David Joravsky (1925–2020)

Abstract

David Joravsky (1925–2020) John Bushnell and Sheila Fitzpatrick Having learned belatedly of the death of David Joravsky, the historian of Soviet science and professor of history at Northwestern University, the editors of Kritika publish this two-part memorial to honor his passing. ________ I first encountered Dave Joravsky in graduate school, when I read his Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917–1932.1 The overarching subject was the shift of the official version of Soviet science from a rather mundane positivist-materialist reductionism in the 1920s (largely ignored by practicing scientists) to an imposed "dialectical materialism" that took hold in the early 1930s and provided ideological cover for (the most famous example) Lysenko's Lamarckian view that traits acquired during an organism's lifetime—that is, not determined by genes—could be inherited by its offspring. Almost everything in the book was new to me. What most startled me, however, was Dave's demolition of the belief, to which almost all scholars of the Soviet Union at the time subscribed, that Lenin, in a 1905 article on "Party Organization and Party Literature" had provided the authoritative basis for Soviet leaders' insistence that literature—belles lettres—should be written from a Bolshevik point of view. That was, in fact, the position that Stalin took in the 1930s. As Dave pointed out, Lenin had asserted only that political and social analysis published in the Bolshevik newspaper should reflect the party's ("party" not yet capitalized) positions; competing socialisms were either irrelevant or unwelcome. That might seem to be no more than a puzzling aside in a book on Soviet science, but in fact it was a refreshing reminder that Soviet scholarship of that time, and even later, [End Page 451] offered a very unreliable history of early Bolshevism, as it did of Soviet science. Yet Western historians decided to turn the Soviet false credit into a false charge (which they nevertheless seemed to think was true). Dave reminded them that they should look at the original documents. Not really a necessary reminder, you might think, but Cold War–era historians made that mistake over and over again. Even as recently as 15 years ago I had to recommend that a publisher not accept a book proposal on the history of Soviet art whose reasonably well-known would-be author claimed the same Lenin article to be the foundation stone of Soviet art. Dave wrote two other remarkable books on Soviet science, The Lysenko Affair and Russian Psychology: A Critical History.2 Here, however, I want to introduce you instead to his last, as yet unpublished but completed book: Great Nations of the West.3 Joravsky used literature (the works of Émile Zola, Lev Tolstoi, Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, and many other greats) as his sources for this meditation on nationalism, antisemitism, and attitudes toward war in 19th- and 20th-century Europe. How did these writers frame the nation? How did they justify nationalism? Did they see war as useful, necessary, inevitable, central to national identity? Dave was the opposite of a nationalist and appalled by the justifications great writers offered for war, but his purpose was not to denounce them, because that would have been too easy. Of course, he did not hide what he thought. He really did want to understand their points of view. The book sits at the boundary of history and literary studies: Dave assumed that literature maps and perhaps shapes intellectual trends. The book reflects his astonishing breadth and depth of knowledge, and his writing is compelling. Dave was a generous colleague, with a habit of asking fundamental questions. When I talked with him about my own work, he routinely honed in on what he took to be the essential questions: What was my basic assumption? Was I writing from a political or moral point of view (he employed other dichotomies as well), and why? Sometimes I found that style of interrogation of my work useful, sometimes—temporarily, at least—annoying, particularly when I didn't have ready answers to his questions. But the questions were useful even when I tried to ignore them. When the department dealt with hiring decisions, Dave tended to pose questions...