THE DYNAMO AND THE DIPLOMAT: TIRYAKIAN'S ROLE IN PRESERVING SOROKIN'S REPUTATION

Alan Sica

The Protean Master and His Disciple

How was it that a scholar known and esteemed globally by readers from all walks of life, between the 1920s through his death in 1968, could have become by the early 1940s a source of embarrassment to his immediate colleagues at Harvard, unable or unwilling to form a "school" of acolytes and apparently destined to be forgotten posthumously? Moreover, how could it be that this man, demonstrably more creative, adventurous and productive than virtually anybody else in the guild of sociologists — which he himself had done so much to foster, first in Russia between 1919 and 1923, and then in the United States — had to wait until the eleventh hour of his professional life to be elected president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), an honor that many times had gone to far lesser scholars? One could believe that "cognitive dissonance" was invented as an analytic term just to illuminate this one man's life, so great was the gap between what he accomplished and how he was regarded by the most prominent practitioners of his craft during the last third of his life (see Nichols 1996 for concise details about this long-term battle). It is partly to address this puzzle that one man's scholarly labors and personal influence can be brought into play.

In a letter of February 27, 1963, Pitirim Sorokin (then 74 years old) wrote to Edward Ashod Tiryakian, 40 years his junior, to say he was "deeply touched by this superlative manifestation of your and [the] contributors' friendship to me." Sorokin was responding to the Festschrift in the former's honor, which Tiryakian had assembled over six long years of frustrating struggle. The "first copy today reached me. The volume [Sociological Theory, Values, and Sociocultural Change: Essays in Honor of Pitirim A. Sorokin] is excellent in all respects. Your preface and [Arthur K.] Davis's article extol my achievements beyond their merits. I ascribe this high estimate to the generosity of yours" (emphasis added). After detailing "several unexpected pleasant surprises" that had recently come his way concerning translations of his work ("some 42" of them), and various awards he had received in his 74th year, Sorokin adds an uncharacteristic postscript: "I would like to order 20 or 30 copies of your volume to distribute it among some of my personal friends. I wonder can you help me in obtaining some discount on these volumes from the publisher?" (Tiryakian Papers, Box 6, File 2; note: all of Sorokin's quoted material appears precisely as he wrote it, including obvious errors).

Born in 1889 with about enough cultural capital to fill a thimble, yet supplemented by boundless energy and ambitious intelligence, this poor, motherless son of a Russian icon peddler from the Koni Land backwater asks in 1963 for help in securing cheaper copies of a book that celebrates his own scholarly achievements. It cost $5.95 in its clothbound edition, the first paperback version appearing several years later. Given that today the book's price would be over $45, Sorokin's request for aid is understandable. Yet, it also epitomizes the durable relationship between his ever-patient and helpful former teaching assistant and the great sociologist himself, whose hunger for professional esteem was understandably substantial, in part because it had eluded him between approximately 1941 and 1963.

Anthony Giddens has reflected on the career of Norbert Elias, based on their having taught together at Leicester University in the early 1960s, recalling that Elias comported himself then as if he were a world-class thinker and theorist, even though no one else would have at that time viewed him as such. Of course, Elias's scholarly self-estimate proved exactly right by the time he approached his 80th birthday and The Civilizing Process (1978) finally became known worldwide. With Sorokin the reverse occurred: he was precociously gifted and recognized as such, even by his dangerous political adversary, Vladimir Lenin who, within one year of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, had this to say: "Pravda today carries a remarkably interesting letter by Pitirim Sorokin [then 29 years old], to which the special attention of all Communists should be drawn. In this letter, which was originally published in Izvestia of the North Dvina Executive Committee, Pitirim Sorokin announces that he is leaving the right Socialist-Revolutionary party and relinquishing his seat in the Constituent Assembly. His motives are that he finds it difficult to provide effective political recipes, not only for others, but even for himself, and that therefore he 'is withdrawing completely from politics.'" This letter is worth mentioning, in the first place, because it is an extremely interesting "human document" (Lenin 1918/1974: 185).

As Sorokin explained in his autobiographies, despite holding a duly elected seat in the Constituent Assembly (having won over 90 percent of the vote in his province in the fall of 1917), he was summarily arrested by the "Cheka" on January 2, 1918, charged with the planned assassination of Lenin, and imprisoned to await execution. His experience as a political prisoner, packed as he was in a cell with dozens of others, some suffering from typhus, was terrifying and indeterminate, his cell mates being led away regularly at night for execution. Finally, on November 20, 1918, he published the letter to which Lenin referred, which helped win him a reprieve from the firing squad. He had earlier been told that his intellectual value to the new USSR might cause him to be spared, but his...