This is the last stop in the line, the final drop in the hat, a tallying of time spent and things gained. When the button popped of my newish pair of pants last week (from wear-and-tear, not gained girth), I immediately thought: Oh thank God I’m going home soon, where I can certainly find brown thread and someone who can sew! But then I stopped, and thought some more: That was the terrifying truth! I am going home soon, and this is it. My final entry.
To begin, here is one memory I’ll never forget:
On the extreme western edge of Russia, at the top of a steep hill that slopes into a twisting blue lake, is an estate where Alexander Pushkin lived a while. When I say estate, do not imagine (although you will now that I’ve gone and said it) the plantations of the Old South, or a grand and crumbling English country manor, or even the stately palaces in Petersburg. This is far from that. The house is sensibly sized (six or seven rooms) and unremarkable. In addition to its blandly elegant architectural, it’s only an approximated recreation of the one that was obliterated by the Nazis as they passed through: the polished rooms hold none of Pushkin’s spirit and just a few of his belongings. Only his former study is of any interest, as it holds some of the old books and an original footstool, chair, desk, cane, etc. But Pushkin did not draw his greatest inspiration from rafters and baseboards – and he wrote much of Eugene Onegin in that study. It’s the land around that’s most astounding.
The estate grounds are lovely. They cover several rolling acres: soft grass, a little orchard, a cobblestone path replete with iron lampposts, a bridge over stream that starts at a small pond with its own island, a forlorn guest house, slim birches and grand oaks, berry patches, white benches, and a dirt drive leading away into the cool, deep pine woods. These are some of my favorite things, and they were all within the square mile around Pushkin’s old home.
And off at an angle a few meters away from the house, I stood in awe of the view: the long, long, loping line of the horizon; a wooden windmill, its sails bound, standing out at the tip of a little peninsula which jutted into the lake; the lake itself. And so much green in so many hues! White and yellow wildflowers bobbed in the mild breeze. It was as though that wide corner of the world had been coaxed to shimmering life by the brush of Monet or Van Gogh. There was an old, off-kilter fencepost driven into the soft ground just next to me, and so I put my hand on it as I looked out, and felt as though I was fused in place. After all, that fencepost provided the most concrete link between me and the ground which Pushkin walked on. I gripped tighter, and looked more closely at the post. Its blue paint was flaking, and weathered silver wood shone through: the color of a partly cloudy sky.
We spent the rest of the weekend at a low-slung lodge outside of a tiny Russian village (the clean air!), rejuvenating from the stress of city life. We visited the monastery where Pushkin is buried beneath a great tombstone, now covered in a heap of flowers. As we bent our heads for a quiet moment, I waited for something big to come over me – but there was only the golden sun on white marble, and then a murmur of Russian. Some people laid flowers. I didn’t have any, but I waited until the crowd left and kept on looking for what I was supposed to feel, although I didn’t know what that was exactly. All I knew was a vague feeling of disappointment. What was it I really feel for this man? Why do I obsess over him? What have I even ever read by him? Where do I know him from?
The grave stood next to the monastery’s little church (both precariously perched on the top of a steep, short hill), and so I went in. In a dazzling collection of sunbeams, a young monk in faded black robes was chanting in Old Church Slavonic (a precursor to modern Russian) and waving an incense holder around; a handful of people trickled in, crossed themselves, bowed, kissed an icon, and slipped back out. I watched, and felt the incense smoke tickle my ears. Shortly, I left too (minus the crossing, kissing and bowing). By then, most everyone in the group had walked on down the hill to meander towards the bus, so I was quite alone; a balmy breeze washed over the hill; I went back around to the grave. And there it was.
The answer to what I was looking for was not, of course, in a grave. It was in all the other things I’d seen that were devoted to Pushkin, or written about him, or in all the (many, many) people who could spout his poetry on the spot, or in old wooden fence-posts and how I feel when I look out at this stunning, endless country.
Alexander Pushkin is her most beloved poet, bigger here than Shakespeare in England. The only reason the English-speaking world doesn’t know more about him is that his work is so complex that it is untranslatable (it’s hard to transform moderately simple Russian into English. All you can get of Pushkin in English is a faint feeling that something wondrous is going on.) He was their mischievous Mozart of the written word. He was the horny, hard-drinking, laughter-loving meteoritic genesis of one of the world’s greatest literary traditions. There is not a single life in this land of books which he has not touched in some way. And so I love him too, and owe him: for all of my favorite Russian authors, and the feeling I get when I walk down most streets in St. Petersburg, and many other things I cannot explain for lack of space. My Russia is the way it is because of him. He gave her the soul that I have fallen in love with. (And he liked to doodle in his notebooks.) I said, outloud, “Thank you,” and turned and walked back to the group.
Eventually, we drove back to St. Petersburg, where these past two weeks have evaporated in the hot sun, in her forests or fountained parks whose fervent green is gemlike, in walks along cool canals, in slippery vowels and consonants that tingle on the tongue.
Of this week, I will only say a little because so much has happened. In fact, there is no easy way to condense everything that should be said in a last word on such a big experience into this more manageable space. There’s certainly no time. And so, because that’s the case, I’ve come to realize that when I say this is my final entry, I know I’m wrong: I’ll keep on posting, although perhaps less often. I’ve too much to think and say about Russia. Posthaste.
By Monday we were talking about our plans for Thursday and Friday: presents for host families and teachers, final exams, cake, slideshows, a final get-together (a beautiful evening boat ride down the Neva). I started to get a little misty-eyed whenever I went into my homestay’s kitchen, or saw my host mom.
On Tuesday evening, I met with my English-language tutee and we drank tea and ended up talking only in Russian (me, exhausted and apologetic – I just had my grammar exam). I said that I had an eighteen hour layover in London, and she gave this little gasp and told me about the different times she had been to London. “Nice place,” she said. “The British are nice people.” When our time was up, we shook hands and she told me to let her know the next time I was in town. Then, with Erica, I returned to the Petersburg Philharmonic – which is for me now the epitome of a concert hall – to attend a performance of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony. Music like that defies concrete form – the written word burns up in any attempt. Best only to say that I wandered away afterward in a daze and on the verge of tears. A little while later, I could not stop smiling. For the rest of the night, I felt incandescent.
But that day was the first real day of lasts. My last grammar class, my last tutoring session, my last concert in Petersburg: I sensed each of them flash through me, as though I were a trembling tree struck by lightning, and waved them off with a sigh and greeted the next in line like old pals soon to be the dearly departed. That’s how the last few days have passed.
Classmates and conversation partners and friends with familiar smiles, routines, favored pathways through the birch trees, keys, a room, a bed, a ceramic mug, a carved cat, a bust of Lenin: these are the kinds of things we all say goodbye to over and over again in our lives – a final orbit, and a marveling look down and back at the gleam of a little world, a little life made up of myriad moves and billions of moments – before we sail off again into the great blue star-strewn beyond.
From there, recalling the things we’ve learned and, in turn, everything we might have left behind but are going back to, we enact daring, desperate feats of synthesis and diplomacy: pulling it all together is the thrilling act of recreating our lives.
I first realized this most clearly when I was leaving for St. Petersburg several months ago. I felt the same vast uncertain and opportunity then as I feel today: It is the stuff from which we can mould for ourselves a brave new world. And so I think to myself as I stand on this bittersweet embankment that, in at least some aspect of my life, I am immortal.
For now, as many times before, I begin again.
21 May 2010
10 May 2010
Mountaineering in Old Familiar Places
As homecomings go, my return to Russia from Paris was remarkable.
It was a brief trip back, and I sat next to a colorful American couple who were traveling to St. Petersburg for the second time in ten years to adopt a baby Russian boy. After they told me their story, I told mine: Russian language, one semester. They looked at me as though I was mad and asked if I was excited to go back. I hesitated, as I’d been doing lately when thinking about that question, and eventually said: “I don’t really know.” Although St. Petersburg itself was beautiful, three months of cold, commonly grey, and perpetually grumpy Russia had begun to weight on me (and everyone else). And after the material abundance of Western Europe (i.e. Paris in spring), returning felt something like dragging oneself back out into a desert after lounging in an oasis with all the cool, drinkable tap water you could want. I told them this and they nodded sympathetically and stared off into a space a while, before going back to their napping or reading. Later, the husband leaned in and asked – breath sweet from his latest Coca-Cola, sweat on the tip of his round and pitted nose – if they had any “American” places to eat yet. He explained that he didn’t want to be served boiled cow tongue again when he asked for red meat. It was hard not to laugh as I told him that there are many McDonaldses and Pizza Huts in Petersburg. He heaved a huge and happy sigh (which shook his barrel-like belly), and said: “Oh thank God.” As we were disembarking, I grinned, waved, and wished them all the luck in the world. The last I saw of the two, they were tangled up in the red tape of Russian passport control.
But Erica and I breezed on through with our multi-entry visas and none of the anxiety we had felt during our first arrival; instead, we chuckled at the charming ineptitude of our newfound friends. As I stood waiting the short while for our luggage to appear, the significance of what we had just accomplished occurred to me: Over the last three months, the mesmerizing mystery and near terror Russia once raised in our minds had been, more or less, subsumed by fondness. I found my crippled bag (Parisian streets had somehow ground down the left wheel) and carried it along, feeling for it the same kind of lopsided love that I suddenly felt for Russia. In the airport’s only coffee shop, I bought a latte and thought about how it was good to be in a place where I had some grasp on the language, where I could at least successfully say things like, “This lid doesn’t work. I don’t think it’s the right size. Can I get another?”
It was nearly midnight when I arrived back at my homestay, but my host mom emerged from her room and exclaimed, “Ah, the Parisian is back!” She remarked at how smart my new leather jacket and linen scarf looked (“Very French; very beautiful.”), needlessly made me dinner, and packed me off to bed saying that I was very tired and could tell her all about my trip at breakfast. But I didn’t go to sleep immediately.
Instead, I went to stand in front of my wide bedroom, momentarily poised there at exactly one in the morning, as though atop a mountain of time: perhaps a minor peak in the long, chronic range of a lifetime, but a towering one in this short semester: I was glad to be back in Russia. Really glad – despite (or because) of all of her faults and quirks, and despite the siren song of Paris or anywhere else. I was glad to be back where poets are superstars who can fill soccer stadiums, shopping malls always seem surprising, mushroom hunting is a major autumnal pastime, and plans often crumble to dust. When I finally wrapped myself up in blankets and darkness and drifted off to sleep, I dreamt of clowns, of cats in costume, of butterfly-haunted fields. And overnight, a metamorphosis began in Petersburg.
Maybe it’d happened earlier, but we’d slipped in so late at night that I hadn’t noticed: the snow had mostly melted away. A few dirty mounds lingered here and there, and actual grass was still a good ways off – although an occasional dash of green glinted in the dark, rugged topsoil (tossed and turned by plows). But the strength of the sun had been dialed up ten-fold, and the sky, once anemic, was blindingly blue. The city looked completely different, as though she’d shed her clothes in the warm weather.
April sailed by in a flurry of lacy clouds, long sunsets, fleeting showers, and shining sun: an endless parade of improvements. One day there was still a heavy mantle of ice on the Neva and every canal, and the next, that layer cracked apart and was swept away to the Gulf of Finland, revealing smoothly flowing water. Sunlight refracted off the polished gold points of Peter and Paul Fortress prickled the air; those already majestic palace facades seemed to swell up in pride; the blue of Smolny practically crackled and spit sparks it was so bright; and my host mom turned to me one morning to ask if I’d heard the nightingale singing at midnight. I had not then, but now I heard them all the time.
And as the air and ground began to thaw, so did the people. Suddenly, kids everywhere rocketed around on rollerblades and couples walked their cats. Parks slammed shut for spring cleaning, and crews of workwomen combed trash and dirt out of dead grass; masons tore up and replaced huge clumps of sidewalk; street repairs that had languished under ice were suddenly, startlingly finished. Everything was polished, primped, pumped up. They even repainted pipes running up and down the sides of buildings. One evening, on my way home, I saw a woman walking along with her head tilted back. She was smiling vaguely at the richly pink and violet sky. It was a look of happiness, a sigh of relief – a surge of love.
Spring had come to the Venice of the North.
.
I passed those first invigorating weeks with a slew of activities and the usual minor struggles. First, it seemed that I had forgotten about half of the already limited vocabulary I’d had before going off to Paris. In that first week back, I had to throw up my hands at nearly every dinner and my host mom (jokingly, I think) asked if I’d unlearned all my Russian in France. Grammar class left me feeling like a monkey who would have to mime what he wanted for the rest of his life, and phonetics became a joke. I moped a little more than needed, and kept telling myself that it would get better. Surprisingly, it did.
Within the next week my brain miraculously clicked into gear. I could understand everything my host mom and almost anyone else said. I spent one whole curious evening chattering to myself in all the Russian I knew. (I use chattering because I think it most aptly reflects how I probably looked and sounded to actual Russians: like a demented ten-year old.) The next week, I could only understand three-fourths of what my host mom asked me; soon it became one-half, then nothing, then three-fourths again. The pendulum continues to swing back and forth – between getting everything and nothing, everything and nothing. I wonder if this is how people with multiple personalities feel: at a complete loss for control, but wildly exhilarated because you’re always going somewhere different.
Outside of haphazard language learning, I spent a fair clump of time looking at houses: Anna Akhmatova’s house, tucked back behind a palace and facing the calm of a little park; Pushkin’s place (on a canal within sight of the Winter Palace), where he – after being wounded in a famous duel – died at age thirty-seven; and the Nabokovs’ town house. The first two houses had little to offer in the way of connection with those brightest stars of Russia, except for a few carefully copied relics. (I however did see the actual bed on which Pushkin spent his last hours. Or so they say.) But the last, the only museum to Vladimir Nabokov, proved a startlingly powerful experience.
I went with seven or eight of my fellow Americans, on an after-hours (all-Russian) tour arranged by CIEE. Our guide led us up and down a short stretch of rooms, and pointing to butterfly books colored in by V.N. himself, butterflies collected by V.N. himself, a framed array of famed books by V.N. himself, yellowed note-cards and stubs of yellow pencil, and the beautiful, multi-shade, jigsaw-puzzle woodwork of the walls and ceilings. When we’d finished with the public part of the museum, we tiptoed upstairs into the museum offices – which were also once lived-in rooms. There is a very impressive stove in one of them, and an excellent view of the wide street below, which opens out into the cobblestone Square of St. Isaac’s.
Seeing actually used objects was thrilling, of course. Nonetheless, peering into glass cases at fairly indistinct pieces of a person’s life is a common museum activity and nothing really special (although our guide’s quiet enthusiasm helped hugely). But when we entered what used to be the family library, we were met with a connection more palpable. V.N. describes it in Speak Memory: “The place combined pleasantly the scholarly and the athletic, the leather of books and the leather of boxing gloves. Fat armchairs stood alongside the book lined walls. An elaborate ‘punching ball’ affair purchased in England…gleamed at one end of the room.” Nothing exists of those books, gloves, and punching bag now, except faint outlines traced by our guide of where they once might have stood. In their place is a projector and screen; several rows of chairs; two small bookcases filled with copies Lolita, Pale Fire, and all the rest; and, of course, a library-like table.
