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As a scholar and reader of literature, I have never seen books as divorced from the present or from our subjective experiences. Books are personal. The subjective intimacy that emerges out of reading is such that books grow part of who we are. When we reenter the same book, we hark back to earlier selves that preserve aspects of who we were. As a scholar of literature, I inevitably find myself reentering the same literary universes over and over, with visitations from past selves in the margins, bemusing in their enthusiasm, insight, and the occasional pedestrian underlining. However historically removed from the present, literature speaks directly to our present personal and geopolitical realities. As a person who doesn't keep a diary, I find some of my most pointed personal opinions in the margins of books. I see my own past memorialized in those margins, while my realities speak back to the text, confronting the urgency of the past with the sometimes-louder urgency of the present.
For me, the current Russian violence in Ukraine has been howling loudly at the pages and margins of Fyodor Dostoevsky ever since February 24, 2022. Many of his words denounce his other words, in an excruciating cacophony of voices that shows no signs of coming to a reconciliation. Some Dostoevsky passages may seem to enshrine Russian nationalism and greatness," furthering the Russian governments pernicious global and political agendas, while others morally shake us to the point of recoiling from everything that's happened and continues to happen in Ukraine. Reading Dostoevsky now, I find myself furious with parts of his writings, processing the world through Dostoevsky and yet also knowing many of his ideas have been made complicit in what is happening. And this, all the while coming into direct confrontation with the me in the margins who read Dostoevsky ten or twenty years ago, the me who became a scholar because of Dostoevsky.
Twenty years ago, Dostoevsky was at the center of my own liberal arts journey as a student. I've written primarily about Tolstoy in my scholarly career, but studying Dostoevsky is how I learned to become a scholar in the first place. Dostoevsky helped me be the version of myself that wouldn't be complete without my scholarly identity;...