Dictionary of Literary Influences

Thatcher, Margaret Hilda

1956, this early film was only released in the 1990s in a few countries, most prominently France. Tarkovsky became more widely known when his true story of a painter of icons, Andrei Rouble, was finally released in 1966 after many problems with Soviet authorities. Although similar to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) was a more spiritual science fiction essay adapted from a novel by Stanislaw Lem. Poems by Andrei Tarkovsky’s father are quoted in his The Mirror (1974) and Stalker (1979). He directed only two plays for the stage: Hamlet at the Moscow Theater in 1976 and Boris Godounov at Covent Garden in London (1983 and 1984). With only seven feature films, Andrei Tarkovsky is still considered the Soviet Union’s most important filmmaker of the second half of the twentieth century.

Archives

Archives of Mosfilm Studios, Moscow. Manuscripts, correspondence.

Svenska Filminstitutet, Stockholm. Materials related to Tarkovsky’s last film, The Sacrifice (Offret), shot in Sweden.

Tarkovsky Archives, Moscow. Still in preparation; includes diaries, correspondence. Tarkovsky Museum Centre, Ulitsa, Sovetskaya, Russia. Souvenirs from childhood; the

museum is built in the house where he lived during World War II.

Printed Sources

Edelhajt, Boleslaw. “Entretien avec Andreï Tarkovski,” Les Cahiers du cinéma, 392, février 1987, 39–43. In this interview Tarkovsky talks about his main literary and cinematic influences.

Laberge, Yves. “Andreï Tarkovski. Sculpting in Time,” Études littéraires, Ste-Foy (Canada), Université Laval 20, 3 (Hiver 1987–88), 151–53.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. Collected Screenplays, William Powell and Anastasia Synessiou (trans.), (London: Faber and Faber, 1999).

———.Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, Kitty Hunter-Blair (trans.), (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). In his unique book, the director writes about his vision of life and about his conception of cinema.

———.Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986, Kitty Hunter-Blair (trans.), (London: Verso Books, 1993). Tarkovsky’s intimate, personal diary.

Tarkovsky, Arseny. Life, Life, Virginia Rounding (ed.), (Kent, U.K.: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2001). English translations of poems written by Andrei Tarkovsky’s father.

Turovskaya, Maya. Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, Natasha Ward (trans.), (London: Faber and Faber, 1990). The best analysis of the cultural, religious, and literary influences on Tarkovsky’s movies.

Yves Laberge

THATCHER, MARGARET HILDA (1925– )

Margaret Thatcher, along with Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, was one of the dominant political personalities in Britain (and the West) in the latter half of the twentieth century. In her 11 years as prime minister of Britain (1979–90), she fundamentally altered the direction of both the Conservative Party and British politics generally. Her influence, along with that of Ronald Reagan in the United States, in redirecting Western economies toward free markets and away from Keynesian planning, proved to have a lasting impact.

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Thatcher has famously traced the roots of her economic policies to the practical lessons in economics and morality that she learned at the knee of her father, Alfred Roberts, and at the counter of the family grocery, above which the family lived, in the English market town of Grantham. Early on, her father instilled an ethic of reading. The first book she remembered receiving was an almanac of “homespun philosophy and religion,” but under the influence of her father, a local councilor, she was primarily exposed to nonfiction works, sharing the books he borrowed from the public library and discussing them. She therefore was exposed to tracts in the contemporary debates on socialism and appeasement by the likes of John Strachey. She seems to have read less fiction, although in her memoirs she does mention being exposed to “the classics,” such as Dickens, as well as the poetry of Milton and Kipling (Thatcher 1995, 7, 16, 28; Campbell 2000, 28). Her parents’ Methodist faith instilled in her a strong sense of individualistic values, including charity, frugality, and work (Thatcher 1995, 11–12; Campbell 2000, 16). She remained an active Methodist until her marriage to Denis Thatcher, when she joined the Anglican Church.

