ERNEST J. SIMMONS is an authority on Russian writing and a frequent visitor to the U.S.S.R. He did research there before World War II, and his monumental biography of Leo Tolstoy, as well as his fine critical work RUSSIAN FICTION AND SOVIET IDEOLOGY, is the result of working on firsthand sources. He is now completing a biography of Chekhov which promises to be as definitive as his life of Tolstoy.
The Soviet educational system, which in 1958 produced twice as many engineers as did the United States’s, is now undergoing a complete revision, as directed by Premier Khrushchev. For an account of this reorganization we have turned to ERNEST J. SIMMONS, an authority on Russian writers and a frequent visitor to the U.S.S.R.
Six times in the past thirty years, ERNEST J. SIMMONS has visited the U.S.S.R. He did research there before World War II, and his two big books, LEG TOLSTOY and RUSSIAN FICTION AND SOVIET IDEOLOGY, are the result of working on firsthand sources. Last summer he returned to Russia for his most recent surrey.
For an evaluation of the most important novel to come out of Russia in many years, the ATLANTIC has turned to ERNEST J. SIMMONS, the author of LEO TOLSTOY and RUSSIAN FICTION AND SOVIET IDEOLOGY. Mr. Simmons was engaged in research work in Russia before World War II. He laught at Harvard and Cornell, and in 1946 he became chairman of the department of Slavic languages at Columbia, where he is also professor of Russian literature at the Russian Institute.