Professor of Russian Priscilla Meyer’s was recently awarded the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic for her recent book, How the Russians Read the French. The monograph, which is the culmination of a ten-year project, discusses the use of French literature and culture in defining the Russian writer.
Argus: What sparked your idea for this book?
Priscilla Meyer: I began co-teaching a course. We were teaching Madame Bovary with Anna Karenina. I noticed several features from one showed in translation from the other. The nugget of an idea for the book began with this: in Madame Bovary the heroine takes a coach from her village to meet her lover in Rouen. That’s the vehicle that allows her adulterous affair. A ragged and bleeding peasant jumps on and grotesquely sings merry songs about love in May. In Anna Karenina, the heroine arrives in Moscow on a train and meets the man with whom she has an adulterous affair. Each of the heroines dreams of a ragged peasant who says something grotesque, and in French. I thought “ah ha”—Tolstoy is responding to the work of Flaubert.
A: How did this idea develop into How the Russians Read the French?
PM: When I looked into it, I began to see into the creative process of the writer. You begin to see glimmers of what the writer was reading. Fyodor Dostoyevsky read lots of Balzac, and there is a connection between Crime and Punishment and Père Goriot. Dostoyevsky incorporated ideas and details from it and many other French novels into Crime and Punishment as a way of arguing with them, as if to say “you French have it all wrong. It’s really like this.” The Russians articulate in their novels what they consider to be the moral meaning of existence. Their interpretation of the French material is that their understanding of the meaning of life, their loss of faith in God, makes their tales trivial; the Russian writers argue with the attitude they see to be conveyed in French realist fiction.
A: Which language did you begin with, French or Russian?
PM: My parents were Francophiles and I had taken French in school. I rebelled against the idea of French elegance. I wanted to explore a completely different kind of world, and Russian language and culture presented a different world from my 17 year old point of view.
A: How did this interest in Russian bring you to Wesleyan?
PM: I started studying Russian at UC Berkeley. As a scholar, you could only get to Russia in those days if you were writing a PhD dissertation. I applied, but there were a total of 25 slots for United States scholars to go to the Soviet Union. I arrived at Wesleyan in the fall of 1968, and in the summer of 1970 I took a dozen Wesleyan students to Moscow on a language study program for foreign students. When I first came to Wesleyan, I co-taught a course on the French and Russian novel, which led to an article on the relationship of Anna Karenina to Madame Bovary, Balzac’s Father Goriot to Crime and Punishment, and Lermontov’s response to Western European Romanticism in A Hero of Our Time.
A: How has your work in the classroom influenced your writing?
PM: In my courses I begin from the details of a text, to accumulate motifs, parallelisms, various kinds of patterning, references to other literature, in order to get to the larger levels of meaning of a text. Writers of artistic prose work with words and images in articulating their vision—otherwise they could simply write an essay.