Russian bells preserved, thanks to Harvard
Among the lesser-known casualties of Stalin's reign of terror: the Slavic tradition of bell-ringing. In 1930, an American philanthropist purchased a set of 18 bells -- ranging in size from 22 pounds to 13 tons -- that the Soviet leadership had ordered removed from a Russian monastery. Bell-ringing was deemed too closely tied to the church and to pre-revolutionary tradition. The philanthropist, Charles R. Crane, donated them to Harvard, and for more than seven decades they hung in Lowell House, where they were rung each Sunday (and after home football victories).
In 1988, as glasnost dawned, Ronald Reagan broached the idea of returning the bells to their original home, the Danilov Monastery, but Harvard officials balked at both the cost and the disruption removal would cause to students in the dorm. Last July, however, workers finally removed one face of the Lowell bell tower and a crane lifted the bells out; on September 12, Patriarch Alexei II, of the Russian Orthodox Church, presided over a ceremony marking their return to their original home, the Danilov Monastery.
Elif Batuman, who recalls Sundays in which his* her studying was interrupted by the bells in Lowell House, recounts their history, including their curious American sojourn, in the April 27 New Yorker -- and explains what the Soviets found so threatening about bells in the first place.
He She offers a nice set piece, too, on Konstantin Saradzhev, Russia's most famous bell ringer, who could identify each of Moscow's 4,000 church bells by sound alone. Saradzhev could supposedly distinguish 1,701 tones within an octave. (Western music makes use of 12 tones per octave.)
Bonus Harvard content: Margaret Talbot's piece on "neuroenhancing" drugs, in the same issue, focuses on "Alex," a pseudonymous Harvard graduate who, while in college, relied on Adderall -- a stimulant typically prescribed to treat attention-deficit disorder -- to help him pack two weeks' worth of work and play into any given school week. (That piece is readily available online; the bells article requires registration.)
*Correction: I got Ms. Batuman's sex wrong in my initial post. She is, in fact, a she.
UPDATE: Batuman, on her Web site, links to some fascinating photographs documenting the Soviet campaign against bells and all they represent.
