'For the Ordinary Educated Man'

I’ve read most of Robert Conquest’s books – history, poetry, fiction – and here is the sole passage I have almost committed to memory: 

“Literature exists for the ordinary educated man, and any literature that actively requires enormous training can be at best of only peripheral value. Moreover, such a mood in literature produces the specialist who only knows about literature. The man who only knows about literature does not know even about literature.”

 

Conquest is playing a variation on Dr. Johnson’s rousing declaration in his “Life of Gray”: “In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours. The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”

 

The idea that readers must undergo a specialized apprenticeship in order to love books is the purest snobbery and puritanism. Whoever trained to read Dickens? The ideal preparation for reading literature is being human. The overriding concern of academics is turf protection. Literature at its best is built for autodidacts, people who read, love and read again, and don't make a profession of it.

 

In The Story of a Life (trans. Robert Chandler, New York Review Books, 2023), Konstantin Paustovsky (1892-1968) writes of his schoolboy days in pre-Revolutionary Russia:

 

“We immersed ourselves in reading. Our understanding of Russian literature, with all its classical clarity and depth, came to us later than that of the West. We were young, and Western literature attracted us with its elegance, its calm and its perfection of design. . . . It’s possible that the ‘Universal Library’ was responsible for our  passion for Western literature.”

 

As the Modern Library, Everyman’s Library and paperbacks in general were for mine.

 

Robert Conquest was born on this date, July 15, in 1917 – the year of the revolution he would spend a lifetime studying – and died in 2015 at age ninety-eight.