Viktoria Schweitzer

"Schweitzer gained an international reputation for her scholarship, most notably her work on the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, one of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers absent from the curriculum of communist Russia. Schweitzer's work on Tsvetaeva, which began in 1954 with the collection of rare and archival materials, resulted in Bytie Mariny Tsvetaevoi, a groundbreaking biography first published in Paris in 1988...

"Enriching the Mount Holyoke community with what Cruise calls 'an encyclopedic knowledge of Russian culture' and 'long, thoughtful, tea-drinking conversations that are the heart of Russian intelligentsia culture,' Schweitzer also contributed much to the cultural development of her native Russia. Most notably, she organized in 1966 the 'Letter of Sixty-Three,' in which sixty-three prominent Russian and Soviet writers expressed opposition to the government's arrest and persecution of dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky. This letter, for which Schweitzer was fired from her job at the Union of Soviet Writers, was a watershed in the Soviet dissident movement, contributing to the underground society that would emerge into the open twenty years later."