Cool, Yet Daunting

There was this book, and it was a pretty important book for my research. It had everything: miscegenation, betrayal, never-before-used documents, suicide. Great stuff and central to my own work.

The initial problem that this book presented involved those never-before-used documents. They are in a language other than English, and they are in an archive that used to be behind the Iron Curtain and where the people speak yet another language other than English. No one ever told me that I might need to know these two languages back when I decided to study the antebellum U.S., by the way, although I did have 3 years of high school classes in one. Furthermore, these documents have been neither microfilmed nor digitized nor published, meaning that I would have to venture beyond the ruins of the Iron Curtain and see the actual things. Cool, yet daunting.

I began to wonder if I could get around actually seeing these items. After all, I could go by the research in the book, and look at the letters -- as few as they are -- in American collections. Except, I did start going through the American collections, and they weren't quite saying what the book was saying they were saying. Plus, many of the citations were "as quoted in [this other secondary source]" I'm familiar with that other secondary source, and the quotes there are sometimes taken out of context or they refer to documents that don't quite say what the book was saying they were saying.

It gets better. In this and other secondary sources, the authors had a propensity to use "frequently" and "constantly" and other such adverbs and adjectives that were not at all reflected in the primary sources. I also found another secondary source, an article, that described the "never-before-used" documents and both it and the book quote the exact same passages.

Then, I began to realize that this book made parallels between the actual actors in the book and characters in novels, implying that the actual historical people highly identified with the characters, but having little evidence to support this argument. In fact, the parallels were all of the author's observation, rather than a conscious and documented choice on the part of these historical actors. It would be much as if someone 100 years from now decided that I identified and based my life on the character of a novel published in my lifetime, but with no evidence that I had ever read the book, or if I read it, found anything interesting in the book.

Finally, this secondary source describes a relationship for which there is almost no evidence in other sources, only those in another language far across the ocean. One of the paramours in this relationship is mentioned only in passing and only a few times by all of the people who knew both people.

When I began to question the use of the sources in English, I really began to question the use of the sources far away and not in English, sources few biographers of an American figure might take the effort to pursue, thus making this secondary source the ultimate interpretation of this relationship. I don't think there is anything malicious in this set up, just that I began to realize that I have to see these documents. I have to see what they actually say. I have to see if there are innuendos "peppered" or appearing "frequently" throughout the correspondence, or if that is a case of historians' hyperbole. I have to make my own interpretations of their contents, unfiltered through the interpretation of someone else with different academic training. I can't cheat on this.

Fortunately, the Emerald City is (relative to the U.S.) not that far from the Former Iron Curtain City. Cool, yet daunting, yet must make it happen.