DLCL 2025 Commencement Address

Monika Greenleaf, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature, Emerita, delivered the 2025 Commencement Address on Sunday, June 15, 2025 at the DLCL Diploma Ceremony in Dinkelspiel Auditorium with the following speech:

"Greetings and congratulations to you, graduating students and doctors of philosophy who have chosen to house your linguistic gifts and cravings for world-exploration in the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages. I congratulate you, parents and families of the students honored today, for nurturing your children who continue to grow and branch out in ways that maybe now, maybe later, will carry on your family spirit. Time in college moves fast, doesn’t it? perhaps faster for us all than ever before. Students, we have come here to celebrate your choices among the embarrassment of riches to which an education in the Humanities and Sciences, and the DLCL’s community of interests, opens windows and doors. Even more, I would like to celebrate the care you have developed in the company of your peers: to research with curiosity, read and write inventively and exactly, and sustain the vibrancy of those great brainstorming conversations you have had in college and graduate school. The pleasure of meaningful work with creative friends will stick with you as a necessity of life. Flat, “efficient” exchange of word-tokens that mean or act the opposite the very next day will not inspire such work and such trust. Your dedication to studying language in all its visible, invisible, and inaudible forms, is exactly what our society needs now.

Because so many Stanford students choose to exercise their versatile minds by choosing to do dual-majors, one in the liberal arts and humanities, to put it simply, the other in sciences and technology, I would like to tell you my favorite quotation by the renowned Russian-American émigré author, Vladimir Nabokov.

But first, let me provide a little relevant background. The older, more dignified word émigré implies having chosen to leave one’s country, but in fact Nabokov and members of his family twice fled as refugees, first from the Russian Revolution and Civil War in 1919, then from the gearing up of the Third Reich in 1940. (You may be interested to know that the head of Stanford’s tiny Slavic Department, Henry Lanz, offered Nabokov his first teaching job and essential documentation.) Migrating from Russia to England to America to Switzerland, Nabokov produced two prodigious, transformatively modern bodies of work: first in his memory-infused Russian language, then in the scintillating English of his provocative American novels, stories, and lectures that challenge us to push language, avid perception, and shell-games of memory past their comfortable limits. All of his works are expressions of a trilingual mind (Russian, French, and English), a trilingual literary heritage and imagination. Art history, environmental biology, insect species’ and human migration patterns, sexuality and the psyche furnish keys (and many deceptive skeleton keys) to his novels’ symbolic systems and philosophy.

I taught my last class on Nabokov’s novels last fall, and I ended with my favorite quote: “Consider the sheer miracle of reading. Of human beings leaving marks on a surface that resolve themselves into words which imaginations conceive as full breathing worlds… Now imagine that you find yourself in 2024, and that everyone has forgotten how to read.” I pointed to the students, and now to you here, as the embodied resistance to his eerie prophecy.

These days it is often said that no one can read whole long novels anymore (due to short attention span, etc.) even in universities. Here, too, I beg to differ. In “The Great Russian Novel,” students from many different majors came to wrangle the biggest ones of all, those that remain at the end of the summer with a bookmark stuck at Chapter 2. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867 – 1224 pages, including two Epilogues), and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (serially published 1879-80 – 776 pages – just one Epilogue.) Two world-creating novels, back to back, in 9 weeks, with two papers. The students not only read, blogged responses, and built off each other’s keen observations in seminar. Their lively scientific, legal, philosophical, and artistic brains were just the kind that these two omnivorous, polymath writers had cultivated in themselves, to counter European scientific materialism and “realism,” and to create new forms of reality – and comedy. Their characters, more vivid than life, try to solve riddles of family, power, abuse, suffering, law, and infinite consciousness posed by their authors to the authors themselves. Albert Einstein called Brothers Karamazov the greatest novel he knew, with the most transformative effect on his thinking, saying that its complexity had clarified his path to the conception of Relativity theory and the fourth dimension – of time.

