Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) by Rachel Kadish

onto the screen. “Entering this lecture hall, you’ve stepped into an era that predates doubt. A person might win or lose, live or die—but life was struggle, never paralysis. Moral uncertainty was not in the sixteenth-century worldview. You may think of the sixteenth century as the era of obsessive love poetry, but that’s only because our modern perspective has blinded us to the more important aspects of this writing. In fact the sixteenth century was an age of poets like none since. Poets who wrestled with the workings of the world. The capacities and limits of the soul.” Joanne gave a swift signal to a waiting TA. The hall lights snapped on; King’s College Chapel vanished. Stepping to the center of the stage, Joanne loomed over the dazed students. “They built the moral house you think in.”
    Another prof might not have pulled it off. Joanne, though, has that magnetism you sometimes see in physically powerful people. She’s a big woman—not overweight, just post-college-jock-imposing—with a voice bred on the rugby field and a carriage that hints she might tackle if you resist her interpretation of a sonnet. She has a wide face, faint freckles, and pale-lashed brown eyes that, under rimless glasses, are keen and unblinking. Her prematurely gray-streaked hair, pulled back in a tight bun, gives her face a powerful dignity.In a certain light, caught in a certain becalmed mood, she brings to mind a larger-than-life figure in an allegorical painting by Raphael, or even a Vermeer portrait: her face timeless, her unmasked gaze so thoughtfully penetrating it unnerves.
    These days the sixteenth-century gig is staffed either by pallid romantics, drawn by all those sonnets detailing women’s features in fourteen innuendo-laden lines, or by morbid souls fascinated with the unforgiving morality plays of an age when life was synonymous with suffering. All those paeans to loss. All those marble busts of dead cherubic children, cold stony ghosts of their former ruddy selves. Joanne’s cospecialists are a mousy, bookish lot, even for professors. Among this cohort Joanne is—agree or disagree with her—a standout.
    At the end of that first lecture I scribbled in my notebook:
At last! A prof unafraid to show intellectual passion!
    That was then. Since I joined the faculty, Joanne Miller has appeared on my radar primarily as a somewhat self-important colleague a rung higher on the academic ladder (five years older than me, and recently tenured). She’s a solid academician and publishes reasonably often. Her papers are persuasive if not lightning-bolt original. I know little else about her, as she never reciprocated the overtures I made when I was first hired. But I’ve had no problems with Joanne, apart from a few skirmishes upon joining the faculty. (Garden-variety turf battles. Would I
please
ask my students to exit lecture quietly, so their clamor of postlecture liberation won’t disrupt Joanne’s Spenser seminar across the hall? She doesn’t know what I’m doing to them in there, but they sure sound happy to get out. Just kidding.)
    It’s only her recent push for departmental all-star status that’s earned Joanne an upgrade to true nuisance. She’s going to climb the academic ladder by sheer bloody-mindedness. She’s willing to take on the committee work no one else wants; she’s poised to organize and discipline the entire faculty at Grub’s behest. Joanne’s blunt organizational missives have become a regular addition to the department’s e-mail in boxes. Yet when I groused to Jeff he dismissed me. “You want to do the work?” he said. “Let her be chairman’s pet.” Joanne may be tenured, says Jeff, but the sixteenth century is out of vogue. The reach of her work is limited, and sheknows it. Every department has a majority whip. Better her, says Jeff, than us.
    I join the small crowd assembling in