Russian Native Speakers — Again

Henry James’ “The Real Thing” presents an English couple that, all in all, seem to be. in all visible details, the very perfect, cultured English couple. They are the real thing — more than the real thing itself, which inevitably comes with unwanted blemishes — and they are looking for an artist who might hire them for the illustrations to a novel, or, say, a Henry James short story. Problem is, they are impoverished, and in “real fact” the only thing they are good at is sitting still for long, long periods of time, with great patience. Well, they do find an artist who might need a model. There is, however, a kind of emptiness underneath the surface that the artist tires of, and, by the end of the story, when the English couple is begging the artist to hire them as cook and cleaning lady, the facade has crumbled, and the artist is wracking his brains for a polite way to tell them to get out of his studio.
Well, now, there are tens and tens of millions of Russians who ‘speak’ Russian, more or less, and would love to ‘teach’ Russian to people who will pay them for the honor of learning at their feet; problem is, they haven’t anything but their idiolect. Russian to them is a tissue of memorized lines from Pushkin whose history they never learned, banter from bad movies, a welter of off-color stories, and the emptiness of never really having learned their own history. I speak, mind you, of Russians born around 1980, with no noble ties to relatives across the pond, no advanced education, Russians who never endured the blockade of Leningrad, who never wrote Brezhnev an angry letter, who never were transported by the Nazis from Kiev to Heidelberg as slave labor.
But even the many Russians I know and respect for their experiences, their learning, their humility before a terrific past they knew — or, by their youth, never came to know — talented Russians, hard-working, self-sacrificing, literate beyong the lights of Americans their age and experience — even these enviable individuals, with all their credentials, are not fit to teach Russian. You have to be trained for that, and many’s the golden heart who hates teaching language (although she won’t admit it even to herself) and so botches it.
The term ‘native speaker’ was very much in vogue when I was in graduate school, and my school had the enlightened notion that we students would have contact with native speakers whose role was to get us talking, not, themselves, to tell us about the language we were learning. We met an hour or two a week with various Russians, and they were a lot of fun. We worked hard at figuring out how to learn the sorts of things they did when speaking: techniques of telling a story, intonational patterns of ‘contemporary standard Russian,’ and the like. When I studied Czech, my instructor was, to be sure, a native speaker herself, but she was also a scholar and had been the Czech wife of Jakobson, so she was an exception to the rule. When in our second term of Czech we had an ‘informant’ whose speech differed a lot from hers, she waved her hand and told us, dismissively, that he was a “Moravian.” She was great, and well known in Soviet Czechoslovakia, but perhaps a bit too emotionally tied to her subject. In 1968, when the Warsaw Pact army invaded the country and the liberalization of the Prague Spring had been quashed, she was never the same again. I do admit she was an exception, and a fairly decent teacher of her own language.
But when I took Serbo-Croatian the next year I met some real professionals. Professor Lord, a specialist in the oral epic, had written the grammar book himself, and it was a model of precision. His associate was a passionate oral-epic man, and he, too, was perfect in the classroom. The class was exposed to a Serbian speaker one semester, and a Croatian the next. When we met the Croatian with our newly-formed Serbian accents, telling him we wanted to speak “српски,” we were not shocked, but interested, to learn that he spoken only Croatian, “a totally different and much more cultivated tongue,” written in Roman letters and Roman Catholic in religion. Today in these nationalistic times there are actually three languages carved out of the one we learned in the days of Tito.
Yes, you need a native speaker or your language learning is for naught. You need her for testing whether she accepts as good Russian the phrases you make up. You need her to read paragraphs out loud for your to record. You need her to tell you her background so that you can learn where she grew up and where she studied.
And at Tulane it is our great good fortune to have lots of Russians about here and there, some of whom will be eager to help. If they say they can ‘teach’ you ‘some Russian,” take it cum grano salis, but if they will talk some Russian with you, that’s better still.
gmc