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Tuesday, October 10, 2006
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"Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma..." ... wrote Winston Churchill, and he might have been talking about Aleksey Vayner, son of Mother Russia, and currently a senior at Yale University. Everyone's trying to unwrap Aleksey. Known to classmates in his early campus days as the "Crazy Prefrosh," Vayner makes Jay Gatsby look all the way down authentic. Ivygate, a blog about Ivy League universities, calls this master deceiver "the next Kaavya." That'd be Kaavya Niswanathan, the lovely Harvard plagiarist ... but while Kaavya and Aleksey share good looks, they seem to me to differ in levels of cynicism and dementia. Kaavya after all was a freshman, and her novel, plagiarized from many sources, seems to have been engineered as much by editors looking for a diversity babe as by poor Kaavya herself. Aleksey on the other hand is a senior -- even a bit older than a senior, because he apparently flunked out of Yale for awhile -- and he's very much the author of his own much more extensive bullshit. Aleksey's bullshit is as extensive as the Siberian tundra. To picture its reach, imagine you're Doctor Zhivago, and you and Lara are in that sleigh galloping across the Siberian tundra. You'd have to gallop for forty days and forty nights to cover as much bullshit as Aleksey has covered. To put it in terms that might be easier for an American to understand: You'd have to lay twenty Godzillatrons side by side on the University of Texas football field to begin to comprehend the extent of Aleksey's bullshit. His dossier includes a fake charity he claimed to run, and absurdly grandiose claims about himself and his physical strength, courageous adventures, and miracle medical skills. But his breakthrough came with a video resume he sent to a bunch of New York banks which was full of lies so outrageous that, as the New York Sun reports, his "cover letter, resume, and video bounced from bank to bank in New York — from Bain and Company to the Blackstone Group to the Boston Consulting Group to Lehman Brothers and onward," becoming a source of laughter all over the banking community: Thousands of Ivy Leaguers circulate their resumes each year to New York's investment banks, but few garner as much attention as Aleksey Vayner, who last week submitted an 11-page resume and video to UBS's human resources department. Un p'tit peu of commentary: One: Say what you will, the guy is the perfect Yale applicant. Everything he creates about himself is exactly what universities like Yale are looking for: geographical distribution; international background; fascinating extracurricular activities; jocksmanship as well as intellectuality; self-confidence supreme... In an admittedly naive and over-reactive sense, Alexey is responding to market pressures. Two: Again, say what you will, but the guy is in some sense the perfect New York money job candidate. Remember Sherman McCoy's insider description of one of these places in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities: How these sons of the great universities, these legatees of Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, William James, Frederick Jackson Turner, William Lyons Phelps, Samuel Flagg Bemis, and the other three-name giants of American scholarship - how these inheritors of the lux and the veritas now flocked to Wall Street and to the bond trading room of Pierce & Pierce! How the stories circulated on every campus! If you weren't making $250,000 a year within five years, then you were either grossly stupid or grossly lazy. That was the word. By age thirty, $500,000 - and that sum had the taint of the mediocre. By age forty you were either making a million a year or you were too timid and incompetent. Make it now! That motto burned in every heart, like myocarditis. ... Masters of the Universe! In this context, isn't the insane arrogance of Aleksey's cover letter understandable? UBS’s reputation as one of the top investment management firms in the world motivates me to consider a career with your firm. The fast-paced environment and focus on results and excellence that define UBS would be an ideal place for me in terms of both personality and skills. How different is this, really, from the sort of writing UD'd be producing if she'd done better during her short involvement with Trump University? 'Why is Aleksey Vayner at Yale University?!' ask the writers at Ivygate, with all the passionate intensity of youth. I hope I have begun to unravel that mysterious riddling enigma. --many thanks to tim, for the vayner alert-- |