Cool afternoon light streamed in through the window. You could almost taste the dust and sweet leather. On the table was a chess board, only half of its squares occupied. We sat around the table and talked about Nabokov’s love of puzzles. Here, for example, are two anagrams that appear in his books: Vivian Darkbloom (a character) and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (title of V.N.’s first English novel; answer is chess-related). How can they be unscrambled? We leaned in, discussed, fidgeted with handily placed Scrabble pieces. Words began to form. I felt a tingle, like a ghost of lightning low on the horizon, run through me. We were joined together, the seven or eight of us – and joined also to Vladimir Nabokov. Our minds were all engaged with coaxing out his secret; with sliding it out of its dark velvet pouch and into the daylight. We thought furiously. Suddenly, something subtle snuck into place and the full answer almost immediately followed. We clapped heartily.
Next, we turned to the curiously arranged chess board. It was a chess equation, also formulated by Nabokov. Most of us didn’t know much about chess problems or the game itself, and so nothing happened. After a while, our guide reached down and – with two or three deft moves – solved it. The solution had striking elegance in both intellectual and physical form. We clapped again, marveling at Nabokov’s playful and ingenious mind. After that, we settled in with tea and cookies and watched an engaging black-and-white interview with the man himself; part of it was filmed in a sunlight meadow, with snow-capped mountains in the background. After the half-hour interview was up, we all agreed to meet back at the museum the following week to watch Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of Lolita, which is exactly what we did. Thus, I am now part of an infrequent club Набокова.
On another warm night the preceding week (was it?), all of CIEE got dressed up in hoop skirts and uniforms out of a different century, and danced the night away.
For weeks before, several devoted people had been breathlessly planning and preparing for this ball: teaching everyone how to do (or passably pretend to do) the polonaise, waltz, and other dances; teaching the girls how to use the fan as a method of communication; pulling together food and music and champagne. The point of the whole affair was to spend a star-spangled night as it would have been in eighteenth century St. Petersburg (i.e. Pushkin’s period), in a building roughly dating back to that time (i.e. Smolny – where we go to school). We all rented costumes from a woman who ran a shop out of her cramped Soviet-era apartment. All the dresses smacked of Disney princess or a charming version of prostitute, and the uniforms ranged from foppish Musketeer to Hussar cavalryman and, in my case, a matador (no pun intended). Golden tassels were the bling of the day. Knee high boots. Hairspray by the gallon. Feathered fans, silver swords. We paraded into the high-ceilinged ballrooms, preened proudly, hopped to the left and again to the right, bowed, skipped, sipped, smiled, laughed hysterically, and ended our evening by rocking out (as was the tradition) to Lil’ Wayne and Lady Gaga. It was a grand time. When we finally left for home, the sun had only just set and the sky was still cooling from electric blue to smooth black. A party of a different kind followed two days after.
I woke up on my host mom’s birthday and had four or five hours before her family and friends started to arrive, so I went for a walk. By eleven in the morning, the sun – which practically sits on my windowsill every morning – had chased away all the lingering, damp and cool shadows; it got positively hot. I wound my way through the senseless maze of apartment buildings, and happily took stock of every sizable bit of grass and budding bush. And since it was Sunday, people were out in droves. A girl blew wearing rollerblades whizzed by me, streaming bubbles from a pink plastic wand. Children swirled around playground pieces, screaming happily; their parents sat on benches and chatted. An elongated arrowhead of geese shot in from the south, zoning in on a tame park and pond which I later passed. Past that park rose a strange Soviet tower that reminded me of something out of The Lord of the Rings (Orthanc, perhaps). Just beyond its milky concrete and spiked crenellations was a mammoth forest-park: the largest of its kind in the city. I followed a woman pushing a baby carriage down one of the wide (somewhat muddy) paths, and eventually lost her after turning onto another.
It was mostly quiet except for birds. The occasional mountain-biker or elderly couple – the latter almost always holding hands, and picking their dainty way through the mud – would shimmer into sight through the trees, but always disappear again or pass me by. After a while of wandering down those wider byways, I went off on one of the hundred footpaths that led off into the woods. I followed a sluggish stream, half expecting to find a windowless hut on chicken legs and Baba Yaga. Instead, I found a stand of birch trees, all lyrical lines and glowing white skin. The sun fell through their half-bare branches onto my stream, fallen logs, and ragged, golden or olive-colored grass. I was alone in that kind of wildly beautiful place which would have shot Pushkin through with inspiration. It was perfectly still for a long time. But then I heard voices and laugher, looked up, and saw a large group of picnickers threading their way toward me. I left quietly, treading tenderly, feeling myself very Russian.
On the way home, I bought my host mom three purple lilies. (Giving flowers is very big here. There are flower shops on nearly every block.) When I got back to the apartment, a whole crowd of family was there. I re-met my host mom’s three adult children and their significant others, her mother, one of her good friends, and her father (who greeted me in English with, “I am very pleased to meet you.” I replied in Russian: “I’m glad to meet you too.”) We all squeezed into what is usually my host mom’s bed room (the largest room in the apartment) and sat at a table that groaned with food. There was juice, sickly-sweet cognac, kvass; stew, bread, multiple salads, and a platter piled high with radishes, cucumbers, and tomatoes – all staple Russian food and drink. When the meal wound down, an hour later or so (it was by then four o’clock), we leaned back and I listened drowsily to my surrogate family chat in lazy circles. When I was asked a rare direct question, I could answer – but beyond that, I kept silent; it was pleasant just to listen and not worry about how blurry my syntax is or lacking my vocabulary. Sometimes I caught the drift of conversation, and other times it slid on by. They mentioned modern movies and apartments. They laughed when the little granddaughter squealed in delight at my red hair and could not take her eyes off of it. We ate cake with tea and turned on the television to see how the Petersburg soccer team was doing in its latest match. The game ended in a tie as dusk settled.
After most everyone had left, the dishes were cleared away and cleaned my host mom and her friend. My help was refused, and so I sat in my room with an unopened book and the yellow light on overhead. I was glad that I’d been able to be a part of this family’s celebration, to elicit their smiles and listen to their table-talk. Just then, a wave of sweet night air blew in through my open window. Loud laughter burst from the kitchen.
And suddenly I knew again, with infinite certainty, as on that pinnacle of time in the night just one month ago, when the air grew thin and my breath caught short, as the snare snapped shut and the realization first struck: Even if I never get the chance to visit her again, this country will always own half of my heart.
It’s enough to make one howl from the rooftops.
It was a brief trip back, and I sat next to a colorful American couple who were traveling to St. Petersburg for the second time in ten years to adopt a baby Russian boy. After they told me their story, I told mine: Russian language, one semester. They looked at me as though I was mad and asked if I was excited to go back. I hesitated, as I’d been doing lately when thinking about that question, and eventually said: “I don’t really know.” Although St. Petersburg itself was beautiful, three months of cold, commonly grey, and perpetually grumpy Russia had begun to weight on me (and everyone else). And after the material abundance of Western Europe (i.e. Paris in spring), returning felt something like dragging oneself back out into a desert after lounging in an oasis with all the cool, drinkable tap water you could want. I told them this and they nodded sympathetically and stared off into a space a while, before going back to their napping or reading. Later, the husband leaned in and asked – breath sweet from his latest Coca-Cola, sweat on the tip of his round and pitted nose – if they had any “American” places to eat yet. He explained that he didn’t want to be served boiled cow tongue again when he asked for red meat. It was hard not to laugh as I told him that there are many McDonaldses and Pizza Huts in Petersburg. He heaved a huge and happy sigh (which shook his barrel-like belly), and said: “Oh thank God.” As we were disembarking, I grinned, waved, and wished them all the luck in the world. The last I saw of the two, they were tangled up in the red tape of Russian passport control.
But Erica and I breezed on through with our multi-entry visas and none of the anxiety we had felt during our first arrival; instead, we chuckled at the charming ineptitude of our newfound friends. As I stood waiting the short while for our luggage to appear, the significance of what we had just accomplished occurred to me: Over the last three months, the mesmerizing mystery and near terror Russia once raised in our minds had been, more or less, subsumed by fondness. I found my crippled bag (Parisian streets had somehow ground down the left wheel) and carried it along, feeling for it the same kind of lopsided love that I suddenly felt for Russia. In the airport’s only coffee shop, I bought a latte and thought about how it was good to be in a place where I had some grasp on the language, where I could at least successfully say things like, “This lid doesn’t work. I don’t think it’s the right size. Can I get another?”
It was nearly midnight when I arrived back at my homestay, but my host mom emerged from her room and exclaimed, “Ah, the Parisian is back!” She remarked at how smart my new leather jacket and linen scarf looked (“Very French; very beautiful.”), needlessly made me dinner, and packed me off to bed saying that I was very tired and could tell her all about my trip at breakfast. But I didn’t go to sleep immediately.
Instead, I went to stand in front of my wide bedroom, momentarily poised there at exactly one in the morning, as though atop a mountain of time: perhaps a minor peak in the long, chronic range of a lifetime, but a towering one in this short semester: I was glad to be back in Russia. Really glad – despite (or because) of all of her faults and quirks, and despite the siren song of Paris or anywhere else. I was glad to be back where poets are superstars who can fill soccer stadiums, shopping malls always seem surprising, mushroom hunting is a major autumnal pastime, and plans often crumble to dust. When I finally wrapped myself up in blankets and darkness and drifted off to sleep, I dreamt of clowns, of cats in costume, of butterfly-haunted fields. And overnight, a metamorphosis began in Petersburg.
Maybe it’d happened earlier, but we’d slipped in so late at night that I hadn’t noticed: the snow had mostly melted away. A few dirty mounds lingered here and there, and actual grass was still a good ways off – although an occasional dash of green glinted in the dark, rugged topsoil (tossed and turned by plows). But the strength of the sun had been dialed up ten-fold, and the sky, once anemic, was blindingly blue. The city looked completely different, as though she’d shed her clothes in the warm weather.
April sailed by in a flurry of lacy clouds, long sunsets, fleeting showers, and shining sun: an endless parade of improvements. One day there was still a heavy mantle of ice on the Neva and every canal, and the next, that layer cracked apart and was swept away to the Gulf of Finland, revealing smoothly flowing water. Sunlight refracted off the polished gold points of Peter and Paul Fortress prickled the air; those already majestic palace facades seemed to swell up in pride; the blue of Smolny practically crackled and spit sparks it was so bright; and my host mom turned to me one morning to ask if I’d heard the nightingale singing at midnight. I had not then, but now I heard them all the time.
And as the air and ground began to thaw, so did the people. Suddenly, kids everywhere rocketed around on rollerblades and couples walked their cats. Parks slammed shut for spring cleaning, and crews of workwomen combed trash and dirt out of dead grass; masons tore up and replaced huge clumps of sidewalk; street repairs that had languished under ice were suddenly, startlingly finished. Everything was polished, primped, pumped up. They even repainted pipes running up and down the sides of buildings. One evening, on my way home, I saw a woman walking along with her head tilted back. She was smiling vaguely at the richly pink and violet sky. It was a look of happiness, a sigh of relief – a surge of love.
Spring had come to the Venice of the North.
.
I passed those first invigorating weeks with a slew of activities and the usual minor struggles. First, it seemed that I had forgotten about half of the already limited vocabulary I’d had before going off to Paris. In that first week back, I had to throw up my hands at nearly every dinner and my host mom (jokingly, I think) asked if I’d unlearned all my Russian in France. Grammar class left me feeling like a monkey who would have to mime what he wanted for the rest of his life, and phonetics became a joke. I moped a little more than needed, and kept telling myself that it would get better. Surprisingly, it did.
Within the next week my brain miraculously clicked into gear. I could understand everything my host mom and almost anyone else said. I spent one whole curious evening chattering to myself in all the Russian I knew. (I use chattering because I think it most aptly reflects how I probably looked and sounded to actual Russians: like a demented ten-year old.) The next week, I could only understand three-fourths of what my host mom asked me; soon it became one-half, then nothing, then three-fourths again. The pendulum continues to swing back and forth – between getting everything and nothing, everything and nothing. I wonder if this is how people with multiple personalities feel: at a complete loss for control, but wildly exhilarated because you’re always going somewhere different.
Outside of haphazard language learning, I spent a fair clump of time looking at houses: Anna Akhmatova’s house, tucked back behind a palace and facing the calm of a little park; Pushkin’s place (on a canal within sight of the Winter Palace), where he – after being wounded in a famous duel – died at age thirty-seven; and the Nabokovs’ town house. The first two houses had little to offer in the way of connection with those brightest stars of Russia, except for a few carefully copied relics. (I however did see the actual bed on which Pushkin spent his last hours. Or so they say.) But the last, the only museum to Vladimir Nabokov, proved a startlingly powerful experience.
I went with seven or eight of my fellow Americans, on an after-hours (all-Russian) tour arranged by CIEE. Our guide led us up and down a short stretch of rooms, and pointing to butterfly books colored in by V.N. himself, butterflies collected by V.N. himself, a framed array of famed books by V.N. himself, yellowed note-cards and stubs of yellow pencil, and the beautiful, multi-shade, jigsaw-puzzle woodwork of the walls and ceilings. When we’d finished with the public part of the museum, we tiptoed upstairs into the museum offices – which were also once lived-in rooms. There is a very impressive stove in one of them, and an excellent view of the wide street below, which opens out into the cobblestone Square of St. Isaac’s.
Seeing actually used objects was thrilling, of course. Nonetheless, peering into glass cases at fairly indistinct pieces of a person’s life is a common museum activity and nothing really special (although our guide’s quiet enthusiasm helped hugely). But when we entered what used to be the family library, we were met with a connection more palpable. V.N. describes it in Speak Memory: “The place combined pleasantly the scholarly and the athletic, the leather of books and the leather of boxing gloves. Fat armchairs stood alongside the book lined walls. An elaborate ‘punching ball’ affair purchased in England…gleamed at one end of the room.” Nothing exists of those books, gloves, and punching bag now, except faint outlines traced by our guide of where they once might have stood. In their place is a projector and screen; several rows of chairs; two small bookcases filled with copies Lolita, Pale Fire, and all the rest; and, of course, a library-like table.
Cool afternoon light streamed in through the window. You could almost taste the dust and sweet leather. On the table was a chess board, only half of its squares occupied. We sat around the table and talked about Nabokov’s love of puzzles. Here, for example, are two anagrams that appear in his books: Vivian Darkbloom (a character) and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (title of V.N.’s first English novel; answer is chess-related). How can they be unscrambled? We leaned in, discussed, fidgeted with handily placed Scrabble pieces. Words began to form. I felt a tingle, like a ghost of lightning low on the horizon, run through me. We were joined together, the seven or eight of us – and joined also to Vladimir Nabokov. Our minds were all engaged with coaxing out his secret; with sliding it out of its dark velvet pouch and into the daylight. We thought furiously. Suddenly, something subtle snuck into place and the full answer almost immediately followed. We clapped heartily.
Next, we turned to the curiously arranged chess board. It was a chess equation, also formulated by Nabokov. Most of us didn’t know much about chess problems or the game itself, and so nothing happened. After a while, our guide reached down and – with two or three deft moves – solved it. The solution had striking elegance in both intellectual and physical form. We clapped again, marveling at Nabokov’s playful and ingenious mind. After that, we settled in with tea and cookies and watched an engaging black-and-white interview with the man himself; part of it was filmed in a sunlight meadow, with snow-capped mountains in the background. After the half-hour interview was up, we all agreed to meet back at the museum the following week to watch Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of Lolita, which is exactly what we did. Thus, I am now part of an infrequent club Набокова.
