Passion of Turgenev

My Russian reading club serves troubled students who are operating at a variety of reading comprehension levels.  I'm still learning what works well for these students, and what doesn't.  The fact that at least a few of my students apparently can't read at all complicates matters.  The fact that brand new students show up at the center every month or so also makes planning difficult.  However, recently I've had some luck asking student volunteers to read aloud.   Each week, we go through one Russian short story from the book, Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida.  In this way, the stronger readers can practice their pronunciation skills while the entire class, inclujding the weaker readers, can at least learn new vocabulary words.  Although I haven't had time for much literary analysis, we do at least tack back and forth between the text and some of the larger themes of Russian history, or indeed of history in general.  For instance, two weeks ago we read a short story from Turgenev's A Hunter's Notebook, and spent some time discussing the whole concept of serfdom in Russian history.  The students inevitably and profitably made comparisons to American history, and the institution of slavery, in particular.  The class also had an opportunity to discuss aristocratic traditions such as hunting.  

The highlight of the evening came when a fistfight broke out in class, right in the midst of the Turgenev reading.  The fight, which was apparently the aftereffect of a previous verbal altercation, was quickly broken up by trained staff, and thankfully nobody was hurt.  Of course, the fight helped to underscore the essential irony of asking troubled kids to engage with advanced literature.  On the one hand, one asks oneself whether this level of tension precludes serious intellectual work.  On the other hand, one wonders whether serious literature isn't needed most whereever students are struggling the most to find real meaning in their lives.  Whatever the answer, reading Turgenev with a nontraditional audience of novice readers helps shed new light on an old text.  How will these students relate to the hunter, the hunter's servant, the local peasants, and the alleged brigands?  One of my favorite parts about the reading club is hearing how some of the most creative students read the story.  They add accents, invent brand new Anglicized names to replace the difficult Russian ones, and laugh at jokes that may or may not have been intended as such by the author.  To be sure, by the end of any evening with a Russian author, the kids are ready to quit, tired out by the day, and sometimes a little bored by the text they had no hand in picking.  Even so, my hope is that each week they learn a few new words, and gain a little more confidence in their own ability to tackle new and difficult subjects.

Mission to Moscow (and also Kaliningrad, Arkhangelsk, and Saint-Petersburg)

On Saturday morning, I'll be travelling to Russia for the second time in my life.  I'll be making short visits to Kaliningrad, Arkhangelsk, and Saint-Petersburg.  In the space of two weeks, my small Fulbright delegation of community college administrators will visit Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, Kalinigrad State Technical University, State Polytechnical University, Smolny College (The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences), the University of Information Technologies (Mechanics and Optics), Northern (Arctic) Federal University, and Krasnogorsk State College.  We'll also the American Center and the American embassy in Moscow.  Over the past eight years, I've gradually become obssessed with Russia, but I'm always reminded of the Don DeLillo novel, White Noise, in which a professor invents a brand new academic field of inquiry, Hitler Studies, only to become increasingly embarrassed by the fact that he knows no German whatsoever. On my second visit to Russia, I'm acutely aware that it's time to learn Russian.  Like DeLillo's character in White Noise, the academic conference is about to begin, I'm headed for ever greater levels of humiliation if I don't find myself a Russian language course or immersion experience in the very near future.

As I prepare for my Mission to Moscow, I reflect on my professional life.  Shouldn't everybody have a chance to go abroad for professional development?  I think so, and to this end I secured permission for my college to join a consortium of international programs.  This consortium will allow my college to send a faculty member and a staff member to Holland, Finland, or China, each and every year.  More than that, the consortium will allow my college to host international vistors from each of these countries.  I'm also excited by the consortium's student exchange programs.  Over time, my hope is to send many of my college's unprivileged students overseas to add a truly global dimension to their programs of study.

Leaving for Russia also comes in the context of my newly formed Russian literature book club.  This club takes place in the context of a youth services facility for at risk high school students.  This week, I showed a few slides about Russia, and we read the first half of Gogol's famous work, The Greatcoat (i.e., The Overcoat).    On my first recent reading of this book, I was struck by how Gogol ridiculed Akaky Akakiyevich as a penny-pinching, pendantic clerk whose only joy in life seemed to be copying what other people had written.  Gogol seemed to be critiquing everything about the poor soul, including his asceticism, materialism, penury, slavishness, and sexless life.  If Akaky Akakiyevich was consumed with the ideal of possessing a new coat, how small was his inner life?  Shouldn't everybody, nobody how poor, be interested in something beyond a new coat?

