In my seminar, I am teaching students how to read, though not the way I read, because my way of reading is entirely singular. I read the texts in such a way that the students will discover the secrets of reading. For one thing, I historicize. This is vital, because a part of what one does when one writes is clearly a way of receiving and reworking the current, the contemporary, what’s in the process of happening. Our times are mixed into us. You can’t understand Balzac, Flaubert, or Stendhal without their historical periods⁠—the wars, the conquests, the colonialism, everything that causes humanity to constantly transform. One cannot read Tsvetaeva without reading the admirable generation to which she belonged⁠—Pasternak, Akhmatova⁠—who suffered from Stalinist persecution, and corresponded with and read one another. One can’t read Dostoyevsky without trying to learn about the Tsarist world and revolutionary infiltrations.