Bildung 1

The idea of Bildung is a product of the XVIIIth-century Enlightened thinking that sees human beings as infinitely perfectible and charges every individual with the life-long task of intellectual and personal growth. Irrespective of our circumstances, we are ultimately responsible for our own Bildung and should see our lives as a project in self-development that it is up to us to carry out. In this series of posts, I want to follow Jonathan Mayhew’s lead in charting the course of my intellectual development which is very fitting since Jonathan contribution to my Bildung has been immense.

By the time I was four, I was already an avid reader. Even then I preferred to read long realist novels, and there are many stories in the family lore of me scaring strangers in public places by being glued to a huge volume of Dreiser or some other equally verbose realist.

Dreiser was the perfect writer for me even at the age of four. His characters are obsessed with the desire to succeed and transcend the circumstances of their birth by advancing professionally, socially, and economically. They are always thawarted in their efforts by their insatiable appetites, by the demands of their physiology. Imposing discipline on their temperaments is a task at which they always fail. This forever would be one of the central struggles of my life and my love of Dreiser’s work never lessened.

Dreiser is also the writer who, I believe, understood America, especially the tensions between the American Midwest and the East Coast, better than anybody else. Thirty years after I first read Dreiser on a beach in Ukraine, this conflict would become a defining experience of my life.