On another warm night the preceding week (was it?), all of CIEE got dressed up in hoop skirts and uniforms out of a different century, and danced the night away.
For weeks before, several devoted people had been breathlessly planning and preparing for this ball: teaching everyone how to do (or passably pretend to do) the polonaise, waltz, and other dances; teaching the girls how to use the fan as a method of communication; pulling together food and music and champagne. The point of the whole affair was to spend a star-spangled night as it would have been in eighteenth century St. Petersburg (i.e. Pushkin’s period), in a building roughly dating back to that time (i.e. Smolny – where we go to school). We all rented costumes from a woman who ran a shop out of her cramped Soviet-era apartment. All the dresses smacked of Disney princess or a charming version of prostitute, and the uniforms ranged from foppish Musketeer to Hussar cavalryman and, in my case, a matador (no pun intended). Golden tassels were the bling of the day. Knee high boots. Hairspray by the gallon. Feathered fans, silver swords. We paraded into the high-ceilinged ballrooms, preened proudly, hopped to the left and again to the right, bowed, skipped, sipped, smiled, laughed hysterically, and ended our evening by rocking out (as was the tradition) to Lil’ Wayne and Lady Gaga. It was a grand time. When we finally left for home, the sun had only just set and the sky was still cooling from electric blue to smooth black. A party of a different kind followed two days after.
I woke up on my host mom’s birthday and had four or five hours before her family and friends started to arrive, so I went for a walk. By eleven in the morning, the sun – which practically sits on my windowsill every morning – had chased away all the lingering, damp and cool shadows; it got positively hot. I wound my way through the senseless maze of apartment buildings, and happily took stock of every sizable bit of grass and budding bush. And since it was Sunday, people were out in droves. A girl blew wearing rollerblades whizzed by me, streaming bubbles from a pink plastic wand. Children swirled around playground pieces, screaming happily; their parents sat on benches and chatted. An elongated arrowhead of geese shot in from the south, zoning in on a tame park and pond which I later passed. Past that park rose a strange Soviet tower that reminded me of something out of The Lord of the Rings (Orthanc, perhaps). Just beyond its milky concrete and spiked crenellations was a mammoth forest-park: the largest of its kind in the city. I followed a woman pushing a baby carriage down one of the wide (somewhat muddy) paths, and eventually lost her after turning onto another.
It was mostly quiet except for birds. The occasional mountain-biker or elderly couple – the latter almost always holding hands, and picking their dainty way through the mud – would shimmer into sight through the trees, but always disappear again or pass me by. After a while of wandering down those wider byways, I went off on one of the hundred footpaths that led off into the woods. I followed a sluggish stream, half expecting to find a windowless hut on chicken legs and Baba Yaga. Instead, I found a stand of birch trees, all lyrical lines and glowing white skin. The sun fell through their half-bare branches onto my stream, fallen logs, and ragged, golden or olive-colored grass. I was alone in that kind of wildly beautiful place which would have shot Pushkin through with inspiration. It was perfectly still for a long time. But then I heard voices and laugher, looked up, and saw a large group of picnickers threading their way toward me. I left quietly, treading tenderly, feeling myself very Russian.
On the way home, I bought my host mom three purple lilies. (Giving flowers is very big here. There are flower shops on nearly every block.) When I got back to the apartment, a whole crowd of family was there. I re-met my host mom’s three adult children and their significant others, her mother, one of her good friends, and her father (who greeted me in English with, “I am very pleased to meet you.” I replied in Russian: “I’m glad to meet you too.”) We all squeezed into what is usually my host mom’s bed room (the largest room in the apartment) and sat at a table that groaned with food. There was juice, sickly-sweet cognac, kvass; stew, bread, multiple salads, and a platter piled high with radishes, cucumbers, and tomatoes – all staple Russian food and drink. When the meal wound down, an hour later or so (it was by then four o’clock), we leaned back and I listened drowsily to my surrogate family chat in lazy circles. When I was asked a rare direct question, I could answer – but beyond that, I kept silent; it was pleasant just to listen and not worry about how blurry my syntax is or lacking my vocabulary. Sometimes I caught the drift of conversation, and other times it slid on by. They mentioned modern movies and apartments. They laughed when the little granddaughter squealed in delight at my red hair and could not take her eyes off of it. We ate cake with tea and turned on the television to see how the Petersburg soccer team was doing in its latest match. The game ended in a tie as dusk settled.
After most everyone had left, the dishes were cleared away and cleaned my host mom and her friend. My help was refused, and so I sat in my room with an unopened book and the yellow light on overhead. I was glad that I’d been able to be a part of this family’s celebration, to elicit their smiles and listen to their table-talk. Just then, a wave of sweet night air blew in through my open window. Loud laughter burst from the kitchen.
And suddenly I knew again, with infinite certainty, as on that pinnacle of time in the night just one month ago, when the air grew thin and my breath caught short, as the snare snapped shut and the realization first struck: Even if I never get the chance to visit her again, this country will always own half of my heart.
It’s enough to make one howl from the rooftops.
28 April 2010
Paris
Just a little while before the long plume of volcanic ash lifted into the air over Europe, I was in its place, on a plane gliding toward Paris, feeling – after the hot chaos of Moscow and the prosaic drizzle of Petersburg – radiantly reincarnated.
At the dopey, unclearly marked little international airport in St. Petersburg, check-in came after a preliminary round of security. I was pulled aside and told to open and search my own bag. I unlocked the lock and palpated my socks. I turned over my t-shirts. I opened my toothpaste. Finding nothing unexpected, I shrugged, stood back, and stared at the dour security woman. She looked from me to my suitcase; she frowned and motioned her supervisor over. They talked heatedly. I waited. Eventually, the lovely lady glanced back up, rolled her eyes, and waved me away. I stalked off hoping that I hadn’t stepped into a Kafka story.
But soon afterwards – after Erica and I confirmed our seats and received our tickets, fidgeted in front of customs officers with our handful of paperwork, and endured a second round of security – we got onto our Air France flight, where the world reversed into one of bold colors and attractive surfaces, soft baguettes with butter and real coffee, and attentive (if incoherent) French flight attendants who knew how to smile. I settled in as we leapt off, hoping that the change was permanent. Incidentally, it was drizzling in Paris too.
Except – unlike that blind, cold Petersburg precipitation – this rain softened and freshened. Everywhere, as we (with one of Erica’s friends, Heather, who joined us at Charles de Gaulle) rode a train (and then metro) through a short stretch of countryside and into the city, the rain worked to coax grass up and buds out; it drew impurities out of the air and enhanced what was left, and so when it stopped just as we emerged from a metro stop near the Bastille, the air swirled with springtime scents and, under the now full moon, my first-ever wide and tree-lined French boulevard gleamed darkly, as though it had been carved out of colored glass.
From the metro stop, we promptly got lost and spent several hours walking in circles, looking for our hostel. Erica spoke the most French, and stopped periodically to ask for directions, but no one seemed to know the street we were after – although one nice couple stopped and, unable to point the way, gave us a spare map. Eventually, we made it, found our fourth comrade (Mary, another of Erica’s friends), and lugged our luggage into the creaking little elevator, which nearly passed out with the effort of getting us to the fifth floor and our room. Later we ate dinner at a streetside café while droll music rolled on by in the background. Later still, in celebration of our first night in Paris, we drank a bottle of red wine out of plastic cups in our room. We were exhausted. We slept.
So that was how we had made it to Paris. There were no interrogations, or deportations to the gulag archipelago. The plane was not delayed by volcanic activity, heavy fog, or terrorist threats. When the new day dawned, I woke up wholly myself (no bug) and real (no dream).
Of course I knew what Paris is supposed to be like long before I got there: proud, beautiful, often antique, keenly fashionable, sparkling, joyous, legendary. But until I got there and saw her during the daylight hours, I didn’t realize just how much she lives up to the hype!
We ate crumbly croissants in our hostel for breakfast. We traveled up a metro line to the city center (our hostel was just a ways out), and strolled up the Champs-Elysees. Japanese tourists snapped photos and gabbed to one another; groups of school children in matching windbreakers swirled around us. After breaking our necks staring up at Napoleon’s triumphant triumphal arch, we bobbed off toward the Eiffel Tower. In the intervening space (greening, airy), we wandered for a while in the web of narrow cobblestone streets. Spring glinted in every tree and off every vibrantly newborn blade of grass. Birds sang and happy Parisians swung down off their bicycles and ducked in and out of little bakeries, singing out “Bonjour!” and “Merci!” as though buying a bit of bread was the best thing that could ever happen to them.
Contrary to what I was expecting (and to Russia), every single person we met beamed at us. We rested on a bench in the sun, drank Coca-colas, and I devoured a giant chocolate chip cookie from one of those (many, many) little bakeries. I felt as though I’d not tasted a good chocolate chip cookie in years. They simply don’t seem to have them in Russia. It was then that we, when we thought of them, started writing down the things which Russia does not seem to have in comparison with France (or the rest of the Western world, at least). For example: toilet paper that is softer than birch bark (and not made from it), drinkable tap water, cigarette smoke-free air, public displays of happiness, flowers, lettuce, optimism, traffic laws, and wine that doesn’t taste like tin.
We found a Post Office (bright, airy) and bought stamps (for postcards) from a woman who almost immediately switched to English and asked where we were from. She told us, after Erica and I explained where we were studying, that she was married to a Russian. We exchanged a few delighted words in that language. Afterwards, all remarking on the friendliness of French people, our little group found the Eiffel Tower, where we jumped on a carousel and rode around and around, and waved at the other tourists. Now that’s entertainment.
Up close, the Tower itself was hulking, brown and awfully ugly. It was the only disappointment of the whole week. I ate a chocolate-filled crepe to consol myself. We walked along the Seine and wondered what it would be like to live in a houseboat with a garden. A few picturesque streets away, in a gentle rain and the translucent blue light of early evening, we shopped in an outdoor fruit-and-vegetable market (fresh strawberries!) and browsed through a small French bookstore (finding Nabokov in a very different translation). After dinner in another streetside café, we bought more wine and whiled away the evening talking under the low eves of our room, with the rain pouring down outside.
We spent almost all of the next day at the Louvre; I smiled back at the Mona Lisa. I think I’m on to her. We saw Notre-Dame at sunset. Inside they were holding a service, and the whole serenely august place was filled with people and sublime singing. And later: two courses worth of crepes at a little crêpery in Montparnasse. Rain on windowpanes. White wine rather than red. Velvet curtain.
The next day, Heather went home to Scotland and the rest of us moved to different places: Mary to another hostel and Erica and I to the center of the city, to the sleek, fifth-story apartment of a friend on the CIEE program.
Now at this point I’d like to say: I could go on trying to conjure every detail of the following days, but I don’t want to: golden memories tend to lose their luster under the glare of an interrogator's lamp. But also, we didn’t really do much. After those first few days, we decided not to go and see anything terribly touristy. We’d caught the essentials.
The rest of the time, we walked a lot (sometimes in the sun and sometimes in the rain, with our umbrellas), made friends of nearly everyone we talked to for more than five minutes, hopped from café to café sipping at long-stemmed wine glasses, dashed in and out of dapper clothing stores, and spent hours in English-language bookstores. One of our favorites was tucked into a bank of colorful cafes and sundry shops on the left side of the Seine across from Notre-Dame. It was called Shakespeare and Company, and it had (in addition to a wonderful selection) a used-books library on its second floor that was open to all patrons.
And one evening, after wandering all day, the three of us stopped in a grocery store and bought pasta, brie and baguettes. Back at that sleek apartment of ours, we uncorked a bottle of wine, set the table, and cooked a meal for ourselves in a kitchen that was – for the first in months – ours to command completely. The dinner meandered by and we talked about our lives in Paris and elsewhere, while Ray Charles crooned in the background. Afterward, we went out onto our apartment’s little terrace, which overlooked a dark courtyard. Just beyond one roofline was a narrow street full of seductive nighttime bustle, but we could not see or hear a bit of it. A cool wind blew through, the stars shone overhead, and now and then strains of Ray Charles still leaked through the open terrace door.
For just a split-second of our brief lives, we are standing high Paris with our wine glasses, living as many people – even Parisians – likely only dream about: luxuriously and without obligation in one of the most expensive cities in the world. We wondered: What made us so lucky? How did we get here? Where are we going?
And the answer to the last question was, inevitably, unfortunately: Back to Russia.
At the dopey, unclearly marked little international airport in St. Petersburg, check-in came after a preliminary round of security. I was pulled aside and told to open and search my own bag. I unlocked the lock and palpated my socks. I turned over my t-shirts. I opened my toothpaste. Finding nothing unexpected, I shrugged, stood back, and stared at the dour security woman. She looked from me to my suitcase; she frowned and motioned her supervisor over. They talked heatedly. I waited. Eventually, the lovely lady glanced back up, rolled her eyes, and waved me away. I stalked off hoping that I hadn’t stepped into a Kafka story.
But soon afterwards – after Erica and I confirmed our seats and received our tickets, fidgeted in front of customs officers with our handful of paperwork, and endured a second round of security – we got onto our Air France flight, where the world reversed into one of bold colors and attractive surfaces, soft baguettes with butter and real coffee, and attentive (if incoherent) French flight attendants who knew how to smile. I settled in as we leapt off, hoping that the change was permanent. Incidentally, it was drizzling in Paris too.
Except – unlike that blind, cold Petersburg precipitation – this rain softened and freshened. Everywhere, as we (with one of Erica’s friends, Heather, who joined us at Charles de Gaulle) rode a train (and then metro) through a short stretch of countryside and into the city, the rain worked to coax grass up and buds out; it drew impurities out of the air and enhanced what was left, and so when it stopped just as we emerged from a metro stop near the Bastille, the air swirled with springtime scents and, under the now full moon, my first-ever wide and tree-lined French boulevard gleamed darkly, as though it had been carved out of colored glass.
From the metro stop, we promptly got lost and spent several hours walking in circles, looking for our hostel. Erica spoke the most French, and stopped periodically to ask for directions, but no one seemed to know the street we were after – although one nice couple stopped and, unable to point the way, gave us a spare map. Eventually, we made it, found our fourth comrade (Mary, another of Erica’s friends), and lugged our luggage into the creaking little elevator, which nearly passed out with the effort of getting us to the fifth floor and our room. Later we ate dinner at a streetside café while droll music rolled on by in the background. Later still, in celebration of our first night in Paris, we drank a bottle of red wine out of plastic cups in our room. We were exhausted. We slept.
So that was how we had made it to Paris. There were no interrogations, or deportations to the gulag archipelago. The plane was not delayed by volcanic activity, heavy fog, or terrorist threats. When the new day dawned, I woke up wholly myself (no bug) and real (no dream).
Of course I knew what Paris is supposed to be like long before I got there: proud, beautiful, often antique, keenly fashionable, sparkling, joyous, legendary. But until I got there and saw her during the daylight hours, I didn’t realize just how much she lives up to the hype!
We ate crumbly croissants in our hostel for breakfast. We traveled up a metro line to the city center (our hostel was just a ways out), and strolled up the Champs-Elysees. Japanese tourists snapped photos and gabbed to one another; groups of school children in matching windbreakers swirled around us. After breaking our necks staring up at Napoleon’s triumphant triumphal arch, we bobbed off toward the Eiffel Tower. In the intervening space (greening, airy), we wandered for a while in the web of narrow cobblestone streets. Spring glinted in every tree and off every vibrantly newborn blade of grass. Birds sang and happy Parisians swung down off their bicycles and ducked in and out of little bakeries, singing out “Bonjour!” and “Merci!” as though buying a bit of bread was the best thing that could ever happen to them.
