RIP RBP: Robert B. Pynsent Is Dead

Today, I cannot really imagine never having had the opportunity to get to know Robert Pynsent .But actually, thirty-five years ago I almost didn't go to the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES).While at the University of Toronto from 1984 to 1988, I had befriended Gordon Skilling, professor emeritus, whose area of specialization was Czechoslovak politics and dissidents.When I told Gordon and his wife Sally that I had been accepted into master's programmes at Michigan, Glasgow and London, I asked Gordon's opinion of each to help me decide.He had obtained his PhD from SSEES in 1940.'Well, a big part of your university years is the place where you'll be studying.And nothing compares to London.But that terrible man is there -Pynsent.'That was Skilling's reaction partly to the infamous Pynsent-Brušák-Short letter to The Times, in which, in less than 140 words, they bemoaned the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Jaroslav Seifert in 1984, and partly to Pynsent's not inviting Czechoslovak dissident historians to a 1986 Masaryk conference in London but inviting some regime-approved ones.'Oh, don't listen to Gordon,' said Sally.'Pynsent's all right.Don't worry.He and Gordon just crossed swords on occasion.That's all.'And that was enough, I suppose, to help me decide.In the autumn of 1988, when I first went to SSEES, few people of my acquaintance were interested in Czech history, politics, or literature, let alone Slovak.That was, I think, true despite the international publicity the country could enjoy with Seifert's receiving the Nobel Prize only four years earlier, Forman's great success with Amadeus the same year, and Kundera still being all the rage, particularly with the film adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being released in 1988.But telling someone, say, at a party, that I was off to study Czech things in London was the perfect way to send that person looking for a way out of the conversation.It was hardly a surprise, then, to find when I got to SSEES that I was the only student enrolled in Robert's 'Czech Prose Fiction from 1958 to 1988', which I think he had to make because I was coming.And my Czech was so poor that he finally agreed to let me take the course largely thanks to David Short telling him that I would soon manage, particularly after a bit of help, which David generously provided.Robert had joined SSEES in 1972.He and David Short, a superb scholar in his own right who came the next year, soon became the embodiment of Czech and Slovak Studies at that institution.Of course others, for instance, George Schöpflin included

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