Word: kennan
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...Anton Chekhov once remarked that medicine was his wife and literature his mistress. Ambassador George F. Kennan, 85, acknowledges that his own situation is "analogous, except that the mistress was far less beautiful than Chekhov's and had to content herself with much smaller pickings...
...Kennan's statement contains his typical amalgam of self-effacement and presumption. The diplomat and historian has written 17 books on 19th and 20th century foreign policy; he knows very well that his current "pickings" contain 61 years of incomparable observations. He was in Germany when the Nazis rose to power, and in the U.S.S.R. during Stalin's purges. Since his departure from the Foreign Service in 1953 he has visited almost every dry surface of the globe, and he has never forgotten his notebook. From it he has now culled Sketches from a Life, which brims with diverting character...
...early as 1927, the young vice consul senses an approaching malaise in Hamburg: "The city talks with a thrilling breathless strength through the restless machinery of its harbor, and yet talks with the voice of unutterable horror, through the lurid, repulsive alleys of St. Pauli." Kennan watches a 23-year-old pianist who is "Jewish, from Russia, and evidently is rumored to be near to death with tuberculosis . . . When he played . . . it seemed as though he himself were being played upon by some unseen musician -- as though every note were being wrung out of him." Many things have altered...
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Kennan is imprisoned by the Nazis. Released, he goes on to serve in Portugal, London and then, as the war winds down, the Soviet Union. In the early days, the writer regards the country less as a diplomat than as a romantic novelist manque. Leningrad is "one of the most poignant communities of the world . . . I know that in this city, where I have never lived, there had nevertheless been deposited by some strange quirk of fate -- a previous life, perhaps? -- a portion of my own capacity to feel and to love...
...Kennan says little in Sketches about the great distress the Soviet Union caused him. In fact he was expelled from the U.S.S.R. in 1952 for criticizing the government. "I was interned . . . in Germany for several months during the last war," he complained to reporters while traveling in West Berlin. "The treatment we receive in Moscow is just about like the treatment we internees received then." Soviet officials considered his remarks ! "slanderous attacks . . . in a rude violation of generally recognized norms of international law." Soon afterward Secretary of State John Foster Dulles terminated his career...