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Henry Gifford and the ‘Mind of Europe’

Henry Gifford and the ‘Mind of Europe’ In the foreword to his early book on Russian fiction, The Hero of his Time, Henry Gifford wrote: ‘The foreigner who enters [Russian] literature, reading it in its own language, comes slowly to unlearn his prejudices, and to think and feel like the people about whom he is reading.’ In doing this, moreover, the foreigner learns ‘to look at his own world from a distance’.1 This declaration seems to me to characterize the approach of a professor of English who, as he put it in the foreword to his outstanding study of Pasternak, ‘spent more hours on the study of Russian literature than may seem legitimate for a full-time member of an English department’.2 He wrote of Russian (or Greek, or Italian, or Spanish) literature as a ‘foreigner’, one rooted in English culture. But his aim was always to find a position from which English literature – and above all English poetry – was seen not as a closed system, but as part of a great European and American concert or dialogue of voices. Having received a classical education at an English public school, it is perhaps not surprising that Gifford saw modern literature essentially in relation to http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Critical Studies Edinburgh University Press

Henry Gifford and the ‘Mind of Europe’

France, Peter
Comparative Critical Studies , Volume 7 (2-3): 193 – Oct 1, 2010
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Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
© British Comparative Literature Association 2010
Subject
Legacies; Literary Studies
ISSN
1744-1854
eISSN
1750-0109
DOI
10.3366/ccs.2010.0005
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

In the foreword to his early book on Russian fiction, The Hero of his Time, Henry Gifford wrote: ‘The foreigner who enters [Russian] literature, reading it in its own language, comes slowly to unlearn his prejudices, and to think and feel like the people about whom he is reading.’ In doing this, moreover, the foreigner learns ‘to look at his own world from a distance’.1 This declaration seems to me to characterize the approach of a professor of English who, as he put it in the foreword to his outstanding study of Pasternak, ‘spent more hours on the study of Russian literature than may seem legitimate for a full-time member of an English department’.2 He wrote of Russian (or Greek, or Italian, or Spanish) literature as a ‘foreigner’, one rooted in English culture. But his aim was always to find a position from which English literature – and above all English poetry – was seen not as a closed system, but as part of a great European and American concert or dialogue of voices. Having received a classical education at an English public school, it is perhaps not surprising that Gifford saw modern literature essentially in relation to

Journal

Comparative Critical Studies – Edinburgh University Press

Published: Oct 1, 2010

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