Thatcher attended the local grammar school where she did well, eventually focusing upon chemistry. Although her headmaster discouraged her from seeking a place at Oxford and prevented her from taking Latin, she eventually won a place at Somerville College, Oxford, to study chemistry. She finished her degree with a second and was generally remembered as an able, if not gifted, chemist by her teachers, who included the Nobel-prize winning chemist Dorothy Hodgkin. She remains the only British prime minister whose education was directed to a physical science. On the other hand, she failed to get the broad, liberal education that her colleagues in the Oxford University Conservative Association were receiving by reading history or politics. In general, her reading does not seem to have expanded significantly during these years, though she read The Times and famously did purchase a copy of F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, a work that would have much more influence on her three decades later. Another work she later recalled was Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies,which debunked the Marxist claim of “scientific” socialism (Thatcher 1995, 38, 50). As one biographer has described her, “She arrived in Oxford with her political views already settled and spent four years diligently confirming them. . . . she read little or no history at university; and neither then nor later did she read much literature. . . . Her mind dealt in facts and moral certainties” (Campbell 2000, 64–5).

Thatcher was defeated in the 1951 and 1955 elections, but began to establish a name within the Conservative Party and was eventually elected to Parliament in 1959. At the same time, she began reading for the bar, which she had decided was a better basis than chemistry for a political career. Passing the bar and working as a tax lawyer contributed to the “elevated, almost mystical, reverence for the rule of law as the foundation of English liberty” already present in her mind from her childhood. Here, the works of A. V. Dicey, the late Victorian legal scholar, with his stress on the rule of law within a framework of classical liberalism, was particularly influential (Thatcher 1995, 84).

Although she held ministerial posts in the Tory governments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it was a surprise when she challenged and defeated Edward Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1975. Under the tutelage of Keith Joseph, she was given a rapid education in the new, monetarist economic thinking,

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reading the remainder of Hayek’s works as well as those of Milton Friedman, Alan Waters, and others. She was a quick convert and integrated these ideas with the more homespun lessons in economics she had learned from her father. As she later wrote, “Before I ever read a page of Milton Friedman or Alan Walters, I just knew that these [collectivist] assertions could not be true. Thrift was a virtue and profligacy a vice” (Thatcher 1995, 567).

She seized upon the opportunity of the economic crises that Britain faced in the late 1970s to lead the Conservative Party to victory in the general election of 1979. Pursuing policies of monetarism, individualism, and reducing the obligations of government, she was reelected in 1983 and 1987 before being forced to resign from the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1990, primarily as a result of disagreements on European policy. The changes that her governments brought about with regard to public welfare, state ownership, and economic policies proved lasting and brought about a restriction of the welfare state and an end to the post–World War II “collectivist” consensus in Britain.

Mrs. Thatcher was created Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, a life peerage, after her retirement from office.

Archives

Lady Thatcher’s private papers have not yet been deposited in an archive.

Official papers will be available at the Public Record Office, subject to the Thirty Year Rule, and the Conservative Party Archive at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, holds the party’s official records.

Printed Sources

Campbell, John. Margaret Thatcher: Volume One, The Grocer’s Daughter (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000).

Thatcher, Margaret. The Collected Speeches, Robin Harris (ed.), (London: HarperCollins, 1997).

———.Complete Public Statements, 1945–1990 on CD-ROM, Christopher Collins (ed.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

———.The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993).

———.The Path to Power (London: HarperCollins, 1995).

Young, Hugo. One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher (London: Macmillan, 1989; revised 1991).

Derek W. Blakeley

THOMAS, DYLAN MARLAIS (1914–1953)

Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, where he studied at the grammar school under his father David John Thomas, the English master, and had several of his poems printed in the school magazine. Thomas began his writing career as a journalist for the Herald of Wales and South Wales Evening Post. When Thomas was 19, New English Weekly published his poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.” After moving to London (although he would later return repeatedly to Wales), Thomas continued as a journalist for a time and went on to publish seven volumes of poetry, plays, film scripts, and short stories in his lifetime; a number more were published posthumously. He supplemented his income as a radio scriptwriter and reader for the British Broadcasting Corporation. He married Caitlin Macnamara in 1937; despite Thomas’s womanizing, the couple

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stayed together until his death. They had a daughter, Aeronwy, and two sons, Llewelyn and Colm. An infamous pub-frequenter, Thomas died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 39 while in the United States on the last of four lecture tours there.

