A Return to Scholarly Roots

With joy I have been preparing a new course on Russian literature offered as part of Memoria College. And yes, I have shamelessly picked my most beloved novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin as our principal focus. By considering also Turgenev’s masterwork Fathers and Sons, and filling in some gaps, those enrolled should emerge with a useful grasp of the intellectual and social milieu from which writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy would later explode. At least, that’s the plan.

Beyond obsessing gloriously as to which tantalizing avenues into Pushkin’s world we should travel, the best part of preparing the course has been dragging out all my Pushkin stuff . . . and I do mean all. Suddenly I have a good excuse to buy additional translations of both titles, ones that either were lacking in my library or had been lost along the way. In short, it feels like “old times.”

Many a person has described how delicious it is to return to one’s scholarly roots—in this case, the Russian literary world I fell in love with long ago. I do not need to parrot their descriptions. What I will mention, though, is the thrill of reuniting with the minds of those who authored the analyses, biographies, and translations that defined my world back in those student days.

Time-travel seems real when grasping a long yearned-for, imaginary visit with a person who shaped one’s thought. Case in point: how fine it feels now to open Prof. Walter Vickery’s two slim, power-packed monographs on Pushkin. A consummate British scholar who easily could have dominated the publishing world, he chose instead to publish very little. Rather, he concentrated instead on teaching, advising dissertations, and collaborating with colleagues across the world. Every page he did publish, therefore, bears an authority rare in modern academia.

This is not my first occasion to return to Vickery’s writings, but somehow, opening his volumes now, has flung me back into the narrow single-windowed room where he conducted his biennial grad seminar on Pushkin. This time, though, rather than exhaust my hand scribbling to keep up, I am waltzing with his printed words. I can pause, stare at the trees that line our deck (my favorite summertime office), and invite my visage of Dr. Vickery to pull up a chair and join me for tea, or stroll down our neighborhood’s wooded paths.

Moreover, I can entertain some of the things I wish I could say to him like:

“Oh Dr. Vickery! How I yearn to hear again your 90-minute lecture on the rules of 19th-century dueling à la française as opposed to à la anglaise! Did you really draw a lamp shade and list your main points around it (as I recall)? If so, what was the lamp all about? The field of dueling? The duelers? The law in tsarist Russia? Tell me, please!”

Astonishing knowledge that scholars like Walter Vickery possessed was accrued over a lifetime of dogged inquiry. It was not gathered by clicking links to articles on bibliographical sites like JSTOR or through Wikipedia summaries. It came from twelve-hour days in far-away archives where a lone reader painfully scoured stacks of crumbling journals and blurry microfilms during a hard-fought-for sabbatical. It came from translating original sources with super-human patience, be they Russian, French, German, Latin, or Greek. It came from building upon the wisdom of the legendary generation of World War I scholars who guided them.

Such true experts distilled their knowledge not by snooty pronouncements of obscure minutiae buried in articles no one reads, or hardly can read. Their knowledge, instead, was offered in gracious, elegant prose backed by a lifetime of pondering.

It was a lucky day when Vickery agreed to be a member of my dissertation committee. Having not yet worked as a professor myself, I failed to appreciated his glee—expressed in a restrained Oxford tone—at the thought of being an uncontested (non-musicologist) member of a committee otherwise filled by musicologists. “Oh, this should be fun” he sniffed (or something like that). He then suggested his ability to help might be limited, being an outsider to the field.

Limited? Good grief. I’d have been lost without his insights. He, together with my saintly advisor Dr. Howard Smither, repeatedly patched my fledgling barque with tar so that I could sail (or limp) through the tumultuous channel known as a “dissertation defense.” The words of gratitude I expressed to both men then seem more insufficient with each passing decade.

You may have had people like Walter Vickery in your life too. At least, I hope you have. It seems unfair that young people, no matter how well-prepared and serious, cannot hold up the other end of such a relationship with sufficient aplomb. At least, I couldn’t.

But this is how teaching and learning works. Teachers fell trees, till the soil, and pour; students receive. Seeds germinate quickly or slowly; vines grow, quickly or slowly. The fruit, years later, does not reach down to thank the seed, but rather is directed to produce and scatter seeds.

As the decades of our lives pass (bringing many things we do not like), there are delicious moments when we find ourselves hiding in the velvet folds of a heavy theater curtain. The curtain parts, we poke out our bewildered heads, and walk onto a stage beautifully decorated for a production we never knew existed.

Pushkin would say it better. In one line, with a tint of irony clothed in the sounds of soft rain. How happy I am to be journeying again into this world.