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?
24 March 2010
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.
12 February 2010
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.
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.
04 February 2010
Four Degrees South of the Arctic Circle
Nearly everything that you have heard about Russia is true.
The long shadow of the past century is barely concealed by twenty short years of rampant capitalism and roughshod democracy. Tucked into the heart of St. Petersburg, the former KGB headquarters are twelve stories (six of which are underground) of dour Soviet-style architecture and very dark history. Many natives will not approach it; they cross to the far side of the street if they must pass by. It is bad luck to stand too close, as too many terrible things took place there: inventive tortures, measured murders, paranoid police-stating. Over one million people starved to death in the Nazi blockade of Leningrad. The ones who survived did so on just two or three grams of bread per day. If you see a man or woman over sixty, they probably lived through the blockade. They are quietly venerated. Outside the hotel where CIEE did its three-day orientation is a grand monument to those who fell to the Nazi siege. If anything epitomizes enduring pride and aching sadness, it is that monument. It, in many ways, is Russia.
Perhaps it is because of that past that people do not often smile on the streets, and don’t talk on the metro. Few readily volunteer information, but are very blunt when they want it. They drink too much. Drunken Russian men sometimes hit their girlfriends in public, but always hold the door for them. Plans seldom go as anticipated, or hoped. Many cops are corrupt and must be bribed. It is very cold (a week ago it was a record -30 Fahrenheit), and snows off and on nearly every day. You can stand in line for tickets to one of a hundred theaters for ages, in that cold and snow. You cultivate a special patience. I need that patience for my daily hour-long metro commute into the city center. And the metro runs well, although it looks like it hasn’t been updated since the sixties; the stations are palatial and each uniquely decorated, and a couple of them are so deep underground (a Soviet defense against nuclear war), that they take up to three minutes to reach by escalator. (Three days ago, I saw a woman reading a book titled Hasta La Vista, Baby, in Cyrillic, on the metro, and tried really hard not to laugh.) On a guided tour through the city, I saw a little bear drinking orange juice outside the Winter Palace, handle via steel collar and chain by a man with a fur hat. Everyone – or nearly – wears some fur here. The sun rarely comes out from behind the clouds, except to set over the frozen Neva, as it did yesterday. The outlying areas of the city are choked with long, tall blocks of gray and decrepit-looking Soviet apartments. I live in one.
And inside that decrepit-looking gray building, with its peeling paint and one-person elevator which practically predates Stalin, is a very snug and warm world – one well lit and clean, and furnished with new furniture, technology and flooring. The bed in my spacious room is long enough and comfortable; I have thick blankets and a soft pillow. A bust of Lenin sits on my desk, alongside my copies of Crime and Punishment and Stranger in a Strange Land and a carved wooden cat. I have my slippers and house keys. The front door (which really just opens out onto a stairwell) is nicer and newer than the doors at any previous place I’ve lived, and locks in two places. One glows blue when engaged. My host mom takes the prize, however. So far, she has been ever so jovial, helpful, and kind. I’m going to buy her flowers on Women’s Day (but don’t tell – it’s a surprise). She makes me breakfast and dinner, and in return I keep my things in order and her abreast of my day. After dinner, we sit and drink tea and eat sweet cakes, and talk in simple English (her, sometimes) and broken Russian (me, most of the time). We have to pantomime a lot, and always have a dictionary handy. We discuss – among other things – work, the weather, our language issues, our lives and loved ones, the city.
I’ve exlaimed how great the campus I’m studying at is – brilliant blue and white baroque, and at the heart of town, it is right next door to bright yellow Smolny Institute, where the Governor of St. Petersburg has her seat. Both buildings look their crisp and inspiring best in winter time. (Well actually, all of St. Petersburg looks best in winter. It was made to wear snow.) The Tsars and Tsarinas of old yearned to make St. Petersburg the envy of the world, and decades of Soviet rule have not snuffed the results of that imperial initiative. In fact, despite having been horribly damaged in the blockade, St. Petersburg has recovered remarkably well. Recently, there has been a huge effort to reclaim the 19th century look and feel (and thank god!) Laws have been made which deny the construction of buildings higher than the gleaming golden spire of the ancient Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. So now, there literally are graceful yellow or green or red or blue palaces (mostly housing museums or shops) on nearly every corner of the city center, and not a single skyscraper. The city is re-realizing a history that, naturally, does include the Soviet Century – but not exclusively.