Determining Dylan Thomas’s literary influences is challenging. On one hand, Thomas was quite well read, beginning with his father’s extensive library. On the other hand, Thomas did not attend university, eschewed academia, and even chided those who would classify him by literary school or identify his writing with a particular poet, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, to whom he was frequently compared. Although Thomas identified himself first as a Welshman, he could not read or speak Welsh. However, he heard Welsh poetry read and was said to be influenced by the rhythm and rhyme of its words in his poems as well as its subjects of death, nature, and spirituality. Many termed Thomas a “bardic poet,” referring to the early Welsh poets.

Responding to a question on his early inspirations, Thomas remarked: “I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.” He proceeded to list the influences on his early poetry as “folk tales, the Scottish Ballads, a few lines of hymns, the most famous Bible stories and the rhythms of the Bible, Blake’s Songs of Innocence, and the quite incomprehensible magical majesty and nonsense of Shakespeare heard, read, and near-murdered in the first forms of my school” (Maud 1992, 12). The use of biblical language and allusions is particularly noticeable in his poetry; despite his father’s agnosticism, the elder Thomas still quoted from the Bible at home, and Thomas attended a Presbyterian church. Two of Dylan Thomas’s uncles as well as his grandfather were also ministers.

As he records in his correspondence and radio programs, Thomas’s subsequent reading ranged from ancient through medieval epics (in translation), including Dante’s works, to seventeenth-century poets, particularly John Donne, George Herbert, whose shaped poem “Easter Wings” Thomas adapted to his own work “Vision and Prayer,” John Milton, and Henry Vaughan, up to his contemporaries. His close friend was fellow Welsh poet Vernon Watkins, from whom he would sometimes solicit writing advice, as recorded in Thomas’s letters. Often outspoken, Dylan Thomas was vocal in both his praise and castigation of other writers. William Wordsworth earned Thomas’s scorn for his lack of true mystical insight and poetic language. Thomas criticized W. H. Auden for his obscurity and paucity of emotions, and derided T. S. Eliot’s influence. Thomas praised and was influenced by William Butler Yeats, his favorite to read aloud at lectures, Walter de la Mare, Thomas Hardy, and some of D. H. Lawrence’s works, and he imitated James Joyce in his own collection of autobiographical short stories, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.

Archives

British Library, London: MS. 48,217, Thomas’s early typewritten and corrected poems; MS 52,612, correspondence with Vernon Watkins.

Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo: Four notebooks, 1930–33; Pamela Hanson Johnson letters.

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin: Thomas letters.

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Printed Sources

Ackerman, John. Dylan Thomas: His Life and Work (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996).

Ferris, Paul (ed.). The Collected Letters: Dylan Thomas, new ed. (London: J. M. Dent, 2000).

———. Dylan Thomas: The Biography, new ed. (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000). Maud, Ralph (ed.). On the Air with Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts (New York: New Direc-

tions, 1992).

Moynihan, William T. The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966).

Thomas, Dylan. Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, Ralph Maud (ed.), (London: J. M. Dent, 1968).

Tindall, William York. A Reader’s Guide to Dylan Thomas (New York: Octagon Books, 1973).

