Victor Erlich is a distinguished literary critic and professor emeritus of Russian literature at Yale University. He is the author of several books, including Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine; and Modernism and Revolution: Russian Literature in Transition. He is also the grandson of Simon Dubunov, the famous Jewish historian who was killed by a Nazi bullet in December, 1941. Erlich’s father, Henryk Erlich, also met a terrible end. He was a Jewish socialist leader who took his own life in one of Stalin’s prisons in May 1942. Such a tragic history has its precedents in 19th century Russia, as well as the 20th century orgy of World Wars I and II.
Erlich was born in 1914, on the eve of World War I, in Saint Petersburg, then still called Petrograd and later still, Leningrad— an entire history in a name. Reading Erlich’s memoir is to experience history through him — from the Russian Revolution to the present. Erlich and his wife, Iza, had to escape Poland through Lithuania to Japan, then emigrated to Canada and finally to America where he was drafted into the U.S. army, served in Germany, emerging at last from the cauldron of history to fulfill a brilliant postwar academic career in the United States with his grace and humor intact. An interesting, well-written memoir. Notes.
