Thursday
I came across a fascinating account by Harvard English professor Diedre Lynch about teaching Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Ukrainian students via zoom. One student was even taking the class while Russian soldiers prowled the streets outside.
Because Ukrainian education has been interrupted, the government set up these on-line classes for its students. Lynch says conditions were far from ideal but therefore all the more important:
Many of the students had fled the towns where they had been based while studying for their degrees in, variously, philology, law, and journalism, and with their families had taken refuge in safer locations more distant from the conflict zones. Many were lonely for that reason. Their internet connections were unstable, occasionally knocked out just by rainfall. By the end of June, the situation on the ground meant that the student in Kyiv, who had at first been feeling secure there, was having to do her Shelley reading in a bomb shelter. Another student, whom I worry about every day, was doing her reading while Russian soldiers patrolled the streets outside. The region where she and her family live had fallen under the control of the occupying army earlier in the spring.
Lynch writes that, for her twelve students, “talking and writing about Shelley’s monster story was a way both to examine and enact their commitments to education and community.” My only disappointment with Lynch’s article is that I didn’t hear enough from the Ukrainian students to figure out how they were using the novel to process their experience. I have some theories, however.
That’s in part because of the way that Lynch sets up her piece, noting the the novel is about how Dr. Frankenstein’s creation
overcame his unpromising beginnings and, learning language, obtained the wherewithal to tell his story. The monster, the reader finds, must steal an education. He is not given one.
She then provides a useful reminder of how that education occurs:
After being abandoned by his creator, on the very night when Frankenstein’s science experiment first ushers him into his unnatural existence, the monster sets to wandering through the woods and fields, destitute and solitary. Eventually he happens upon a cottage with a ramshackle lean-to annexed to it. He takes shelter inside and, finding a gap in the boarding that joins the hovel to the cottage, realizes that he can peer through this aperture and, unseen, watch the inhabitants as they go about their daily lives. Having already experienced the antipathy his ghastly appearance provokes in human observers, he decides to make this hiding place his place of residence. The monster soon makes a momentous discovery: “I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds. […] This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it.
Through various means, the monster achieves a liberal arts education, only to be spurned by society when people actually see him. Lynch says his determined efforts struck a chord with her students:
For Ukrainians in 2022, education has the same high stakes it is granted in Shelley’s novel, where the monster dreams that the language lessons on which he eavesdrops will, in giving him the means to tell his own story, enable him to elicit sympathy. He believes — in vain, it turns out — that this clandestine education will secure his entry into the human community.
Unfortunately, Lynch doesn’t go much deeper into how her students used the novel to process their experience. The most she says is the following:
Fiction-reading provided them relief from the pressures of a real world, in which choices had to be made and firm lines drawn between enemy and friend.
At the same time, the novel does bear some resemblance to the real lives these students and their compatriots have led since the Russian invasion. In Shelley’s fictional universe, disasters are always lurking, and one bereavement follows hard on the heels of another. For all its sensationalism, indeed even because of its sensationalism, the novel is, as the kids say, relatable. “When […] real disaster comes, even the innocent will suffer and there will always be many victims,” Anastasia wrote on our class discussion board, reflecting on the fate of one of the novel’s minor characters but in terms that resonated more widely. On some days I feared that Elizabeth, Victor Frankenstein’s fiancée, spoke for these students and their generation, as when she says to him, “Before, I looked upon the accounts of vice and injustice, that I read in books or heard from others, as tales of ancient days, or imaginary evils […] but now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood.”
I want to build more on this since Lynch doesn’t—with the caveat that I wasn’t teaching these students and so can only speculate. But I think the students identified with the monster because of the way that Russia, like Frankenstein, has denied them their humanity. Before Russia began its two invasions, many in Ukraine felt friendship for Russia. After all, most Ukrainians speak Russian, some of Russia’s greatest authors were either born in Ukraine or have strong Ukrainian ties (most notably Gogol, Bulgakov, and Chekhov), and there are many Russian-Ukrainian intermarriages. In the novel, the monster is more than willing to let the scientist go his own way unmolested—all it wants is a companion for itself—but Dr. Frankenstein, like Russia, is unwilling to grant it autonomous rights. Instead, he tramples on all that the monster holds dear, thereby unleashing a bloody response. It is Russia/Frankenstein, not Ukraine/monster, that has set chaos into motion.
Remember, these students are reading about the enmity between Frankenstein and monster at the same time that they are witnessing war first hand between their country and Russia. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Russia refuses to give up its vengeful pursuit of the monster—a drama that he created in the first place—and the monster, like Ukraine, stays always just out of reach. It sounds like the students appear to see Dr. Frankenstein as the real monster.
Lynch, who wants a more nuanced response, seems somewhat taken aback by their black-and-white reading. She says that, before she taught the class, she thought that the novel’s “multiplication of points of view”
impedes the reader who might want to take sides. Before this summer I had thought of that as the book’s greatest asset, the very ground of its claim to be a cornerstone of a humanistic education.
With these Ukrainian students, however, she’s not so sure. In fact, it sounds like the students, without reservation, saw Dr. Frankenstein as the real monster. Lynch doesn’t want to fully acknowledge this—she claims that her students didn’t want to take sides—but reading between her lines, it sounds like they actually did, labeling Frankenstein as the evil one:
But with this group of students, who were reading from within a war zone, who were inclined — indeed, forced by circumstances —to use, unironically, words like “evil,” I felt less certain about that.
Readers shift from sympathizing with Victor — who, as he has recounted to Walton, lost his brother to this monster’s vindictive revenge — to sympathizing with the monster, who, after he takes up the narrative reins, makes the case to Victor that such “vices” are only “the children of a forced solitude that [he] abhor[s]” and that his “virtues will necessarily arise” as soon as he lives “in communion with an equal.”
Yes, Ukraine will cease hating and killing Russians once it is considered an equal. It would be surprising, given their circumstances, if the students read the novel in any other way. And now the situation in the novel appears to have reversed for these readers, with the monster chasing Frankenstein.
Russia, however, like Frankenstein, remains as arrogant and sure of its righteousness as ever. It has created a monster that may destroy it, even as its young men, like Frankenstein’s bride, are paying the price.