Nina, who was working on the third volume of her biography, was rightly trying to demonstrate how the Bolsheviks had erased Tolstoy’s pacifist political positions, reducing him—“if I may,” she said—to the image of the great novelist, the father of realism. Nevertheless, Tolstoy had attempted to create an alternative against revolutionary violence and against capitalist destruction. Not resisting evil.
“The great social fictions are those of the Adventurer (who expects everything from action) and the Dandy (who lives life as an art form); in the twenty-first century, the hero will be the Terrorist,” said Nina. A dandy and adventurer, considered, deep down, to be an exceptional individual.
According to her, Tolstoy had been the first to become aware of those triumphal fictions, and he tried to counter them with the epiphanic image of the starets, the holy man, the mystic wanderer: the practical realization of his sermon was Mahatma Gandhi, a direct disciple of Tolstoy’s. “But India didn’t turn out so well either,” I said. “In good novels, Emilio, nothing turns out well,” said Nina. We were in the living room at her house, among her books and papers. “Want some tea? Cookies? They’re Russian.”
3
The FBI had distributed the manifesto among literature professors with the aim of seeing whether they could detect any idiosyncrasies in its style that would allow it to be identified. They hoped that someone would recognize the writing of the culprit behind the attacks or at least provide some clue to his identification. Mary Goldman, an expert in psychoanalytic literary criticism and a disciple of Charles Mauron, was trying to decipher the psychology of the text’s author based on metaphors, adverbial forms, repetitions, and word families. Others were looking for traces of urban argots and linguistic peculiarities from rural areas in the United States, trying to narrow down the field of investigation.
“It wasn’t about discovering him but imagining him,” said Nina. Is it possible to know what a person is like based on the things he or she writes? Any professional accustomed to reading with precision—a translator, a style editor—would quickly recognize the author as an educated man, accustomed to logical constructions, with a language of great lexical breadth and considerable syntactical richness. His use of written English was too deliberate, with no traces of orality, although sometimes there did appear slight errors of the kind that might suggest a tendency toward the hypercorrection typical of the middlebrow; beyond that, unexpected grammatical deviations suggested that English might not be his mother tongue, or that, at any rate, the author had spent his childhood in an environment where his parents weren’t native speakers.
I discussed some of these theories with Nina, but after reading the manifesto, we realized—as often happens in literary criticism—that the things we’d been analyzing meticulously could be apprehended at once by any reader. The author was an academic, perhaps a mathematician or a specialist in logic, very intelligent, a solitary man, used to speaking on his own and referring to himself in the plural (“We will now go” or “We declare that” or “Shall we say”). A form of self-representation that was typical of individuals (generally men) who had spent many years in the army or revolutionary groups or closed academic communities.
Classes finished at the end of May: the students in my seminar turned in their monographs, all brilliant but predictable, except—of course—for Yho Lyn’s, which was astonishing and opaque. I never like to judge or evaluate, but I gave out three A’s, one B+, and two B’s, according to the anachronistic and affected use of the Greek alphabet (alpha, beta, etc.) for grades that is employed in North American universities. The majority of them had written about Hudson’s “plein-air autobiographies,” about his way of writing and narrating “in motion” (on horseback), and about his motley personal zoo, all except for Yho Lyn, who’d done a stunning project on the correspondence between Constance Garnett and Tolstoy concerning the rural commune and the English farmers—colonists—in New England, compared with Hudson’s experience on idyllic Argentine ranches in Far Away and Long Ago. For his part, John III showed that he was sophisticated and very gender studies, analyzing the connection between prairie life and homosexuality in Hudson’s work (“Oh, those little gauchos of the prairie”).
That Monday, when classes ended, I invited them for a drink at the pub opposite the plaza with the post office. John III, Mike, and Rachel had submitted their curricula vitae and applications for the open positions being offered in the fall, and they hoped to have their theses completed by the end-of-year MLA meeting. They had already ceased to be—or were ceasing to be—students, and they saw their first jobs as a reality at once desirable and destructive. Education was a parking lot for the young, and now they had to switch gears and learn the hard rules of traffic. Positions in remote places, teaching apathetic students, facing the conflicts among colleagues to find a position and survive there until tenure. (“The real artistes maudits of this era are the assistant professors, monitored by colleagues who hold the deciding power,” said John III.)
We said goodbye at dusk, convinced we might never see each other again. Today, aware as I am of their fates, I know that many triumphed and others foundered, but none forgot their years as graduate students, when life seems to pass like a long parenthesis before you confront the harsh winter of real experience.
I too was at a similar crossroads. I didn’t want to return to Argentina and kept going back and forth about the possibility of
