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EVERY life takes place in contexts, and each life has a narrative. This tribute to Dan Davidson, ADFL's honoree in 1997 as an outstanding educator, uses contexts and narratives to establish the rich merits of Dan's award. One context included here is the rise of Russian-language study in the post- Sputnik era, a period that may be dated from the late 1950s through the 1960s. A second contextis Dan's use of this earlier dynamism to expand Russian studies throughout the nation and then to forge ties between Russianists in the United States and Russia itself—an ever-growing enterprise that began in the 1970s and that, greatly enlarged, continues today. Much of the narrative relates my life in a profession on which Dan has exerted an extraordinary influence. To temper the solipsism, I would ask the reader to multiply my story many hundreds of times in order to appreciate the dimensions of Dan's impact on Russian-language programs in this country, as well as the increasingly global character of Dan's endeavors as an ambassador whom we have posted to the Russophone world. Finally, context and narrative come together in this essay's attempt to locate in Russian literature the inspiration for Dan's activities and for our profession's.
Boris Pasternak, on whom Dan Davidson has done important scholarship, writes beautifully of the profound interconnectedness that links us to ourselves, to one another, to the universe, and to an indeterminable divinity:
Every motion in the world taken separately was calculated and purposeful, but, taken together, they were spontaneously intoxicated with the general stream of life which united them all. People worked and struggled, each set in motion by the mechanism of their own cares. But the mechanisms would not have worked properly had they not been regulated and governed by a higher sense of an ultimate freedom from care. This freedom came from the feeling that all human lives were interrelated, a certainty that they flowed into each other—a happy feeling that all events took place not only on the earth, in which the dead are buried, but also in some other region which some called the Kingdom of God, others history, and still others by some other name.
(13)
We can view Pasternak as continuing here Russian literature's visionary effort to fulfill, in every sphere of life, the precise linguistic sense of the word religion —a religation or rebinding of what had once been whole and then had gotten separated. One thinks of Pierre Bezukhov's ecstatic announcement in War and Peace of our place in the web of worlds: “We must live, we must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on this scrap of earth, but we have lived and shall live forever, there, in the whole.” Appropriately, nature endorses Pierre's vision, as the water around him whispers, “It is true, believe it” (Tolstoy 340). Then, in keeping with the dense intertextuality of Russian literature, Dostoevsky's Father Zosima preaches that “all things flow and blend, a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth.” 1 Almost like the famous three tenors of today, Yurii Zhivago and Pierre Bezukhov join Father Zosima in the latter's hymn to being, “It's all like an ocean, I tell you” (299).
When I first experienced those fictive moments some four decades ago—in translation, several years before I learned my first word of Russian—I couldn't have foreseen how closely my life would be bound up with these great writers, with their grand language, and with the often unhappy homeland that nevertheless shaped their happy art. Although Pasternak, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky need no further encomiums, let me immodestly suggest that the direction of my life since I first read their works demonstrates their prophetic vision. It has been a wondrously good life in a wondrously good profession, one in which, year after year, students and I harvest Russian literature's almost scriptural wisdom. In a practical vein, my life experience could be helpful to us in our roles as academic advisors: we can counsel students to be less anxious about their futures, pursue their “bliss,” as Joseph Campbell like to advise students (147). No less an authority than Mikhail Bulgakov's Woland comforts a distressed Master and Margarita by assuring them of a providential cosmic design: “All will be as it should; that is how the world is made” (370).
As I was preparing remarks for this wonderful honor to Dan Davidson, my thoughts on Russian literature's testimony to life's benign patterns focused on the nexus of people and energy that we call ACTR (the American Council of Teachers of Russian). Please allow me to be autobiographical for just a little while longer. I promise in due time to “go global”—in a manner befitting Bulgakov, Pasternak, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and ACTR.
