“Maybe they should not be. But…ah, allowances must be made, Flora Solomonovna. This is about correcting the injustices that came before. Not all students have had the same opportunities and privileges.” The vice-rector seemed to bear her no ill-will. His beard, tinged yellow from pipe smoke, had a stale, benevolent smell. She left his office promising to help the slower students.
This proved easier in theory than in practice. One pupil in particular, who Florence suspected was the one behind her summons, was a tall, horsily pretty girl named Yulia Larina—a shortcut taker who openly fell asleep in class after exhausting herself at Komsomol meetings and parade rallies. Following the vice-rector’s directive, Florence gave Yulia her last poor dictation with all the corrections written out carefully to help the girl grasp her errors. “There will be a makeup dictation tomorrow after classes,” she suggested. “You will come here to take it, and if you do better on that one, I’ll replace your grade.” But instead of gratitude, the girl offered her only a look of rude boredom. “I have a newspaper meeting tomorrow after class.”
“Then come after that; I will wait.”
“After that, I have to go home and cook dinner. I have two younger brothers. Our mother works two shifts.” In each of these excuses Florence could sense a suppressed but perceptible challenge. It was clear that Yulia had no intention of redoing this dictation, or any other. She expected Florence to raise her grade simply because of her good standing with the administration.
“You’re not the only student with competing priorities,” said Florence. But the following afternoon, she was not sure she’d handled things well. Teachers were little more than university servants, a fact that operators like Yulia intuitively grasped. And so it was no surprise that the next day, in her lecture, Florence lost her nerve.
Among the approved texts for her course she had discovered an excerpt from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi that she was shocked she’d never read before. In it, Twain described the Mississippi River two times: first with the eyes of his youth, as a boy overcome by the river’s colossal beauty, and later with the gaze of a seasoned skipper who knew that a golden sunset portended high morning winds, and that graceful ripples in the tide were messengers of mortal hazards. “No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.” Like a fisherman’s hand, the words had grabbed her with a cold, euphoric shiver. The country she’d come to six years earlier—once so romantic and full of possibility—had become for her full of perilous signals.
Florence felt safe in the understanding that her students were unlikely to draw this connection. But she hoped that, with her help, they might still be touched by the words, enough to contemplate that the optimistic certainty stamped on their faces might one day give way to other forms of knowledge.
“What do you think Twain is really talking about?” she asked them the next afternoon, letting her gaze drift from one set of obedient eyes to another. A pale, literal-minded young man named Alexei raised his hand in the front row. “He is disenchanted with the river because it’s made him lose his eye for beauty.”
“Has it really, though?” She tilted her head as she smiled.
“The quest for knowledge comes with a cost?” murmured a tiny, serious girl Florence had come to think of as “Little Bront?.”
“That’s very good.” Again, Florence looked about encouragingly, waiting for lights to go on in other eyes.
A voice came from the back. “Twain is nostalgic for his own ignorance.” Florence knew this voice well, though she’d never before heard Yulia volunteer an answer. “It’s just anti-progressive, reactionary romanticism,” said the girl, with her usual pointed indifference. Of all the remarks, this was, oddly enough, the most cogent exegesis on the essay so far, enough to confirm for Florence that Yulia’s lackluster work had little to do with her intelligence.
“So you don’t agree that Mark Twain feels he has lost something unique with his new knowledge?”
The other students watched Yulia alertly now. Even Florence could feel her own face contorting into an appeasing grimace, as if to reassure the girl that her view was as welcome as the others’. Only, the “view” Yulia had to offer was hardly her own: “Writers have to depict life in its revolutionary development,” she said confidently, and left it at that. It wasn’t an opinion so much as an incantation—specifically, of Zhdanov’s official statement from the Soviet Writers Congress of ’34. It was a Commandment of a Revealed Truth, and the other students, Florence observed nervously, were all nodding along with it in repentant agreement, as though Yulia were Moses stepping down from Sinai, and they, the shamefaced Hebrews who’d forgotten the Law in their moment of pantheistic abandon. Florence could feel her own advantage slipping. She knew that if she didn’t turn things around, she too would be going the way of the golden calf. “And, indeed, Twain spent his life doing just that,” she said with smooth elision. “He was a revolutionist not only as a writer of stories, but as an anti-imperialist campaigner and a speaker.” And soon Florence found herself launching into a lengthy disquisition on Twain’s attacks on organized religion, his critique of slavery, and even his swipes at monarchy through the figures of satiric characters like the duke and the king—drawing from the information she had read in the institute-approved Introduction to English Authors. And she continued in this vein even as class time ran out and the bell rang, adding bits and pieces of her own knowledge, about Twain’s rage over America’s brutal imperialist seizure of the Philippines, while her students, looking around with shy embarrassment, packed up their notebooks. “Our final dictation will be next week. Those of you who plan to make up previous ones should see me after class,” she called with ear-splitting congeniality as they filed out. But Yulia was not among those who lingered to take advantage of this indulgence.