(no subject)

[cactuswatcher]

Yesterday I was in the bookstore and found a book The Possessed by Elif Batuman a young woman from Stanford. it's subtitled Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Elif+Batuman&x=11&y=16

It brought back so many memories of grad school in Russian. Not just the thought processes, but the people I met and dealt with every day. One reviewer started off by saying, "Are comical things more likely to happen to funny people, or is funniness simply the ability to make ordinary things seem comical?" Believe me, the events she writes about are anything but ordinary. But every last one of us who got very far into grad school Russian and thought ourselves otherwise very ordinary, had stories just like hers. The changes in book from the funny insanity of her everyday life to the dead seriousness of her literary criticism and back, were exactly what all of us dealt with. Batuman may have grown up in a Turkish family, studied Comparative Lit instead of just Russian,and lived her life mostly in places I've never been. But I read one chapter and said to myself out loud, "she's my people!" The New Tork Times review http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/books/17book.html gives a taste of what the book is like.

I enjoyed it very much, and I recommend it to anyone who can't imagine how I ended up so strange.

Comments

[masqthephlsphr.livejournal.com]

Being a graduate student in Russian in the 60's/70's. What was that like? Did the CIA try to recruit you?

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

No, I don't know of any grad students who were at all interested in that, either. But literally half of the undergrad class I learned Russian with wanted to work for the CIA or FBI. One of the easiest places to get a job for B.A. people who knew Russian was the NSA, a less well publicized spying organization. In grad school I briefly worked for a think tank which was gleaning info from Russian and other Soviet publications for just about anything the military might want to know. I got hired almost sight unseen because I knew a little Bulgarian. Horribly boring work and I had better things to do, so I quit very quickly.

You couldn't simply go to Russia and travel around then, like you can these days. Everything was organized either as set tourist tours or closely controlled study tours. All of us assumed we were being followed and acted accordingly. Still people would approach us on the streets and ask if we wanted to exchange currency, if we had blue jeans to sell, ask us to buy something for them in the foreign-currency stores or offer to sell icons. If they were careless and too obvious you'd see the police come by and drag them away. In the foreign-currency-only stores except for the vodka and the caviar a lot of the things were cheap crappy souvenirs, but there were always things available that could not be had by the general public without a long wait because the supply system was so bad. Things like decent toothpaste and shampoo and higher quality Soviet cigarettes.

[masqthephlsphr.livejournal.com]

I figured it was either that, or they pegged you as a commie sympathizer.

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

LOL
We didn't have any of those either.