Sponsored by the US Government' makes for a good headline, and somebody in the heat of the internal backbiting threw that bait to the media. Mr Hitchens swallowed it all too eagerly.
But I cannot help asking my grand- mother's question: 'Is it good for the Jews?' Hardly. Solzhenitsyn's moral teaching might be naive, his historical concepts might be one-sided, and his art might be not to everybody's liking, but the great writer goes out of his way to clean Russian-Jewish relations from suspicion and half-expressed assumptions, and it is not good to malign him for that. It is bad for the Jews and for the Russians.
Lev Loseff
Hanover, New Hampshire
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