Brezhnev's reading

[Anne O'Brien Fisher]

Hello SEELANGers,

I'm forwarding a note from another listserv that may be of interest.

- Annie

-snip-

Following the recent exchanges on SHARP-L about presidential reading, some
of you may be interested in a two-part documentary on Leonid Ilyich
Brezhnev
that Radio 4 is broadcasting at the moment. The first part - broadcast
yesterday (Saturday 12 February) between 10.30am-11.00am - included a
brief
section where Brezhnev was described as not a great reader but that he
understood the power of literature to such extent that he maintained two
views of the books he read, his 'official' view and then his own different
personal view. The most delightful revelation was that he cut a quotation
from Marx from a speech he was to give: 'People know that I haven't read
that!'

You can read more about the broadcast here
<http://tinyurl.com/56d6f> and should you have a fast internet connection
and Real Player, you can listen to the whole programme at
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/rams/sat1030.ram> (this will probably
only be available until next Friday). The relevant portion starts at just
under 23 minutes into the broadcast.

Ian Gadd


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H. L. Mencken, commenting on Warren Harding's writing, called it
"the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a
string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line;
it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking
idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of
grandeur creeps into it."

- Quoted in John M. Hamilton, _Casanova Was a Book Lover_

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Anne Fisher
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Michigan Slavic Department
Sylvia "Duffy" Engle Graduate Student Fellow, University of Michigan
Institute for the Humanities
work tel: 734-936-1865
aof at umich.edu

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