Milton and the English Revolution

The only reason for my being here this evening, I suspect, is that I once wrote a book called Milton and the English Revolution. I shall assume that none of you have read it. However, one item in it may be of relevance to our discussions. I cited Chekhov’s letters in which we see that great (and relatively non-political) artist haggling with the censor about what he was permitted to say, sometimes deciding to omit a passage in order to get the rest published, at other times deciding that it was not worth it: a particular story must be sacrificed rather than emasculated. Milton’s relationship to the censor was rather similar, only Milton was a much more politically involved character than Chekhov, and after 1660 he was marked down as a notorious enemy of the regime. A second item of possible relevance: Maurice Baring’s report during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905–6 that one of the most popular books with the peasant soldiers in the tsar’s army was a Russian translation of Paradise Lost. I am not quite sure what to conclude from this unexpected fact, but it helps to link the English and Russian Revolutions.