Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

As I was finishing up the semester, I was rewarded, in a way, by a dinner invitation from a postdoc I knew named Simon. He was in Moscow for the year working on his long-standing project about Czech–Russian cultural relations, and he was having a party, he wrote, in honor of the visit to town of the delightful Alex Fishman. He actually said that—“delightful.” Fishman was coming to town over break and Simon was throwing him a dinner party.

Since I’d arrived I had avoided Simon and the rest of the expat academics. They were all in Russia for a reason, with specific goals and projects, whereas I was doing who knows what and living with my grandmother. It wasn’t really a conversation I felt like having. This dinner party, however, was a different matter. Whatever else it was, Moscow was my town. I was born here. Fishman didn’t get to show up for a visit without having to deal with me. Also, I had to admit, I was lonely.

The evening did not go as planned. My first mistake was arriving an hour late. This was my grandmother’s fault. I had spent the day writing the last “narrative” evaluations of my many students. This was one of the perks of the PMOOC, as opposed to a regular old MOOC that you didn’t have to pay for; in addition to a grade, you got a narrative evaluation! When I finally got up to go, my grandmother blocked the way and asked if I would play anagrams with her. “We already played today,” I said. This was true. We’d played after lunch.

“We did?” said my grandmother. She looked, standing in the hallway in her pink robe, a pen and piece of scrap paper already in her hand, terribly disappointed. I couldn’t do it to her.

“OK,” I said. “One quick game.”

We ended up playing four games—as usual, a total slaughter—and then I was able to leave.

By the time I arrived, people were already eating, and Fishman, I could tell, had already monopolized the conversation. I could hear him from the front hallway as I came in and took off my shoes and shook Simon’s hand. Simon’s apartment was in a compound owned by the Czech embassy, and it was recently refurbished and was on the twelfth floor, with a great view of Triumphal Square and the Mayakovsky monument. He escorted me to the kitchen so I could put the bagful of beers I’d brought—there was no such thing as a six-pack in Russia—into the fridge and take one for myself. (I noticed that someone else had brought a superior brand of beer, but it would be gauche at least at first not to drink the inferior Russian beer that I’d brought, so I took that.) “Listen,” said Simon quietly as I opened my beer, “are you and Alex cool?”

I was surprised. I thought I had managed to keep my hatred of Fishman pretty much to myself. I resolved to continue doing so. “Sure,” I said. “Why?”

Now I saw that it was Simon’s turn to be surprised. He apparently thought I knew something that I did not know. And he had inadvertently half revealed it to me.

“Why?” I said again.

Very reluctantly Simon said, “Because of Sarah?”

“Sarah,” I repeated, nodding as if I knew what he meant. And then I did know. Of course. That’s who she was seeing; that’s who was taking all those photos. If I hadn’t mentally muted Fishman’s Facebook posts after his obnoxious photo of Princeton, I’d have figured it out sooner. “Well,” I said now. “That’s nice. For them.” I had no right to be angry—they were grown-ups, I was living in Moscow, and anyway Sarah had dumped me—and I did not want to ruin Simon’s party. He was a good guy, when you came down to it. But I followed him out into the dining room in a bit of a daze.

There were about ten people sitting around a large rectangular glass table and drinking wine. The lights were dimmed and the furniture was modern (though, I suspect, Czech), and if you couldn’t see the Mayakovsky statue out the window you’d have thought you were in a condo in midtown Manhattan. I recognized half the people at the table from various conferences and lectures, as well as Fishman, of course, who had grown a hipster beard since last I saw him and now gave me a somewhat wary nod, before continuing to hold forth on his favorite topic, that is to say, Fishman himself. The one notable thing about Fishman on this occasion, aside from the fact that he was wearing a very expensive shirt, was the pretty girl sitting next to him. I didn’t catch everyone’s name as I was hurriedly introduced, but I caught hers—Yulia. By the way she dressed and said hello, I could tell she was Russian. How did she know Fishman?

Simon had made a big vat of spaghetti and I was able to hide behind a mound of it as I tried to adjust, first, to the thought that Fishman was sleeping with Sarah, and next to being around people who were neither profanity-spewing Russian hockey players nor my grandmother. I had thought it would be annoying but—whenever Fishman stopped talking for a minute—I found to my surprise that it was not annoying. It was nice. The group was a mix of Russians and Americans, all of them grad students or post-docs. Some of the stuff they were working on was very interesting—one of the Russians was writing a biography of the controversial formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky. Another was studying the Marina Tsvetaeva archive at the NKVD. These were sweet, earnest people who had gone into academia because they cared about knowledge. The Americans among them brought news of the financial crisis: there was talk at some of the universities of doing away with Slavic departments altogether, merging them into the history or literature departments, and cutting staff—enrollment was already down, no one wanted to learn Russian anymore, and now money was tight. I felt a surge of warmth toward my fellow Slavicists. I spent so much time on Facebook being envious of their successes, their plum posts or brilliant futures, but they were good people! That they were now all stuck in a demeaning pursuit of professional advancement, and in a shrinking field to boot, was not their fault. They had gone into this with the purest motives. Even Fishman, maybe. Though maybe not.

Why did this happen to people? All of us could have pursued more lucrative careers. There were people in our field who had left academia and prospered. Aaron Bloom had dropped out of our program after two years and gone to law school and was now an intellectual property attorney in Washington, D.C.; he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Or Eugene Priglashovkin, an émigré like me and Fishman, who had thought one of his research topics—the post-Soviet existence of a former Gulag town in Siberia—was so interesting that he made a documentary about it. Now he was in Hollywood directing actual films. Reports of Priglashovkin’s new life in Los Angeles filled conversations in the Slavic department like rumors of another world. Priglashovkin was dating an actress. Priglashovkin went to a party at Leonardo DiCaprio’s! Fishman himself, actually, when I ran into him in the library the year before, had pulled me over to a computer and showed me Priglashovkin’s house on Zillow.com. It had been bought for $2.2 million. By Priglashovkin.

And yet the people in this room had stuck it out! And I too had stuck it out! We might have been frustrated, thwarted, bitter, poor, but at least we still had the dream. The dream of scholarship, of teaching, of learning, of the advancement of human knowledge. Anyone who stayed in academia for this long was my brother, I thought to myself as I put another serving of spaghetti on my plate. Hell, even Fishman.

But Fishman was resolved not to allow me these generous thoughts—not about him, not about anyone. He wouldn’t stop talking, and the more he talked, the more I felt like I was being pulled back into all the pettiness of academia, like Fishman was magically conjuring it by sheer force of will.