Letter 045, pg. 1

To Alexander Kerensky

Alexander Kerensky was the premier of Russia before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. This undated letter has been translated from the handwritten Russian. Prior to 1917, Kerensky was greatly admired by AR, as she later recalled: “I was twelve, and my great enthusiasm at the time was Kerensky, about whom I knew nothing except that he was the hero of the revolution, you see, and he was sold as a very heroic figure. So I had a whole collection of photographs of him which were sold everywhere. . . . And why I would have been all for the Kerensky Revolution was precisely because it seemed to be the freedom of the individual, at that time.” But by the time she met him in 1945, she “had no illusions about him, and he was worse than I would have expected . . . , a real mediocrity.”

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Aleksandr Fyodorovich,

If you remember me being among the crowd in the “Town Hall” this morning, I am taking advantage of the permission you gave me to send you my book [We the Living] which I had mentioned to you.

Of all the great Russian people in the world, your opinion is the most valuable to me, and I have waited for an opportunity to send you this book for a long time: since I started writing it. It was printed here, in America, two years ago; last year, in England; and is now being prepared for print in several European countries.

I lived in Russia for many years under the Soviet regime, and I think that a depiction of daily Soviet life will probably be of interest to you. If you do not consider it stupidity on my part, I would like to ask you to let me know your opinion