Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

Not everyone was happy about the new conditions. The liberals on Echo complained about press censorship and the marginalization of opposition politicians. Sometimes they held small protests to express their anger at the regime. And there were also occasional local issue-oriented protests, for example against the building of a mall in Pushkin Square. Most of these were tolerated, but some were violently dispersed, and my grandmother had apparently seen such a dispersal because every time we walked past a larger than usual group of people—whether waiting in line or watching a juggler perform, and especially if there were police nearby—she would say, “Let’s get out of here, it’s a protest, the police are very harsh toward protesters,” and pull us in the opposite direction. Nonetheless she remained very curious about the news, and every time she found me in the kitchen with the radio on or Kommersant or the Moscow Times in front of me, she started asking questions. “What are they saying?” she’d say.

“About what?”

“You know, about the situation. What’s the situation?”

What was the situation? I couldn’t tell! It was some kind of modern authoritarianism. Or authoritarian modernization. Or something. I tried to keep her up on the latest, and she gamely nodded her head.

In the meantime, the fall PMOOC sections had begun. I was in charge of four online sections of Jeff Wilson’s class on the classics of Russian literature. It was an OK class. Jeff was in his midforties and taught a kind of hepped-up version of the classics. He would say things like “Vronski is a bro in a hipster outfit” and “Tolstoy was sort of the Kanye of Russian literature—he was always making embarrassing public statements and then being forced to apologize.” The idea was to make the books relatable to a younger audience. I didn’t mind, even though, having TA’ed for Jeff quite a bit in grad school, I had noticed that he also compared Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky to Kanye, to the point where I wondered if he knew any other figures from popular culture. (“Pushkin is really the Tupac of Russian literature, though, don’t you think?” my adviser quipped once, when I complained about it to him.)

The class began in early September, and so in the Coffee Grind across from the FSB I would watch Jeff’s lecture, skim the assigned book to refresh my memory, and then log on to the different class blogs, where the students wrote responses to the text and then commented on those responses and then commented on the comments—forever.

In my many years of grad school I had taught all sorts of people. I had taught arriving freshmen in their first semester, when they still resembled children, their upper lips irritated from their first shaves; they thought that Tolstoy or, better still, Dostoevsky was trying to communicate directly to them and responded accordingly (often without doing the reading). I had taught cynical seniors who had learned to manipulate the limited belief system of contemporary literary studies and receive good grades. They knew that Tolstoy was just a name that we gave to a machine that had once written symbols on a piece of paper. It was ridiculous to try to assign some kind of intention or consistency to this machine. The seniors floated in and out of class, making fun of me. At the end of the year, I watched them all get jobs at hedge funds. I experienced it as a personal failure when they left literature; the only thing worse was when they remained. But the PMOOC students were something else altogether—a volatile mixture of the young and old, the overeducated and the autodidactic. They wrote me a tremendous number of emails.

The first book we read that fall semester was Tolstoy’s The Cossacks . It was one of Tolstoy’s early novels, about a spoiled young officer from Moscow who is sent to do his army service in a Cossack town on the southern Russian frontier. Back home, the young officer has gambling debts and a bad reputation, but in the Cossack village he starts over again, falling in love with the simple, straightforward, earthbound ways of the natives. He falls in love too with a handsome, strong-boned Cossack girl named Dunya, and though she is engaged to be married to her childhood sweetheart, the spoiled young officer eventually convinces her to break it off. Though skeptical, she knows she’d be a fool to turn down a wealthy Muscovite. And then, just as they’re about to make it official, there is a raid on the village and Dunya’s former fiancé is killed. Somewhat unfairly, Dunya blames the young officer for her friend’s death. Unable to muster a defense of his actions, he packs his things and goes back to Moscow. The end.

The students did not like the book, primarily because they didn’t like the young officer. “Why read a book about a jerk?” they said. After reading seven or eight responses along these lines, I wrote an impassioned defense of The Cossacks . Books weren’t just for likeable characters overcoming hardships, I said. Some of the world’s greatest books are about jerks! I wrote the post and uploaded it and waited. The blogging software we used allowed people to “like” posts, as on Facebook; after my heartfelt essay received just one like, I spent an hour in the Coffee Grind figuring out how to disable that function, and did.

At the end of my work sessions at the Grind, I would check the Slavic jobs listings page—in early September it was, predictably, pretty fallow—and then give myself the dubious treat of scrolling through Facebook. Sarah hadn’t bothered to unfriend me after our break-up and it would have been churlish on my part to unfriend her, and now I saw her posting solo photos of herself, looking cuter and cuter with each one, here on some beach over Labor Day, there on some college campus that was definitely not our college campus… Her status was still “single,” and she was alone in all the photos, and it was possible that it was just a friend of hers who was taking them—maybe her friend Ellen?—but they didn’t feel like photos that Ellen would take. Sarah was going into her third year in the English department, and she had said that all the boys in English were ridiculous, but maybe she had found one who wasn’t. Or maybe she was dating a guy from anthro. I tried not to think too much about it. I went back to studying the Facebook posts of my stupid former classmates: A syllabus completed! A manuscript accepted! An issue of the Slavic Review with their peer-reviewed article in it! Oh, how I hated all of them. Through gritted teeth I pressed “like” on all their posts, pretty much without exception.

I tried to be helpful around the house, but like much else this was more difficult than I had expected. The place was so old and had been adjusted over the years in so many ingenious but ad hoc ways that a person without deep knowledge of it was lost. I had lived in an old building in Brooklyn, at least as old as my grandmother’s, but it had been built to last, and when something broke down we called the super, Elvis, who took his time but eventually came up and more or less fixed what was broken. If you gave Elvis twenty dollars at Christmas, he would start coming up faster. In Moscow it would never occur to a group of residents to employ and house a permanent handyman. Every man of the house was his own handyman. Except, as it turned out, me.

One morning I got up to find my grandmother at the kitchen table, looking worried. “Ah, Andryush, you’re up,” she said. “We have a problem. There’s no hot water.”

“Oh?” I said.

I half expected to turn on the tap and find hot water coming out and explain to my grandmother that she had been mistakenly turning the cold water knob, but this was not the case. I turned the hot water knob, let it run, and nothing but cold water emerged. She was right.