Contrary to what I was expecting (and to Russia), every single person we met beamed at us. We rested on a bench in the sun, drank Coca-colas, and I devoured a giant chocolate chip cookie from one of those (many, many) little bakeries. I felt as though I’d not tasted a good chocolate chip cookie in years. They simply don’t seem to have them in Russia. It was then that we, when we thought of them, started writing down the things which Russia does not seem to have in comparison with France (or the rest of the Western world, at least). For example: toilet paper that is softer than birch bark (and not made from it), drinkable tap water, cigarette smoke-free air, public displays of happiness, flowers, lettuce, optimism, traffic laws, and wine that doesn’t taste like tin.
We found a Post Office (bright, airy) and bought stamps (for postcards) from a woman who almost immediately switched to English and asked where we were from. She told us, after Erica and I explained where we were studying, that she was married to a Russian. We exchanged a few delighted words in that language. Afterwards, all remarking on the friendliness of French people, our little group found the Eiffel Tower, where we jumped on a carousel and rode around and around, and waved at the other tourists. Now that’s entertainment.
Up close, the Tower itself was hulking, brown and awfully ugly. It was the only disappointment of the whole week. I ate a chocolate-filled crepe to consol myself. We walked along the Seine and wondered what it would be like to live in a houseboat with a garden. A few picturesque streets away, in a gentle rain and the translucent blue light of early evening, we shopped in an outdoor fruit-and-vegetable market (fresh strawberries!) and browsed through a small French bookstore (finding Nabokov in a very different translation). After dinner in another streetside café, we bought more wine and whiled away the evening talking under the low eves of our room, with the rain pouring down outside.
We spent almost all of the next day at the Louvre; I smiled back at the Mona Lisa. I think I’m on to her. We saw Notre-Dame at sunset. Inside they were holding a service, and the whole serenely august place was filled with people and sublime singing. And later: two courses worth of crepes at a little crêpery in Montparnasse. Rain on windowpanes. White wine rather than red. Velvet curtain.
The next day, Heather went home to Scotland and the rest of us moved to different places: Mary to another hostel and Erica and I to the center of the city, to the sleek, fifth-story apartment of a friend on the CIEE program.
Now at this point I’d like to say: I could go on trying to conjure every detail of the following days, but I don’t want to: golden memories tend to lose their luster under the glare of an interrogator's lamp. But also, we didn’t really do much. After those first few days, we decided not to go and see anything terribly touristy. We’d caught the essentials.
The rest of the time, we walked a lot (sometimes in the sun and sometimes in the rain, with our umbrellas), made friends of nearly everyone we talked to for more than five minutes, hopped from café to café sipping at long-stemmed wine glasses, dashed in and out of dapper clothing stores, and spent hours in English-language bookstores. One of our favorites was tucked into a bank of colorful cafes and sundry shops on the left side of the Seine across from Notre-Dame. It was called Shakespeare and Company, and it had (in addition to a wonderful selection) a used-books library on its second floor that was open to all patrons.
And one evening, after wandering all day, the three of us stopped in a grocery store and bought pasta, brie and baguettes. Back at that sleek apartment of ours, we uncorked a bottle of wine, set the table, and cooked a meal for ourselves in a kitchen that was – for the first in months – ours to command completely. The dinner meandered by and we talked about our lives in Paris and elsewhere, while Ray Charles crooned in the background. Afterward, we went out onto our apartment’s little terrace, which overlooked a dark courtyard. Just beyond one roofline was a narrow street full of seductive nighttime bustle, but we could not see or hear a bit of it. A cool wind blew through, the stars shone overhead, and now and then strains of Ray Charles still leaked through the open terrace door.
For just a split-second of our brief lives, we are standing high Paris with our wine glasses, living as many people – even Parisians – likely only dream about: luxuriously and without obligation in one of the most expensive cities in the world. We wondered: What made us so lucky? How did we get here? Where are we going?
And the answer to the last question was, inevitably, unfortunately: Back to Russia.
18 April 2010
Moscow
The night train to Moscow arrived early in the morning at a station named for Leningrad, a city which no longer exists.
Like bees waking after a long winter, we dragged ourselves out of our little four-bunk sleeping compartments, buzzing, albeit blearily, with excitement. We flicked flakes of sleep from our eyes. We burst out of the dim, cool train station; the city crashed down like heat at the height of summer, or, at its fall, a hurricane at sea. What a place!
Moscow stretches from one side of the world to the other, filling every space in between. Travel from end to end can exhaust gas tanks and all but the most infinite reserves of patience. It is wild with noise and velocity; the electric vitality of seventeen million people sizzles in every street. It overwhelms with possibility and shatters language as if it were glass. It’s alive!
Lumbering from the station in mild shock, we climbed into a bus and drove to the local Holiday Inn, although it was before our check-in time; we refueled in the hotel restaurant, and bussed back off into the madly eddying motor pools to snap pictures in passing and listen to a Muscovite guide with a very dry wit. As we careened around one corner, we caught a glimpse of Lubyanka, the drab brown KGB central headquarters. Among other things, we saw a handful of the Seven Sisters – Stalin’s monumental “skyscrapers” – classily done up as hotels and office buildings. The tallest of the Sisters stands astride the crown of highest hill in the city and, the grand scepter of the Russian educational system, serves as the main building of Moscow State University (and some speculate that her “off-limits” upper levels might shelter super-secret government goings-on or, at very least, one of the best views in the world). From her vantage point, we could see the glass-and-steel whorl of the Olympic Stadium, the scraggly clump of skyscrapers sprouting in the financial district, the house of the late Count Smirnoff (vodka extraordinaire) and, in parks, patches of pale green stubble.
We went down to a frozen lake next to one of Moscow’s many gold-domed churches. I took a picture of a lady with a small dog; friends skated around on the ice, and fell down laughing. Towards evening, we split into smaller groups and wandered around the city center (near the Kremlin), soaking in the springtime air, pointing up (a little aghast) at what must be the world’s largest MacDonald’s (Moscow is well known for its superlatives). I wondered how cool it would be to live and study in such an immensely dynamic place. Other students were confessing that they liked it better than static old St. Petersburg, which seems to have become, by tragic ways that few other cities have traveled, only collection of memories, frozen (literally and literarily) in time. I wondered if I was falling permanently into that vein of thinking, like a meteorite sucked down to Earth by gravity. How could I go back to Piter after such a betrayal? I thought about that often later on.
The next morning, we took a tour of the Kremlin. A cluster of very old churches, home to the head of Russian Orthodoxy (the Patriarch; like Catholic Pope in form and function). Black pine trees, outer walls red and crenellated, the President’s pale yellow office. Our dry Muscovite guide told us about how Russia, already a very big country, possesses many of the world’s largest things. By way of example, he pointed out the megalithic iron cannon that sits in the Kremlin courtyard. It was made long ago, at the order of one Tsar or another who wished to lay claim to the world’s biggest artillery piece. Unfortunately, they failed to take some crucial measurements, because upon trying to load the thing, they found that their specially made, multi-ton cannon balls were too big for the bore. So it’s never been fired. Now it sits where we saw it, collecting winter snow and summer dust, facing the former office of Boris Yeltsin. As our guide told us: Yeltsin came to work one morning (very hung-over), stood at his window, pulled aside the curtains, and saw the world’s largest gun pointed straight at him. He changed buildings the next day.
After our chilly outdoor tour, we stepped into the Kremlin Museum, which contains a splendid trove of imperial artifacts: elaborate carriages, gilt crowns, carved thrones, delicate porcelain and ivory, velveteen dresses and silken surcoats. The wealth of the Tsars was astounding.
Later, an even smaller group of us walked along the brimming byways, past the very large and important Church of the Ascension, which was once dynamited by Stalin to make way for his proposed Palace of the Soviets (a skyscraper to make all others tremble, which never quite came into being because the foundation was unstable and it kept falling down at the slightest tremor; in its place they built – you guessed it – the world’s largest swimming pool). We made our way over a graceful pedestrian bridge (with great panoramic view of the city) to the far side of the Moskva River, where we wandered in strong sunlight and newly minted neighborhoods until coming to a little sculpture garden and the renowned Treytyakov Gallery of Russian Art, standing out in a muddy park (or field. It was hard to tell.) The garden was neat, although half buried in snow and grime; the gallery was astounding. We went straight the floor housing the mind-and-rule bending 20th century paintings, and I fell in love. Such style! What color! And these, by far the most interesting I’ve yet seen, were done during the (early) Soviet era. Who knew?
After it grew dark, Erica and I walked into the Red Square and stopped short. Just over a tower of the Kremlin, I saw:
One bejeweled red star shining in the night sky. It was braced stock-still against black space by a dark spire, thin as the very peak of a rocketship: its ruby light did not waver in the cold wind. All of a sudden, the ghostly clouds thinned and passed away altogether; the wide white moon blazed brighter; this star and moon hung an arm’s-length away, still and seeming, dreamily, both to complement the other and cry for individual attention or outright solitude, like fraternal twins which had developed, along the arc of their lives, completely different personalities.
I tried to photograph the moment, but my hands could not hold still and every attempt came out blurry or altogether obscured by something. I watched them for about a century more, lovelessly locked in a light embrace, but eventually, unfortunately, got too cold and tired of stamping my feet on uneven cobblestones (echoing the military parades of decades past) and drifted on, toward the legendary bon-bon turrets of St. Basil’s, all lit up by floodlights; toward Lenin’s little tomb, squatting in front of the soaring walls of the Kremlin; and at last, catching the reflection of her trillion little white twinkle-lights caught in the high gloss of the tomb, toward Moscow’s largest mall.
There I was, in the slowly beating heart of Russia.
And Erica said: “We are such a long way from home.”
I could only nod and swallow.
I went back the next morning with others. The previous night’s vision had vanished. We toured the cavernous, brightly painted depths of St. Basil’s. We got in line to see waxy Lenin inside his tomb, lying on his back in a glass box, eyes softly closed and arms crossed over his chest like a mummified pharaoh. He is still in his dark suit. I wondered what he would say if he had sat up at the moment I passed by. Would he launch into lecture mode? Would he asked, “What the hell? Where’s Trotsky?!” Or would he simply sigh and resume his long rest?
I stood in the Red Square just a little more after visiting Lenin. It seems to me that it is the one place I’ve found that is exclusively Russian and not replicable to any degree. You may visit Amsterdam and basically find there the architecture of St. Petersburg; you can visit almost any American city of decent size (e.g. 100,000) and see something akin to what Moscow looks like (although there are some aspects which are notably different, like the alphabet and, perhaps, the color palate). If I scrunch up my eyes, I can see Madison, or New York. But the Red Square is a completely unique experience, one which I would gladly relive.
Erica and I spent the rest of that day at a vast souvenir market in the outer city and touring the marvelous metro stations, which are absolute works of art (often involving heavy use of the hammer and sickle motif). We met with the rest of our diminished group in the evening, many having flown off from Moscow to enjoy their week of spring break, and clambered back into a sweltering train. We slept little, overheated and uneasy, and arrived back in soggy St. Petersburg at the crack of dawn.
I wheeled my suitcase along familiar sidewalks; I collapsed for an hour or so into a familiar bed, and woke to a familiar face and a familiar breakfast. I quickly packed for Paris, as my plane left in a matter of hours. And then I heard, and had to sit down: Sometime while I was going through those motions, haggard and harried, two devastating bombs had detonated in Moscow’s marvelous metro.
My afterimage was no doubt consumed.
Like bees waking after a long winter, we dragged ourselves out of our little four-bunk sleeping compartments, buzzing, albeit blearily, with excitement. We flicked flakes of sleep from our eyes. We burst out of the dim, cool train station; the city crashed down like heat at the height of summer, or, at its fall, a hurricane at sea. What a place!
Moscow stretches from one side of the world to the other, filling every space in between. Travel from end to end can exhaust gas tanks and all but the most infinite reserves of patience. It is wild with noise and velocity; the electric vitality of seventeen million people sizzles in every street. It overwhelms with possibility and shatters language as if it were glass. It’s alive!
Lumbering from the station in mild shock, we climbed into a bus and drove to the local Holiday Inn, although it was before our check-in time; we refueled in the hotel restaurant, and bussed back off into the madly eddying motor pools to snap pictures in passing and listen to a Muscovite guide with a very dry wit. As we careened around one corner, we caught a glimpse of Lubyanka, the drab brown KGB central headquarters. Among other things, we saw a handful of the Seven Sisters – Stalin’s monumental “skyscrapers” – classily done up as hotels and office buildings. The tallest of the Sisters stands astride the crown of highest hill in the city and, the grand scepter of the Russian educational system, serves as the main building of Moscow State University (and some speculate that her “off-limits” upper levels might shelter super-secret government goings-on or, at very least, one of the best views in the world). From her vantage point, we could see the glass-and-steel whorl of the Olympic Stadium, the scraggly clump of skyscrapers sprouting in the financial district, the house of the late Count Smirnoff (vodka extraordinaire) and, in parks, patches of pale green stubble.
We went down to a frozen lake next to one of Moscow’s many gold-domed churches. I took a picture of a lady with a small dog; friends skated around on the ice, and fell down laughing. Towards evening, we split into smaller groups and wandered around the city center (near the Kremlin), soaking in the springtime air, pointing up (a little aghast) at what must be the world’s largest MacDonald’s (Moscow is well known for its superlatives). I wondered how cool it would be to live and study in such an immensely dynamic place. Other students were confessing that they liked it better than static old St. Petersburg, which seems to have become, by tragic ways that few other cities have traveled, only collection of memories, frozen (literally and literarily) in time. I wondered if I was falling permanently into that vein of thinking, like a meteorite sucked down to Earth by gravity. How could I go back to Piter after such a betrayal? I thought about that often later on.
The next morning, we took a tour of the Kremlin. A cluster of very old churches, home to the head of Russian Orthodoxy (the Patriarch; like Catholic Pope in form and function). Black pine trees, outer walls red and crenellated, the President’s pale yellow office. Our dry Muscovite guide told us about how Russia, already a very big country, possesses many of the world’s largest things. By way of example, he pointed out the megalithic iron cannon that sits in the Kremlin courtyard. It was made long ago, at the order of one Tsar or another who wished to lay claim to the world’s biggest artillery piece. Unfortunately, they failed to take some crucial measurements, because upon trying to load the thing, they found that their specially made, multi-ton cannon balls were too big for the bore. So it’s never been fired. Now it sits where we saw it, collecting winter snow and summer dust, facing the former office of Boris Yeltsin. As our guide told us: Yeltsin came to work one morning (very hung-over), stood at his window, pulled aside the curtains, and saw the world’s largest gun pointed straight at him. He changed buildings the next day.
After our chilly outdoor tour, we stepped into the Kremlin Museum, which contains a splendid trove of imperial artifacts: elaborate carriages, gilt crowns, carved thrones, delicate porcelain and ivory, velveteen dresses and silken surcoats. The wealth of the Tsars was astounding.
