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.