Monday, November 02, 2020

The Hedgehog and the Fox

I was talking to Peter about Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia yesterday. I can't remember how or why it came up. Stoppard's protagonist is Alexander Herzen, the Russian writer and thinker and a real historical figure. I mentioned that I had read Isiah Berlin on Herzen only for PG to tell me he knew him. You could have knocked me down with a feather.

It seems that Peter's 1981 production of Turgenev's A Month in the Country was based on a translation that the National Theatre commissioned from Berlin and PG used to pop around Isiah B's flat in the Albany* to discuss it as a work in progress. "Nice man," apparently.

The Albany! My cup overfloweth.

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