Manic Bookstore Cafe

Last week my students and I read three different scholars writing about Yury Tynianov, the formalist literary theorist, literary historian, and writer of historical anecdotes and biographical fiction. It felt a bit odd, because one of those scholars was me. I first explored Tynianov with my professor, Yury Konstantinovich Shcheglov, while I was still in graduate school. Prof. Shcheglov was fantastic -- a wonderfully intelligent and deeply compassionate and thoughtful man whose knowledge of everything from eighteenth century Russian poetry to contemporary American fiction amazed and amused me in the years I knew him. (More about that last later.) His erudition was legendary, as was his absentmindedness. Once I met him in Van Hise Hall, the languages building at Wisconsin. "Angela," he greeted me enthusiastically. "I'm so glad to see you! Do you know where the exit is?" We were on the fourth floor, a floor with glass doors opening out in several directions, i...

An essay my students and I read this week argues that "sources have shaped the nature of biographies and the biographical method adopted" (William St Clair, "Biographer as Archaeologist," in Mapping Lives ). In exploring biography, we have been thinking precisely about sources. Historians have their own techniques; they visit archives, dig through files and folders, decipher handwriting and piece together their stories. Geoffrey Parker, who talked with us this week about his majesterial  Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II , even confided one of his research strategies that is more about the human than the document. Convinced by years of experience that archivists tend to withhold the "good stuff" until the bitter end, when they love to say "if only you had more time you could look through this  lovely stack of materials," he now tells the staff of archives that he'll be leaving on a certain date, and then -- if and when they pull that...

Whenever you listen to Terry Gross on NPR , you'll hear her say: "Next on Fresh Air, such-and-such a celebrity will join us to talk about her (or his) new memoir." A memoir, it seems, is a very specific genre. Instead of waiting, like Benjamin Franklin or Henry Adams, to write a full autobiography or a Bildungsroman -like narrative (I have in mind here  The Education of Henry Adams ), people today write memoir after memoir: the memoir of the first ten years of my life; the memoir of the "lost years"; the memoir of last week. Tolstoy with his grandchildren circa 1909 This is not entirely new, of course. In his autobiographical trilogy Leo Tolstoy highlighted first Childhood , then  Boyhood , then Youth (1852-56). And here, I suppose, I am approaching my subject: the mixing of fact and fiction. Tolstoy named the hero of his book "Nikolenka," little Nikolai -- not Lyovushka. So while he was basing some of the events, and certainly many of the e...