Likes Seville and the Atlantic. Likes Philip in the Mediterranean.

Transcript context

…Much of that is a theme in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, right? The passivity of people, denunciations, the logic of decentralized control. Yes. I read Grossman later. Remember, I’m an ignoramus like most graduate students, but even more so because I don’t know any Russian history. I have no Russian history training. I’m learning the Russian alphabet. I don’t have that deep and rich feel for the place that I would only develop later on by reading Life and Fate and much else, everything that Vasily Grossman wrote. What I had was French history. I had the Annales school, the Annales school founded by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in the ’20s. The journal was called Annales, and it was known as the Annales school. Fernand Braudel became one of the most famous proponents of the school, although Pierre Chaunu I prefer much more. I like Chaunu’s Seville and the Atlantic much more than I like Braudel’s Philip in the Mediterranean. Febvre was my favorite by far, and unlike Bloch, Febvre decided to continue to publish during the Vichy days. Bloch went into the resistance and was eventually killed. Febvre had the whiff of that Schauspieler, that actor in the Mephisto, a movie that I was talking about. Anyway, it’s this fabulous historical eruption that comes from the French. What they do is, they do total history, meaning they take a place, they go into the judicial archives, which record daily life, and they do economy, society, culture, and politics all rolled into one. So, that’s what I decided to do, but in the Soviet case. I became the first case study of any Soviet place based upon archival material with this Magnetic Mountain project. But I did it Annales school–style, splicing in the theories of micropower and micro-politics from Foucault and de Certeau. I start learning the Russian alphabet as a PhD student at Berkeley instead of taking my exam. I had this professor, Sergei Kasatkin, an émigré who was well on in years, probably 70s, maybe even older — I never asked him — who had immigrated in the civil war in 1919–20 out through Harbin, and then became an orientalist. He wrote a Mongol-Mongol dictionary — not a Mongol-Russian but Mongol-Mongol dictionary. Knew Chinese, knew Japanese, worked for British intelligence in World War II. He ends up at the end of life, or later days at Berkeley, teaching intensive Russian for beginners. I took Russian two hours a day, five days a week with a tiny number of other students in Sergei Kasatkin’s classroom, so that’s my level of understanding. Vasily Grossman is very far at that point. I’m trying to figure out how gerunds work, how the past tense works, how you use verbs in Russian, which are very different. Russian is much closer to ancient Greek than it is to English in its grammar and some of the behavior of the language. Mastering that, and then getting on a plane, and Gorbachev comes into power, and I have to do PhD research. Then I finished this, and four years later, I’m an assistant professor of Russian Soviet history at Princeton University. This is like some kind of fantasy dystopia. Talk about novels — this is just unimaginable. hed this, and four years later, I’m an assistant professor of Russian Soviet history at Princeton University. This is like some kind of fantasy dystopia. Talk about novels — this is just unimaginable. I don’t even know if a novelist could have imagined this life. Then I have to backfill, and I have to start reading the Bulgakov, and I have to start reading the Grossman, and of course, I have to read them in the original Russian now, so I don’t read them in translation. I don’t go through the point where I read them in translation when I was a kid, and now I’m a professional at reading them. The first time I ever read them was Russian language, just like I read Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting after I learned Czech. It was part of my Czech language training at Berkeley. I studied Czech before Russian because I did Habsburg history. All the backfill. I discovered this amazing ancient civilization with all of these layers, like music and graphic arts and literature and poetry and theater. That was a bonus. I had gone into this only because it was a problem of how power works and the connection between geopolitics, institutions, daily life, ideas, and I discovered a world that I had not appreciated, not even anticipated. Okay, sure, I wasn’t totally ignorant in the way that maybe I’m portraying it. I was predominantly ignorant, so I’m not exaggerating my ignorance here, but it was deep. I had studied European intellectual history at University of Rochester as an undergraduate, so I knew the German, the French, British, some Italian stuff. I studied German and French languages as an undergraduate, so I was not a complete unwashed ignoramus, but Russia was a world that I would only discover later, and it was a stroke of luck.…

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