The annals of Jonathan Brent: one man and a great publishing project

National Review, May 22, 2006 by John J. Miller

FOR those who are wearily familiar with the Left's control of higher education, it will come as no surprise to learn that Bard College in New York is home to the Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature--an endowed chair named after one of the most notorious traitors in American history. "Every year we get some crank letters from fringe groups about it," complains Leon Botstein, Bard's president and one of the few remaining agnostics on the question of whether Hiss, while serving in FDR's State Department, spied for the Soviet Union. "It really isn't a political appointment."

That claim would be laugh-out-loud funny--except that it appears to be true. Amazingly, the current occupant of the Hiss professorship may be as responsible as anyone in the United States for exposing the crimes of Communism. Jonathan Brent is not only the holder of the Hiss chair at Bard, where he teaches a weekly class, but also editorial director of the Yale University Press, where he oversees the publication of a series of books that meticulously chronicle the evils of Soviet totalitarianism. "What Jonathan Brent and the Yale press have done for Soviet history is unprecedented: Their work has put previously unknown and inaccessible documents in libraries where students and historians will be able to use them forever," raves Anne Applebaum, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for Gulag. It is perhaps not too much to say that Brent's Annals of Communism series, which was launched more than a decade ago, is one of the most important publishing projects in the world.

FORMATIONS

The 56-year-old Brent occupies a first-floor corner office at Yale University Press, in a building near the New Haven Green. With his salt-and-pepper hair, he looks vaguely like Paul Wolfowitz. Newspaper clippings and reviews of books he has edited cover his walls, along with a calendar that, in the great tradition of the absent-minded professor, hangs open to last August. Manuscripts clutter his desk and books are piled everywhere.

The books are no surprise--not only is Brent the editorial director of a non-profit publishing enterprise, but literature has been a part of his life from the very start. His father was the owner of Stuart Brent Books, a Chicago shop frequented by the likes of Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom. When he was in the eighth grade, Brent made it his ambition to read a really long book, and so he searched his grandmother's house for the one with the thickest spine. He found Anna Karenina. "It took about a year to read," he says. "I fell in love with that book." Then he moved on to an even thicker Tolstoy volume: War and Peace. When Brent's grandfather, who was born in Lvov, spotted him reading it, he showed the boy how to spell "Tolstoy" with Cyrillic letters. "From that moment," says Brent, "I knew I wanted to study Russian literature."

That's what he did as an undergraduate at Columbia, becoming fluent in a language for which he figured he would have no professional use. He eventually went to the University of Chicago for his Ph.D. in English and did some translating on the side, including a few of the first translations of the Russian-born poet Joseph Brodsky (who won the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature). Around this time, Brent got his first taste of Solzhenitsyn by reading The Gulag Archipelago. "My father managed to get 100 copies of the original book in Russian," says Brent. "There were people lined up outside the store to buy it, but he saved one for me. It really opened my eyes to what was going on in the Soviet Union." Even so, Brent was hardly a Cold Warrior--he had protested the Vietnam War at Columbia, and his attraction to Solzhenitsyn had more to do with literature than politics.

These were hectic years, as Brent tried to balance the demands of fatherhood with graduate school, teaching, translating, reviewing books for the local papers, working part time in his father's store, and searching for a regular job. He finally found employment at Northwestern University Press (where he would eventually rise to director), but he always stayed busy with side projects. In 1984, he and his wife started Formations, a quarterly journal that took an interest in Eastern European writers. "Formations didn't start out as anti-Communist, but it became that way over time," he says. "A lot of our writers were critiquing Communism." He also began publishing material on dissidents.

Before long, several bookstores refused to carry Formations. "They just wouldn't stock it," says Brent. "It taught me about a sickness in a certain kind of left-wing politics--the notion that someone could accuse me of retrograde views simply because I was trying to defend the civil liberties of artists who were being oppressed by the state." He may have made some enemies, but he also made friends on both sides of the Iron Curtain. One of his patrons was George Soros, the Hungarian-born financial speculator.

OPENING THE VAULT

In the spring of 1991, Brent attended a conference in Prague, where he heard a Hungarian historian talk about his research into the newly opened archives of his government. "Having access to these documents sounded like a great publishing opportunity," says Brent. Yet he was not sure how to take advantage of it. He thought about moving to Europe, but instead took a job at Yale's imprint, where his assignment was to edit books on the humanities. As he was making this personal transition, the Soviet Union collapsed--Gorbachev was out and Yeltsin was in. Brent began thinking about the possibility of a multi-volume project that drew from Soviet archives. He asked his boss, the now-retired John Ryden, to let him fly to Moscow. Recalling Brent's enthusiasm, Ryden says, "No one else on the staff had his interest in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. I told him to go and see what he could find."