Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

The one thing I did manage to do on our walks was remind her of who I was. This I enjoyed.

“Do you remember who I am?” I said.

“You’re Andryusha.”

“But do you remember how I know you?”

“How you know me…”

“Do you remember your daughter?”

“My daughter?” There was almost always a pause. “My little daughter? My Yelochka?”

“Yes.”

“She died.”

“Yes.”

“And you?”

“I am her son.”

“You are her son.” I could practically see as her mind went back to the dacha at Sheremetevo, me as a little boy running around the yard, my father coming one weekend and teaching me how to ride a bike. Then she’d look up at grown-up me. “Andryusha?”

“Yes.”

And we would continue walking, and I would try not to cry.

YOU HAD TO BE fundamentally stupid , I sometimes thought, to become the sort of academic specialist that hiring committees liked. You had to be thick somehow. You had to block out all the other things in the world to focus on one narrow, particular thing. And how, without knowing all the other things out there, could you possibly choose? I was enjoying this thought one day while walking to the Coffee Grind. It wasn’t the only time in the day that I had to think, but it was the most concentrated. I always walked past the little grocery where I got my sushki and then I was on creepy, deserted Bolshaya Lubyanka. I had no choice but to think.

If I looked at my classmates, the ones who started at the same time as I did, what was the difference between them and me? It wasn’t that they were actually stupid. Most of them were smart, and some were quite a bit smarter than I was. That wasn’t the difference, though. The difference was their willingness to stick with something. The successful ones were like pit bulls who had sunk their teeth into a topic and wouldn’t let go until someone shot them or they had tenure.

To the ongoing frustration of my adviser, I was not doing that.

“Pretend I’m a hiring committee,” he said once. “What is your pitch to me?”

“My pitch is that I love this stuff. I love Russian history and literature and I love talking about it to people.”

“OK, but a university is also a place for research. What’s your specialty?”

I had been through this with him before. “Modernity,” I said, knowing already that he wasn’t going to like it. “I am a specialist in modernity.”

My adviser, a six-foot-four former basketball player from Iowa, did a very girly imitation of my voice. “‘I’m a specialist in modernity,’” he said. “‘I study the ways in which modernity affects the Russian mind.’”

I waited for him to finish.

“I’m a specialist in my own butt!” yelled my adviser. “That’s not what got me this job!”

“What’s wrong with modernity?”

“It covers three centuries! It’s not a specialization. Three years is a specialization. Or better yet, three months. Three days. If you were a specialist in, like, Tuesday through Thursday of the first week of February 1904, but also in total command of Russian modernism, I could get you a job anywhere you wanted.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I mean, look at the writers you’ve studied.” We were in my adviser’s tiny office, the two printed-out sheets of my CV lying on his desk between us. Despite his unorthodox advising methods, he was a good guy. He said he’d gotten serious about studying Russia after he realized he wasn’t going to the NBA. (“It took me a long time to realize that,” he said, “because I am dumb.”) He was a great teacher, a truly inspired teacher, but his own academic career had not gone smoothly. He wanted me to avoid his mistakes. “Who is Patrushkin?” he asked now, looking at the description of my dissertation. Grigory Patrushkin was an early-nineteenth-century poet. He hadn’t actually written very many poems, nor were the poems he wrote very good, but I wanted someone from that era who wasn’t Pushkin. Although Patrushkin knew Pushkin.

“Patrushkin was a friend of Pushkin’s,” I now said.

“A friend?”

“He sort of knew Pushkin.”

“And does this mean you can teach Pushkin?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because there’s no course on Patrushkin!”

“I just didn’t want to write about the usual suspects. I thought…” I sort of trailed off.

“Look,” he said. “Do you think I want to be studying the architecture of early Russian huts?” In his one smart academic move, my adviser had developed a theory that medieval Russian huts lacked chimneys—they discovered chimneys some two hundred years after Western European peasants—and this gave early Russian peasants brain damage, which explains why they didn’t develop some of the farming strategies that radically increased crop yields in early modern Europe and helped bring about the Renaissance. “Do you think I wanted to become another of these people who come up with a monocause for Russian backwardness? No, dude. I wanted to be Isaiah Berlin!”

“I know I’m not Isaiah Berlin.”

“I know, OK. I’m just saying. I know you love teaching. That’s a good thing. But in order to teach, you need a teaching job, yes? And right now, at this point in time, that means finding a topic that’s going to appeal to a hiring committee.”

Back in July he was very excited when I told him I was going to Russia.

“This is great!” he said. “You’ll be on the ground. You can find something new and original. Or something old.” It was my adviser who suggested I interview my grandmother. “She’ll tell you stories about the USSR. You can weave them in and out of a tale of modernity. That shit is gold, my friend. People love that shit.”

“Hiring committees love it?”

“Yes. Who did you think I meant when I said ‘people’?”

Now that was out. If I couldn’t use my grandmother’s stories, which she didn’t remember, I would have to think of something else. But what? I really had no idea. People like Alex Fishman made their careers repackaging Russian dictatorship. “Gulag,” said Fishman, then “internet,” and granting institutions swooned. (He was now doing an online history of the Gulag.) People loved reading about the Soviet Gulag—it made them feel better about the U.S. of A.

Of course it wasn’t like Russia was now a flourishing democracy. But it was complicated. Back in Brooklyn on the internet, and now in my grandmother’s kitchen on Echo of Moscow, all I heard about was what a dangerous place Russia was, what a bloody tyrant Putin had become. And it was, and he was. But I had half expected to be arrested at the airport! I thought I’d be robbed on the train. In fact the only thing I was in danger of being arrested for was accidentally buying too many cappuccinos at the Coffee Grind and not having enough cash on me to pay. (They did not take credit cards.) The only robbery going on was the price of croissants on Sretenka.

The country had become rich. Not everyone was rich—my grandmother wasn’t rich, and in fact, speaking of robbery, she had been robbed of certain things—but overall, generally speaking, a lot of people, especially in Moscow, were pretty well off. Looking out the window, it was hard to square all the talk of bloody dictatorship with all the people in expensive suits, getting into Audis, talking on their cell phones. Was this naïve? Didn’t people in Saudi Arabia drive fancy cars and talk on cell phones in between chopping off the heads of dissidents? Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. I’d never been to Saudi Arabia. For me—and not just for me, I think—Soviet oppression and Soviet poverty had always been inextricably intertwined.