Manic Bookstore Cafe

In a great speech about Nikolai Novikov — given on the 150th anniversary of Novikov’s birth — the famous Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevsky noted: In ancient Rus’ they read a lot, but not much and not many. What he meant by this was that traditionally a few people read a few texts, and they read them all the time. “Master readers” knew their holy texts, and they read or recited them aloud, instilling a “fear of the book” in their listeners. Then came Peter I, Peter the Great. In Peter’s time Russians learned to read secular, often dry, educational texts and lost that “ancient fear,” while in Elizaveta Petrovna’s time Russians discovered songs of all kinds, then bourgeois tragedies and sentimentalist novels. This led, in Kliuchevsky’s opinion, to a separation of “serious” secular literature from “heartfelt” secular literature, and the two branches became enemies. Russians swallowed the 18th century English novel whole, and followed it with dessert carts of poorly understood F

We had a talk Tuesday evening on women writers and translators, and the speaker mentioned a problem with biography in his research — some of these women wrote under pseudonyms, or anonymously, and even the ones whose names we know don’t necessarily have biographies. Our speaker’s project is to “recover” some of the names, but without knowing anything about the women themselves, it is difficult to make judgments about their work, their motivations, their influences, etc. In other words, to become known, someone must already know that they want to know you. In order to ascend to the rank of Writer, someone must write your Biography. Something the speaker said reminded me of Evgeny Bolkhovitinov and his project: a dictionary of Russian writers. Evgenii when he became Metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia Son of a Voronezh priest, Evgeny had studied in Moscow at the Slavic Greek Latin Academy and at Moscow University. Interestingly for my purposes — and perhaps for Tuesday’s speak

Thinking about the Caesars, I turned to the Ohio State History Department’s e-magazine  Origins.  I found there an interesting  essay about Caesar Augustus  which was published in August (appropriately enough). My favorite quote about the life of Augustus is: “This story is usually told and appreciated like a power fantasy.” The author goes on to equate Augustus with power and to suggest that we exult in the positive aspects of his reign — fabulous wealth! artistic achievements! public works! glory and more glory! — without remembering the human tragedy, anguish, and poverty that accompanied them. In other words, the man, and the biography of the man, obscure (some of the) historical circumstances around him. Surely in part that is due to Plutarch and Suetonius? I suppose I am looking forward to the religious turn my biography course is about to take. How will all the questions we’ve asked so far about life writing look different when we are no longer considering political

In the New York Times Book Review this weekend there was a  fascinating essay   by Leon Wieseltier, 31-year veteran literary editor of the  New Republic  and, in one estimation, “ the last of the New York intellectuals .” One pull quote reads: there is no more urgent task for American writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology. We are, as he argues, in the middle of a digital revolution, and it is still unclear what will emerge at the end of it, but there is no doubt that the literary landscape has changed drastically since I myself entered academic life. I started at Ohio State twenty years ago with an email address longer than my left arm and no real sense that the “electronic” was permanent. I kept copies of my dissertation and early articles on floppy drives, but also in paper form, filed in file cabinets. If you were to dig around in those file cabinets even today you might find a folder entitled “email” — in the early days back at

Over the past month I have been using another blogging platform for my teaching. One result is that I practically feel like an expert blogger -- over the past four years I've used weebly, blogger, and WordPress. My university uses a platform designed by WordPress, so my students and I have been blogging there . Because the university really limits your color schemes, I was doing a parallel blog as well -- copying everything into the regular WordPress site so I could try different visuals. And mostly, I hate it. So I am giving it up. I will continue to post on the university site, but I have missed my Manic Bookstore Cafe, so I'm moving the content from WordPress to my "home" site, my favorite blog, the one I know and understand and can format the way I like. Even though it's owned by Google, so I can't use it in mainland China (most of the time), and it may take over my life (the way Amazon is trying to...). Whew. I'm committed. I'm staying

YeBeZhe . Chekhov's "White Dacha" in Yalta About seven years ago I was at a conference in Yalta on the Crimean peninsula, on the shores of the Black Sea. Traditionally in April Chekhov scholars from all over the Soviet Union, and then from the former Soviet Union, would make a pilgrimage to the “White Dacha,” the house-museum of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, to share their scholarly work. Every year they greeted the spring in Chekhov’s garden, walked the promenade featured in his classic 1899 story “The Lady with the Little Dog,” drank Crimean wines and cognacs, and took quick dips in the cold waters of the Black Sea. My friend from Moscow, a Chekhov scholar, had been inviting me to join them at the conference for a number of years, and in 2008 for the first time I was able to make it.  Spring break in Yalta has to include a  walk on the seaside promenade. For years these scholars had been taking their week-long spring break in Yalta together, and had of co