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Scien(tifi)c(e) Fiction: Footnotes and Anecdotes

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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, including toward the parking lot where he kept his car while teaching. (No, he didn’t drive, but his wife did. Thank goodness on both counts.) I gently grasped his arm and turned him away from the elevators and toward the proper door.

R.D. Yakhnin,
Illustration for Lieutenant Kizhe

One semester I did an independent study with Prof. Shcheglov, reading Tynianov’s three stories set in the reigns of Peter I, Paul I and Nicholas I, trying to isolate the characteristic that linked them. My conclusions?

Each story was “believable” not only because each was infused with a special paranoia unique to its respective tsar, but also because its language was inflected with vocabulary and verbal structures from the appropriate era. Tynianov was a chameleon, able to endow his narrators with just the right linguistic coloration.

My dissertation and first book emerged from that in-depth study of Tynianov, which meant that reading two chapters fromWriting a Usable Past with my students was for me a journey back to the years when I first wrote some of those sentences — over twenty years ago.

About the same time as me, another scholar was writing her dissertation at Columbia — Ludmilla Trigos, whose work on the Decembrist myth also brought her to study Tynianov. My book came out before her article on Kiukhlia, which in the scholarly world means she had to cite me rather than the other way around, though we probably had similar ideas simultaneously. (Avril Pyman, the third scholar, did not cite us.)

Prof. Pyman’s piece, in the Mapping Lives book we are using as a kind of “textbook,” detailed Tynianov’s theory and practice, and several of the students seemed frustrated that there was no real attempt to integrate the two. But both Milla and I, it seems to me, came up with our own ways to finesse this point, identifying the cutting back and forth from one consciousness and even location to another (Milla, in Kiukhlia, about Kiukhelbeker and Nicholas I during the Decembrist revolt) and a deliberately “have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too” explanation in The Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar (me) where Tynianov “footnotes” his sources for those who want to explore the contradictions and vacillations of his portrait of Griboedov.

In class we talked about archives and sources and readings: what was “true” and what needed to be documented. Tynianov famously stated: “where the document ends, that’s where I begin,” but he also tried to claim a status as a prophet, that sometimes he instinctually wrote something and only found the proof later. A complicated individual, but a talented one.

The protagonist of Twelve Chairs,
Ostap Bender, here in Gaidar’s classic film.

Speaking of which: Yury Konstantinovich. Some of his most brilliant published work was his commentaries to Ilf and Petrov’s novel Twelve Chairs. I tried to convince him to translate them into English for use as a teaching aid, but by then he had too many other projects he wanted to pursue.

He may have had a similar problem when I asked him to work with me back in 1992.

Faculty never get any “credit” for teaching independent studies; we do it out of our own intellectual interest and/or the goodness of our hearts. So when I asked Yury Konstantinovich to work on Tynianov with me, he proposed a bargain. “First, you will write a serious paper, 25-30 pages, by the end of the semester.” This was pretty scary for me at that stage, but I agreed. “And second, we will spend five-ten minutes at the end of every meeting talking about this paperback novel. I will mark pages for you to tell me: is this normal American English, or is it in some way linguistically marked, so that an American reader would find it unusual?” The novel was The Silence of the Lambs, and yes, much of it was unusual. Adorable, though, that this famous and brilliant scholar was so engaged with the culture around him that he was intensely curious about the literary language — even though he might not always know how to exit the building.

It’s all about your sources

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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 trick on him — announces: “oh, I’m actually staying another week.” He wants to make sure to get all the good stuff.

But what is “all the good stuff”? Does more evidence sometimes mean less certainty, to paraphrase St Clair?

In the preface to his famous Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey tells us to

row out over the great ocean of material and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen from those far depths to be examined with a careful curiosity.

Really? We love his narratives, but we can’t help thinking that one should be a bit more selective in choosing what to include in the life one is writing. This vivid image of dipping the “little bucket” doesn’t feel right for a scholarly crowd like my students. They want more research, not less, more material to choose from.

Another essay we read argued that the brief lives written by “new biographers” such as Strachey leave out too much; the chronological method, writes Mark Kinkead-Weekes, offers “less lucid reading, but greater and more complex understanding” (“Writing Lives Forwards,” Mapping Lives). Here we run into the question of “biographical method.” Prof. Parker had no doubt as to where his biography would begin (with the birth of Philip II), nor where it would end (with his death — though the posthumous “miracles” allowed him to extend somewhat!), but the 2012 Spanish version of his biografia definitiva runs to 1436 pages. It’s the rare fan of Philip II who wants to read that much about the man.

Beware the word “definitive,” warns Parker, who

found a new cache of documents after publishing this volume!