Fortunately, Dostoevsky, rushing against time and illness as always, was able to complete The Brothers K shortly before he died. In a poignant letter to his beloved brother, Mikhail, written during his transport as a political criminal to a Siberian labor camp in 1848, he wrote that he was not afraid of the freezing climate, the cruel hard labor, deprivation and sickness that he would be sharing with other prisoners, but how could his mind and soul distill each day without paper and pen?

Princeton Class Day Speaker, Jay Shetty, requested, as a principle of grounding one’s life day by day, to ask oneself, not what do you want to gain, but what might it help you to lose? While everyone’s putting pressure on visibility, be invisible. Disappear into your work ethic.” He added, “Read novels. This is a trait of the best physicians, the best presidents. If you don’t read fiction, part of your brain responsible for imagination atrophies.”

Now I’d like to turn to subsets of literature that are being practiced more and more in recent years and on this campus: poetry, intermedial art, translation, and many forms of public speaking and performance. I apologize again for speaking from my own fields and experience rather than others in DLCL which obviously have their own rich heritages and trajectories.

For my very last class this winter, I decided to give a new version of my course “Poetess: Women Poets Take Back Time.” We began in 600 BC with the ancient Greek poet Sappho’s surprisingly conversational lyrics, in which she taunts men’s basic simplicity and harmonizes individual girls’ homoerotic desires and women’s sensuous rituals with the philosophical rhythms of the earth. Her influence has lasted to this day despite the fact that so few fragments of the papyri survived – or because their modern elliptical spaces leave so many openings. We read an international and interethnic selection of women poets who nevertheless constituted a genealogy conscious of each other’s experiments with selfhood, memory, and philosophy of forms. We did our best to provide at least a few original next to translated texts, and ended with students’ choices of contemporary poets and translators like Anne Carson, poets from the students’ native countries (Kazakhstan, Puerto Rico), and our own émigré Belarusian graduate student Masha Malinovskaia. Her Russophone volume of documental poetry Linia begstva (Line of Flight), builds poetic compositions from pieces of authoritarian prohibitions, sotto voce war-time conversations, and utterances of the traumatized and disabled. It had just been published in 2024 in the series Literature Without Borders and is widely praised. We watched a video of the remarkable Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk reading poems from Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails, her cycle of wartime instants of time, beautifully translated and commented in a bilingual volume published by our colleagues, Professors Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk.

I have given the topic of poetry and performance some detailed attention, to answer questions like: what can we do with our study of literature and other arts and sciences, what kinds of work can we engage in outside academia, enough to live on, will they reach people? Many of you in the DLCL know the answer is yes, and have been energetically and collaboratively performing and publishing your poetry, prose, plays, and translations. Creative versatility is the reward you have worked for.

I think of Sibyl Diver, an undergraduate major in Human Biology and Russian language at Stanford (I met her in my first Poetess class), who returned to become a leading scholar and lecturer in the Department of Earth Systems here. She was sitting on the Commencement stage this morning to receive the Gores Award for her “Transformative Work Advancing Environmental Justice at Stanford, and for her leadership in Community-Centered Research.” Her next step after graduation was unusual: she accepted a three-year fellowship to join a Russian and indigenous group of scientists studying the ecology of coastal life in the Russian Far East – “it was hard and I loved it.” She worked for eight years doing international conservation work as a Russian translator and facilitator of exchanges. With a Berkeley Ph.D. in Environmental Science, she brought her focus to the Pacific Northwest salmon watersheds, which negotiating collaborative management between indigenous communities and state agencies. With optimism and great good humor, she continues to bring her scientific expertise and inspiring presentational skills to negotiate complex environmental alliances and legal protections in the context of the current raw geopolitics, and involves current students in concrete stewardship of life on earth. What, to quote Jay Shetty again, does she not lapse into? Skepticism, passiveness, and bitter frustration. She talks to everyone as if meeting them on their own ground for the first time. 

