Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, now the Latvian capital, in 1909. When the child was six years old, the family moved to Petrograd and witnessed both revolutions - the Social Democratic and then the Bolshevik. In 1921, Berlin settled on English soil. Isaiah was educated at St. Paul's School (London) and the Corpus Christi College in Oxford. There, at Oxford, Isaiah Berlin later became a full member of the scientific societies at the College of All Souls and the New College, a professor of social and political theory, and the founder and first president of Wolfson College. He died in 1997. Sir Isaiah Berlin made a huge contribution to English Russian studies. Magnificent translations from Turgenev ("First Love" and "Moon in the Village") are considered classic. Numerous other publications relating to Russia include Karl Marx (1939; 4th reprint - 1978), Concepts and Categories (1978), Against the Current (1979). "Personal Impressions" (1980, 2nd ed. 1998), "The Crooked Timber of Humanity" (1990), "Sense of Reality" (1990), "The Sense of Reality" (1996), "Impartial View of the Human Race" (The Proper Study of Mankind (1997), Roots of Romanticism (1999), The Power of Ideas (2000), Three Critics of the Enlightenment (2000), Freedom and Its Betrayal (2002), Liberty (2002), The Soviet Mind (2004) and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, 2006). "Russian Thinkers" was first published in 1978 as a collection of essays. Decades later, the book inspired Tom Stoppard, who wrote the dramatic trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002).
