Encounters with Isaiah Berlin

The volume contains Isaiah Berlin’s letters to his Polish friend, Andrzej Walicki, and Walicki’s detailed account of Berlin’s role in his life. Berlin actively promoted Walicki’s books on Russian intellectual history not only because of his own interest in the subject. Above all he wanted to promote Russian intellectual history as a separate, internationally recognized field of study and, therefore, warmly welcomed Walicki’s firm intention to study it in a systematic way, with the aim of providing a comprehensive synthesis of all important currents in pre-Revolutionary Russian thought. Already at their meeting Berlin discovered in Walicki a promising candidate to help him in laying foundations for Russian intellectual history as a legitimate part of the universal history of ideas; as a discipline rewarding in itself and particularly relevant for rediscovering the great traditions of the Russian intelligentsia and setting them against the stifling dogmas of Soviet totalitarianism.

Andrzej Walicki, born in 1930; 1955-1981 at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences; in 1960 encounter with Isaiah Berlin in Oxford; 1981-1986 at The History of Ideas Unit of the Australian National University in Canberra; since 1986 O’Neill Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana; Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences; author of various books and articles; 1998 Balzan Prize for History; retired in 1999 and returned to Poland in 2006.