Manic Bookstore Cafe

Thinking about the relevance of the work that I do is an ongoing endeavor. At today's American university, we feel that literature and culture somehow have to justify themselves, and in today's economy, students (and their parents) worry about the applicability of their major. Recently a student who had been abroad needed my signature for his transfer credits. We started talking. Turns out that last year he studied in Moscow for a semester, but then scored an internship with a global company and worked all summer with Russian co-workers, and was going back again this summer. "You should be a Russian major," I told him. "Nah," he replied. "I am a business major, and I don't have time for more Russian courses." So he is learning the language, and learning the country through hands-on experience, but he won't be a double major. Not practical. In my student days people also said "A Russian major? What are you going to do with that?...

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...

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 con...