The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture Book

I entered Grinnell College with the intention of becoming a professor of history like one of those fine individuals, two of whom had gone to the same college, who taught the subject at my high school. During the sophomore year I took Greg Guroff's year-long, eight-semester-hour credit Russian History course.

Guroff was Russian himself, a collector of icons and, strange for Grinnell at the time, a political conservative. Unsurprisingly, he went on later to work for the State Department. At the time, however, he was in continuous struggle with us, his students, to try to pound into our heads the information and perspectives which had shaped his intellectual understanding of Russia and its history. He was by far the most demanding professor I ever had at Grinnell, demanding not only quite a lot of reading, but also an enormous amount of writing--several substantial papers a term. I liked the reading, doing much of it in the music listening rooms of the library while listening to Russian classical music and opera, but the writing was almost too much. I didn't figure out how to manage that kind of work until the end of that year and didn't really write anything of academic note until the senior thesis. Still, I got by.

Guroff did the usual lecture/discussion class arrangement, the discussions often being arguments because of his political differences with most of the students. The one exception to this was the visit of Dr. Billington, Guroff's own teacher from Princeton, who visited the college during the course of the year and was staying at the school's guesthouse. On that occasion we went to see the great man, the twenty to thirty of us crammed into the guesthouse's living-room reception area, most of us on the floor facing him in his winged chair. I don't particularly recall what he said, just the sun streaming through the windows and the uncomfortableness of a cross-legged position. I was, however, impressed enough by his talk to go out and purchase his 'The Icon and the Axe' at the college bookstore.

Obviously, I didn't read it then. I didn't read it for decades. I was too busy with school, with politics, with social activities. When I did read it, though, I was happy to have obtained the thing and impressed enough to pass my copy on--after buying another copy--to a scholarly old Croatian fellow I know in the neighborhood.