In 1964 I was fresh from the United States Army's Russian-language program at Monterey, California. Certified to teach in the Maryland public schools, I was invited to teach Russian in Baltimore County. I was terrified. Desperately looking for colleagues, I contacted the teacher of Russian at the Friends School in Baltimore. That person turned out to be Claire Walker, who a decade later would become one of the founding spirits of ACTR. Claire counseled me and invited my students and me to participate in Russian extracurricular activities at the Friends School. (Zita Dabars, Claire's successor as the teacher of Russian at the Friends School, now shares with me the pleasant duty of honoring Dan—“all things flow and blend.”)
In 1973, after the MA and PhD training, I found myself in a young Russian-language program at Grinnell College, in Grinnell, Iowa. Again I was terrified. When the dean indicated that an outside consultant should assess our program's needs, he accepted my suggestion that Claire Walker serve as our reviewer. After her visit to our campus, Claire wrote a report containing ideas that, when implemented, served our department very well for years to come. In Claire's view, we needed to bring Russian reality to Iowa, and toward this end our administration funded her proposal that we grant paraprofessional teaching assistantships to children of the émigrés streaming from the Soviet Union to the United States in the 1970s. So that our students could be transported to Russian reality in the Soviet Union, Claire urged us to become affiliated with a new organization, ACTR, that was about to institute programs of language study in Russia, a country with which the United States was then virtually at war and that accordingly offered few study opportunities at the time to American undergraduates.
At this point Dan Davidson, the founder of ACTR, enters the picture, and my story goes global. In that period of cold war and of a correspondingly gelid Soviet bureaucracy, how did Dan part the Iron Curtain and begin Russia-based study programs that would allow hundreds and then thousands of young Americans to live and breathe the language in its motherland, to have access to the cultural and spiritual wealth of that land? I can only imagine—no, I can't imagine—yes, you and I can imagine the charisma, charm, dedication, deftness, and zeal with which Dan negotiated with the Soviets in the mid-1970s. We should only hope that the people currently in charge of our negotiations in the Balkans and Iraq possess the same winning qualities. Dan and ACTR truly caused all things to flow and connect with each other in the academic traffic between the United States and Russia.
The initial trickle of outbound students became a stream, and the stream then became a river. When definitive histories of glasnost and perestroika are written, we may learn about the effects Western exchange students exercised on Soviet elites. We must remember that after the death of Lenin and the fall from grace of the first Bolsheviks, Soviet leadership cadres—from Stalin through Gorbachev—had little firsthand knowledge of the West. In this connection, we can almost find a symbolic significance in the friendship between a young Czech and Gorbachev when the two were students at Moscow State University in the early 1950s. The Czech, Zdeněk Mlynář went on to play an important role in the Prague Spring, and Gorbachev later caused the walls of totalitarian Russia to come tumbling down, notwithstanding the faults that political scientists and his fellow citizens attribute to him. Mlynář may not have directly assisted in the birth of Russia's reshaping, but historians cannot easily trace the effects of late-night dormitory discussions, often the best parts of educational exchanges (Remnick 158–59). The seven thousand American students whom ACTR has sponsored in the Soviet Union and its successor states since 1976 must surely have befriended and positively influenced several thousand people there who now occupy middle-level positions in the public and private sectors as the region undergoes a change that much resembles Europe's transition from the medieval to the modern. As Russia painfully builds a new political culture, the presence of educated Americans is indispensable, not least to demonstrate to Russians that America exports more than cosmetics, cigarettes, booze, and car-chase movies. Without Dan and ACTR, these forays of our young people into geopolitics would have been unimaginable. Father Zosima, with his profound belief that “a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth,” would be pleased by this intercontinental cultural flow and blending.
