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...

In 1974, John Le Carré published the first novel in his Karla trilogy, entitled Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy . In the novel, the professions in a traditional British children's rhyme are used as code names for British spies engaged in cold war drama with the Soviet Union. I thought about Le Carré this past weekend. We had come to the end of the international symposium I was hosting, devoted to diplomatic and cultural relations between Russia and Iran in the 1820s. After two days of intense conversations, it was time to sum up. An immensely rich topic, full of intrigue and complicated relationships, "official versions" of tragic events that simply don't ring true, and long-lasting ramifications for varieties of peoples -- from Persians and Russians to Armenians and Georgians, not to mention the English. I had invited twelve scholars from seven countries to come to Ohio State and speak about the period. We had art historians and diplomatic historians, literary scholar...