Being KlejnTrudno byt’ Klejnom: avtobiografija v monologah i dialogah [Hard to be Klejn: autobiography in monologues and dialogues]. By Lev Klejn. St. Petersburg, Russia: Nestor-Historia, 2010.

Abstract

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Stephen Leach. A Russian Perspective on Theoretical Archaeology: The Life and Work of Leo S. Klejn (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2015, 221pp., 11 figs., ISBN 978-1-62958-138-5)

“…The session organized by Ludomir Lozny and Stephen Leach at the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference in 2011 (University of Birmingham, UK), focusing on his personality and work-and attended by both Western and Russian experts-was a collective tribute to Klejn (Lozny & Leach, 2011). In a review of his autobiography, which regrettably remains untranslated, Lozny (2010) states that A Panorama of Theoretical Archaeology (Klejn, 1977)-the first of Klejn's theoretical works to be published in the West-'had fractured the intellectual iron curtain (the political one collapsed thirteen years later), and Trigger rightly noted that it marked the global entrée of Russian (Soviet) archaeology' (Lozny, 2010: 890). In the words of Bruce Trigger, whose way of thinking Klejn considers to be the closest to his own, 'That venerable champion of unimpeded international scholarly communication, V. Gordon Childe, would have rejoiced to see Klejn's paper' (Trigger, 1978: 198).…”

“…Topics still awaiting monographic treatment while having been addressed by Klejn in numerous articles include the origin of various Bronze Age cultures, Scythians, Slavic paganism, and many others, not to mention his brilliant journalistic pamphlets on political matters and a tremendous summarizing metanarrative titled Hard to be Klejn (Trudno byt' Klejnom) (Klejn, 2010)-an allusion to the Strugatsky brothers' novel (Strugatsky & Strugatsky, 1973[1964) and a hint that only those unversed in Klejnology might deem ostentatious (see Lozny, 2010, for a review). Navigating in the boundless ocean of his scholarship is a truly Homeric feat, and the brave who venture out will find the nearly sixty-page Appendix B in Leach's book ('Klejn's Bibliography', pp.…”