Under the Center for Language Education (CLE) in the Russian department, the class “‘Disciplines Without Borders’ and Multidisciplinarity in Literature, Art, and Sciences” bridges Russian literary text and scientific discoveries. Taught by Professor Victoria Juharyan, the class analyzes Russian literature, including novels, poems and plays, and reads academic books studying the role of science and mathematics in the development of the author’s writing style.
Juharyan, a senior lecturer, has been teaching Russian language, literature and philosophy at Hopkins for the last four semesters. Growing up, Juharyan loved studying geometry and literature, hoping to one day become a doctor. However, as she moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, Juharyan began to study journalism, later studying public relations and comparative literature in the United States. In an interview with The News-Letter, Juharyan shared how she emulated her multidisciplinary background in her teaching style.
“That love of [multiple disciplines] stayed with me. So whenever I would teach literature and philosophy and had mathematics majors, I always would kind of suggest multidisciplinary projects for them to do,” Juharyan said.
For the fall semester, Juharyan crafted a class that resembled her personal conference 10 years ago. The class aims to demonstrate how seemingly unrelated disciplines tie together, with the combination revealing a profound understanding of the literature’s origin and structure.
Recently, the class read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, connecting their analysis to the book The Mathematical Mind of F. M. Dostoevsky: Imaginary Numbers, Non-Euclidean Geometry, and Infinity, written by University of Richmond professor Michael Marsh-Soloway. Juharyan chose the book after being a blind reviewer due to its comprehensive overview of both disciplines.
“One of the dangers of interdisciplinary research is when one of the disciplines becomes kind of a stroll. You're really good in one and then you use the other one to make yourself a little different,” Juharyan said. “Some of the excellent scholarships are when the person is really well versed from both sides. [...] Michael's book, I think, does a really good job of representing properly both mathematics and literature.”
On Sept. 26, Juharyan invited Marsh-Soloway to Hopkins to discuss his research and methods for the class. Marsh-Soloway began his talk by discussing the book’s timeline. Starting with an initial idea in 2011 and proposing the idea to the dissertation committee in 2014, Marsh-Soloway aimed to highlight how Dostoevsky used mathematical concepts like infinity and geometry to inform his writing and narrative structure, noting that Dostoevsky ranks highly in scientific citations.
For example, Marsh-Soloway explained that Dostoevsky proves that certain moral cases, like whether or not murder should be allowed or prohibited in some instances (as explored in Crime and Punishment), demonstrate that one concept can not serve as the “language of the universe.” Analagous to mathematics, where certain calculations like dividing by zero do not output a value, Dostoevsky shows that math in itself is not a perfect system.
“Dostoevsky uses the language of mathematics to say that we don't know everything there is to know about mathematics,” Marsh-Soloway discussed. “He’s undermining rationality with its own language of rationality.”
After his mother’s death at age seven, Dostoevsky lived in a censored society under Tsar Nicholas I. Due to his radical engagement with the Petrashevsky Circle, an intellectual group advocating for the importance of art and literature, the government ordered the execution of Dostoevsky and other members — but stopped at the last minute and changed their punishment to work in Siberia. According to Marsh-Soloway, Dostoevsky’s early life shaped his writing and inclination to delve into certain themes.
“[Dostoevsky] writes a lot about certainty and finality. For him, if something is fixed, he's going to do everything he possibly can to resist or dispel it,” Marsh-Soloway explained. “You'll see in his writing, he’s oftentimes almost banging his head against the wall asking the world to change, and he feels sort of powerless to change it.”
Dostoevsky attended the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute in St. Petersburg, an engineering school designed to prepare students for optimizing the military. However, Marsh-Soloway said, many Dostoevsky biographies don’t focus on this institute’s role in shaping his writing. During this time, Russian students learned extensive sciences from the West, including chemistry, geometry, algebra and calculus. Marsh-Soloway explained how his research of archival sources allowed him to understand Dostoevsky’s experience during these years.