Later, an even smaller group of us walked along the brimming byways, past the very large and important Church of the Ascension, which was once dynamited by Stalin to make way for his proposed Palace of the Soviets (a skyscraper to make all others tremble, which never quite came into being because the foundation was unstable and it kept falling down at the slightest tremor; in its place they built – you guessed it – the world’s largest swimming pool). We made our way over a graceful pedestrian bridge (with great panoramic view of the city) to the far side of the Moskva River, where we wandered in strong sunlight and newly minted neighborhoods until coming to a little sculpture garden and the renowned Treytyakov Gallery of Russian Art, standing out in a muddy park (or field. It was hard to tell.) The garden was neat, although half buried in snow and grime; the gallery was astounding. We went straight the floor housing the mind-and-rule bending 20th century paintings, and I fell in love. Such style! What color! And these, by far the most interesting I’ve yet seen, were done during the (early) Soviet era. Who knew?
After it grew dark, Erica and I walked into the Red Square and stopped short. Just over a tower of the Kremlin, I saw:
One bejeweled red star shining in the night sky. It was braced stock-still against black space by a dark spire, thin as the very peak of a rocketship: its ruby light did not waver in the cold wind. All of a sudden, the ghostly clouds thinned and passed away altogether; the wide white moon blazed brighter; this star and moon hung an arm’s-length away, still and seeming, dreamily, both to complement the other and cry for individual attention or outright solitude, like fraternal twins which had developed, along the arc of their lives, completely different personalities.
I tried to photograph the moment, but my hands could not hold still and every attempt came out blurry or altogether obscured by something. I watched them for about a century more, lovelessly locked in a light embrace, but eventually, unfortunately, got too cold and tired of stamping my feet on uneven cobblestones (echoing the military parades of decades past) and drifted on, toward the legendary bon-bon turrets of St. Basil’s, all lit up by floodlights; toward Lenin’s little tomb, squatting in front of the soaring walls of the Kremlin; and at last, catching the reflection of her trillion little white twinkle-lights caught in the high gloss of the tomb, toward Moscow’s largest mall.
There I was, in the slowly beating heart of Russia.
And Erica said: “We are such a long way from home.”
I could only nod and swallow.
I went back the next morning with others. The previous night’s vision had vanished. We toured the cavernous, brightly painted depths of St. Basil’s. We got in line to see waxy Lenin inside his tomb, lying on his back in a glass box, eyes softly closed and arms crossed over his chest like a mummified pharaoh. He is still in his dark suit. I wondered what he would say if he had sat up at the moment I passed by. Would he launch into lecture mode? Would he asked, “What the hell? Where’s Trotsky?!” Or would he simply sigh and resume his long rest?
I stood in the Red Square just a little more after visiting Lenin. It seems to me that it is the one place I’ve found that is exclusively Russian and not replicable to any degree. You may visit Amsterdam and basically find there the architecture of St. Petersburg; you can visit almost any American city of decent size (e.g. 100,000) and see something akin to what Moscow looks like (although there are some aspects which are notably different, like the alphabet and, perhaps, the color palate). If I scrunch up my eyes, I can see Madison, or New York. But the Red Square is a completely unique experience, one which I would gladly relive.
Erica and I spent the rest of that day at a vast souvenir market in the outer city and touring the marvelous metro stations, which are absolute works of art (often involving heavy use of the hammer and sickle motif). We met with the rest of our diminished group in the evening, many having flown off from Moscow to enjoy their week of spring break, and clambered back into a sweltering train. We slept little, overheated and uneasy, and arrived back in soggy St. Petersburg at the crack of dawn.
I wheeled my suitcase along familiar sidewalks; I collapsed for an hour or so into a familiar bed, and woke to a familiar face and a familiar breakfast. I quickly packed for Paris, as my plane left in a matter of hours. And then I heard, and had to sit down: Sometime while I was going through those motions, haggard and harried, two devastating bombs had detonated in Moscow’s marvelous metro.
My afterimage was no doubt consumed.
24 March 2010
In Someone Else's Homeland
I have never been in exile, and I doubt that I ever will - but if I had to go, I imagine I’d spend a lot of my time it the kitchens of other countries.
Why kitchens?
Really, it’s easier to see myself there than to think of a cold park bench or someone’s filthy basement. It’s more pleasant, of course, to imagine being huddled around a small table in a small, cozy kitchen like this one, with another person maybe, hunching towards the warmth of their conversation; or alone, quiet as stone and alight with thoughts about damp dungeons or dark forests. In such kitchens, with such talk and thinking, my life would rise toward its golden age like bread in a hot oven, or burn and turn blackly bitter. I could compose the epic novel of my century, write letters that urge or decry, construct poetry that would grow glittery with sentiment and also great power. I would idly swirl sugar into my tea or coffee, and look out the wide window and see ordinary people everywhere shuffle off to work, stiff and sniffling in this brisk spring air. I could not be ordinary in the same way they are, not anymore.
But I would remind myself that I am certainly not the first to live like this, and that by Russia’s standards I am, in fact, a lucky one: So many of her exiles never actually went beyond the borders. Instead, they were buried alive under the weight of persecution by a Tsar or other autocrat, sent into servitude, forced underground, slandered and defiled, muted, suffocated, euthanized. Precious old Pushkin was urged off stage for a time in his youth, to the Crimea; Dostoevsky and Osip Mandelstam were shipped to Siberia; Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak remained where they were, but besieged by fear and Communist ideology, and they floated like phantoms in a grey limbo alongside Hamlet’s dead father.
These writers all continued to write, however.
Pushkin was freer than his fellows: He traveled the mountains of the Crimea, spellbound by their beauty. And about the region, he composed a sizable collection of somewhat romantic, largely lyrical poems. (I own that collection in Russian.) Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment while he contemplated his own misdeeds (real or imagined). Many terrible years later, Mandelstam slipped bitter verse through the cracks of Stalin’s crackpot state. Predictably ostracized yet inexplicably untouched, Pasternak watched his hair turn grey and his love imprisoned, and rose to his zenith with Dr. Zhivago and a Nobel Prize for Literature, the former of which he could not publish and the latter of which he was forced to refuse. Ethereal Akhmatova, once the Soul of the Silver Age and Queen of the Neva, lived for years on the brink of starvation in the living rooms of close friends or admirers, and wrote this poem – “The Last Toast” – one warm July night in 1934, on a faded, stained scrap of napkin:
I drink to the house, already destroyed,
And my whole life, too awful to tell,
To the loneliness we together enjoyed,
I drink to you as well,
To the eyes with deadly cold imbued,
To the lips that betrayed me with a lie,
To the world for being cruel and rude,
To God who didn’t save us, or try.
Born near and raised in the Tsar’s village (or “Tsarskoye Selo”) near the turn of the century, Anna Akhmatova shared more than just her literary origin with Alexander Pushkin, who had lived and attended school in Tsarskoye Selo over a century before. In fact, in the park there, she wandered along the very same paths as he did, and around the same lake that he did, chasing after the bright memory of him. As graying golden birch leaves fell down all around, young Anna sat by the lakeshore on a rotting stump, and wrote poems about Alexander sitting by the same lakeshore, composing his poetry at sixteen. Just up a long, gentle rise from that lakeshore is the magnificent summer palace of Catherine the Great. No doubt both Pushkin and Akhmatova swept through its endless ball and banquet halls, through the Amber Room, their talent on the rise, their voices ringing, the wave of applause deafening as thunder, the air a-crackle, black storm clouds building on the horizon.
When the CIEE group visited Tsarskoye Selo this past weekend, we saw a bronze statue of Pushkin (so lifelike – reclining, in thought, on a bench – that I thought it would jump to life at any moment), and watched a people came up to touch his knee or lay roses at his feet. If there was a statue of him here in Akhmatova’s time, would she have done the same? Would she have wanted so tactile a link? Most of me thinks the better way to connect with Pushkin is through poetry, but nonetheless: I took a picture with him. Unfortunately, he said nothing.
We took a bus back through the dripping countryside just outside Petersburg, and once deep in the heart of familiar territory, I stopped for pie at my favorite pie place, and meandered home to think about why I can’t stop thinking about these poets and writers of Russia. The weekend before last, I spent a good chunk of my day visiting one of Dostoevsky’s old apartments in a charming neighborhood of the inner city, and saw the study in which he wrote Crime and Punishment (and afterwards saw Tim Burton’s “Alice In Wonderland” in Russian and 3-D – what a freaky, funky combination!); and at home that night, I dug into Vladimir Nabokov’s very vivid account of life in and around Petersburg, Speak, Memory.
I’ve realized that nearly everything I think or say about St. Petersburg or Russia as a whole is influenced in some way by P & A, and all of the other literary giants that lived here.
It’s not only their technical skill, the immediacy of their language, and the way it perfectly conveys the intensity of their experience (whatever that happens to be). It’s not only that St. Petersburg openly obsesses over their triumphs, their stories. It’s also a very personal provocation, one that is (at least from my point of view) often obscured by the aforementioned. I’m a literature major and, more importantly in this case, a writer. I automatically (unconsciously) stare hard at their lives, and try imagining what it’s like to stand in their shoes. That’s why, when I sit at the table in my host mom’s little kitchen, I think of myself as an exile – so many of the Russian writers I read spent time as such.
But if you can’t already tell, I really admire those who stayed. Not because I think it’s noble. It's not something that requires the same kind of courage often advocated by ads for the U.S. Army. It’s of a meeker sort, I think (or less forthright at any rate.) It’s the last-straw kind of courage – and perhaps therefore more valuable. Do you think?
Nonetheless, Anna Akhmatova remained. She became a stooped stranger in her own land, and it nearly cost her everything. But she remained behind – behind the dead and those who left outright, like Nabokov – because someone had to continue to cultivate this rich heartland (her heartland) of Russian literature. Someone had to mine in the darkness of the Soviet experience for something helpful, if not hopeful; to write out that something in messages, and to put those messages in blue glass bottles or between the yellowing leaves of books, for someone at a distant shore or nearby kitchen table to pick up and wipe off, and read over and over, until the meaning sinks in and stays.
I wonder: Will I ever need to be that brave?
Why kitchens?
Really, it’s easier to see myself there than to think of a cold park bench or someone’s filthy basement. It’s more pleasant, of course, to imagine being huddled around a small table in a small, cozy kitchen like this one, with another person maybe, hunching towards the warmth of their conversation; or alone, quiet as stone and alight with thoughts about damp dungeons or dark forests. In such kitchens, with such talk and thinking, my life would rise toward its golden age like bread in a hot oven, or burn and turn blackly bitter. I could compose the epic novel of my century, write letters that urge or decry, construct poetry that would grow glittery with sentiment and also great power. I would idly swirl sugar into my tea or coffee, and look out the wide window and see ordinary people everywhere shuffle off to work, stiff and sniffling in this brisk spring air. I could not be ordinary in the same way they are, not anymore.
But I would remind myself that I am certainly not the first to live like this, and that by Russia’s standards I am, in fact, a lucky one: So many of her exiles never actually went beyond the borders. Instead, they were buried alive under the weight of persecution by a Tsar or other autocrat, sent into servitude, forced underground, slandered and defiled, muted, suffocated, euthanized. Precious old Pushkin was urged off stage for a time in his youth, to the Crimea; Dostoevsky and Osip Mandelstam were shipped to Siberia; Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak remained where they were, but besieged by fear and Communist ideology, and they floated like phantoms in a grey limbo alongside Hamlet’s dead father.
These writers all continued to write, however.
Pushkin was freer than his fellows: He traveled the mountains of the Crimea, spellbound by their beauty. And about the region, he composed a sizable collection of somewhat romantic, largely lyrical poems. (I own that collection in Russian.) Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment while he contemplated his own misdeeds (real or imagined). Many terrible years later, Mandelstam slipped bitter verse through the cracks of Stalin’s crackpot state. Predictably ostracized yet inexplicably untouched, Pasternak watched his hair turn grey and his love imprisoned, and rose to his zenith with Dr. Zhivago and a Nobel Prize for Literature, the former of which he could not publish and the latter of which he was forced to refuse. Ethereal Akhmatova, once the Soul of the Silver Age and Queen of the Neva, lived for years on the brink of starvation in the living rooms of close friends or admirers, and wrote this poem – “The Last Toast” – one warm July night in 1934, on a faded, stained scrap of napkin:
I drink to the house, already destroyed,
And my whole life, too awful to tell,
To the loneliness we together enjoyed,
I drink to you as well,
To the eyes with deadly cold imbued,
To the lips that betrayed me with a lie,
To the world for being cruel and rude,
To God who didn’t save us, or try.
Born near and raised in the Tsar’s village (or “Tsarskoye Selo”) near the turn of the century, Anna Akhmatova shared more than just her literary origin with Alexander Pushkin, who had lived and attended school in Tsarskoye Selo over a century before. In fact, in the park there, she wandered along the very same paths as he did, and around the same lake that he did, chasing after the bright memory of him. As graying golden birch leaves fell down all around, young Anna sat by the lakeshore on a rotting stump, and wrote poems about Alexander sitting by the same lakeshore, composing his poetry at sixteen. Just up a long, gentle rise from that lakeshore is the magnificent summer palace of Catherine the Great. No doubt both Pushkin and Akhmatova swept through its endless ball and banquet halls, through the Amber Room, their talent on the rise, their voices ringing, the wave of applause deafening as thunder, the air a-crackle, black storm clouds building on the horizon.
When the CIEE group visited Tsarskoye Selo this past weekend, we saw a bronze statue of Pushkin (so lifelike – reclining, in thought, on a bench – that I thought it would jump to life at any moment), and watched a people came up to touch his knee or lay roses at his feet. If there was a statue of him here in Akhmatova’s time, would she have done the same? Would she have wanted so tactile a link? Most of me thinks the better way to connect with Pushkin is through poetry, but nonetheless: I took a picture with him. Unfortunately, he said nothing.
We took a bus back through the dripping countryside just outside Petersburg, and once deep in the heart of familiar territory, I stopped for pie at my favorite pie place, and meandered home to think about why I can’t stop thinking about these poets and writers of Russia. The weekend before last, I spent a good chunk of my day visiting one of Dostoevsky’s old apartments in a charming neighborhood of the inner city, and saw the study in which he wrote Crime and Punishment (and afterwards saw Tim Burton’s “Alice In Wonderland” in Russian and 3-D – what a freaky, funky combination!); and at home that night, I dug into Vladimir Nabokov’s very vivid account of life in and around Petersburg, Speak, Memory.
I’ve realized that nearly everything I think or say about St. Petersburg or Russia as a whole is influenced in some way by P & A, and all of the other literary giants that lived here.
It’s not only their technical skill, the immediacy of their language, and the way it perfectly conveys the intensity of their experience (whatever that happens to be). It’s not only that St. Petersburg openly obsesses over their triumphs, their stories. It’s also a very personal provocation, one that is (at least from my point of view) often obscured by the aforementioned. I’m a literature major and, more importantly in this case, a writer. I automatically (unconsciously) stare hard at their lives, and try imagining what it’s like to stand in their shoes. That’s why, when I sit at the table in my host mom’s little kitchen, I think of myself as an exile – so many of the Russian writers I read spent time as such.
But if you can’t already tell, I really admire those who stayed. Not because I think it’s noble. It's not something that requires the same kind of courage often advocated by ads for the U.S. Army. It’s of a meeker sort, I think (or less forthright at any rate.) It’s the last-straw kind of courage – and perhaps therefore more valuable. Do you think?
