Fatalism

As avid readers of Soviet Roulette will recall, I recently launched a Russian history reading club at a center for troubled teenagers.  I wanted to use the book, Russian Short Stores from Pushkin to Buida, tell the story of modern Russian history to this group of young people.  On the way to my first session of the club, I called a friend to ask her what I might expect on the first day of class.  This friend had a lot of experience teaching the language arts to diverse groups of people.  But I forgot that she also had very specific experience teaching students who were ordered by one governmental agency or another to live away from home.  I asked her:  Was I being overly ambitious?  Would my students be able to relate to Russia?  Would they be able to handle difficult readings?  My friend gave me a lot of good advice.  She told me it would take some time to build up trust with a diverse community of learners.  Some were very gifted learners, others had severe learning disabilities:  but almost all would have issues related to abandonment, loss, betrayal, or victimization.

How bad off were some of these kids, I wondered?  She said I could expect to see children with all levels of reading ability, and all sorts of emotional and behavioral dispositions.  What was the worst I could expect from these students, in terms of the difficulties they had encountered before they arrived at a center such as the one I was getting to know? She gave me this story to tell me about the kinds of kids she would sometimes encounter in her work twenty years previously.  She said that in one particular culture, children frequently made "suicide pacts."  I started to express my horror but she interrupted me.  This wasn't the heart of the tragedy.  The fact was that the local society shunned anyone who didn't follow through with a suicide pact.  The survivor would inevitably be isolated, abused for having failed to meet his or her obligations to the lost friend.  And so it was that one young person was her a friend when that friend shot herself.  Worse was to come.  After witnessing the death, the traumatized teenager waited for adults, parents of the dead girl, to return.  When they did, they were so angered by what they perceived to be the betrayal their dead daughter that they locked the survivor away for a weekend, to share a room with the murdered girl for two days.  While this was perhaps an extreme form of tragedy, my friend said this was the type of experience some of her charges had experienced, either immediately prior to their arrival at a group home, or at some point in their troubled biographies.

 Knowing all this, I wondered whether I wasn't being overly ambitious, and accordingly I prepared to modify my lesson plan for the evening.  On the first day of class, I tried to demonstrate my interest in them by asking them open-ended questions about their interests, about their experience with reading, and about their existing knowledge of Russia.  The conversation was revealing insofar as I had not (but perhaps should have) guessed at the extent to which each of them bore some level of antipathy for school, and for reading in particularly.  Although the conversation was lively, and the students intelligent, very few of them could admit to any level of interest in history or literature.  Trying to broaden the conversation, I asked if people had ever learned something important from somebody who was different from them.  Perhaps my students didn't understand the question, but few expressed any interest in getting to know new people.  Moreover, almost nobody had even been out of the county. 

On the second day of class, I came prepared to talk about Pushkin's short story, "Queen of Spades."  However, I was not surprised when not a single student had read the story.  Fortunately, I had already resolved to focus more on a general discussion of concepts which are related, however loosely, to the story I had assigned so futilely.  That is to say, I wanted them to think about the nature of aristocracy but indeed autocracy.  The best I could do with this was to ask questions related to power.  Who rules in a society, and why?  What does the term aristocracy mean?  What is a peasant or serf?  How do societies change?  What kind of classes are there in America?  What is a citizen? What is a subject?  What rights do citizens have?  What rights, if any, does a subject have?  What is democracy?  The goal, of course, was to contrast modern American society with Russian society in the age of Pushkin.  However, the discussion was meant to suggest some similarities as well.  If nineteenth century Russian society was undemocratic and unfree, is American society entirely free of surveillance, censorship, and militarism? 

In two weeks this reading club with meet to discuss Mikhail Lermontov's "The Fatalist," drawn from his Hero of Our Times.  While I don't really expect anybody to have read the short work, I will once again try to get the students to engage in a general discussion which toggles back and forth between their lives, American politics and culture, and the Russian past.  In this case, we'll discuss military and aristocratic values in more detail.  We'll also some general philosophical questions about predestination and free will.  I can only hope that over time the Russian theme will germinate.  In the meantime, I am hoping that intelligent conversation about social science will have a value in helping these students to see themselves as citizens rather than subjects of these United States.

