Milton and the English Revolution

Abstract

The only reason for my being here this evening, I suspect, is that I once wrote a book called Milton and the English Revolution. I shall assume that none of you have read it. However, one item in it may be of relevance to our discussions. I cited Chekhov’s letters in which we see that great (and relatively non-political) artist haggling with the censor about what he was permitted to say, sometimes deciding to omit a passage in order to get the rest published, at other times deciding that it was not worth it: a particular story must be sacrificed rather than emasculated. Milton’s relationship to the censor was rather similar, only Milton was a much more politically involved character than Chekhov, and after 1660 he was marked down as a notorious enemy of the regime. A second item of possible relevance: Maurice Baring’s report during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905–6 that one of the most popular books with the peasant soldiers in the tsar’s army was a Russian translation of Paradise Lost. I am not quite sure what to conclude from this unexpected fact, but it helps to link the English and Russian Revolutions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 202 citations exist upstream.