Hitler's Argument and The Name of the Book

Dear Students,

When Fred Starr was provost at Tulane, he put a clipping on the bulletin board across from the French department. It was an excerpt from Hitler’s memoir, Mein Kampf. In a rambling paragraph Hitler deplored the many wasted hours German schoolboys and girls spend diligently and vainly studying other languages, when German is the only language needed anyway. The time would be so much better spent in ideological battle, I think the argument went on to claim. For Fred it was an argument in reverse persuasion, of course: Hitler was talking like so many American businessmen of the past century. Why learn Japanese? Takes forever, I won’t get it right, and they have to learn English anyway, the language of power. Sounds like what Hitler was saying. And you know, the power-broker Americans of the mid-twentieth century had a despicable ignorance of minority languages, especially Asian languages, not to mention Arabic, Indic languages, African languages, native American languages. And they nourished an unhealthy disdain for them and for the cultures they represent, the ugly disdain born of ignorance.
So many of your generation, by happy contrast with my parents’ and mine, now don’t talk like the CEOs of General Motors. You, unlike us in our day, know how essential a fluency in a foreign language is and how incalculably valuable it is. You wouldn’t be continuing with Russian in 203 (by the way, that’s the name of an excellent second-year textbook, “Continuing with Russian) if this weren’t so, and some of you in 203 sincerely want to get fluent in it (makes me want to return to my holy vow of Russian-only, at least out of my mouth). This can only be good.
I remember my first ‘language’ textbook in high school; it was a Latin grammar handbook, entitled “Latin for Americans.” It was a naive title that I was ashamed of. I much preferred the conservative, staid cover of “Third Year Latin,” with its smug certainty of what ‘third year’ should be and its glossy pages, with lists of recondite tropes and syntactic constructions. It’s hard to find a really catchy title for a beginning language book. A group of very bright female Slavists called their Czech textbook “Czech the Game,” Čeština hrou, less catchily translated as “Czech for Fun.” Wanna bet it’s not fun? Some female Czech teachers of the 80’s gave their book the disaffecting title “Czech for Foreigners.” Foreigners? Perhaps because in that day only people who were working in the country had perforce to study it as a ‘foreign language’, hence the title.
My old Russian professor in college, who was a profoundly stupid person in most students’ opinion, gave his book the title “Basic Russian,” which we felt insulting. Are we “basic people”? Do we speak “basic English”? My Harvard prof called his “Fundamentals of Russian.” It had no pictures, no realia, no jokes, no texts. Just sample phrases and all the morphology of the language. In its time I would use it as a textbook at Tulane, because it was such a good reference; I supplemented it with my own texts. One of the most popular texts of the mid-70s and 80s, up to the fall of the CCCP, was “Russian for Everybody.” This seems disingenuous, since Russian is not for everybody, so how should this book present it so?
The communicative textbooks of today, with their glossy cyberwise realia and their page setups, suspiciously more redolent of an internet storefront than an academic manual, have catchy titles that “young people” (Russians call them молодёжь) will ‘relate to’: German “Kontakte,” for example — in fact most serious students are confused by such books, with their fragments of cartoons, movie clips, interviews with famous personalities, and so on. Where’s the beef? Or, as students will diffidently ask: “What (of all this crap) am I supposed to know? (and why?)”
It’s enough to make an “old person” yearn for the good staid old days. Russian professors of the good old days, who wrote textbooks for Russian as well as other languages, wouldn’t think of calling them anything more suggestive than “Учебник русской грамматики для шестого года” ‘Тextbook of Russian Grammar for the Sixth Form.’ (I’m asleep already.)
This brings to mind N. Smirnovsky, author of Учебник русской грамматики, quoted by Nabokov in the epigraph to “The Gift”: Дуб — дерево. Роза — цветок. Олень — животное. Воробей — птица. Россия — наше отечество. Смерть неизбежна.
This laconic paragraph seems to be a study in predicate nominatives, with the copula ‘be’ omitted in Russian; the inner arc of poetry leans into the melancholy fate of the Russian people, as in English: “An oak is a tree. A rose is a flower. A deer is an animal. A sparrow is a bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable.” The last, fatal, punch line, shows a noun with a short adjective; in this doom-charged atmosphere one does not require a dash.
gmc