My host mom and I also talk about what I do in the city. Yesterday, I told her that I was planning on meeting some friends for dinner and drinks tonight, on Vasilevsky Island (one of the city’s many), where many CIEE students are staying. We will go sledding in the winter wonderland of Pavlovsk on Saturday, and may go clubbing with Russian students that night. I also told her that the day before a couple of us went into the Hermitage (Van Gogh! Rembrandt! Picasso! Gold leaf on banisters!) and came out so blown away that we absolutely needed to have a scrumptious bowl of borsch and calming cup of tea in a restaurant on bustling Nevsky Prospekt (see Most Famous Street In St. Petersburg/Russia, under the Really Cool Places Heading of any Travel Guide to Russia), and then visit the vast House of Books. There, I bought my first collection of Pushkin in Russian, which I want to read by the end of the semester. I also explained to my host mom that I, along with most of the other CIEE students, have bought tickets to a Sunday performance of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake and to another ballet called Giselle, both of which are playing in the one of the theater houses on the Square of Arts.
And sometimes, my host mom and I sit and simply stare out the kitchen window, at the little forested park in the courtyard outside. I mention how many trees the city has and how softly the snow sits in them, and she tells me how gorgeous they are in the dazzling spring and short summer.
So it’s true that Russia may be a riddle wrapped in an enigma, a place of extremes. But as much as St. Petersburg and her people do embody that dichotomy, she is hardly a puzzling place. When the sun does finally come out, and its weak fire lights up so much, you realize that only one truth really matters: This is the most beautiful city in the world.
Note: Of all the things I forgot to pack, the USB cable for my camera was the one. I'll take lots of pictures, and try to by a new cable here soon. I'm dying to show you St. Petersburg. Keep your fingers crossed!
The long shadow of the past century is barely concealed by twenty short years of rampant capitalism and roughshod democracy. Tucked into the heart of St. Petersburg, the former KGB headquarters are twelve stories (six of which are underground) of dour Soviet-style architecture and very dark history. Many natives will not approach it; they cross to the far side of the street if they must pass by. It is bad luck to stand too close, as too many terrible things took place there: inventive tortures, measured murders, paranoid police-stating. Over one million people starved to death in the Nazi blockade of Leningrad. The ones who survived did so on just two or three grams of bread per day. If you see a man or woman over sixty, they probably lived through the blockade. They are quietly venerated. Outside the hotel where CIEE did its three-day orientation is a grand monument to those who fell to the Nazi siege. If anything epitomizes enduring pride and aching sadness, it is that monument. It, in many ways, is Russia.
Perhaps it is because of that past that people do not often smile on the streets, and don’t talk on the metro. Few readily volunteer information, but are very blunt when they want it. They drink too much. Drunken Russian men sometimes hit their girlfriends in public, but always hold the door for them. Plans seldom go as anticipated, or hoped. Many cops are corrupt and must be bribed. It is very cold (a week ago it was a record -30 Fahrenheit), and snows off and on nearly every day. You can stand in line for tickets to one of a hundred theaters for ages, in that cold and snow. You cultivate a special patience. I need that patience for my daily hour-long metro commute into the city center. And the metro runs well, although it looks like it hasn’t been updated since the sixties; the stations are palatial and each uniquely decorated, and a couple of them are so deep underground (a Soviet defense against nuclear war), that they take up to three minutes to reach by escalator. (Three days ago, I saw a woman reading a book titled Hasta La Vista, Baby, in Cyrillic, on the metro, and tried really hard not to laugh.) On a guided tour through the city, I saw a little bear drinking orange juice outside the Winter Palace, handle via steel collar and chain by a man with a fur hat. Everyone – or nearly – wears some fur here. The sun rarely comes out from behind the clouds, except to set over the frozen Neva, as it did yesterday. The outlying areas of the city are choked with long, tall blocks of gray and decrepit-looking Soviet apartments. I live in one.
And inside that decrepit-looking gray building, with its peeling paint and one-person elevator which practically predates Stalin, is a very snug and warm world – one well lit and clean, and furnished with new furniture, technology and flooring. The bed in my spacious room is long enough and comfortable; I have thick blankets and a soft pillow. A bust of Lenin sits on my desk, alongside my copies of Crime and Punishment and Stranger in a Strange Land and a carved wooden cat. I have my slippers and house keys. The front door (which really just opens out onto a stairwell) is nicer and newer than the doors at any previous place I’ve lived, and locks in two places. One glows blue when engaged. My host mom takes the prize, however. So far, she has been ever so jovial, helpful, and kind. I’m going to buy her flowers on Women’s Day (but don’t tell – it’s a surprise). She makes me breakfast and dinner, and in return I keep my things in order and her abreast of my day. After dinner, we sit and drink tea and eat sweet cakes, and talk in simple English (her, sometimes) and broken Russian (me, most of the time). We have to pantomime a lot, and always have a dictionary handy. We discuss – among other things – work, the weather, our language issues, our lives and loved ones, the city.