Carol Blessing

TILLICH, PAUL JOHANNES (1886–1965)

Paul Tillich was born in Starzeddel, Prussia, the son of Johannes Tillich, a conservative Lutheran minister, and Mathilde Dürselen, whose attitudes were more liberal. In the 1890s his father was superintendent of parishes in the Diocese of Schönfliess-Neumark. Tillich began school in the walled medieval town of Schönfliess, then from age 12 to 14 he attended the humanistic gymnasium as a boarding student in nearby Königsberg-Neumark, where he immersed himself in German romantic poetry, literature, and philosophy. During this period he read Joseph von Eichendorff, Stefan George, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, Friedrich Nietzsche, and especially Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, with whom he felt a lifelong affinity. Schelling’s emphasis on nature, the aesthetic, and the dilemmas of life that can only be overcome by mysticism enthralled Tillich. Life in the Schönfliess parsonage between the Lutheran school and his father’s church intensified Tillich’s deep feeling of the close relationship, if not neo-Platonic identity, among nature, the beautiful, the spiritual, and the holy. In this conducive atmosphere he first encountered the works of Jakob Böhme, Rudolf Otto, and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher.

Tillich’s father was transferred to Berlin in 1900. After graduating in 1904 from the humanistic gymnasium in Berlin, where he enjoyed ancient Greek language and literature and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Tillich studied theology at the universities of Berlin, Tübingen, Breslau, and Halle, receiving his Ph.D. at Breslau in 1911 with a dissertation on Schelling and his licentiate in theology at Halle in 1912. Besides Schelling, his reading at this time centered on Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Søren Kierkegaard. He was ordained in 1912, served as a chaplain in the German army throughout World War I, and began teaching theology at the University of Berlin in 1919. Throughout the 1920s he wrestled with the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. He allied himself with liberals such as Rudolf Bultmann against the neo-Orthodoxy of Karl Barth. From 1924 to 1925 he taught at the University of Marburg, where his colleague Martin Heidegger encouraged his interest in existentialism. From 1925 to 1929 he taught at the universities of Dresden and Leipzig, then became professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. When Adolf Hitler fired Tillich and many other religious liberals from their teaching positions in 1933, Reinhold Niebuhr invited him to Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

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Tillich wrote in My Search for Absolutes, his brief intellectual autobiography, that “the way of synthesis . . . my own way . . . follows the classical German philosophers from Kant to Hegel and has remained a driving force in all my theological work. It has found its final form in my Systematic Theolog y.”

Archives

The largest collection of Tillich’s papers is in the Manuscripts and Archives Department of the Andover–Harvard Theological Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Printed Sources

Albrecht, Renate. Paul Tillich: sein Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993).

Calí, Grace. Paul Tillich, First-Hand: A Memoir of the Harvard Years (Chicago: Exploration Press, 1996).

Carey, John Jesse. Paulus, Then and Now: A Study of Paul Tillich’s Theological World and the Continuing Relevance of His Work (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2002).

Dourley, John P. Paul Tillich and Bonaventure: An Evaluation of Tillich’s Claim to Stand in the Augustinian-Franciscan Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1975).

O’Meara, Thomas F., and Donald M. Weisser (eds.). Paul Tillich in Catholic Thought (New York: Image, 1969).

Pauck, Wilhelm. Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989). Stenger, Mary Ann, and Ronald H. Stone. Dialogues of Paul Tillich (Macon, Ga.: Mercer Uni-

versity Press, 2002).

Stumme, John R. Socialism in Theological Perspective: A Study of Paul Tillich, 1918–1933 (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1978).

Tillich, Paul. My Search for Absolutes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969).

———. On the Boundary: An Autobiographical Sketch (London: Collins, 1967).

Eric v.d. Luft

TITO, JOSIP BROZ (1892–1980)

