вторник, 25 ноября 2008 г.
Cruise 4
More Cruise: Kazan
четверг, 20 ноября 2008 г.
A Cruise Continued.
четверг, 6 ноября 2008 г.
My dear America!: A moment of partisanship
Two months in a foreign land followed by this historic election have inspired in me an unexpected and previously unknown patriotism. Beyond missing large black coffees in those gorgeous sturdy paper cups, easy communication with strangers, and being better dressed than most of my peers, I now have some understanding of the phrase to long for one’s motherland. On waking this morning I immediately called friends in Portland, who had just watched the president-elect’s acceptance speech in a bar filled with teary, elated students. I had steeled myself for bad news, for another ugly, hotly contested election, but when I heard Jesse yell “We have a black president!” over the cheering of a bar full of young Americans, pride and relief overwhelmed me. Still groggy and nursing my first cup of instant coffee I laughed and cried into the receiver until my phone card ran out of minutes. Over our breakfast of blini Tanya tried valiantly to understand what this day meant to me, as I tried more clumsily to explain what it meant that “my people” had elected a black president, a man who opposed war, who supported unions, social equality, education and accessible health care, who was respected and actually liked by the international community. Biting my tongue not a little bit, I nodded when Tanya compared Obama to Putin, who was also a handsome and eloquent young president. Insofar as is possible in broken Russian, I waxed poetic about Martin Luther King, the legacy of slavery, the past eight years of pessimism and alienation. After a moment of silence, she responded with customary Russian wariness, “Well. Let’s see if he isn’t killed, like Kennedy.”
As of last August I never attributed any special meaning to being an American. Coming to Russia, I certainly didn’t expect to miss not only family, friends and my several hometowns, but “America.” Absence, however, has done its job, and taught me of the reality of cultural differences. While this isn’t the most politically correct of sentiments, there are certain areas where cross-cultural communication fails; beyond the language barrier, there are differences in perspective, belief, and frame of reference which complicate mutual understanding. I think particularly for Russian-American discourse, where both sides have such powerful and complex national myths, and share such a convoluted history of interrelation, real understanding on some subjects is attained with great difficulty.
American pluralism, for example, is a damnably difficult ideal to explain. Russians can state with absolute confidence what is “Russian” and what not, and I have not yet succeeded to convey that what I miss most about America is how much difference thrives there. Over dinner my friend’s tutor asked us how to say “cool” in English, and we offered up about twenty synonyms, all with different regional and social connotations. “If you’re from New England ‘wicked’ is an adverb, but in California it’s an adjective, and if you’re African-American ‘bad’ might mean really, really good, and you wouldn’t say ‘far out’ unless you were an aged hippy…” Of course there are different social groups and regions in Russia, but the diversity of America, and the ease with which we relate to it, is incomparable. It’s been both frustrating and comforting to realize over these past weeks that no matter how fluent I become in Russian, no matter how accustomed I become to the culture, American English will always be my first and strongest love, the language that just sounds right. Listening to part of Obama’s acceptance speech dubbed in Russian on TV, the impossibilty of honest translation was painfully apparent. How does one convey to a foreign audience what that speech owed to the tradition of African-American Baptist preaching, which in turn owes so much to the rhythms of both the King James Bible and slaves’ working songs, whose same rhythms were borrowed by Walt Whitman in his crafting of an indigenous American poetry, and by the twentieth century labor movement in their songs of protest, and whose cadences therefore conjure a long history of spirituality in the face of hardship, of past battles for the very American rights of self-definition and personal dignity, while also celebrating cultural difference? And so on. This must be how Russians feel trying to explain the meaning of же.
While this homesickness is today most present in my mind, I expect by January I will have a similar longing for pirozhki, tapochki (the slippers donned upon every entrance to a home, which mark the strict line between inside and outside, "nashe" and "chuzhoe")-- maybe even the thigh-high vinyl boots so popular among Petersburg's female population. Already, when speaking English, I miss the Russian habit of making a diminutive of even the most sterile words, which seems to make every object part of a family: Smoking pipes here, for example, are "little pipes" (trubki), while drinking straws are "very little pipes" (trubochki). Almost without noticing, I've in many ways adjusted to Russian life, and after my initial glee at returning to America (traffic laws! emissions laws! those dull green dollars!), I'll have to adjust all over again to "our" strange ways.
11 November: A Cruise Along the Volga...


воскресенье, 28 сентября 2008 г.
Мой любимый памятник
ALL ABOUT ME.
воскресенье, 21 сентября 2008 г.
Three weeks have passed since I arrived in Peter, but it seems much shorter. My days are filled with classes, group excursions, and long walks around this strange and wonderful city; time for reflection and recording is little. I live with Tatiana Petrovna (“Tania” to me) and her adult daughter, Ira, in a cozy apartment five kilometers from the city center, where I attend classes four days a week. Most days, I dash to the metro station on Prospekt Veteranov at quarter to nine, jam myself into a full-to-capacity car, and travel north squeezed on all sides by grumpy Russians. At Tekhnologicheskii Institut I shove my way out of the car (if I move too slowly, someone’s hand will materialize between my shoulderblades, pushing me forcefully toward the exit), race across the platform to catch the second train, and the process is repeated until I mount the impossibly long escalator that ejects the sleepy crowd onto Nevskii Prospekt. From there it’s a five minute walk past the monumental Kazanskii Sabor to our classroom building, into which I slink sheepishly, usually five minutes late to Conversation Practice. This daily commute, while far from the most pleasant feature of Russian life, is a valuable key to understanding a few of the mysteries of Petersburg, such as: Why are shopgirls and waitresses so cranky? It’s because every hapless customer must remind them of the jerk into whose sweaty armpit their faces were pressed that very morning on the train.
Every day, too, I am reminded that these struggles are entirely worthwhile, when I walk beneath the Khram Spas' na krovi (Church of Spilt Blood) on my way somewhere, when I swing by the Hermitage after classes, or come home from the cold to hot borscht, tea, and Tania’s rhapsodizing about the mushrooms at her dacha. Evenings (wrapped in sweaters as the city has yet to turn on our radiators) I hunch over my lessons beneath the dim yellow bulb, while Ira yells indecipherably at the newscasters on TV and Tania calls out crossword clues from the kitchen, or I work my way through Babel or Brodskii, asking Tania to explain the many words neglected by my dictionary. Each new word I learn suddenly begins to show up everywhere, in advertisements, on TV, in conversations. Language study is far from abstract here, but an unavoidable component of daily life. Moreover, the language itself is living. Flipping through flash cards on the train, I'll look up to see that passive participle printed on the wall. Every time I explain to Tania and Ira what time I'll be home and where I'm going, verbs of motion are alive in a way I couldn't have imagined when I was learning them by rote in the library in Oregon.
For now I'll leave you. Soon: More pictures, more postings, some Russian-language things that I hope will be of interest to students of the language. Увидимся!
"Пайпер Давидовна"