I’ve exlaimed how great the campus I’m studying at is – brilliant blue and white baroque, and at the heart of town, it is right next door to bright yellow Smolny Institute, where the Governor of St. Petersburg has her seat. Both buildings look their crisp and inspiring best in winter time. (Well actually, all of St. Petersburg looks best in winter. It was made to wear snow.) The Tsars and Tsarinas of old yearned to make St. Petersburg the envy of the world, and decades of Soviet rule have not snuffed the results of that imperial initiative. In fact, despite having been horribly damaged in the blockade, St. Petersburg has recovered remarkably well. Recently, there has been a huge effort to reclaim the 19th century look and feel (and thank god!) Laws have been made which deny the construction of buildings higher than the gleaming golden spire of the ancient Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. So now, there literally are graceful yellow or green or red or blue palaces (mostly housing museums or shops) on nearly every corner of the city center, and not a single skyscraper. The city is re-realizing a history that, naturally, does include the Soviet Century – but not exclusively.
My host mom and I also talk about what I do in the city. Yesterday, I told her that I was planning on meeting some friends for dinner and drinks tonight, on Vasilevsky Island (one of the city’s many), where many CIEE students are staying. We will go sledding in the winter wonderland of Pavlovsk on Saturday, and may go clubbing with Russian students that night. I also told her that the day before a couple of us went into the Hermitage (Van Gogh! Rembrandt! Picasso! Gold leaf on banisters!) and came out so blown away that we absolutely needed to have a scrumptious bowl of borsch and calming cup of tea in a restaurant on bustling Nevsky Prospekt (see Most Famous Street In St. Petersburg/Russia, under the Really Cool Places Heading of any Travel Guide to Russia), and then visit the vast House of Books. There, I bought my first collection of Pushkin in Russian, which I want to read by the end of the semester. I also explained to my host mom that I, along with most of the other CIEE students, have bought tickets to a Sunday performance of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake and to another ballet called Giselle, both of which are playing in the one of the theater houses on the Square of Arts.
And sometimes, my host mom and I sit and simply stare out the kitchen window, at the little forested park in the courtyard outside. I mention how many trees the city has and how softly the snow sits in them, and she tells me how gorgeous they are in the dazzling spring and short summer.
So it’s true that Russia may be a riddle wrapped in an enigma, a place of extremes. But as much as St. Petersburg and her people do embody that dichotomy, she is hardly a puzzling place. When the sun does finally come out, and its weak fire lights up so much, you realize that only one truth really matters: This is the most beautiful city in the world.
Note: Of all the things I forgot to pack, the USB cable for my camera was the one. I'll take lots of pictures, and try to by a new cable here soon. I'm dying to show you St. Petersburg. Keep your fingers crossed!
16 January 2010
Back to Doing the Things We Do Best
A few days ago, as almost everyone I love went back to school and cold wind blew through me, I saw battle plans drawn in electric-blue chalk on a sidewalk. In terms that were nothing short of graphic, they said: Move Forward! Infallibly helpful and quite inimitable, no doubt – a brilliant strategy.
But when I moved myself along, I found, as I often do, that I have no idea where I’m going. Forward, sure. But to where? What destination? Why Russia, of course. And everyone knows where Russia is (it’s hard to miss), and everyone knows what it was (as yet, I’m refraining to read up on gulags before I go). But:
How is it now?
Oddly enough, other than the occasional and honestly enthusiastic “Oh, you’ll love it there!” and the certifiably charming “St. Petersburg just had its biggest snow storm in 130 years,” no one really seems to have much of an answer. I have no choice but to find out for myself when I get there. Regardless of what I discover, I think that writing about it will be helpful: About cats and cultural memory, about onion domes, about scratchy throats and gold leaf on banisters, stopping, walking, snow, gray, and stars; about brightly colored scarves and bread, about panic, about shopping malls and ballet and taiga. Is that all wrong? Is that delusion or stereotyping? Half delusion or stereotyping? What will I find? What will I make of it? Funny stories?
You will know more or less as I do. It will be your adventure too. Yes, in moving forward, I find myself back at the beginning of my project: I plan to restart this blog, and this time ‘round, I’ll cover my Russia experience (mostly; to the best of my ability). Will you join me? I’d like to update once a week (weather permitting) and promise it’ll probably fun to read (and comment on!) what I put down here. And if fun isn’t your cup of tea, then I’d just like to have your community.
