THE SKIDELSKY RUSSIAN LECTURE
Robert Skidelsky: Rediscovering Russian roots
Monday 7 June, 7pm Chaired by Elaine Feinstein
The Bolshevik Revolution produced a mass exodus of Russia’s aristocracy and educated bourgeoisie. In the years following 1917 many of Russia’s most talented writers, artists, composers, scientists, professionals, managers and entrepreneurs went into exile, depriving the Soviet Union of a huge and irreplaceable cultural resource. The roll-call of writers alone includes such names as Nabokov, Sinyavsky and Solzhenitsyn. After the fall of communism some of these exiles and their descendants started to reconnect with their motherland.
Lord Skidelsky is the biographer of J.M. Keynes and Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. Inaugurating a series of annual Russian lectures by different speakers that he is generously sponsoring, he traces his own reconnection with Russia, against the background of a turbulent, murderous history. The prerevolutionary story of his two families, the Skidelskys and the Sapelkins, is a book he intends to write – explaining how his birth in Harbin, Manchuria, in 1939, was the outcome of a chance toss of the historical dice. Venue: Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre Courtauld Institute, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA
The event is free for Fellows and Members of the Royal Society of Literature. There are a limited number of tickets available for members of the public at all RSL events. These are sold on the door, from 6pm, on a first-come-first-served basis. We suggest a contribution of £7
(£5 concessions).
For further information please visit the Royal Society of Literature website, or call 020 7845 4676.
