Dinner with Stalin and Other Stories

The House Of Edgar Allan Poe

169 The House Of Edgar Allan Poe Eduard Polyakov, a Russian émigré of the “third wave,” was walking down the hill from the Rockefeller Library of Brown University toward Benefit Street. Polyakov had come to Providence, the capital of the diminutive state of Rhode Island, to collect materials for a future biography of Edgar Allan Poe. The book had been commissioned by one of the largest Moscow publishers. He had come for two months from the Californian city of San Diego, where he was a professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Polyakov dropped off his carry-on bag and suitcase at the university guesthouse and immediately headed out in search of the house of Edgar Allan Poe. His future book had received its original impulse from the poet Valery Bryusov, one of the first Russians to translate Poe’s works. It was none other than Bryusov, who had been Polyakov’s object of study for about a decade, that eventually steered him to Poe, but not until Sashenka Tverskaya became fascinated with the American writer. At the time, she was Professor Polyakov’s graduate student at San Diego. For a year now, Sashenka had been working as a junior faculty member in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. From Providence, Sashenka sent Polyakov pigeon flocks of electronic messages, in which the frequency of the words waiting and love exceeded the incidence of all other words. Sashenka was supposed to be coauthoring the future book with Polyakov. 170 | DI N N E R W I T H S TA L I N A N D O T H E R S T OR I E S Polyakov was a little over forty. He was just slightly taller than average height, with a resolute chin, grey eyes, and a mane of light brown, grizzled hair. Sashenka, by contrast, had managed to stay this side of the thirty-year barrier, although, in the unanimous opinion of her friends and colleagues, she had no apparent reason to slow down the natural passage of time. She was a long-legged and blue-eyed Russian beauty of Muscovite vintage, equally good at making friends and becoming infatuated. For five years now, she had been infatuated with both Edgar Allan Poe and Edik Polyakov. Their love affair had been going on for almost as many years as it had taken Sashenka to complete her graduate coursework and her doctoral thesis. To be absolutely precise, for four of the five years Sashenka had spent as a doctoral student and dissertator, she and Polyakov had been enmeshed in a tumultuous affair, which they had to conceal from everyone. It seemed that, given their love and passion, there would have been no reason for them to separate almost a year ago, and for Sashenka to migrate from the West Coast back East. There seemed to be no reason for their love affair not to become a family affair. No reason? Of course there were reasons! Or at least there was one reason, the most important one for all Americans : there was no teaching position for Sashenka at San Diego, whereas a junior faculty appointment had opened up at Brown. She applied for the Brown job and got it. She and Polyakov couldn’t fathom living apart for more than a year. Which is why each had silently decided they would spend two summer months together in Providence—and if no miracle occurred, they would give each other freedom to choose new partners. It seems that even love stories have to reckon with their job openings and faculty searches. Immediately upon arrival, Polyakov rushed down to Benefit Street because he couldn’t wait to see the house where Edgar Allan Poe’s beloved once lived, the woman whom the great fantasy writer saw on visits from Boston. She was actually one of his two great loves, and he gave preference to neither one of them until his dying The House Of Edgar Allan Poe | 171 day. Some incomprehensible force led Polyakov to the mysterious house of Edgar Allan Poe, as if the researcher from California sensed the approach of an entirely new era in his life. He also had another reason for going there. Polyakov was very much in love with Sashenka, and his desire to see her all the time, at least in the course of the two months allotted to them by...