I React Intensely to Everything

Russia and the Frustrated Emotions of George F. Kennan, 1933-1958

Bibliographic Data

ID4155243
AuthorsFrank Costigliola (University of Connecticut, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume102
Issue4
Pages1075-1101
Publication date2016-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jav769
OpenAlexW2311836063
LanguageEN
Citations received6

After viewing a performance of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard in 1958, America's famous foreign policy strategist George F. Kennan confided to his diary that the play stirred all the rusty, untuned strings of the past and of my own youth: Riga, and the Russian landscape, and the staggering, unexpected familiarity and convincingness of the Chekhovian world—it stirred up, in other words, my Russian self, which is entirely a Chekhovian self and much more genuine than the American one—and having all this prodded to the surface in me, I sat there blubbering like a child and trying desperately to keep the rest of the company from noticing it. Here was the author of the doctrine to contain the Soviet Union, America's lodestar during the Cold War, feeling that his “Russian self” was more real. Here, moreover, was a spokesman for reason in foreign relations struggling to hide his own intense feelings.1

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Cold war · Doctrine · Economics · Face (sociological concept · Feeling · Foreign policy · George (robot · Management · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Soviet union · Strategist · History · Law · Military History and Strategy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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