Kinkead-Weekes insists that chronological biographies are preferable; “we do not, alas, live our lives in themes but day by day,” he explains. And yet. The lure of writing a non-“definitive” biography is great. Certainly if and when I write my biography of Tynianov, the art of arranging the life will intrigue me more than taking every scrap of evidence into account. But then, I’m no Geoffrey Parker.

I had another line of inquiry in mind, though, when I sat down to write this. So here it is: What is a source, or what will be a source, in the Facebook Age?

Academics are ambivalent about Facebook. Many of us use it, though some feel guilty, or pretend they don’t spend much time on it. For the 21st century Facebook is a means of communication — I PM’d my old swim coach just last week, though I’m not positive he knows how to receive a private message — and I maintain that it also will be a source for future biographers. But at what cost?

Yesterday I wandered onto the page of Lev Rubinstein, Muscovite and Russian conceptualist poet. I regularly mention Rubinstein in lectures — his Mama was washing the windowframe is a classic of its time — and I remember with pleasure a reading of his I went to in 1989, I think at the Teatr na doskakh (Theater on the Boards, a makeshift semi-underground theater in perestroika Moscow). But before yesterday I hadn’t contemplated Rubinstein as a private individual, and I certainly hadn’t considered him as a presence on Facebook.

A mutual acquaintance had “liked” his post reminiscing about how his parents met — in the 1930s, at an impromptu dance party in a Moscow communal apartment. Olga Sedakova (whose religious philosophical poetry had been the subject of one of the chapters of my student’s dissertation some years ago) then commented something on the order of “so your talent as a dancer is genetic — remember that evening at NLO?”

Memoirs can lie, and sometimes conversations are meant to be private. But what do we make of such a conversation conducted via social media? If we were to write a biography of Rubinstein, or of Sedakova, would we need to conduct research on their social media pages?

Rubinstein has 26,000 followers, now 26,001 including me. I think he’s smart, and his observations are fascinating. But two questions: does the number of followers equal a portion of a possible audience for biography, or does social media replace biography? And secondly, if poets are writing their memories and thoughts on FB etc, does that mean they are not writing poetry?

The “New Memoir”

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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 emotions and thoughts, on his own experiences growing up, Tolstoy was distancing himself from his own memories. Serialized in The Contemporary under the initials L.N., this work was not presented as a memoir, or even an autobiography per se. We talk about it as Tolstoy’s “autobiographical trilogy,” but we consider it to be fiction.

Tolstoy was influenced by, among others, Ben Franklin himself — although Franklin had called his own work “memoirs” and originally written them primarily for his son William, not for his admiring public. Unlike Tolstoy, Franklin did not publish his Autobiography in his lifetime, and the complicated publication history in the end involved various manuscript versions, translations into French and back into English, etc.

But Franklin’s work was at least an autobiography as we think of it — covering much if not all of his life and, importantly, not an auto-hagiography but rather a record of both positive and negative impulses and events.

After writing the above, about Franklin’s influence on Tolstoy, I went to check and found a significant literature debating whether or not Tolstoy read the Autobiography, particularly whether he read it as a young and impressionable man. (And now I have to violate blog protocol and give a footnote… see below.)

Regardless, we know that Tolstoy admired the work and the man.

My students and I spent last week thinking about the “New Biography” — the new direction in anti-Victorian biography started by Lytton Strachey in 1918 with his Eminent Victorians. In the “New Biography,” characters sometimes speak, and biographers usually take the opportunity of having access to letters and/or memoirs to choose the subjects’ own words, to allow the subjects to speak for themselves.

This gives the feeling of authenticity — a feeling that echoes how we respond to autobiography or memoir. If the hero of a biography said something him/herself, then it must be true, right?

Or not. I’ve asked my students to try and focus all semester on biography — rather than memoir or autobiography — and we continue to add to our list of questions in order to figure out the parameters of this genre, from ancient times to the present. So far the consensus is that biographies “feel” authentic when we know that they are based on primary sources, including documents, letters, and even memoirs. Strachey’s bibliography for each of his biographies made us think about how he was using and recasting his sources.

But yesterday a friend sent me a copy of a “new memoir” by Vladimir Kantor — a Russian writer and philosopher who visited Ohio State in 1995, when I was a new assistant professor. And let me tell you — though there is photographic evidence of our meeting, the stories Kantor tells of our mutual adventures are mostly fictional.

His memories don’t correspond to ours, and his memoirs are not “true.” We can “read” some actual people and events in what he has to say; other events and places seem completely made up.

I’m not saying that anyone will write Kantor’s biography, or mine, based on these or any other memoirs. But if they do… the “sources” will be fiction, not fact. Since I was there, I think I know.

