Both a Culinary Heaven and a Winter Wonderland

This week is Maslenitsa, the Russian version of Mardi Gras, and everyone eats lots of bliny. So in the spirit of tradition, I went into a restaurant that was advertising chocolate bliny. I had just come from class and dinner was still a couple hours away, so I wondered if I should get something more substantial than just chocolate and coffee. But then, there is nothing like reading through translated descriptions on a menu and find enticing entrees like “Puff roll with meat and spinach,” and the positively painful-sounding “Salad with salmon and bloated eel.” I decided to stick with chocolate and coffee.

That was yesterday. On Saturday, before Maslenitsa started, the CIEE group took a slow train outside the city, to Pavlovsk. Pale even in unobstructed daylight, and sprawled out on a low hill, Pavlovsk is the former summer residence of Tsar Pavel I. The palace itself is impressive; ornate, cavernous, and empty, its interior decorator must have been obsessed with ancient Rome and Greece. But – it’s the hundreds of surrounding acres (the palace grounds, now a park) that are breathtaking.

It is like a scene out of Tolstoy: Hundreds of families, all with their children and sleds and skies and smiles, funnel from the little train station at the edge of the grounds down a narrow, mile-long path bored through the dense pine forest, to the clear heart of the park where the palace sleeps. In the rare bright sunlight and crisp cold, Russians drink light beer, and sled and tumble, ski and stroll. When our group climbs the hill to the palace, there are happy people everywhere, and we pause to watch their ice skating. We feel as though we and all the others here are weekend guests of the Tsar, and that later in the evening, we will all dine well in his hall with its high ceiling painted to simulate a brilliant blue sky and white clouds. But of course, we do not, and are forced home as the sun goes down and it becomes bitter cold. The world slowly turns its way into another day.

On Sunday, I slept and memorized vocabulary and went to Swan Lake. It was great (of course), and I learned that Russians, at the end of a notable solo or curtain call, tend to clap all in time with each other. This is a little disconcerting somehow – perhaps because it reminds me of the Russian tendency towards collectivism (so unusual and uncomfortable to Americans, including me). On Monday, three American friends and I braved the way through rush-hour traffic to a renowned Russian pie shop just off of Nevsky Prospekt. It was a pleasant place – warm lighting, intimate rooms, scuffed parquet floors. The pie we chose was square (all the pies were), and it had a cottage-cheese filling and tasted like a billion rubles. Then we settled down and discussed the Russian soul.

You see, in Russia, the word “soul” carries a weight similar to that of the word “freedom” in America. Its definition is really difficult to pin down, but some philosophers (mostly Russian) have said that the vibrancy of a country’s “soul” is based in the strength of its culture, which is largely considered to be “the arts” – i.e. literature, music, etc. These philosophers also say that the “opposite” of culture is civilization, which is defined as the level of a country’s material development (and I put opposite in quotes because it seems an obvious fallacy to completely separate the two). Russia, which has produced some of the finest art in the world (Hello Dostoevsky!), is often said to be very cultured but not very civilized. In contrast, America, although possessed of cheap iPhones and great toilets and roads (unlike Russia), has not (arguably) produced art of the highest caliber (Hello Dolly!), and so is very civilized but not cultured (i.e. less soulful than Russia). Whatever the truth of that assessment – and I only have to think of blues and jazz to feel its weakness – it certainly makes for an interesting discussion in a Russian pie shop. You can imagine.

Then here’s how the ride home goes: You walk through the freezing dark back to packed metro (everyone always seems to be heading home when you are), and jostle your way through turnstiles and sigh while the escalator creeps down and down and down and down. You wedge yourself into metro car – if you had a hatchet you would readily use it to hack open a space. You absolutely do not make eye contact with the man with extensive nose hair standing three inches away. Six stops later, everybody has exited and you can finally breathe and sit down: it seems nobody but you lives way out at Akademicheskaya, except for the young woman in brown fur reading her book, and that sleeping guy in black, and the babushka seated across from you – she probably survived WWII and could break your back. You have seen her jackknife grown men in the ribs in order to get a seat. You pull out the colorful little book of Russian fairy tales your host mom gave you, stare stupidly at words a six-year-old would know, and try to ignore the fact that the babushka is now looking at you in a very funny way; she may have even growled.

Then suddenly it’s your stop and so you hustle on out, and up another escalator and back into the bitter night air, which is so cold that it erases all smells. It’s a long and very brisk walk past rows of dark trees, brightly-lit nightclubs, miniscule pharmacies, hulking Soviet-era apartments, and a Japanese-themed restaurant. The sidewalk is touch and go. Sometimes it’s shoveled, but mostly not; sometimes a gleaming Range Rover or rusting, madcap Soviet-made Lada will clamber its way around banks of snow and up onto your path, in order to park closer to a building. Barring getting hit by a car and having both legs broken, barring getting knocked out by falling snow or ice, barring slipping on ice or snow and breaking your kneecaps, you make it to the little grocery store right next to your apartment building. You wander around, and are proud because although that little white package looks like cheese, you know from the Cyrillic label that it is in fact butter. You buy bottles of water and yogurt, and maybe dried fruit, or something to share with your host mom during tea time. You are not yet brave enough to try kvass.

And then you’re home at last. You eat dinner, mutter about how you don’t quite understand what your host mom is trying to say, eat more dinner, smile, nod, mutter, drink tea. In your eagerness to try out the new verbs you’ve learned today, you try to tell her in Russian, “I drank a lot [of water] today,” and end up accidentally saying “I slept a lot today” – a poor reflection on your academic performance in more than one way. Later, you read over various exceptions in the accusative case and review nominative adjectival endings for about two minutes. You realize that you’ve already forgotten about one-third of what you covered in your three-hour language class today. And then its midnight, and you pass out and sleep soundly until seven the next morning. There are bliny for breakfast.