Caryl Emerson is Emerita Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton. She is also my dearly beloved, indefatigable octogenarian aunt.

Caryl’s fascination with Russian culture dates back to when she was a teenager in the 1950s, a time when most people in the West were even more wary of all things Russian than they are today (or rather, the opposite political camps were). This young girl fell in love: a literature full of “heroic” narratives, artists so severely constrained by totalitarian government that their work could emerge only with startling creativity and courage… a world away from the American entertainment industry, or the British bourgeois novel’s marriage plot.

I’m interested in that story, but the bigger theme I’m chewing on here is why it is so important to engage in deep, immersive reading. In one’s native language or any other. Because it’s hard, and quite different to the interruptible skimming of short-form, mixed audio-visual content that dominates our feeds. If you happen to observe children working to acquire literacy, you remember what a feat that cultural technology really is. Mastering it at all, and then developing it to a level that can sustain the inner universe of a novel.

My actually literary friends may smirk at my naive questions (what even is a novel?), but I really enjoyed this conversation, and I’m glad I captured it. Somewhat to my surprise, Caryl is optimistic about “young” people’s reading habits. She did not give me a short answer to the question of why children should spend their precious time studying foreign languages, or develop the concentration span to read War and Peace. But I am perhaps a little closer to distilling my own, which is the sign of a great teacher at work.

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