Teaching & Learning Russian in America

A Look Back to Look Ahead

By Bob Blaisdell

What has changed about Russian studies in the United States? After I reviewed the excellent memoir I Outlived the Bastards: A Memoir of Escaping Russia and Discovering America (published here on Sept. 22) by Albert Parry (originally Abram Paretzky), I was curious enough about him to read his 1967 history, America Learns Russian (Syracuse University Press, 1967). Though he was a professor of Russian at Colgate University, Parry doesn’t limit his survey to university teaching (and learning). He begins with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian Alaska, where he recounts the too common story of invasive cultures: “the Russian invaders wanted the efficient, skillful and productive labor of the very people they were enslaving and decimating.”

He appreciates, on the other hand, the Russians’ marvelous linguistic dexterity and those orthodox priests who were exceptional and kindly teachers, among them Father Ioann Veniaminov, who in 1833, at the age of 27, arrived in Alaska. “He brought not only his wife and son, his vestments, and his many books, not only his scientific instruments, his tools and his household effects, but even his mother and his brother. He traveled the numerous islands of his far-flung parish, learning the language of the Aleuts, acquainting himself with their troubles, and teaching Russian to the tribesmen.”

At Fort Ross, on the coast north of San Francisco, as the St. Petersburg-based “Russian-American Company” established trade, the Russian merchants learned the pre-statehood Spanish. After the Russians’ withdrawal from California and, in 1869, the sale of Alaska to the U.S., the seeds of Russian-learning on the continent sprouted very slowly or withered. Parry can practically name all of the American scholars and language-wizards who took up Russian before 1900, among them the future president John Quincy Adams, James McNeill Whistler (yes, the great painter) and Isabel Florence Hapgood, who would eventually translate dozens of soon-to-be Russian classics.

I’m embarrassed to note that one nineteenth-century aficionado of Russian, James Gates Percival, reminds me of me:

He “dabbled long in Russian language and literature” without becoming truly professional about his considerable effort. … He remained too much of a lone researcher and writer, proceeding in his own haphazard way.

Parry, having been a journalist in Russian and in English, was an expert researcher. He himself did not pursue teaching as much as it pursued him, but, as with all of his projects, shortly after Colgate University hired him, he threw his energy into the job, and established a Russian Studies Program there in 1947. He was sympathetic to students and understood and acknowledged the language’s challenges for Americans, which acknowledgement proved controversial: “Some colleagues of the present writer have objected strenuously when he has publicly spoken and written of the difficulty of the Russian language.”

Before World War I, university teaching of Russian took root in tiny (sometimes one-person) patches at, among a few others places, Dartmouth (which purportedly was the first Russian language program in a US college), Harvard, U.C. Berkeley and the University of Chicago. Because of the war and pogroms, hundreds of thousands of speakers of Russian arrived as immigrants to North America, but only rarely did colleges, much less high schools, offer Russian as a foreign language. Even when Russian courses were available before World War II, there were practically only handfuls of students attaining proficiency. Parry quotes Professor George Rapall Noyes: “During the years before the First World War … serious interest in Russian life and above all in the grotesque and unpronounceable Russian language, was accounted something freakish, the mark of an eccentric, almost unbalanced mind.”

Parry quotes a longtime instructor of Russian at Columbia about how her classes were in 1921, which were, she said, “very much like those of 1946: people enrolled to learn Russian for all sorts of reasons, and many had no serious purpose whatever.” In 1940, there were only three universities offering Ph.D.s in Slavic languages, and “scarcely more than twenty such doctorates had been granted.” The biggest boon to Russian studies in the U.S. was the Soviet space program’s Sputnik.

“October 4, 1957, [was] the day when Sputnik went into orbit and took Russian studies with it; overnight Russian became a ‘hot’ academic property,” writes another professor who was teaching in a state university at the time.

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I began studying Russian when I was forty-five and on a sabbatical from my teaching of English at the City University of New York’s Kingsborough Community College. My friend had started studying Russian at about that age, so I thought I could handle it too. I was fooled by my friend’s rapid progress and by my hero Lev Tolstoy (a genius), who could learn a language in a few months by picking up a copy of the New Testament in that language. I studied Russian like mad, but I only made perceptible progress when I spent weeks at a shot with tutors in New York, St. Petersburg, Santa Barbara, and at Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana.

I picked up Parry’s America Learns Russian in the Butler Library stacks at Columbia, where I found another treasure on the same shelf, also almost never having been checked out, Teaching, Learning, Acquiring Russian, edited by Sophia Lubensky and Donald K. Jarvis (Slavica 1984). Reading the three dozen articles was often like reading my tutors’ confidential reports to one another: What’s wrong with this guy? He studies hard, but he’s dim about so many fundamentals of intonation, stress, grammar!

The essays and talks in Teaching, Learning, Acquiring Russian reflect the challenges my colleagues and I have teaching English to non-native speakers. One reason for that, explains Deborah A. Garretson, of Dartmouth, is “the study of foreign language involves a deep-seated affective dimension, and demands a self-exposure and threat to self-esteem that is more apparent and more critical for success than in many other learning and cognitive activities. It involves, as language in general involves, many aspects of the individual’s personality.”

Thomas F. Manger, of Pennsylvania State University, reflected in 1982 that “Foreign languages have never had a secure place in American institutions of higher education.” He rued that “the American suspicion of bilingualism is pervasive and is reflected in the half-hearted diversion of resources for the teaching of foreign languages.”

The history of Russian-learning in the United States since the 1960s needs to be written by someone as informed and deft as Albert Parry. It’s easy to ask for this, but I swear I would be an eager reader!

In the meantime, what’s the story, what are the challenges and pleasures for you, Russian Life’s readers, of teaching or studying Russian in North American college programs? If you’re in a graduate program, what are your prospects for a job? SUNY Albany’s Alex M. Shane, writing in the early 1980s, observed: “employment opportunities at the high school and junior college level are almost non-existent … At the college and university level there are approximately 15 to 25 advertised language teaching positions per year for which the doctoral degree is prerequisite.” (I came out onto the job market in 1988, one of, I’m guessing, 998 recipients of brand-new English doctorate degrees, with openings for about three tenure-track teaching jobs.)

Is studying Russian in a graduate program similar to how it was for the students in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, when it was “viewed in general as personal self-fulfillment and intellectual achievement only peripherally related to career placement”? In this era of A.I., who or what values Russian-language proficiency?

Parry quotes the eighteenth-century polymath Mikhail Lomonosov, who “found in Russian ‘the splendor of Spanish, the vivacity of French, the strength of German, the tenderness of Italian, and the richness and brevity of Greek and Latin.’” I’ll toast to that.

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