Born Josip Broz, he became known to the world under the alias Tito, which he adopted in the 1930s. Tito was born in the village of Kumrovec in the Zagorje region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Croatia), into a Roman Catholic family as the seventh of 15 children. His father was a Croatian peasant while his mother was of a slightly more aff luent Slovenian descent. He spent his early childhood in Slovenia with his grandparents, attended school in the native village from the age of 7 to 12, and was trained as a locksmith. He traveled throughout the empire and worked at different places, supposedly even as a test-driver at the Daimler-Benz factory near Vienna. As a young trade-union member he was exposed to labor issues and became a socialist sympathizer. Tito was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army and during the First World War he fought on the eastern front until he was wounded and captured by the Russians in 1915. By the time he was released in 1917, he was a committed communist who supported the Bolsheviks and joined the Red Guard during the Russian Civil War. In 1920 Tito returned from the Soviet Union and became a prominent member of the outlawed Communist Party. Following a series of imprisonments for his underground communist activity, Tito was appointed secretary general of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1937. During the Second World War the communists under Tito’s leadership engaged in partisan warfare and successfully fought the Nazis as well as the domestic royalist, nationalist, and fascist factions. After win-

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ning the war and ruthlessly eliminating the opponents, in 1945 Tito reestablished Yugoslavia as a federal, centralized, communist state. Tito soon broke the ties with the Soviet Union and the Cominform (1948), subdued ethnic nationalisms, introduced a unique brand of market socialism and worker’s self-management, and pursued a foreign policy of nonalignment. A skilled manipulator of power politics with aristocratic pretensions and an insatiable appetite for luxury, Tito served as secretary general of the Party, head of government, commander-in- chief, and president of Yugoslavia, which disintegrated in a bloody civil war only a decade after his death.

Although Tito’s education was inadequate for him to be considered an intellectual, he bequeathed numerous speeches, interviews, articles, and books, many of which have been widely translated. Some of the most prominent compiled and edited works are of a political nature and deal with issues, such as neutrality, that defined Yugoslav foreign policy: Non-Alignment, the Conscience and Future of Mankind (1979); on nationalism, The National Question (1983); on the Second World War communist struggle for power, Selected Works on the People’s War of Liberation (1969); and on domestic politics, Self-Management (1983). Vladimir Dedijer, Milovan Djilas, Richard West, and other Tito biographers suggest that Tito possessed a meager knowledge of socialist theory, economy, and history. During his prison sentences Tito read the Communist Manifesto, and he acquainted himself with the major works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Tito possessed considerable mechanical skill, had a solid understanding of technical matters, and learned languages easily. In addition to knowing Slovenian, German, and French, Tito was so fluent in Russian that he confused Serbo-Croatian and Russian idioms. He was never an avid reader, though his closest associates, such as Edvard Kardelj and others, kept Tito abreast of current events. Tito was not an excellent military strategist but was considered to be an exemplary military commander and a brilliant and charismatic political leader who had an unquenchable drive for power.

Archives

Arhiv Jugoslavije, Beograd. Hrvatski Drzˇ avni Arhiv, Zagreb.

Arhiv Republike Slovenije, Ljubljana. Public Record Office, Kew, U.K.

United States National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

Printed Works

Beloff, Nora. Tito’s Flawed Legacy: Yugoslavia and the West since 1939 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985).

Dedijer, Vladimir. Novi Prilozi za Biografiju Josipa Broza Tito, 3 vols. (Zagreb: Mladost, 1980).

———. Tito Speaks: His Self Portrait and Struggle with Stalin (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953).

Djilas, Milovan. Tito: The Story from Inside (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980). Pavlowitch, Stevan K. Tito: Yugoslavia’s Great Dictator: A Reassessment (Columbus: Ohio State

University Press, 1992).

West, Richard. Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1996).

Josip Mocnik

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Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel

TOLKIEN, JOHN RONALD REUEL (1892–1973)

