MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Yesterday was Luba Golburt’s presentation on Pushkin and the Historical Novel with the Stanford Working Group on the Novel. It was so great! I learned a lot about minor characters. The Working Group is co-organized by Alex Woloch, director of the Center for the Study of the Novel and author of an interesting book on minor characters, which my former classmate Na’ama Rokem gave me for my birthday in 2005.

Alex Woloch The One vs. the Many	Ilya Bernstein Self-Portrait entelechy: mind & culture

I recently realized that Alex Woloch and I are further connected, like two minor characters in the Bildung of some romantic monster, through the central life-problem of the magazine n+1.

In 2005, n+1 presented a “dramatic reading” of my piece “Babel in California” at the National Arts Club, where the first-person/ female parts were read by the writer and copy-editor Emily Votruba, and the male parts (including the voice of Isaac Babel) were read by the poet and translator Ilya Bernstein. I was unfortunately unable to attend the reading because I was in California, but a friend later reported to me on Bernstein’s impressive delivery and “amazing, sepulchral” voice, which had evidently emanated, to wonderful effect, from a body that looked like it had been “riding the train all night from Bulgaria” to get to the National Arts Club. (I think this description was probably more vivid than accurate… although n+1 has long been valued highly by connoisseurs of “slightly rumpled charm” (and also of Sad Young Literary Men).

Two years later, at the n+1 party in September 2007, I was very happy to make the acquaintance of Ilya Bernstein, who shortly afterwards emailed me an extremely entertaining excerpt from his unpublished autobiographical novel, Scenes from the Drama of My Life in College, about his undergraduate days at Columbia. Scenes includes such exchanges as the following:

“Talk,” said Ferdinand, “and I will listen.”

“I like you,” I said, “because you sometimes look tragic.”

“Why not?” said Ferdinand. “Soon, both of us will be dead.”

Now, guess who the real-life prototype for Ferdinand was? That’s right: Alex Woloch, current director of Stanford’s Center for the Study of the Novel, and author of a well-received book on minor characters!

If you liked the above three lines from Scenes from the Drama, here is what you will love: The Year in Review, which appeared earlier this month on n+1’s underappreciated website. Ferdinand makes several appearances. For example:

I rubbed my chin and Ferdinand scratched his forehead.

It was my third philosophy lecture of the day and I was impatient for the action to begin.

Or:

“Let’s discuss James Joyce,” Ferdinand said.

I was eager to share my views on this great writer.

Or, my favorite:

Time was flying. Cold days started coming one after the other. My life was becoming wrinkled, like the surface of a lake on a windy day.

Ferdinand paced up and down his room, squeezing the receiver in one hand and making wrathful gestures with the other.

Lying in the dark under the covers, my mind drifted back to my mysterious past.

To be continued…

Tags: academic life, comparative literature, Luba Golburt, n+1, Pushkin, Stanford

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