Pushkin's Queen of Spades

My new book club meets tonight.  I am excited to introduce Russian short stories to a small group of students who are under some form of court-ordered lock down.  I am nervous about my lack of experience educating teenagers, and worried by my lack of knowledge about the reading levels of this particular group of students.  However, I am going to give them serious readings, namely, the Penguin Classics book, Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida.  Hopefully, with the right support, they will find some level of satisfaction in learning new things while conquering difficult texts.  I will also use the book club also has a vehicle for enhancing my own knowledge of Russian literature.  To date, I’ve never really read all that many short stories, so this particular genre will be new territory for me. 

As a form of introduction to the club’s theme, Russia, I will ask students a series of questions related to their current knowledge of Russia, which may be limited to the Olympic Games or Soviet spy themes in American cinematography.  Drawing on my previous presentation to a grammar school, but adjusting the sophistication of the answers to my high school audience, I will ask students some basic questions such as the following:  Is Russia an old country or a new one?  Is it hot or cold?  Is it flat or mountainous?  Is it far or close to the United States?  What language do they speak in Russia?  What religion do they practice? 

After giving students a general framework for a discussion of Russia, I will try to give them at least a couple of broad reasons for my own personal interest in Russian history and Russian literature.  While passions may never be fully rationale, I will explain that Russia bears sustained scrutiny because it is a large country (in terms of both geography and demography), an influential country (in terms of its cultural legacy, communist past, and historic military might), a complex country (in terms of both diversity as well as its ambivalent relationship to Europe), and a unique country (in terms of both its religious history and almost unparalleled record of revolution, war, and upheaval). 

After covering Russia’s value as an object of study, I’ll say a few words about Russian literature, focusing on the global impact of its novelists, poets, and short-story writers.   While the reasons for Russia’s deserved literary fame aren’t necessarily easy to explain, I will say a few words about Russia’s claim to fame in the annals of world literature.  First, I’ll mention just a few of the “great names” of Russian literature, which include Pushkin, Gogol, Oblomov, Schredrin-Saltykov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bunin, Gorky, Pasternak, Tsveteva, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, and Akhmatova.  Second, I’ll say that Russian literature has a reputation for being profoundly serious, moral, philosophical, and eschatological, if not also egregiously dark and Manichean.

Next, we’ll review some of the reading comprehension techniques we’ll need to be developing as we tackle a series of difficult Russian texts.  One slide from my first night’s presentation will be entitled, “How to read like a college student.”  This will entail a number of overlapping strategies, including underlining, rereading, note-taking, dictionary use, marshaling textual evidence in defense of an opinion, paraphrasing, and collaborative discussion and problem-solving.  I will also give students some basic tool to keep in mind as they approach a complex new plot for the first time.  For instance, even serious readers need to figure out one or more of the following questions:   who, what, when, where, and why?  The overall theme will be that students need not expect reading to be easy in order to see it as rewarding.  In fact, the reverse is at least sometimes the case:  the harder the text, the more difficult its narrative and complex its symbolism, the more satisfying and important it may turn out to be. 

Our first story will be Pushkin’s “Queen of Hearts.”   After asking students to explain the basic plot of the story, and after asking them several open-ended questions about what they liked or didn’t like about the story, I will use the text as a platform for introducing students to historical themes.  I will ask students, for instance, to identify passages that demonstrate something about the society Pushkin was describing.  We will, specifically, focus on what the short story reveals about the role of the Russian aristocracy, specifically focusing on Russia’s female aristocrats.  What were Russian aristocrats expected to do with their time?  What constituted an ideal aristocratic man, or an ideal aristocratic female?   We will of course examine Pushkin’s story-telling devices as well, including those related to suspense.  By the conclusion of the discussion, which will only happen two weeks after today, I’m hoping the class will have jointly diagnosed and rehearsed the story’s plot, and then explicated some of the elements of Russian aristocratic society related to militarism, leisure and gambling, gender, class and rank, and elite Russian identity.