Born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State, J.R.R. Tolkien was four and on holiday in England with his mother when his father died. Having limited resources, Mabel Tolkien settled south of her native Birmingham in the small village of Sarehole. In 1900 Ronald entered King Edward VI’s School in Birmingham. He excelled especially at languages and was soon learning AngloSaxon and Chaucerian English. His mother died when he was 12, leaving her sons to the care of Father Francis Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory. Tolkien’s deep Catholic faith formed one of the underlying foundations of all his “fairy stories” in later life. In 1911, he entered Exeter College, Oxford, receiving his B.A. in 1915 and an M.A. in 1919. Between degrees Tolkien got married but was also called to war. He survived the Battle of the Somme uninjured but fell ill with trench fever and was sent home to recover. After the Armistice, Tolkien became a philologist and spent several months working on what would become the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1920 he was appointed reader in English studies at the University of Leeds, where he produced an edition of the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925). Elected Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University in 1925, he immediately began working with other young scholars, among them C. S. Lewis, to improve the English syllabus. Though he published a few scholarly essays (including the acclaimed “Beowulf: the Monster and the Critics,” 1936), his time was chiefly devoted to teaching, examinations, and the creation of the fantastic literary world of Middle Earth. This world was first revealed to a select group of friends and scholars, the Inklings, whose encouragement, particularly Lewis’s, led Tolkien to publish The Hobbit in 1937. The book was an unexpected success, and the publisher asked for a sequel, which Tolkien agreed to do although he took 17 years to complete it. When the epic Lord of the Rings appeared in three volumes during 1954 and 1955, it received mixed reviews. Some complained about its escapism, but many others, including the poet W. H. Auden, declared it an achievement of lasting importance. Medieval historian Norman Cantor, normally unsympathetic to fantasy literature, has credited it with helping to bring modern readers into contact with a “realm of imagination that at the same time communicates how medieval people thought of themselves” (Cantor 1991, 232). More empathetic evaluators have sought to put Tolkien into the top echelon of twentieth-century writers, especially as Lord of the Rings remained among the most read and recommended of contemporary books.

Tolkien was certainly familiar with the revival of medieval romances and “fairy stories” in the late nineteenth century. But Middle Earth was not inspired by the works of such predecessors as William Morris or George MacDonald. Rather, Tolkien drew his creative breath directly from the classical epics, from the Norse and Icelandic Sagas, and from Anglo-Saxon poetry. Indeed, the very language of northern European mythology and poetry is echoed throughout Tolkien’s stories, with many place and personal names coming directly from Norse, Anglo-Saxon, or even medieval Finnish (which served as the basic inspiration for the elvish languages Tolkien created). While some have decried Tolkien’s apparent endorsement of medieval hierarchical society, others have noted that it is the small and ordinary folk, the Hobbits and their counterparts among elves, dwarves, and men, who are

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the real heroes of the stories, observing that the high and the mighty (which we always have with us) are nothing without the struggle for goodness and decency being won by the common members of society.

Archives

Manuscripts and notes, Marquette University Memorial Library, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Manuscripts and proofs of The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and Farmer Giles of Ham.

Maps relating to the Lord of the Rings, Bodleian Library, Oxford, England.

Printed Sources

Cantor, Norman. Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: William Morrow, 1991).

Carpenter, Humphrey. J. R. R. Tolkien: a Biography (London: Allen & Unwin, 1977). The “official” biography.

——— (ed.). The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). A useful biographical and literary resource.

Shippey, Tom. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001). The latest attempt to raise Tolkien’s literary status.

Stimpson, Catherine R. J. R. R. Tolkien (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). An early and useful, if unsympathetic, literary evaluation.

Richard R. Follett

TOMASI, GIUSEPPE (1896–1957)

Giuseppe Tomasi, Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa, was born in Palermo. He spent most of his life in Sicily but died in Rome. Reading was not just the most important thing in his life, it was the only thing he did. Inertia kept him from beginning his novel, Il gattopardo (The Leopard), until 1954. It was rejected for publication in 1956 and 1957 but after his death it was published to wide acclaim, going through 52 editions in 17 months. He was agnostic. He was cosmopolitan, yet emotionally tied to Palermo and Sicily. He was proud, contemptuous, and reserved, taciturn in public, preferring solitude. Late in life he taught two students English and French literature. For his lectures he wrote notebooks of critical essays, some of which were published posthumously.