Nonetheless, Anna Akhmatova remained. She became a stooped stranger in her own land, and it nearly cost her everything. But she remained behind – behind the dead and those who left outright, like Nabokov – because someone had to continue to cultivate this rich heartland (her heartland) of Russian literature. Someone had to mine in the darkness of the Soviet experience for something helpful, if not hopeful; to write out that something in messages, and to put those messages in blue glass bottles or between the yellowing leaves of books, for someone at a distant shore or nearby kitchen table to pick up and wipe off, and read over and over, until the meaning sinks in and stays.
I wonder: Will I ever need to be that brave?
11 March 2010
Late As Usual
I woke up late this last Saturday, after a long night at the opera (Pushkin/Tchaikovsky collaboration Eugene Onegin), and since my host mom was still at work, found my own breakfast and turned on the radio. For some reason, it was set to an American jazz and soul station. Miles and Ella each sang to me in their unique way; I drank yogurt from a carton and ate an apple off the table. Then I did nothing else all morning except lie in unrefined sunlight and read in sloppy English about the technical virtuosity of Alexander Pushkin. I became so engrossed that I nearly missed my date: I was supposed to meet two friends at the St. Petersburg Philharmonic for an afternoon of Russian symphony, and suddenly only had thirty minutes to make a fifty minute commute. I threw on boots and coat and forgot my gloves, flew out the door, beelined to the metro, ran down the escalator and onto the platform just in time to see the train leave the station. I wonder if even metros can feel sleepy (lightheaded or hung over?) on a Saturday, because when I finally got on five minutes later, the thing seemed to creep from stop to stop to stop.
Years down the line, I pulled into the Philharmonic a complete wreck – sweating from every pore, wobbly with exhaustion, and so very angry at myself – as the orchestra was just cueing up and a woman in white putting the finishing touches on her speech to the audience on the delights they were about to hear. I snuck up, smiled at my friends, and slumped into my seat. But all of that was really just a minor fall into a major lift, because next I mostly only remember clapping and bright chandeliers above, before a first note and then all of Russia opened up before me in a swell and sweep of revolution, thunder, rain and rainbows. I have never been so electrified by live music – classical or otherwise – in all my life. My friends agree. Afterward, we sat still and shocked in our seats (red velvet covers and carved white wood) and could hardly find words for any of it – and the funny thing is, aside from Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto, I could not name any one of the pieces we heard, or their composers. All of that has ecstatically composted away under the weight and heat of the music itself, or the memory of the music itself.
But now I hear myself growing to too strident a pitch (to borrow a line from Nabokov) – and for nothing, really, because there are still no words to spell out anything, beyond: Wow. Highlight of the week. And that’s saying quite a bit, because that particular week was way too much fun.
For example: Forget Route 66 – there’s nothing like going to a Communist Party rally to get your kicks. You see, on Tuesday, all of Russia was on holiday in celebration of the Defenders of the Fatherland (which I thought was a Motherland?), and while most of the people were getting drunk or sleeping in, my friend Erica (Russian Lit. major from Columbia University) and I met outside the infamous Finland Station (from which Lenin arrived out of exile to proclaim the Revolution back in 1917) near the heart of the city, and walked right into a small crowd of old people waving red flags and singing stirring Soviet songs. It’s hard to really say what most people think of communism here, or of the Soviet Union, or of their history in general. Because I’m heir to the “American perspective” of world history, it would be easy for me to say they don’t miss Stalin or Brezhnev or breadlines. I certainly wouldn’t. And sure – many of them, like my host mom, shut their mouths immediately at mention of Stalin; a brief sad shadow slides from history and onto faces. My Russian civilization teacher explained that no one in Russia knew just how many of their people died during Stalin’s epoch until glasnost in the 1980s, when full facts and figures were published, along with many banned books. And every day I think:
You wake up one fine day, find that you can unexpectedly read anything you want, and start to eagerly dispatch book after brand new book (all about your history, and that of the world. You’re now the master of the facts, ma’am. You’re reclaiming your sense of self!) But suddenly, flying past the figure of “deaths under Stalin by war, gulags, purges, collectivization,” you have to do a double take. And from then on out, although you do not slow the influx of information, you’re excitement is dulled, demented, or even derailed altogether because you’ve woken up from a strange century-long dream to find out that under just one leader, 100 million of your people – perhaps even among them your distant relative, neighbor, best friend, significant other, mother – were murdered. That can’t be the figure you feared (because you did fear, every night) all this time. But you’ve got the truth at last, and it tastes of more rust and ash than you thought it ever would.
This is where my inherited “American perspective” falls short:
Perhaps now, in your enlightenment, you’d love to have justice – but she’s blind. So what is to be done? If they could do it once, your still-corrupt government could pull the wool over your eyes again. Does your vote even count? You’re not sure, so you don’t cast it. The future is not in your hands. The bright, beloved golden age of Peter the Great is long gone; no matter how many palaces you restore, you can’t go home again. But who wants absolute monarchy anyway? And who wants breadlines and books banned and a hard, small life in a totalitarian state? And as for the present system? By comparison to what you knew all your life, it’s hopelessly chaotic and uncertain. You gladly live with Gucci, but can’t bring yourself to strike the hammer and sickle from where it still sticks out here and there (it is, for example, the emblem of your only major airline). You have no clear destiny, and certainly no plan. What is to be done? You continue to look with immense pride and nostalgia at the good things in your past, of which there were many. (Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky anyone? Under Brezhnev, you didn’t have to worry that your neighbor has a better car than you, because no one had a car. Who cares that you had to live in a communal apartment – you didn’t need to work much for your food.) So you get confused, lose track of who you are and what you want. You pass that uncertainty on to your children. Russia is like mercurial Mercury, flitting between poles and gods, always a conduit or a mouthpiece and never in a lasting phase. The people of Russia seem to be something similar: They love their history, they despise their history.
Maybe I’ve only been exposed to a small sampling of fairly rare Russians, and so have an inaccurate sounding. Yet maybe not. Obviously, there are some people – like those at the Communist party rally I attended – who don’t seem so confused and maintain belief in one ideal. For one reason or another, according to some poll, ten percent of the people even want to return to Stalin’s time (can you imagine wanting to go back to living with Hitler?) But most of the time, it seems that the country I’ve encountered just doesn’t know how to handle the present or future with optimism (except at Maslenitsa, when there are lotsandlots of bliny – mounds, really) or vigor or certainty because they’re not quite sure what to make of their past. Unlike in America, it’s not been just one glacier-like move toward progress and better things (arguably, I know). It had its moments, but almost every other stitch has had to be ripped out; a good game plan has never quite coalesced. It was one step forward, two steps back, and a stumble to the side – a dance not nearly as sexy as the tango.
So, as I stood in the middle of that small Red rally, up to my ankles in white snow, under a wide blue sky, I thought: Gee whiz! Anything could happen here, because nothing is favored, not really: Right now, life feels so strangely loose and oddly free in this country. What next? Where are we? Ah yes, we have a map, a guide. And off we went, on a walk down the shining Neva and laughed at how the feel of the city can change from Soviet to Baroque in a matter of two blocks and a bridge and a single sunny second in the middle of the day, when everything is possible.
From there on out, things went from pleasant to perfect. In lightly falling snow and the long, shallow shadow of St. Isaac’s cathedral (fourth largest in the world – and so solid that during the German bombardments of WWII, it was used as the city’s safe), we played on a playground (swings never seem to lose their charm) and had a snowball fight as the wind picked up and the Bronze Horseman reared high in the background. We talked about Pushkin and Cape Cod. Then we met two more of our friends at the foot of the cathedral, had an amusing moment with British woman who thought we were Russians, paid for our tickets, and went into the cathedral. Apart from the Winter Palace, I have never been in such an architecturally stunning building: soaring ceilings, massive pillars, brilliant frescos. Spent about an hour wandering around the inside, then climbed over a hundred stairs up, up and out, to the equally impressive colonnade ringing the main dome and a bird’s-eye view of the city, which probably would have been amazing if a snowstorm hadn’t suddenly whipped up. We hunched our shoulders against the wind, and plucked at our madly fluttering scarves, unable to stop grinning at St. Petersburg’s finicky weather and oddly wild beauty, and the preposterousness of being on this legendary “scenic overlook” in the middle of a snowstorm. Someone remembered to take pictures.
Afterwards, we tramped through the dark and snowy day towards an acclaimed Russian donut shop. On the way, I stopped in a park to utilize a pay-to-use restroom, which turned out to be just a line of five or six dark green port-a-potties run by a woman wearing no hat and a wild look in her eye. When I cautiously approached, she stepped out of her office (i.e. one of the port-a-potties, properly renovated for her use), demanded thirty rubles (less than a dollar), and pointed the way. The port-o-potty I selected had no lock, and so I tried the next one and the next one. None of them had locks. I scuttled away feeling vaguely dissatisfied. Such poor customer service! Later, we found the donut shop, and settled in and jabbered away about all sorts of things over cheap coffee and platefuls of even cheaper, criminally delicious donuts. After a while, I could only sit back and sigh with a smile.
By the time we departed, it was past dusk and snowing harder, and later that night, as I slipped into sound sleep, I thought about how if this were Michigan, school would be cancelled tomorrow. But because this is Russia, my classes weren’t cancelled the next day, or the day after that, and so forth: the rest of the work week ticked and tockled by like clockwork, and wound down as I finished off lovely Lolita with a surge of supreme satisfaction. Friday night was Eugene Onegin, Saturday blessed. I spent last Sunday lazily, reading, listening to piano concertos (Rachmaninov, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Beethoven), chatting (such a loose term) with my host mom, and going out only for a long walk in the warming air. I bought two Russian movies for a whopping thirteen dollars. (Let’s hear it for listening comprehension! One is a favorite of mine, called Island; the other is a romance set in the 1890s on a naval vessel – very C.S. Forester, minus thrilling ship-on-ship action.)
I feel as though I spent all of this past week on autopilot. The days dawned slowly; I picked up another book by Nabokov (his first, translated from the original Russian into a reasonable facsimile of true Nabokovian-English prose), took the same route to and from school, worked with the same subjects, talked happily to the same people, ate more great food. There were deviations, of course. On Tuesday, I met with a University administrator and we discussed schedules: I’ll be helping to teach English to Russian students at the Department of Philology, in the oldest part of the city. Having gotten lost (naturally) on my way to that first meeting, I got a chance to see a bit of the neighborhood: beautiful old buildings, fir-lined avenues, warm yellow street lights, and rain. On Wednesday, I met with a young Russian woman that one of my teachers asked me to tutor in colloquial English. She is very nice, married, runs her own café, has a degree in Economics, has formal English classes every Tuesday night at the same place I will be teaching, and pays 1,000 rubles ($30) for my time. We’ll meet once every week.
I have a paying job in Russia. How cool is that?
My host mom and I made the long trek into town on Friday, to Nicholaevsky Palace, to attend a CIEE-encouraged event enthusiastically called – in marvelous and mysteriously mistranslated English – Feel Yourself Russian!!! We were ushered in and up a grand staircase (red carpet and all) by a man and woman dressed like 18th century courtiers, served champagne, and encouraged to mingle with our fellow students and their host parents. Shortly, we filed into a pillared hall with a stage, and were treated to rich, ripe performances by a Russian a cappella group, and explosive routines by a traditional Russian song and dance troupe. And when I say dance, I mean ballet on steroids and in brilliant color. Flips, handstands, foot-stomping, leaps, kicks, and cartwheels; all with perfect precision to fiercely fast music. They made the chandeliers sway, I think. The whole evening was incredibly impressive – really, it was impossible not to feel ourselves Russian (!!!). And unfortunately, as usual, I forgot to take pictures.
But in my defense, I was fighting off the beginning of a cold which has lasted up ‘til today or so, delayed this posting, given my host mom reason to suggest feeding me garlic and warm milk, and threatened to put a damper on any fun my three-day weekend. (Note: Monday was International Women’s Day; I watched two women jauntily share a big bottle of champagne on the metro; I bought a bouquet of pink flowers for my host mom and toasted to good health with her assembled family.)
I managed to spend Saturday and Sunday wandering around the city centre, wondering through the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic, marveling at statues of Pushkin (“I love thee, Peter’s proud creation, thy princely stateliness of line…thy wistful, moonless, lustrous nights,” he wrote), listening to bemused Russians badly/barely singing American songs in a karaoke contest, and riding the metro to its end, where it fizzles out in barren plains beyond the city, and a lonely train takes its place to shuttle brave souls beyond the pale. Erica (with me at the time) and I stood on an empty track – it was a moonless, lustrous night – and stared back across those plains toward the glow of Soviet St. Petersburg. It might have been the last city on Earth.
We took the metro one stop back down the line, and walked from that stop to the next, which is usually mine. It was a colder night than it had been in some time, and we shrunk turtle-like into our coats, and laughed at how bizarre Soviet architecture is. Of course it all looks the same, but couldn’t they have at least painted all of those apartment buildings in brighter colors? Why do those buildings face every which way (as though tossed down like dominoes or dead seeds?) Is “squat and grey” all they could get to grow? Everyone nowadays always asks, wide-eyed and clearly a little disturbed: “What were they thinking?” No amount of rhetoric can excuse them.
After an hour of straining against the wind, running across frozen streets that all seem a mile wide, and laughing – always laughing, for some reason – we finally parted ways. I walked the last mile home alone in my quiet and familiar neighborhood, and couldn’t help but grow elegiac.
All I could think about then was how most of Russia’s greatest voices can still be heard in the dark corners and empty spaces of this city, how she is Russia, despite what the critics say; here you can still touch those fault lines that lurched and tore the world; here you can look the past in the eye, and read there every lesson ever taught in that classic course, Human History.
Pushkin’s city is full of sad ghosts simmering just beneath the surface – and she is so vulnerable to them. For some reason, knowing that makes me more proud of her; it makes her impossible not to love. Some days, she reminds me of a rose with no petals left. She is in a winter garden, she stands upright, and all she has are naked thorns and a curving silhouette: an echo of grace, a trace of bitter glory.
Years down the line, I pulled into the Philharmonic a complete wreck – sweating from every pore, wobbly with exhaustion, and so very angry at myself – as the orchestra was just cueing up and a woman in white putting the finishing touches on her speech to the audience on the delights they were about to hear. I snuck up, smiled at my friends, and slumped into my seat. But all of that was really just a minor fall into a major lift, because next I mostly only remember clapping and bright chandeliers above, before a first note and then all of Russia opened up before me in a swell and sweep of revolution, thunder, rain and rainbows. I have never been so electrified by live music – classical or otherwise – in all my life. My friends agree. Afterward, we sat still and shocked in our seats (red velvet covers and carved white wood) and could hardly find words for any of it – and the funny thing is, aside from Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto, I could not name any one of the pieces we heard, or their composers. All of that has ecstatically composted away under the weight and heat of the music itself, or the memory of the music itself.
But now I hear myself growing to too strident a pitch (to borrow a line from Nabokov) – and for nothing, really, because there are still no words to spell out anything, beyond: Wow. Highlight of the week. And that’s saying quite a bit, because that particular week was way too much fun.