Now raise that vodka glass one more time – to writing, bold adventure, and Mother Russia!
Thus it is as we reach our end, and that is where we are tonight. You may want to call a cab.
Good luck!
And Note: MGMT is boss.
Ancillary Note: I’m not really sure I get the above statement. If it means what I think it means, listen to me (or rather, them). If not, sorry. I’m not a Walking and Compact Urban Dictionary in Five Volumes like some people.
But when I moved myself along, I found, as I often do, that I have no idea where I’m going. Forward, sure. But to where? What destination? Why Russia, of course. And everyone knows where Russia is (it’s hard to miss), and everyone knows what it was (as yet, I’m refraining to read up on gulags before I go). But:
How is it now?
Oddly enough, other than the occasional and honestly enthusiastic “Oh, you’ll love it there!” and the certifiably charming “St. Petersburg just had its biggest snow storm in 130 years,” no one really seems to have much of an answer. I have no choice but to find out for myself when I get there. Regardless of what I discover, I think that writing about it will be helpful: About cats and cultural memory, about onion domes, about scratchy throats and gold leaf on banisters, stopping, walking, snow, gray, and stars; about brightly colored scarves and bread, about panic, about shopping malls and ballet and taiga. Is that all wrong? Is that delusion or stereotyping? Half delusion or stereotyping? What will I find? What will I make of it? Funny stories?
You will know more or less as I do. It will be your adventure too. Yes, in moving forward, I find myself back at the beginning of my project: I plan to restart this blog, and this time ‘round, I’ll cover my Russia experience (mostly; to the best of my ability). Will you join me? I’d like to update once a week (weather permitting) and promise it’ll probably fun to read (and comment on!) what I put down here. And if fun isn’t your cup of tea, then I’d just like to have your community.
Now raise that vodka glass one more time – to writing, bold adventure, and Mother Russia!
Thus it is as we reach our end, and that is where we are tonight. You may want to call a cab.
Good luck!
And Note: MGMT is boss.
Ancillary Note: I’m not really sure I get the above statement. If it means what I think it means, listen to me (or rather, them). If not, sorry. I’m not a Walking and Compact Urban Dictionary in Five Volumes like some people.
06 October 2009
Without, A Clue
Ask yourself: How many words begin with the letter “G”?
You’ll probably come up with “A lot!”
How many can you actually list? Fifteen? Twenty? Now ask: Why the HELL is this important? What good is knowing how many words begin with the letter “G,” or even knowing how many of those words you can use in daily conversation?
“It’s not,” is the answer you’ll undoubtedly get stuck with. And you’re right.
What is important is that you’ll never need to know everything, but you should know what I’m about to tell you:
Abraham Lincoln has special relevance this year.
Of course, I have no idea what or why that special relevance is. My mom and grandma simply insisted that it's so, but couldn’t provide details. Therefore, I will give a Kudos Bar to anyone who (after you’ve finished reading) goes out to research this and returns with a suitable explanation. I’ve considered it the conundrum of my summer (but have been too lazy to bother finding out the facts myself. That doesn’t mean you have to be).
And that’s all. It’s been super busy these days. You all know how it is: Time is tasty, but there are lots of people at the table.
So thus it is as we reach our end – and that is where we are tonight.
Good luck, until next time.
Note: Dracula rides a Vespa, glowing green.
Ancillary Note: For purposes of toasting, English muffins are essentially the same thing as bagels.
You’ll probably come up with “A lot!”
How many can you actually list? Fifteen? Twenty? Now ask: Why the HELL is this important? What good is knowing how many words begin with the letter “G,” or even knowing how many of those words you can use in daily conversation?
“It’s not,” is the answer you’ll undoubtedly get stuck with. And you’re right.
What is important is that you’ll never need to know everything, but you should know what I’m about to tell you:
Abraham Lincoln has special relevance this year.
Of course, I have no idea what or why that special relevance is. My mom and grandma simply insisted that it's so, but couldn’t provide details. Therefore, I will give a Kudos Bar to anyone who (after you’ve finished reading) goes out to research this and returns with a suitable explanation. I’ve considered it the conundrum of my summer (but have been too lazy to bother finding out the facts myself. That doesn’t mean you have to be).
And that’s all. It’s been super busy these days. You all know how it is: Time is tasty, but there are lots of people at the table.
So thus it is as we reach our end – and that is where we are tonight.
Good luck, until next time.
Note: Dracula rides a Vespa, glowing green.
Ancillary Note: For purposes of toasting, English muffins are essentially the same thing as bagels.
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