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?