For example: Forget Route 66 – there’s nothing like going to a Communist Party rally to get your kicks. You see, on Tuesday, all of Russia was on holiday in celebration of the Defenders of the Fatherland (which I thought was a Motherland?), and while most of the people were getting drunk or sleeping in, my friend Erica (Russian Lit. major from Columbia University) and I met outside the infamous Finland Station (from which Lenin arrived out of exile to proclaim the Revolution back in 1917) near the heart of the city, and walked right into a small crowd of old people waving red flags and singing stirring Soviet songs. It’s hard to really say what most people think of communism here, or of the Soviet Union, or of their history in general. Because I’m heir to the “American perspective” of world history, it would be easy for me to say they don’t miss Stalin or Brezhnev or breadlines. I certainly wouldn’t. And sure – many of them, like my host mom, shut their mouths immediately at mention of Stalin; a brief sad shadow slides from history and onto faces. My Russian civilization teacher explained that no one in Russia knew just how many of their people died during Stalin’s epoch until glasnost in the 1980s, when full facts and figures were published, along with many banned books. And every day I think:
You wake up one fine day, find that you can unexpectedly read anything you want, and start to eagerly dispatch book after brand new book (all about your history, and that of the world. You’re now the master of the facts, ma’am. You’re reclaiming your sense of self!) But suddenly, flying past the figure of “deaths under Stalin by war, gulags, purges, collectivization,” you have to do a double take. And from then on out, although you do not slow the influx of information, you’re excitement is dulled, demented, or even derailed altogether because you’ve woken up from a strange century-long dream to find out that under just one leader, 100 million of your people – perhaps even among them your distant relative, neighbor, best friend, significant other, mother – were murdered. That can’t be the figure you feared (because you did fear, every night) all this time. But you’ve got the truth at last, and it tastes of more rust and ash than you thought it ever would.
This is where my inherited “American perspective” falls short:
Perhaps now, in your enlightenment, you’d love to have justice – but she’s blind. So what is to be done? If they could do it once, your still-corrupt government could pull the wool over your eyes again. Does your vote even count? You’re not sure, so you don’t cast it. The future is not in your hands. The bright, beloved golden age of Peter the Great is long gone; no matter how many palaces you restore, you can’t go home again. But who wants absolute monarchy anyway? And who wants breadlines and books banned and a hard, small life in a totalitarian state? And as for the present system? By comparison to what you knew all your life, it’s hopelessly chaotic and uncertain. You gladly live with Gucci, but can’t bring yourself to strike the hammer and sickle from where it still sticks out here and there (it is, for example, the emblem of your only major airline). You have no clear destiny, and certainly no plan. What is to be done? You continue to look with immense pride and nostalgia at the good things in your past, of which there were many. (Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky anyone? Under Brezhnev, you didn’t have to worry that your neighbor has a better car than you, because no one had a car. Who cares that you had to live in a communal apartment – you didn’t need to work much for your food.) So you get confused, lose track of who you are and what you want. You pass that uncertainty on to your children. Russia is like mercurial Mercury, flitting between poles and gods, always a conduit or a mouthpiece and never in a lasting phase. The people of Russia seem to be something similar: They love their history, they despise their history.
Maybe I’ve only been exposed to a small sampling of fairly rare Russians, and so have an inaccurate sounding. Yet maybe not. Obviously, there are some people – like those at the Communist party rally I attended – who don’t seem so confused and maintain belief in one ideal. For one reason or another, according to some poll, ten percent of the people even want to return to Stalin’s time (can you imagine wanting to go back to living with Hitler?) But most of the time, it seems that the country I’ve encountered just doesn’t know how to handle the present or future with optimism (except at Maslenitsa, when there are lotsandlots of bliny – mounds, really) or vigor or certainty because they’re not quite sure what to make of their past. Unlike in America, it’s not been just one glacier-like move toward progress and better things (arguably, I know). It had its moments, but almost every other stitch has had to be ripped out; a good game plan has never quite coalesced. It was one step forward, two steps back, and a stumble to the side – a dance not nearly as sexy as the tango.
So, as I stood in the middle of that small Red rally, up to my ankles in white snow, under a wide blue sky, I thought: Gee whiz! Anything could happen here, because nothing is favored, not really: Right now, life feels so strangely loose and oddly free in this country. What next? Where are we? Ah yes, we have a map, a guide. And off we went, on a walk down the shining Neva and laughed at how the feel of the city can change from Soviet to Baroque in a matter of two blocks and a bridge and a single sunny second in the middle of the day, when everything is possible.
From there on out, things went from pleasant to perfect. In lightly falling snow and the long, shallow shadow of St. Isaac’s cathedral (fourth largest in the world – and so solid that during the German bombardments of WWII, it was used as the city’s safe), we played on a playground (swings never seem to lose their charm) and had a snowball fight as the wind picked up and the Bronze Horseman reared high in the background. We talked about Pushkin and Cape Cod. Then we met two more of our friends at the foot of the cathedral, had an amusing moment with British woman who thought we were Russians, paid for our tickets, and went into the cathedral. Apart from the Winter Palace, I have never been in such an architecturally stunning building: soaring ceilings, massive pillars, brilliant frescos. Spent about an hour wandering around the inside, then climbed over a hundred stairs up, up and out, to the equally impressive colonnade ringing the main dome and a bird’s-eye view of the city, which probably would have been amazing if a snowstorm hadn’t suddenly whipped up. We hunched our shoulders against the wind, and plucked at our madly fluttering scarves, unable to stop grinning at St. Petersburg’s finicky weather and oddly wild beauty, and the preposterousness of being on this legendary “scenic overlook” in the middle of a snowstorm. Someone remembered to take pictures.
Afterwards, we tramped through the dark and snowy day towards an acclaimed Russian donut shop. On the way, I stopped in a park to utilize a pay-to-use restroom, which turned out to be just a line of five or six dark green port-a-potties run by a woman wearing no hat and a wild look in her eye. When I cautiously approached, she stepped out of her office (i.e. one of the port-a-potties, properly renovated for her use), demanded thirty rubles (less than a dollar), and pointed the way. The port-o-potty I selected had no lock, and so I tried the next one and the next one. None of them had locks. I scuttled away feeling vaguely dissatisfied. Such poor customer service! Later, we found the donut shop, and settled in and jabbered away about all sorts of things over cheap coffee and platefuls of even cheaper, criminally delicious donuts. After a while, I could only sit back and sigh with a smile.
By the time we departed, it was past dusk and snowing harder, and later that night, as I slipped into sound sleep, I thought about how if this were Michigan, school would be cancelled tomorrow. But because this is Russia, my classes weren’t cancelled the next day, or the day after that, and so forth: the rest of the work week ticked and tockled by like clockwork, and wound down as I finished off lovely Lolita with a surge of supreme satisfaction. Friday night was Eugene Onegin, Saturday blessed. I spent last Sunday lazily, reading, listening to piano concertos (Rachmaninov, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Beethoven), chatting (such a loose term) with my host mom, and going out only for a long walk in the warming air. I bought two Russian movies for a whopping thirteen dollars. (Let’s hear it for listening comprehension! One is a favorite of mine, called Island; the other is a romance set in the 1890s on a naval vessel – very C.S. Forester, minus thrilling ship-on-ship action.)
I feel as though I spent all of this past week on autopilot. The days dawned slowly; I picked up another book by Nabokov (his first, translated from the original Russian into a reasonable facsimile of true Nabokovian-English prose), took the same route to and from school, worked with the same subjects, talked happily to the same people, ate more great food. There were deviations, of course. On Tuesday, I met with a University administrator and we discussed schedules: I’ll be helping to teach English to Russian students at the Department of Philology, in the oldest part of the city. Having gotten lost (naturally) on my way to that first meeting, I got a chance to see a bit of the neighborhood: beautiful old buildings, fir-lined avenues, warm yellow street lights, and rain. On Wednesday, I met with a young Russian woman that one of my teachers asked me to tutor in colloquial English. She is very nice, married, runs her own café, has a degree in Economics, has formal English classes every Tuesday night at the same place I will be teaching, and pays 1,000 rubles ($30) for my time. We’ll meet once every week.
I have a paying job in Russia. How cool is that?
My host mom and I made the long trek into town on Friday, to Nicholaevsky Palace, to attend a CIEE-encouraged event enthusiastically called – in marvelous and mysteriously mistranslated English – Feel Yourself Russian!!! We were ushered in and up a grand staircase (red carpet and all) by a man and woman dressed like 18th century courtiers, served champagne, and encouraged to mingle with our fellow students and their host parents. Shortly, we filed into a pillared hall with a stage, and were treated to rich, ripe performances by a Russian a cappella group, and explosive routines by a traditional Russian song and dance troupe. And when I say dance, I mean ballet on steroids and in brilliant color. Flips, handstands, foot-stomping, leaps, kicks, and cartwheels; all with perfect precision to fiercely fast music. They made the chandeliers sway, I think. The whole evening was incredibly impressive – really, it was impossible not to feel ourselves Russian (!!!). And unfortunately, as usual, I forgot to take pictures.
But in my defense, I was fighting off the beginning of a cold which has lasted up ‘til today or so, delayed this posting, given my host mom reason to suggest feeding me garlic and warm milk, and threatened to put a damper on any fun my three-day weekend. (Note: Monday was International Women’s Day; I watched two women jauntily share a big bottle of champagne on the metro; I bought a bouquet of pink flowers for my host mom and toasted to good health with her assembled family.)
I managed to spend Saturday and Sunday wandering around the city centre, wondering through the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic, marveling at statues of Pushkin (“I love thee, Peter’s proud creation, thy princely stateliness of line…thy wistful, moonless, lustrous nights,” he wrote), listening to bemused Russians badly/barely singing American songs in a karaoke contest, and riding the metro to its end, where it fizzles out in barren plains beyond the city, and a lonely train takes its place to shuttle brave souls beyond the pale. Erica (with me at the time) and I stood on an empty track – it was a moonless, lustrous night – and stared back across those plains toward the glow of Soviet St. Petersburg. It might have been the last city on Earth.
We took the metro one stop back down the line, and walked from that stop to the next, which is usually mine. It was a colder night than it had been in some time, and we shrunk turtle-like into our coats, and laughed at how bizarre Soviet architecture is. Of course it all looks the same, but couldn’t they have at least painted all of those apartment buildings in brighter colors? Why do those buildings face every which way (as though tossed down like dominoes or dead seeds?) Is “squat and grey” all they could get to grow? Everyone nowadays always asks, wide-eyed and clearly a little disturbed: “What were they thinking?” No amount of rhetoric can excuse them.
After an hour of straining against the wind, running across frozen streets that all seem a mile wide, and laughing – always laughing, for some reason – we finally parted ways. I walked the last mile home alone in my quiet and familiar neighborhood, and couldn’t help but grow elegiac.
All I could think about then was how most of Russia’s greatest voices can still be heard in the dark corners and empty spaces of this city, how she is Russia, despite what the critics say; here you can still touch those fault lines that lurched and tore the world; here you can look the past in the eye, and read there every lesson ever taught in that classic course, Human History.
Pushkin’s city is full of sad ghosts simmering just beneath the surface – and she is so vulnerable to them. For some reason, knowing that makes me more proud of her; it makes her impossible not to love. Some days, she reminds me of a rose with no petals left. She is in a winter garden, she stands upright, and all she has are naked thorns and a curving silhouette: an echo of grace, a trace of bitter glory.
24 February 2010
Reading Lolita in St. Petersburg
There is a thing that you may have felt, which only comes as you are hurtling down one of America’s long highways, as dusk rises around you and the air takes on a colder edge, and you are driven to crank up the heater: You wish you weren’t alone. It is fleeting, and sometimes so passes unnoticed – but nonetheless, it’s a moment of vulnerability.
Life abroad – more than life in your home tongue or town – has many such moments. In a swirling world filled so completely with alien sounds and shrugs or stares, they could come in a metro car, or in a honking, bustling square, or at a newsstand. They can also come creeping up – sometimes most disconcertingly, most devastatingly – during moments of calm. You can be sitting in your room, thinking about how, here, just outside your fourth-story window, the birch trees receive soft winter light with the same grace as do the birch trees back in Michigan. Then, suddenly, the sun passes into even thicker gray clouds, and everything gets darker and you shiver because you are alone and your friends and family – both here, in St. Petersburg, and there, in America – are so far away. Instantly, you recognize that on the other side of that simple sliver of a shiver lies a steep fall into a deep, dizzying dark, and you nearly freeze up.
But then you notice the cool water in a bottle on your desk; the familiar comfort of rest offered up by your blue and white-checkered pillow; the book in your hands – Vladimir Nabokov’s stunning Lolita – in sweet, silky English. The moment is shattered, and composure smoothes over it, seals it up, leaving only a placid surface and your reflection: you go back to thinking about trees, about food, and then (once at a distance) about how you, the artful dodger, may have just avoided the dreaded Stage Two of Culture Shock, which, as we learned in orientation, is ostensibly triggered by some small moment (like the above), or event: Your host mom yells at you, you catch a cold, you perform poorly in language class, you slip on the ice in the street and scrape up your hands, etc., and then you spiral into depression and intense dislike for your host culture/country/language, since it is, after all, the root of many of your problems. (This stage can last for some time – months, or weeks – and then vanish as quickly as it appeared. Once in stage three, one is capable of simply accepting cultural disparities and of moving forward; one’s host culture is not bad, it’s just different.)
Yet is there really such a thing as culture shock (like that)? Maybe. But honestly, I tend to think not.
Last last Saturday and Sunday, during the tail end of Maslenitsa, the CIEE group took a trip to Novgorod, the oldest city in Russia. There are more onion domes there than books in my library. We spent a lot of time following our dear, fur-robed tour guidess, nodding at her and murmuring, “Holy wow! Incredible! These are painted blue and not white?! Holy cow! How daring! I’ve never been so excited in my life! Oh look. Another church.” We also toured the red-walled Kremlin (i.e. city fortress, not the Kremlin), on the banks of a frigid river and spent some time inside the churches, all of which are Eastern Orthodox and are ornately painted in rich colors (trees and saints and crosses in blue, red, yellow, green, and brown). For those moments, our breath didn’t come out as vapor, and the muted glow of lamplight on gilt icons gave some impression of greater warmth. Saturday evening, post tour, after short trek back to the modern hotel with its odd proportions (tiny rooms, cavernous hallways), we warmed ourselves over hot coffee and food.
