Variety and Adventure in the Life of Carl Linden

Abstract

In his long life Carl Linden lived variously and wonderfully. For more than half a century he was a teacher and promoter of Great Books in the classroom and in the neighborhood. Great Books in his hands and mind transformed him into a kind of latter-day Socrates, always questioning, always smiling, sometimes teasingly. As a naturalist he was a hiker/biker on the C&O Canal towpath and promoter of it, as well. His scholarly pursuits took him to Eastern Europe, especially to Russia and Ukraine, about which he wrote and taught for four decades. Finally, he was a bon vivant whose Socratic ways won him laurels in the classroom and friends in the places where good fellows meet.

Keywords:

• Bethesda
• MD
• Charles Elliott
• C&O Canal
• George Washington University
• Great Books
• IERES (Institute for European
• Russian
• and Eurasian Studies)
• James Millar
• Justice William O. Douglas
• Khrushchev
• Leonardo
• Marx
• Machiavelli
• Monacacy Aqueduct
• Paul Carter
• Robert Tucker
• Soviet Political Theory
• St. John's College
• towpath
• University of Lviv
• Ukraine

Notes

See The Great Books Program at St. John's College on the Internet.

I am indebted first to Lijun Gu, who wrote the full citation of which this quotation is only a part, and to Jack Moran, who forwarded it to me.

Carl Linden, The Soviet Party-State: The Politics of Ideocratic Despotism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1983), 28. I am indebted to Jack Moran for this reference.

History of IERES (November 2011): 1–7. See also www.IERES.org.

On pages 2–3 of his work Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership with an Epilogue on Gorbachev Updated Edition (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), Linden details the argument between two schools of thought about Soviet leadership and cites the issues of Problems of Communism (from late 1963 to early 1964) in which it played out.

Foreword to Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership (1990), viii.

History of IERES, 2.

Soviet Party-State, introduction, vii–viii.

Whether performed in the grand old Habsburg theatre of Lviv (Austro-Hungarian Lemburg), the Kennedy Center of Washington, DC, or Saturday renditions of the Metropolitan Opera on HDTV in local DC cinemas, Carl was a devotee of the full range of ballet and opera.

See especially Gary Anthes, The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2013).