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.

Tour de Horizon de Troyat

I've been packing up Russian history and literature books for three days. It's time to put my small Henri Troyat collection away. Troyat was part of the Russian diaspora that was displaced by the Russian Revolution. I think he was a teenager when his family settled in France, one of the centers of counter-revolutionary and general White Russia intellectual activity. Troyat was a prolific writer to say the least, and penned many successful novels (including one work of historical fiction, Red and White, which I have yet to review in this blog) as well as dozens of biographies of Russian historical and literary figures. It's no exaggeration to say that one of the best ways to fall in love with Russian cultural history is to read a Troyat biography, which are like potato chips insofar as you can't stop at just one. Troyat's biographies, as I've said before, are all almost uniformally good. They all read well and possess a literary quality in their own right. They all move quickly to decisive, adult junctures in the subject's right.

Troyat seems to have had divided loyalties, as I also do. (In graduate school in Montreal, I somehow divided my time almost equally between very traditional political biographies of the Stale Male and Pale men of British history such as Castlereagh, Palmerston, Gladstone, Churchill, and Lloyd George; and more recent works about queer, Beatnik authors such as Burroughs and Kerouac--never quite finding any connection between my subjects despite one failed doctoral dissertation that vainly attempted to find a link between literary and political modernism).

In this spirit, Troyat loved politics as well literature. He wrote biographies of the tsars, including Ivan, Peter, Catherine, Alexander I, and many of the minor female tsarinas. But he also wrote brilliant and sensitive portraits of Russia's greatest authors, including Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky--all good, although the Tolstoy book overshadows the others. Orlando Figes, for example, said it remained a sentimental favorite of his.

As I pack up my Troyat books, including many of the books mentioned above, I'm thankful that I still have a few left to read. I've got his portrait of daily life in Moscow at the turn of the century, one of his many French biographies (Flaubert, friend of Turgenev--apparently Troyat's attention couldn't even remained fixed on Russia), and his novel, Red and White. But there are other Troyat books out there, many others. Some are rare, out-of-print, and expensive: just try to find his biographies of Gogol and Dostoevsky for instance. Others are apparently untranslated. It's enough to make you learn French.