The next day, after we drowsily toured a monastery, we went to a really cool museum. Part of it was indoors, and had carefully constructed exhibits that showcased what some Russian peasants wore and used in everyday life, way back when (i.e. hundreds of years ago or, depending on where in Russia you’re talking about, yesterday). Birch bark was woven to make shoes and other interesting items. Bright red was the color to wear for nearly all occasions, as it symbolizes strength, warmth, sacrifice, etc., and was used in aprons and pants and wedding dresses alike. One delighted girl in our group took part in a brief weaving demonstration, and learned how to work wool on a loom. The outdoor part of the museum was even better, however: two rows of intricately carved, all-wood houses in the traditional Russian style, and one grand wooden church replete with (surprise!) onion domes. I tried out a strange wooden sled-ride that can really only be understood with pictures. And I have pictures, but they’re not ready to be uploaded yet (still waiting on a USB cable from the States). After the outdoor museum, we ate stacks of bliny and hot tea, and piled back on our double-decker bus and drove back on over to an old, wooded marketplace in the shadow of the Kremlin’s walls, where an end-of-Maslenitsa festival was in full swing. This was the best, most memorable part of Novgorod, like the line of a lone violin leaping above the rest of the orchestra:
Little wooden stalls selling food and souvenirs faced, with their backs to a birch wood, out toward the old baroque buildings of town. Down a winding track through the birch wood went jingling sleighs and throngs of dancing and singing people, many of whom were dressed in traditional Russian garb. They carried high above their shoulders a straw effigy of old, scary Winter (personified, oddly enough, by a babushka). Two of my friends and I trotted eagerly after them, absorbing everything: the bright colors of the entourage, the music, the chatter, the optimism. In a fit of excitement, we paused to have our picture taken with a police officer (who obliged very kindly in a bubbling of Russian). Then we dashed to catch up to the crowd, which had reached the riverside, and was preparing to set fire to the effigy and dance away the old, cold winter. Heaving and huffing, the three of us clambered over snow and slipped past people and watched the spectacle. It was spectacular. When the fire had finished, laughing men and women in their traditional garb rubbed ash all over one another’s faces. (I’m still not sure if it was a ritual or a practical joke.) On the way back to the bus, back through the birches, we watched as children rode makeshift sleds down the steep embankment of the Kremlin; along with two Russian children, I clambered up and sat atop a defunct Soviet tank (part of a bizarre playground/monument); we met more of our CIEE group, and bought honeyed mead from a vendor. Content, we strolled slowly and talked, then, finally, boarded the bus and blasted off, waving into the falling night at receding Novgorod and its pure Russian spirit.
When I think back on the rest of my week, my mind mostly fills with images of dinner, the Cyrillic alphabet, pigeons crowded around the steaming vents outside Metro Stop Dostoevsky, and the ransacked palace of Lolita. But of course, several big ships also left their berths. For one, I and a group of interested students have signed up to volunteer for five hours a week at the Hermitage. (Yeah, that’s right. I’m going to work at the Hermitage.) I’m supposed to start soon, and duties may include helping with exhibits (somehow), ticket-taking, English-language guiding, English-language website editing, etc. I have also signed up to help teach English-language classes for an hour a week (or so) here at St. Petersburg State University. Thursday evening, I attended a CIEE meet-and-greet with eager Russian students. The idea was that we (Americans) would meet a Russian that we clicked with, and the sign-up to become language partners with that person for the rest of the semester. I met several, and hope that, even if I don’t become their language partner, I’ll get to hang out with them in the future. Just a few hours with them were great for my mood and my Russian skills.
The next night started out as a low-key closeout on the week – quiet time with friends in a quiet café. But we found out most of our CIEE comrades had chosen the exact same meeting spot at the exact same time. So we decided to migrate down to a venue more suited to large groups, and found a club down the street with a packed dance floor, whirling strobes, and pulsing techno and oddly remixed pop. Now, gentlepeople of the jury, Exhibit A: It was Friday night, there was no shortage of music, and we were wide awake and having fun, so we decided to dance until dawn. At six in the morning, the metro re-opened (it closes at midnight), and I hustled on home. Disembarked at my stop, decided to wait for the bus rather than walk twenty minutes through cold (-25 Celsius). Exhibit B: In my sleep-deprived state and sudden impatience to get home, I boarded Bus 93 instead of 94. The bus in question drove right on past my street and kept going, going, and going for forty-five freezing minutes (the radiator was broken, of course). I stayed on in hopes that it would end up back where it picked me up.
But instead, it reached the end of its line in some terribly desolate parking lot on the outskirts of the city, and I was kicked off. I asked the conductor where the nearest metro stop was. She told me in rapid fire Russian, “You go that way and then” lost me amid complicated directions I only half understood. She smiled, patted my shoulder, and trotted off to wherever bus conductors sleep during the day (I’m picturing a bear den), and left me to stare wildly at my altogether unfamiliar surroundings. Well then, I thought. It’s either stand here and die of exposure, or go in the direction she pointed. So I went and found absolutely nothing except snow, still streets, and the odd Soviet apartment building jutting up like an ugly iceberg. It was very cold. I couldn’t walk straight after a while. It was hard to keep it together mentally. I decided to run (literally, to keep warm) toward a more inhabited-looking part of the city. Neither metro nor bus there. Warm shops all locked up. Handful of people on street, all surly.
In a surge of desperation, I hailed a gypsy cab. Ubiquitous and popular in Petersburg, and altogether unofficial, they’re basically just people driving around in their cars taking people where they need to go for a negotiated fee. They’re rather scary for the un-initiated, the Russian-challenged, or those with much sense. Did it anyway, and ordered driver to drive. He booked it to my apartment, half an hour away, and left me at the door at nine in the morning. My host mom was still not home from her job. I gulped down a pot of searing hot tea and buried myself under blankets. When she did get home, she just laughed when I blearily told her I planned on sleeping most of the day because I’d been out all night (and that’s all I told her). She told me she was planning on it too, because she had just worked all night. So we both slept until four-ish, ate a large lunch, took a short break, and ate dinner. Sense of feeling returned fairly fast. Relative peace of mind took ten more hours of sleep.
How am I now?
As awful as it was and could have been, I would not trade that escapade for a whole lifetime of guaranteed safety. Most of the night was an outright blast. The rest of it reminded me about bus numbers, and about a necessary appreciation for self and place, for wool socks and sweaters and scarves and hats, for patience and improvisation. And I spent the rest of my brutalized weekend nursing tea and some poetry by Billy Collins, thinking about how any person – no matter how mad, lonely, or exuberant – would not need to go very far out of his or her way to find adventure here.
But I guess that’s all it is no matter where I go: a string of luminous adventures, bobbing up and down through good days and bad, sometimes shared with people who do not quite speak as I speak. There’s nothing shocking about it - only wonderous. Each moment of every day is like a flash of found art or a Maslenitsa effigy; each is unexpected, vivid, numinous, edifying, and terrifying, flaring up and burning out in the span of a breath or sigh, resonating long down the road, and made all the more perfect by matchless memory.
Life abroad – more than life in your home tongue or town – has many such moments. In a swirling world filled so completely with alien sounds and shrugs or stares, they could come in a metro car, or in a honking, bustling square, or at a newsstand. They can also come creeping up – sometimes most disconcertingly, most devastatingly – during moments of calm. You can be sitting in your room, thinking about how, here, just outside your fourth-story window, the birch trees receive soft winter light with the same grace as do the birch trees back in Michigan. Then, suddenly, the sun passes into even thicker gray clouds, and everything gets darker and you shiver because you are alone and your friends and family – both here, in St. Petersburg, and there, in America – are so far away. Instantly, you recognize that on the other side of that simple sliver of a shiver lies a steep fall into a deep, dizzying dark, and you nearly freeze up.
But then you notice the cool water in a bottle on your desk; the familiar comfort of rest offered up by your blue and white-checkered pillow; the book in your hands – Vladimir Nabokov’s stunning Lolita – in sweet, silky English. The moment is shattered, and composure smoothes over it, seals it up, leaving only a placid surface and your reflection: you go back to thinking about trees, about food, and then (once at a distance) about how you, the artful dodger, may have just avoided the dreaded Stage Two of Culture Shock, which, as we learned in orientation, is ostensibly triggered by some small moment (like the above), or event: Your host mom yells at you, you catch a cold, you perform poorly in language class, you slip on the ice in the street and scrape up your hands, etc., and then you spiral into depression and intense dislike for your host culture/country/language, since it is, after all, the root of many of your problems. (This stage can last for some time – months, or weeks – and then vanish as quickly as it appeared. Once in stage three, one is capable of simply accepting cultural disparities and of moving forward; one’s host culture is not bad, it’s just different.)
Yet is there really such a thing as culture shock (like that)? Maybe. But honestly, I tend to think not.
Last last Saturday and Sunday, during the tail end of Maslenitsa, the CIEE group took a trip to Novgorod, the oldest city in Russia. There are more onion domes there than books in my library. We spent a lot of time following our dear, fur-robed tour guidess, nodding at her and murmuring, “Holy wow! Incredible! These are painted blue and not white?! Holy cow! How daring! I’ve never been so excited in my life! Oh look. Another church.” We also toured the red-walled Kremlin (i.e. city fortress, not the Kremlin), on the banks of a frigid river and spent some time inside the churches, all of which are Eastern Orthodox and are ornately painted in rich colors (trees and saints and crosses in blue, red, yellow, green, and brown). For those moments, our breath didn’t come out as vapor, and the muted glow of lamplight on gilt icons gave some impression of greater warmth. Saturday evening, post tour, after short trek back to the modern hotel with its odd proportions (tiny rooms, cavernous hallways), we warmed ourselves over hot coffee and food.
The next day, after we drowsily toured a monastery, we went to a really cool museum. Part of it was indoors, and had carefully constructed exhibits that showcased what some Russian peasants wore and used in everyday life, way back when (i.e. hundreds of years ago or, depending on where in Russia you’re talking about, yesterday). Birch bark was woven to make shoes and other interesting items. Bright red was the color to wear for nearly all occasions, as it symbolizes strength, warmth, sacrifice, etc., and was used in aprons and pants and wedding dresses alike. One delighted girl in our group took part in a brief weaving demonstration, and learned how to work wool on a loom. The outdoor part of the museum was even better, however: two rows of intricately carved, all-wood houses in the traditional Russian style, and one grand wooden church replete with (surprise!) onion domes. I tried out a strange wooden sled-ride that can really only be understood with pictures. And I have pictures, but they’re not ready to be uploaded yet (still waiting on a USB cable from the States). After the outdoor museum, we ate stacks of bliny and hot tea, and piled back on our double-decker bus and drove back on over to an old, wooded marketplace in the shadow of the Kremlin’s walls, where an end-of-Maslenitsa festival was in full swing. This was the best, most memorable part of Novgorod, like the line of a lone violin leaping above the rest of the orchestra:
Little wooden stalls selling food and souvenirs faced, with their backs to a birch wood, out toward the old baroque buildings of town. Down a winding track through the birch wood went jingling sleighs and throngs of dancing and singing people, many of whom were dressed in traditional Russian garb. They carried high above their shoulders a straw effigy of old, scary Winter (personified, oddly enough, by a babushka). Two of my friends and I trotted eagerly after them, absorbing everything: the bright colors of the entourage, the music, the chatter, the optimism. In a fit of excitement, we paused to have our picture taken with a police officer (who obliged very kindly in a bubbling of Russian). Then we dashed to catch up to the crowd, which had reached the riverside, and was preparing to set fire to the effigy and dance away the old, cold winter. Heaving and huffing, the three of us clambered over snow and slipped past people and watched the spectacle. It was spectacular. When the fire had finished, laughing men and women in their traditional garb rubbed ash all over one another’s faces. (I’m still not sure if it was a ritual or a practical joke.) On the way back to the bus, back through the birches, we watched as children rode makeshift sleds down the steep embankment of the Kremlin; along with two Russian children, I clambered up and sat atop a defunct Soviet tank (part of a bizarre playground/monument); we met more of our CIEE group, and bought honeyed mead from a vendor. Content, we strolled slowly and talked, then, finally, boarded the bus and blasted off, waving into the falling night at receding Novgorod and its pure Russian spirit.
When I think back on the rest of my week, my mind mostly fills with images of dinner, the Cyrillic alphabet, pigeons crowded around the steaming vents outside Metro Stop Dostoevsky, and the ransacked palace of Lolita. But of course, several big ships also left their berths. For one, I and a group of interested students have signed up to volunteer for five hours a week at the Hermitage. (Yeah, that’s right. I’m going to work at the Hermitage.) I’m supposed to start soon, and duties may include helping with exhibits (somehow), ticket-taking, English-language guiding, English-language website editing, etc. I have also signed up to help teach English-language classes for an hour a week (or so) here at St. Petersburg State University. Thursday evening, I attended a CIEE meet-and-greet with eager Russian students. The idea was that we (Americans) would meet a Russian that we clicked with, and the sign-up to become language partners with that person for the rest of the semester. I met several, and hope that, even if I don’t become their language partner, I’ll get to hang out with them in the future. Just a few hours with them were great for my mood and my Russian skills.
The next night started out as a low-key closeout on the week – quiet time with friends in a quiet café. But we found out most of our CIEE comrades had chosen the exact same meeting spot at the exact same time. So we decided to migrate down to a venue more suited to large groups, and found a club down the street with a packed dance floor, whirling strobes, and pulsing techno and oddly remixed pop. Now, gentlepeople of the jury, Exhibit A: It was Friday night, there was no shortage of music, and we were wide awake and having fun, so we decided to dance until dawn. At six in the morning, the metro re-opened (it closes at midnight), and I hustled on home. Disembarked at my stop, decided to wait for the bus rather than walk twenty minutes through cold (-25 Celsius). Exhibit B: In my sleep-deprived state and sudden impatience to get home, I boarded Bus 93 instead of 94. The bus in question drove right on past my street and kept going, going, and going for forty-five freezing minutes (the radiator was broken, of course). I stayed on in hopes that it would end up back where it picked me up.
But instead, it reached the end of its line in some terribly desolate parking lot on the outskirts of the city, and I was kicked off. I asked the conductor where the nearest metro stop was. She told me in rapid fire Russian, “You go that way and then” lost me amid complicated directions I only half understood. She smiled, patted my shoulder, and trotted off to wherever bus conductors sleep during the day (I’m picturing a bear den), and left me to stare wildly at my altogether unfamiliar surroundings. Well then, I thought. It’s either stand here and die of exposure, or go in the direction she pointed. So I went and found absolutely nothing except snow, still streets, and the odd Soviet apartment building jutting up like an ugly iceberg. It was very cold. I couldn’t walk straight after a while. It was hard to keep it together mentally. I decided to run (literally, to keep warm) toward a more inhabited-looking part of the city. Neither metro nor bus there. Warm shops all locked up. Handful of people on street, all surly.
In a surge of desperation, I hailed a gypsy cab. Ubiquitous and popular in Petersburg, and altogether unofficial, they’re basically just people driving around in their cars taking people where they need to go for a negotiated fee. They’re rather scary for the un-initiated, the Russian-challenged, or those with much sense. Did it anyway, and ordered driver to drive. He booked it to my apartment, half an hour away, and left me at the door at nine in the morning. My host mom was still not home from her job. I gulped down a pot of searing hot tea and buried myself under blankets. When she did get home, she just laughed when I blearily told her I planned on sleeping most of the day because I’d been out all night (and that’s all I told her). She told me she was planning on it too, because she had just worked all night. So we both slept until four-ish, ate a large lunch, took a short break, and ate dinner. Sense of feeling returned fairly fast. Relative peace of mind took ten more hours of sleep.
How am I now?
As awful as it was and could have been, I would not trade that escapade for a whole lifetime of guaranteed safety. Most of the night was an outright blast. The rest of it reminded me about bus numbers, and about a necessary appreciation for self and place, for wool socks and sweaters and scarves and hats, for patience and improvisation. And I spent the rest of my brutalized weekend nursing tea and some poetry by Billy Collins, thinking about how any person – no matter how mad, lonely, or exuberant – would not need to go very far out of his or her way to find adventure here.
But I guess that’s all it is no matter where I go: a string of luminous adventures, bobbing up and down through good days and bad, sometimes shared with people who do not quite speak as I speak. There’s nothing shocking about it - only wonderous. Each moment of every day is like a flash of found art or a Maslenitsa effigy; each is unexpected, vivid, numinous, edifying, and terrifying, flaring up and burning out in the span of a breath or sigh, resonating long down the road, and made all the more perfect by matchless memory.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)