“[Dostoevsky’s] stuff is kind of spread out all over Russia, and when he was arrested, most of the material from the days of his schooling were confiscated and destroyed by the secret police, so [...] there's not really a good reconciliation of what he was learning,” Marsh-Soloway said.
Marsh-Soloway explained that his archival research consisted of analyzing his education transcripts, which showed Dostoevsky did well in his first two years of study, despite many biographers writing that he hated his time at school.
The discussion then transitioned to the student audience for any questions on Marsh-Soloway’s talk, delving into whether Dostoevsky’s traumatic past improved or hindered his writing and why he refused to put a hood on in face of execution. Some students also raised questions on Dostoevsky’s works, clarifying their analyses.
Following the presentation, Marsh-Soloway explained how his undergraduate experience inspired the bridge between Dostoevsky and mathematics in an interview with The News-Letter.
“In 2011 I was in a humanities seminar [...] and I read Michael Katz’s translation of Notes from Underground, and Michael Katz was the first person to really illuminate to me that there was sort of a matrix-like orientation to Dostoevsky’s syntax,” he said. “At the time, I was also taking linear algebra, and I said, ‘Wait a minute, this anti-identity matrix looks very similar to what I'm doing in my math class. What's going on here?’”
Marsh-Soloway also shared how his six-month archival research ranged from the state archive in Moscow to Omsk in Siberia, where Dostoevsky worked during his sentence.
“I had to hold things with white gloves, but working in [these cities] proved revelatory. I do think Moscow was probably more productive for me in terms of what I found there, but there were some things in St. Petersburg too that I didn't expect to find; it was different seeing where he lived in his adult life,” Marsh-Soloway shared.
For the future, Marsh-Soloway explained how he looks forward to an inter-institutional initiative that bridges the barriers between departments and disciplines to obtain a common framework of reference. Currently, he is active in the Virginia Foundation of Independent Colleges, a consortium of 17 liberal arts colleges in Virginia working together — a model he hopes he could extend to other schools in the mid-Atlantic to bolster this initiative.
“[We have] this notion that biology can only happen in a biology department, or math can only happen in a mathematics department. We owe it to ourselves to understand that truth is a multifaceted thing, and we have to be able to have discussions and dialogs that extend beyond one department or another. [...] It's not the arts or the sciences. It's the arts and the sciences,” Marsh-Soloway explained.
Juharyan has already obtained positive feedback from her students on this new multidisciplinary format, emphasizing how Hopkins students from different backgrounds also add to the class environment and discussion. She hopes to offer a similarly formatted class next semester.
“I love having students with different backgrounds, and when we get to learn from each other. [...] One of the joys of teaching at a school like Hopkins is just how incredible the students are. They'll bring in such a wealth of knowledge, and they love learning,” Juharyan shared.
Sophomore Deborah Chung, a student in the class, shared her thoughts on the class in an email to The News-Letter. While she shared how the larger detail on Russian literature and the lack of similar depth of STEM concepts creates an unbalanced class experience at times, Chung enjoys the class’ insights and found the timely talk by Marsh-Soloway to be informative, with the book offering a wider, fresh perspective on Dostoevsky’s works.
“The applications of STEM seem to fade into the background and are not addressed with equal weight as the primary literary and philosophical questions of character, metaphysics, human personality, morality, worldview, etc. That is, I believe there is an imbalance in the supposedly multidisciplinary nature of the class, since it tends to lean more toward the humanities side). I do, however, enjoy listening to the insightful comments of my classmates as they share their perspectives, along with the informative class presentations.”
In late October, the class will hear from a nurse after reading Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, bridging the book’s depiction of doctors with terminal diseases to the nurse’s experience with the ethical concern behind terminally ill patience. Students are expected to contemplate different cases and discuss ethical communications and the nurse’s real-life experiences throughout her career.