He was educated at home with access to the family library of Enlightenment classics, modern literature and histories, and later at schools in Rome and Palermo. In 1914 he studied law in Rome, then joined the artillery. He was taken prisoner by the Austrians at Asiago, eventually escaping to Trieste. After 1918 he suffered physical and nervous disorders and abandoned his law studies. Like many intellectual aristocrats, scornful of ineffectual liberalism and afraid of revolution, he was attracted to fascism in the 1920s. But later he was bored by it and by life in Sicily. He traveled in northern Italy, France, Germany, Austria, and England. He learned French, German, and later Spanish and Russian, and knew English well enough to read Shakespeare and James Joyce. In London he undertook private study of British essayists and poets. His favorite authors were John Keats, Homer, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Montaigne, Balzac, André Gide, Dickens, Marcel Proust, Tolstoy, Petrarch, D’Annunzio, and Leopardi. He published three articles on foreign literature in the 1920s. He was disdainful of Italy’s part in World War II and after 1942 was exempt from active service because of ill health. He was depressed,

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especially after 1943 when the family palace in Palermo was bombed. From 1944 he was president of the Palermo and later Sicilian Red Cross, but was frustrated by shortages, rivalries, and internal disputes.

He met Montale, Bassani and other European and American writers. He was inspired by Stendhal’s immediacy and sincerity. But more than formal education or people he met it was extensive reading that shaped his thinking. His book, The Leopard, is a historical novel set in 1860s Sicily at the time of Garibaldi’s landing and Italian unification. The protagonist is Fabrizio Salina, a portrait of Tomasi’s great-grandfather but to some extent also a self-portrait. It is a ruthlessly bitter picture of stagnant Sicilian society, tied to ancient values, prejudices, and indolence. Fabrizio’s deep introspective personal analysis of the collapse of values is dominated by a dark suffocating funereal sense of decay, uselessness, and death. The style—historical, poetic, and elusive, and like Tomasi skeptical and pessimistic—has been compared to Tolstoy, Stendhal, Proust, Conrad, and Thomas Mann.

Tomasi’s ancestors were ascetics, mystics, and fanatics who placed family survival in jeopardy by renouncing everything for the church, left their estates to distant branches of the family or, like his grandfather, failed to make a will, until there was little left to inherit. Tomasi was a literary dilettante who dedicated his life to reading to the detriment of his estates. Family decadence literally brought about the collapse of their properties, yet he did nothing to prevent it. The Lampedusas had never worked for a living and Giuseppe was no exception. His final burst of artistic creativity coincided with his rapid physical decline. After his death the remaining family properties fell into ruins. The only legacy of the Lampedusas was Giuseppe’s memory and understanding of its traditions, which he transformed into literature.

Archives

Tomasi’s papers, diaries, files, correspondence, unpublished works, and commonplace book are held by his adopted son, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, in Palermo.

Printed Sources

Cordona, Caterina. Lettere a Licy (Palermo: Sellerio, 1987).

Gilmour, David. The Last Leopard (London: Quartet, 1988). With bibliography. Orlando, Francesco. Ricordo di Lampedusa (Milano: Vanni Scheiwiller, 1963). Tomasi, Giuseppe. The Leopard (London: Collins, 1961).

Gillian Fenwick

TROTSKY, LEON (1879–1940)

Leon Trotsky was born Lyov Davidovich Bronstein in Yanovka, Ukraine, Russia, and died in Coyoacán, Mexico. Trotsky spent the first nine years of his life on his parents’ farm, where all aspects of life were regulated by the toils of agrarian existence. He was, however, tutored in Russian, mathematics, and biblical Hebrew, and as a high school student, he attended the St. Paul Realschule in Odessa and the Nikolayev Realschule in Nikolayev. In Nikolayev, he came into contact with radical intelligentsia and became interested in revolutionary politics. His further schooling came in the form of incarcerations in czarist prisons, multiple banishments to Siberia, and foreign exile. When he heard that the March Revolution had installed a provisional government under Aleksandr Kerensky, Trotsky returned to Russia, arriving in Petrograd on May 4, 1917. He accepted Vladimir Lenin’s invitation to

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