Word: dieckmann
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...responsible for the new interest in Diderot had been a fan for most of his life. But even to German-born Herbert Dieckmann, now a professor of Romance languages at St. Louis' Washington University, Diderot the man was still a "fantastic and unbelievable enigma." For one thing, most of his original manuscripts had disappeared...
...Fishy Sound. Dieckmann had a hunch that Diderot had never really destroyed the manuscript of his great philosophical dialogue, D'Alembert's Dream, though one contemporary declared that Diderot had burned it and another said he had torn it up. "The whole thing sounded fishy to me," says Dieckmann...
...Dieckmann went from Germany to France, told other scholars his theory that the Diderot manuscript was still in existence somewhere. One day a scholar casually remarked that he thought he might have seen the Dream while going through the family papers of a certain Baron Jacques Le Vavasseur, Diderot's direct descendant. Apparently, Diderot's daughter had passed on a whole batch of papers to her descendants. The family had let only two untrained amateurs take a look: it thought the less said about Diderot's escapades and radical ideas the better. Dieckmann got only a curt...