Score: 3 / 5
A professor of Russian Literature from Oxford is on a lecture tour of Soviet universities in 1958. His Russian is perfect, and both the elegance and the erudition of his discourse are splendid, but he finds it impossible to elicit any interesting questions or answers from the students, who show no signs of any acquaintance with their wonderful literary heritage.
Finally, in desperation, he asks a student in the front row, “Who wrote War and Peace?”
The young man replies: “It wasn’t me!”
The professor abandons any hope that he can achieve anything on this tour. He explains to a senior member of staff why he is giving up.
“It would be a waste of time to continue. My remarks in these lectures are addressed to persons who have already studied Russian literature – widely, and preferably deeply. But many of them are wholly ignorant. What finished me was the reply I got from a student this morning when I asked him who wrote War and Peace. He said it wasn’t him, if you please.”
He returns to England. Three weeks later he gets a telegram from the lecturer at Moscow:
