RADOSLAV ANDREA TSANOFF
by James Street Fulton
Radoslav Andrea Tsanoff lectured to the first class in philosophy at
the Ric≡ Institute, then two years old, in 1914. A little more than fifty
years later, in the spring of 1965, he was giving a brand new course,
0∏ autobiography. In the meanwhile, Houston had grown from a brash,
sprawling small city into a brash, sprawling megalopolitan center; Rice
had passed from lusty infancy to confident maturity, changing its name
along the way from Institute to University, in acknowledgement of the
greatly increased demand for graduate and research programs; and the
young Assistant Professor had become Emeritus Professor of Philosophy
and Trustee Distinguished Professor of Humanities, a scholar of wide re-
nown, almost a Texas institution.
The last phrase needs a word of explanation. His enthusiasm for every-
thing momentous that men have achieved and can achieve artistically
and intellectually and spiritually made him a cultural influence of singular
force in the still provincial Southwest. Brilliant public lectures under Rice’s
auspices soon won him admirers far beyond the boundaries of the campus,
just as his class lectures made friends and admirers of an ever-growing
number of students. To this day he receives many more invitations than
he can accept to speak before groups and meetings of all kinds. He
has never condescended to an audience, but carefully writes out in ad-
vance what he is going to say, thereby expressing delicate ethical percep-
tion of the personal needs implied in an invitation to speak. His style,
in speaking and in writing, reflects a mind at home in world literature
and completely at ease in the highest intellectual company; but he talks
to, never down to, his audience. Soon after coming to Rice, Tsanoff gave
a series of public lectures which were published subsequently as an issue
of the Rice Institute Pamphlet (in 1917) under the title, “The Problem
of Life in the Russian Novel.” Requests for copies were still being received
more than forty years later. Equally outstanding, but in an entirely dif-
ferent context, was a talk given in the McCarthy era before a meeting
called by the Rice Student Forum to consider the problem of intellectual
freedom in view of certain current ideas and activities of a repressive
character. While other speakers dealt with current controversies, Tsanoff
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