and i think in a way someone like gerard or russo really helped me. and although i think someone like dante was very alert to this particular divided figure, and he wrote a whole way of being in the world about doing politics on the basis of this divided human being. still, i think in the way we've done history and we were done intellectual history we haven't really taken on board the insights of literature into this human individual. this is a book that would be inconceivable without the help it has got from novelists and poets. >> you visited a couple years ago and i think of him as someone who has that same strong attention to the 19th century as prefiguring some of the patterns we see and the present. he will write a novel that makes an explicit reference but apply to the situation in russia then to the situation in turkey in recent times. did you guys talk about this kind of thing with them? >> we did. we did. people from the so-called left behind nations get together, there's always a lot to discuss about these issues. because you realize that i