On a second reading of the short story, I started to see the other side of Akaky Akakiyevich.  Perhaps my move from Robert Chandler's translation to Christopher English's translation of the story helped me to gain this new perspective.  Certainly Richard Peace's introduction to Gogol's Plays and Peterburg Tales made a difference.  For Peace argues that Akaky Akakiyevich couldn't have been as poor as his is made out to be.  After all, he wasn't unemployed, didn't spend money unnecessarily, and he had absolutely no family to support.  So perhaps A.A.'s lifestyle was a choice.  Perhaps he actually enjoyed his spartan life.  At the very least, we can say that the hero of The Greatcoat had a Zen-like ability to take pleasure in life as it is.  If one is a copyist, shouldn't one throw oneself in the work?  If he wasn't a Zen Buddhist, perhaps his abstemious lifestyle had elements of the Christian martyr.  Although St. Petersburg was clearly a status-obssessed, bureaucratic world of rank and privilege, Akaky Akakiyevich lived a humble life of service toward others, free from any hint of sensuality.  His life was a life of service, and included regular bouts of mockery from those who immersed themselves in St. Petersburg usual routines.

At any rate, the students haven't finished the story yet.  We're waiting for the ghost to show up to spice up the story.  In the meantime, they seemed interested in my trip to Russia.  None of them has had the chance to travel overseas, and few of them seem interested in venturing abroad.  They asked me whether I thought I'd be kidnapped overseas, or why I even wanted to go anywhere else.  Surprisingly, I was grateful for the chance to talk about some of the prejudices Americans regularly encounter when deadling with other societies.  I also had the chance to discuss some basics concepts of international law and diplomacy.  Upon my return, I'll show the students pictures of my visit and hopefully get them interested in learning more about Russia, or about any foreign people.

Some snippets from Gogo's The Greatcoat:

"As for his rank (and with us rank is the first thing that has to be declared), he was of the genus eternal Titular Councillor..."

"The boy was duly christened, and in the process he started crying and pulled an awful face as if he were having premonitions that one day he might become a titular councillor."

"The young officials would mock him and make fun at his expense to the limits of their clerkish wit..."

"...for no Russian, regardless of his condition, can ever renounce high society.."

[He] "had been hitting the bottle, the one-eyed devil."

"Thus the whole of Holy Russia is polluted by imitation--everyone copies and apes his superior."

"And Petersburg was left without Akaky Akakiyevich, just if he had never been there at all."

"Dead and gone was a being whom no one, not even a naturalist always ready to mount even an ordinary fly on a pin and examine it under a microscope, had ever shown an interest;  a being who had patiently endured the mockery of his office colleagues and who had gone to his grave without excessive fuss..."

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.

Russian History Outreach

Generally speaking, this blog is a personal, self-reflective, and indeed idiosyncratic undertaking.  Placing little emphasis on public dialogue, I document my own investigations into Russian, and especially Soviet, history and literature.  The result is personally satisfying but also somewhat isolating and indeed solipsistic. Therefore, in recent months I've started thinking about interacting more intentionally with a greater variety of actors in order to enrich this project.  With this end in mind, I've applied for, and received, a short-term (i.e., two-week) Fulbright to Russia for this coming April, entitled the Fulbright Russia Community College Administrators Seminar.  As part of a small group of American community college administrators, I'll travel to Moscow, and then a regional city, in order to learn more about the Russian system of higher education. Needless to say, I'm extremely grateful for the opportunity to travel to Russia, and even more grateful to participate in a dialogue on education with my counterparts in Russia.  My hope will be to bring back some of this knowledge to my home campus in order to continue the process of internationalization we've already begun.  

My second effort to interact with others on the subject of Russian history is very different.  Yesterday, I had my orientation to become a volunteer book club facilitator to seriously troubled teenage boys.  In this book club, we'll be reading a book entitled, Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida.  My goal is to introduce students to Russian literature, but also to history and, more broadly, "college readiness" concepts.  Of course, my experience with troubled teenagers is very limited, and I may not be able to get these students interested in reading Pushkin, Gogol, Leskov, and Babel.  Perhaps the texts will prove to be too complicated for them, or the subject matter far too remote.  But I have a hunch that perhaps my own passion for the subject will translate into something positive for them, over time.  

Many years ago I used to go to Zen teacher once a week.  The teacher arrived at a Unitarian church and set up a circle of pillows and began his meditation.  He did this whether students showed up or not, and he charged no fee.  Often, I was the only student to arrive.  Sometimes I would regret the fact that the instructor's spiritual practice didn't have an audience, but over time I started to see that his willingness to show up each week for no ostensible reward was itself part of the spiritual message he was delivering, either to himself, or to his few students.  This Zen teacher's self-discipline and generosity were the most important education he offered us.  In this way, I  hope that somehow offering my own fascination with Russia to students will somehow touch them, or inspire them.  My goal will be to make these students a little more interested in history, a little more knowledgeable about Russia, and a little more willing to believe that people care about them.  I doubt many of them will develop an active and sustained interest in Russia, but perhaps some of them will develop their own equivalent, life-sustaining interests and passions.  

While I'm sure my preconceived notions of doing a book club on Russia to this particular student population will quickly be altered or overturned, I am presently hoping that I'll be able to bring back some of what I learn on my Russian Fulbright and share it with them.