To know Russia, know its classic novels

Caryl Emerson has made more than 40 trips to Russia and Eastern Europe, most of them under cold war conditions. A professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Princeton University, Dr. Emerson teaches courses on 19th-century Russian novels, including Alexander Pushkin's classic in verse, "Eugene Onegin"; Leo Tolstoy's epic, "War and Peace"; and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's psychological thriller, "Crime and Punishment."

A conviction that "kids ought to have better teachers earlier" prompted Emerson to start her career teaching Russian at the secondary-school level.

When she found that there wasn't a large demand for Russian in high schools, she earned a PhD and eventually found a home at Princeton in New Jersey, where she has taught for most of her career.

Although her small department attracts only a few majors every year, Emerson has forged a reputation as one of the university's most compelling lecturers, and her classes attract students from a variety of disciplines. Last fall she was asked to address the student body in a ceremony commemorating the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Throughout her career, which has spanned nearly four decades, teaching undergraduates has remained Emerson's true passion. She subtly weaves profound philosophical thinking into each of her lectures, and sparks lively debate in small-group discussions.

When her students connect with 19th-century texts in a personal way - and leave her courses thinking more deeply about their own lives - she believes she's done justice to the texts she has studied with such devotion.

Excerpts from her recent conversation with the Monitor follow.

On what sparked an interest in Russia:

I went on a trip to the Soviet Union with my grandmother in 1956. That was three years after Stalin died, and it was a very gray and scary country at the time.

We were carefully watched, and this was very exciting to me because I was the sort of adolescent who felt that America had too many freedoms, and that we were taking most of them for granted. I felt that studying a country that was politically unfree gave me a better - and less voyeuristic - position as a student of it.

If you study a wholly free country, then you are simply a tourist. Then in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, when I was teaching and taking groups overseas, we really could do valuable things for the [Russian] culture: take documents out of the country, establish contacts with writers and dissident groups.

It was dangerous, but also exciting. I was fascinated by some of the hardships there.

On the resonance of 19th-century texts for 21st-century students:

Russian literature is one of those that, although grounded well in its own experience, is universal.

What's going on inside the heads of these Dostoyevskian and Tolstoyan heroes are questions of happiness, personal morality, virtue - and there's no human alive who doesn't worry about those questions.

Novels are wonderful conduits for philosophy. Philosophical thought doesn't often grab you as a personal investment until you have some sort of fictional plot wrapped around it. But if we can identify with a character who is living out the results of a moral choice, or a moral quest, then we feel threatened. The voice of your conscience begins to speak up, and you feel you must respond.

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