I also think of Divya Mehrish, the first-born daughter of immigrant parents in New York, New York, who is grateful that she came to Stanford: “So many of us mellow out here.” She began with classes in pre-med Chemistry together with English literature plus Creative Writing, and peeked into Slavic Studies. She reconsidered. Her family languages were French and Italian, she had written poetry intensely throughout her school years, was attracted to philosophy and Russian literature, and discovered that she could unite them all in a Comp Lit major. Worried about the discontinuity between literary analysis and her creative writing, she joined the well-known journal Adroit, eventually as editor-in-chief, poetic contributor, and skillful interviewer of news-breaking writers. Her own poetry, non-fiction, and fiction began to intersect as a hybrid space, which emerged in her stunningly imagined piece about illness, “The Opposite of Tragedy,” and her surreal mosaic of family memories and animals stranded by climate change called “Retaggio,” which won the Mary Steinbeck Decker Award in Fiction this year. To ground her interest in “culture-bound syndromes,” and “thinking strategically but with belief,” she combined Comp Lit with a second major in Science, Technology, and Society, where she earned a Robert McGinn Award in 2025. With still enough energy to write her honors thesis on medical anthropology, for now she is leaving doors open to law school, or graduate school in medical anthropology or philosophy and literature. She says she learned “the power of manifestation” at Stanford. “The power of how you see yourself, how it maps onto people around you. What kind of world I want to live in partly depends on me, on us.”

Our graduate students in the DLCL haver taken the “powers of manifestation” to new heights. We literally could not sustain our departments’ teaching of required language and literature courses, and even more importantly, the co-teaching of freshly invented specialized seminars without them – and this in the trying times of the last few years. They have often had to forego planned on-location research as geopolitical borders have hardened, and have adjusted their dissertations with ingenuity and extra hard work. Please listen to the titles of their dissertations carefully as they receive their degrees, and ask them questions at the reception about their work and what stirred them to make precisely these choices. No two stories will be alike, or standard fare. Our Slavic graduate students have completed four distinctive dissertations in a banner year. All of them are inspired by unexpected phenomena of writing and action that broke through fixed divisions of authoritarian empire and revealed suppressed potentials of mutual knowledge of each other’s lives and just co-existence.

Here are the titles and authors:

“The Famine Years”: Literature and Humanitarianism in Late Imperial Russia by Olga Ovcharskaia.

Between and Beyond Empires: Russian-Ottoman and Soviet-Turkish Travelogues by Evan Alterman.

Talking the Talk, Trotting the Trot: Talking Horses in Russian and Yiddish Prose by Eric Kim.

Kornei Chukovskii: An Individualist in the Collective State by Maria Gorshkova.

The great universities have been the fortunate beneficiaries of foreign-born physicians “who work by day, write by night,” seeking to make sense of the work they do, the suffering and problems they struggle to solve and tragically, sometimes cause. They speak courageously to the societal and university environments that have both supported and benefited from their work until now. They mediate between medical scientific discovery and the public’s desire for personal memoirs of life-and-death work and research communicated with novelistic talent. Some of the best and most forthright Commencement speeches I have listened to for inspiration were given at Harvard by the brilliant physician-writers Abraham Verghese and Atul Gawande, and also young Doctor Kushal Kadakia to the Harvard Medical School. Speaking in defense of the achievements and cooperations of American scientific medical research, the decoding of diseases and alleviation of suffering, not only of the privileged, healthy anger is not one of the instruments they have left behind.

Like many of you studying, teaching, and conducting research at Stanford, my sister and I are children of immigrants and eventually became professors. I would like to give a shout-out to teachers. I happened upon my mother’s Warsaw high school diary recently, which told of the Nazis’ banning of schools in 1940 and her brave teachers continuing to hold secret classes, on pain of death, in their homes. At age seventeen my mother, her friends and my grandmother joined the Polish Underground army as couriers and officers in occupied Warsaw. I am struck by the dedication of teachers all over the world rising above all dangers to give their girls and boys a haven for the free exercise of their bursting intelligence. It is a classic story, a live thread that is gratefully recounted with infinite variations in Commencement speeches across the country. I was lucky to graduate from Stanford’s first Comp Lit program founded in 1969, to return as a sleepless young professor in the departments of Comp Lit and Slavic and eventually the DLCL, and finally to enjoy the amazing celebration and conference Stanford organized for my retirement. (Kind of like dying and going to heaven – I recommend it!)

Now make the campus ring with your celebrations – and wherever you fly off to, take a good book along."