I was working from home that day, so my time is pretty flexible. I decided to take a long lunch hour to do some shopping on my own. I found a formalwear shop that rented tuxedos and the like. They also had some fancy vests for the tuxedos which had these raised patterns on them. I got a black vest with a raised black design. They also had some bigger, slightly floppy, old-fashioned bowties — fortunately also clip-on.
That would be a little better, a step up on the formalwear side, but I also knew that wasn’t the real answer. On the way back home, I stopped off at a bookstore to check out some Russian poetry books. I was thinking that since Yuri was also a poet, maybe that would give me some language or something.
I looked at some of the poems. I don’t know whether it was a problem with translation, or maybe I’m just not a poetry person, but that wasn’t giving me what I was looking for. I decided I would have to do some more thinking about my next step.
What was I missing? As I thought about it, I began to realize that I was, at heart, an American in my soul. I was, whatever setbacks faced me or even faced the country, an optimist. Things were good, and when bad things happened, they would pass. But I also realized that that was not the Russian way. There was some kind of darkness some sense of bad history, some sense that things were only going to get worse in different ways, not better. And that your best hope was to survive, however tragically.
I realized that the answer was not to become a clone of Yuri in the movie (how much more was there to learn about him?), but to become my own Yuri, with his own sense of tragedy interwoven with romance. I started doing some research online to find some quintessential Russian authors. That was easy enough. Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekov, Pushkin. Maybe Solzhenitsyn, although he was later, but he certainly understood Russia. I even decided to add Kafka to my list, even though he wasn’t Russian, but he understood the absurdity of life and the idiocy and dangers of bureaucracy.
A lot of these authors were old enough that their works were out of copyright and available free online through the Gutenberg Project. Where I could, I looked for short stories by these authors, although even their short stories were pretty long by today’s standards. I wanted, as they say, to “git ‘er done,” and reading the novels in full was going to be too much of a project. For the longer works (was I really going to read all of “War and Peace”?), I went to summaries on Wikipedia or study notes on the web.
This was my project. I needed to become my own Yuri, with my own depth, and my own angst. I needed to absorb the culture through my mind and through my skin. I needed to surround Lara with that tragic world, where only love had any meaning at all.
* * *
I still had to keep up with work, and I still went in to the office at least two days a week, so I needed to find ways to block out extra time during the week. On the days when I was working from home, it was easy to use lunch hour for my research. Also, Ellie had about a 30-minute commute from her office to get back to the apartment, so that gave me a little extra time at the end of the day. But I also found myself making time in the evening by telling Ellie I had a project I had to work on and going back to my bedroom to hit my computer for more research.