Of course, that river carries its cargo of bright people in both directions. During the cold war Russian departments everywhere in the United States benefited enormously from ACTR-sponsored curricular consultants from Soviet institutes and universities. Dan and ACTR moved deftly and quickly to bring students in the former Soviet Union to our educational institutions when glasnost and perestroika made such an initiative possible. As of the end of 1997, the organization had placed nineteen thousand inbound students in American schools, colleges, and universities. Over the past decade Grinnell College has hosted fifty ACTR-sponsored students from the Russian State Pedagogical University in Saint Petersburg. In the occasional times in my professional life marked by uncertainty of purpose and ambiguity of results, I take solace in the absolute success of this exchange, the perfect symbiosis by which the college has helped these students and they have enriched our community. To pay tribute to ACTR's selection process, I will paraphrase Garrison Kiellor and say that all the women have been strong, all the men good-looking, and every one of them above average. The vast majority of those nineteen thousand students will be important shapers of political culture across Eurasia in the first decades of the new millennium: the work of our organization again flows from the classroom to a continent. These young people will bring to their task of culture formation whatever they choose to adopt from the methodical madness of our campuses—our styles of nondeference, nonhierarchy, discord amid inclusion, and discourse amid exclusion.
In this era of deconstructing noble schemes, of seeing furtive colonialism and masked power in the machinery of good works, we might detect a strong whiff of imperialism in the outreach of ACTR to the former Soviet Union. While we should always be wary of the colonizing dangers in any teaching-learning transaction, I see in Dan's endeavors and ours a laudable reach toward the global community, away from local, parochial, and narrowly nationalistic loyalities. Since traffic on ACTR's river runs in two directions, the youth in both global regions gain access to world citizenship. In her fine new book Cultivating Humanity , Martha Nussbaum cites Diogenes to argue that foreign language acquisition and the embrace of other cultures enable us to appreciate “what is deep and shallow in our own ways” and to realize that “the only real community is one that embraces the entire world.” Returning to the ancient world for lessons useful in our seemingly different postmodernity, Nussbaum finds in Seneca a description of the richest dividend of a successful education: the ability to journey from the community “to which we have been assigned by birth” to “one that is truly great and truly common […] in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun” (58). Diogenes and Seneca and Zosima speak, therefore, of a flowing interconnectedness of people across a web of time and space. All three sages would view the study of foreign languages and cultures as the most practical form of education. Interestingly, the Greek and Roman philosophers and the Russian monk occupy varying points in the realms of being imagined by Pasternak—earth, history, and heaven.
History, the realm in which we as scholars and citizens are most at home, asks an urgent question about Russia—namely, to what degree does it share values with the western European and North Atlantic communities? Academic and policy-making circles here and in Russia are now attending to Samuel Huntington's claim that there can be no broad and deep cooperation between the peoples on either side of a shaky fault line in world civilization, the one dividing Europe's Latin West from its Orthodox East (158–63). However, by transporting highly educated individuals back and forth across that line, Dan and our organization join in the deliberations of thoughtful Russians who, for almost three centuries, have contemplated the accidents of geography and history that fostered different ways of life on either side of the line.
To play a favorite game of historical speculation, what if there had been an easily navigable waterway flowing between Russia and the West? Topography dictates cultural development, and my fanciful east-west river would have crucially changed Russian history, which was shaped by the uniformly north-south flow of the rivers linking early Russia with Byzantium and not with the West and its seed city, Rome. To be sure, projects designed to alter the direction of rivers bring to mind the Promethean excesses of Soviet power. Yet I would contend that Dan and ACTR have created such a river, and we are all working to broaden and deepen it, so that “all things flow and blend.”
That is no mean feat, Professor Davidson. The humanistic voices of Russian literature urge Dan on in this life-giving task, as do the members of ACTR.
The author is Professor of Russian at Grinnell College. This article is based on his presentation in a session honoring Dan Davidson at the 1997 MLA convention in Toronto, Ontario.
1 I have made a change in the translation of this passage, rendering Bce Teyet N conpuNkacaetcR “all things flow and blend” instead of as “all is flowing and blending.”
Butgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita . New York: Meridian, 1993.
Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth . New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov . New York: Norton, 1976.
Huntingdon, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order . New York: Simon, 1996.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
Pasternak, Boris. Doctor Zhivago . New York: Pantheon, 1958.
Remnick, David. Lenins Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire . New York: Random, 1993.
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace . New York: Norton, 1966.
© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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