erudition - noun - profound extensive scholarly knowledge acquired through intense reading and study (Merriam-Webster).
There is no contemporary American equivalent to Russian literature. There is no 21st century writer, artificial or otherwise, that can compete with the talents of Leo Tolstoy or Fyodor Dostoevsky. There is no American under 35 today interested in what either of the twin Russian literary giants of the 19th century has to say.
Wait a minute. I have to take back the last claim.
Last week, as Bond and I had not seen each other in a month (he had Covid; I had the cold from Hell), we decided to wax nostalgic while revisiting the location of our first date: our favorite food stand at El Porto, the surfers' beach in Manhattan Beach, L.A. Second in line about to order guac and chips, we eyed the young man (approximately thirty years old) in front of us. Most unusually, he had with him a paperback copy of Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1868-69), a challenging novel depicting the ins and outs of protagonist Prince Lev Myshkin inside of the corrupt and cynical high society of Russia during the late 1800s. As a retired English teacher who took seven years to get through Tolstoy's War and Peace (or as I like to call it, Too Much War and a Little Peace) and five summers propped up on various beaches to finish Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (don't ask me if I even recall a paragraph of either), I was astonished. I just had to ask him, a construction worker who had never been a student of Russian literature, why he had chosen such a difficult tome as a beach read. His answer went something like this: "I've never read anything by a Russian before and wanted to try." I questioned his erudition pertaining to Russian literary figures and their fiction. He had none, but ostensibly, he was working on getting some.
Ergo, I took the opportunity to recommend my personal favorite Russian literary achievement, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which he notated on his iPhone. For me, this young man's willingness to jump into yet another complicated book written by yet another complicated Russian was something along the lines of a personal triumph. Hmm. Clearly, this was not an ordinary, thirty-year-old male. After he had left with The Idiot and a smoothie in tow, I, another idiot, pinched myself for not inquiring as to whether or not he was picking up on any modern-day political likenesses in The Idiot, especially since we are surrounded by so many (idiots, that is) of late. I wish I had remembered anything about Dostoevsky's Demons (Possessed), his political novel about the rise of nihilism and radical movements (not that I had read it myself) just to impress upon the receptive construction worker the fact that people (or their causes) don't change over time.
The takeaway? 1. Never stereotype. Don't automatically think that construction workers have no interest in Russian authors, or for that matter, in literature, period. There could be an entire movement of literary laborers out there that has simply gone unreported. 2. Don't automatically think that Gen Z isn't book smart just because they seem to prefer their phones over paperbacks. There are always exceptions. 3. Be open to the element of surprise as you never know when or where you may find it. The world is vast and unpredictable because of its inhabitants. And finally, 4., be open to the professorial treasures of the past. Just because they might have emanated from the 1800s doesn't mean they are antiquated. (If today's authors did more close reading of literary classics, their writing would be much better than it is.)
Just sayin'.
#RussianLiterature, #GenZ, #Dostoevsky, #Tolstoy, #blog, #PersonalEssay
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