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In-between People: Diplomats and Émigrés Boundaries Are Actually Frontiers—A. V. Riasanovsky
All histories are based on underlying philosophies, and all philosophies need to start with premises. Hilary Conroy, much like the pragmatists and Marx, prefers concrete premises. Real individuals in real situations comprise his starting point: on the one hand, a rather elite group serves as diplomats, negotiating at the boundaries, or frontiers, between nations or other entities, and on the other hand, for balance, a more ordinary group whom history has fated to become émigrés—the men and women who belong, at least for a while, to two nations at once, or none at all. If we might approach this topic, for a moment, from an aside: Conroy and his friend and colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, Alexander Riasanovsky, in the 1980s founded a series of what they called “Cosmic History Seminars,” at which they encouraged leaping over the fences that defined disciplines, departments, regions, nations, and in principle, even planets! Riasanovsky, though a historian, wrote poetry for the seminars. For example, the simple little one whose title is “Boundaries Are Actually Frontiers”: