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.