This summer I decided to stop trimming my beard short and see what it would look like longer and fuller. Like many resolutions made during vacation, this one had questionable merit. I look like me, plus an angry squirrel hanging off my jaw.

I did have something of a highbrow inspiration: Ilya Repin's Portrait of the Poet Afanasii Fet (1882). As past entries of this blog show, I have been reading Fet's poetry for about a year, and Repin is not only one of the great European realist painters but also the Michelangelo of beards. Take a look at his portraits of Leo Tolstoy, Modest Mussorgsky, and Pavel Tretyakov, and you'll see just how amazingly expressive facial hair can be.

Fet and Repin might not be especially well known outside of a tiny corner of the English-speaking world. That fact does not, however, prevent almost every English speaker I meet from voicing an opinion about my newly furry face.

One colleague asked if I was trying to look like Karl Marx. I felt queasily reactionary explaining that no, I was in fact aiming more for "serf-oppressing imperialist land owner."

Another saw me and said, "Ahoy! Herman Melville!"

A FaceBook friend who teaches at Lake Forest College started a poll asking who had the best beard in the nineteenth century. I voted for Fet, but his friend list was dominated by trans-Atlanticists. It came down to Tennyson versus Whitman.

A non-academic pointed me to a "beard length job chart." I think with a few more months of hirsuteness I might be able to make "grandpa." I will never make "super-wizard."

Not everyone plays the interpretation game. My mother took one look at me after I got off the plane and said, "Get rid of that thing. Now."

My cat likes it. But squirrels mesmerize him, too.