What’s more, as we contemplate biography, we notice that biographers utilize certain quotes or anecdotes to support their understanding of their subjects, to “prove” that their portraits are true. In this course of his memoir (In the Midst of Time, or a Map of my Memory), Kantor uses his stories of me and other women he met at Ohio State to elaborate his thesis of the “naif” or ingenuous American, and I don’t mind at all. But I do remember some of the gentle falsehoods I told him at the time (after all, this Russian acquaintance of mine had no real need to know all the details of my life). And I wonder just who is the “naif.” Following the map of Kantor’s memory, you might just manage to get lost.

Barbara W. Maggs, “The Franklin-Tolstoy Influence Controversy,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society vol. 129, no. 3 (Sept 1985) pp. 268-277.

From Maggs’s article

Reading and Publishing: Nikolai Novikov

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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 French Enlightenment philosophy. The situation was disastrous:

An unexpected and sad vision emerged: the new ideas of Enlightenment philosophy became a justification and support for old native ignorance and moral stagnation. Voltaire-inspired denunciatory laughter helped to hide chronic Russian ulcers without healing them. […] In a word, this laughter became for our freethinker what a papal indulgence used to be for the Western European, removing from a person every sin, every moral responsibility …

Catherine II began to fight this situation, emphasizing the necessity of education. And Novikov — who, it seems to Kliuchevsky, practically came out of nowhere — stepped up to help, energetically beginning his printing and publishing enterprise and becoming the first “non-serving Russian nobleman … who set out to serve his fatherland with his pen and book as his ancestors had done with horse and shield.”

Portrait of Nikolai Novikov by Dmitry Grigorievich Levitsky

Portrait of Nikolai Novikov by Dmitry Grigorievich Levitsky

Novikov is famous for his satirical journals — and for his jousting with Catherine, that led at times to the banning of his journals — but Kliuchevsky celebrates his fearless publishing activity. “In a time,” as Novikov joked in his journal Zhivopisets, when “even the title of writer was shameful,” Novikov not only wrote, but himself stood at the printing press to get his books out. Novikov motivated a whole group of people — his “Moscow circle,” which included Bolkhovitinov — to band together in efforts to increase the number and quality of books available to Russian readers and to create smart, readable, educational works. “In just three years,” Kliuchevsky writes, “Novikov printed more books at the university printing plant than had come out in its previous 24 years of existence.”

In all, Novikov printed over 900 books in 30 years of publishing activity. He also spent 15 years of his life in the Shlisselberg Fortress, incarcerated for too much “freethinking.” Nonetheless, according to Kliuchevsky Novikov wIMG_0823_2as a vital part of the shift in Russian attitudes toward reading and education and had a lasting impact on Moscow University. And he is important for the history of Russian biography: it was Novikov who began the business of “writing about writers,” publishing his Attempt at a historical dictionary of Russian writers in St. Petersburg in 1772.

 

**Quotes above all taken from: Vospominaniia o N. I. Novikove i ego vremeni, doklad, prochitannyi na zasedanii Obshchestva liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti 13 noiabria 1894 g. [Recollections of N.I. Novikov and his time, a talk given at a meeting of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature on 13 November, 1894]. Reprinted in V.O. Kliuchevskii, “Literaturnye portrety” (Moscow, Sovremennik, 1991) 52-77.

The Beginnings of Literary Biography: Bolkhovitinov

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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.

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 speaker — he also worked as a translator, for Nikolai Novikov’s printing house (more on Novikov in a later post). After his wife died in 1800, Evgeny became a monk and moved to Novgorod, which is how he became interesting to me: a man who had lived a full-fledged secular life, in the first part of the 19th century he was learning how to live in the religious world, and during that time he became very friendly with the poet Gavriil Derzhavin who lived nearby.

Bolkhovitinov was a scholar as well as a monk, and he eventually compiled the first secular dictionary of Russian writers. Called A dictionary of secular writers both fellow-countrymen and foreigners, who wrote in Russia, the book was printed in two volumes by the Moscow University typography in 1845, though it seems it may have had earlier editions as well. When he died in 1816, Derzhavin was buried in the Khutyn’ Monastery where he used to visit Bolkhovitinov. Their relationship — which yielded the beautiful poem “To Evgenii. Life at Zvanka” — was born of these biographical researches. I quote the first three stanzas below.

 

Blest is that man who least depends on other men,

Whose life is free from debt and from capricious striving,

Who goeth not to court for praise, or gold to lend,

And shuns all vanities conniving!

 

Why venture to Petropolis, if uncompelled,

Change space for closeness, liberty for locks and latches,

Live weighed with luxury and wealth, their siren spell,

Endure the gentry’s quizzing glances?

 

Can such a life compare with golden freedom here,

With Zvanka’s solitude, with Zvanka’s rest and quiet?

Abundance, health, sweet concord with my wife–and peace

To round my days–these I require.

 

Power is power — but must it be fame?

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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 considering political figures? Or will the “saints” be political too, in their own way?

George Eliot has been quoted as saying that “a biography by a writer has a double interest, from the glimpses it gives of the writer as well as his hero” [quoted in Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form  (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), 131].

Of course, all biographers are writers, and here Eliot is showing her prejudice. We have been trying to think about the writers behind the biographies written by Plutarch and Suetonius — the men themselves, their motivations, their lives; trying to discern these not just through introductory materials but through their writings: how they organize the material, what emphases they make, to what extent they themselves intrude into their narratives.

Reading anonymous “saints’ lives” will be a different experience. Because, of course, neither the writers nor the subjects are as interested in power as a politician, a philosopher, or a king. But they are all focused on fame and on defining what the trappings of fame might be.

Technology is not the enemy

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In the New York Times Book Review this weekend there was a fascinating essay by Leon Wieseltier, 31-year veteran literary editor of the New Republic and, in one estimation, “the last of the New York intellectuals.” One pull quote reads:

there is no more urgent task for American writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology.

We are, as he argues, in the middle of a digital revolution, and it is still unclear what will emerge at the end of it, but there is no doubt that the literary landscape has changed drastically since I myself entered academic life. I started at Ohio State twenty years ago with an email address longer than my left arm and no real sense that the “electronic” was permanent. I kept copies of my dissertation and early articles on floppy drives, but also in paper form, filed in file cabinets. If you were to dig around in those file cabinets even today you might find a folder entitled “email” — in the early days back at Cunz Hall I printed my email correspondence and kept it, thinking that it might disappear into the ether, words not fixed on paper ultimately leaving no physical trace.

And it might, of course. The question of archives is not less fraught in the digital age. A 1995 paper I was hoping to find and revisit has been lost in the many changes of computers and word processing programs over the years; sometimes a handout I produce for class will have random @ signs — evidence of markings of italicize here commands in Word Perfect 5.1 or some other long-obsolete program. Cyrillic in old computer files is now readable only as little boxes — letters and meaning long gone.

Paper is not eternal either, despite Mikhail Bulgakov’s brave belief that “manuscripts don’t burn,” as the devil in his novel The Master and Margarita famously argued. I sometimes console myself when I can’t sort out my electronic filing system by glancing into those file cabinets, where papers are misfiled and lack systemization just as my computer desktop and other drives do. Papers get lost; they become separated from each other and thus from their meaning; sometimes they are “helpfully” recycled by a friend or relative striving to bring order to my intellectual life. And so on.

So what of writing? My biography seminar — and this blogging project — are designed to work with technology, to encourage good habits (regular writing, fluidity, bravery and experimentation, the development of one’s own tone) and to force students to “put themselves out there,” so to speak, in the blogosphere.

At first in thinking about what Wieseltier so brilliantly calls the process of “content  disappearing into ‘content’,” I wondered whether my project was misconceived, was fundamentally somehow anti-humanistic, whether I was giving into the digital like a drowning person relaxes into an oncoming ocean wave, unable to pick my head up and see what life remains to me and to literature. But further in the essay Wieseltier reminds me of an important aspect of the interface between technology and humanistic writing:

There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is a right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose. In the media, for example, the general inebriation about the multiplicity of platforms has distracted many people from the scruple that questions of quality on the new platforms should be no different from questions of quality on the old platforms. Otherwise a quantitative expansion will result in a qualitative contraction.

So as long as we don’t allow ourselves to become distracted, as long as we “regard the devices as simply new means for old ends,” we can bravely face this digital blank sheet of paper and share it with others. We can use technology not to enhance the old, necessarily, but to supplement it and perhaps replace it. We can consider the quality of our own work and that of others and strive for better — more clarity, more precision, more description and contemplation.

Esli budem zhivy

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Each blog has its own voice, just as each blogger has her own habits. I have been blogging at Manic Bookstore Cafe for almost three years, and have taken breaks (or indeed blogged simultaneously) on other projects, such as the Reading Anna Karenina Challenge and the 2014 Recipe Project.

So this will take a little getting used to. The design of the page faciliates more fun (so far this doesn’t feel fun!) and a more interactive voice. On the Manic Bookstore Cafe I announced this blog and promised to link to it in this post. As my course this semester exploring the genre of biography takes off (and as I come to understand u.osu.edu as a platform) I hope this blog will take off as well!