11 November: A Cruise Along the Volga...

Way back on a Friday in October, the entire ACTR program met up for a ten-day cruise along the Volga River.  From Petersburg to Nizhny-Novgorod we travelled by train—a far pleasanter means of travel than I expected.  During their decades of experience, Russians have developed an ingenious method for weathering overnight train trips, whereby they spread out a feast upon the fold-down tables in each compartment and gorge themselves on pirozhki, chocolate and assorted other delicacies until a pleasantly comatose state is brought on.    The ten hours of night riding across the western steppe dissolved in a sweet dreamless sleep.  Below, our compartment-- that's me in the middle right, with friends from the program and our department's head teacher on the left, all looking appropriately dazed.

At nine AM we were ejected into Nizhny’s industrial center, where a bus waited to take us out of the city again, to the rural Museum of Everyday Life (Muzei byta).  There a peasants’ (nee serfs’) village had been preserved and reconstructed.  We walked through the gorgeous birch forest, then at the height of “zolotaya ocen’” (golden autumn), as our guide described village life, craftsmanship, economy and religion before the revolution.  I regret not shelling out 100 rubles for the right to photograph there, as the tooled wooden facades and other elements of folk design and craft were worth recording.  From the outskirts we drove to Nizhny’s historic center, dominated by the hilltop Kremlin.  Along the steep hillside slanting to the riverfront, a series of terraces has been constructed, and there in the evening light, looking down at the ancient churches, the picturesque cottages and winding streets, breathing air much cleaner than our lungs had become accustomed to, we were confronted by an entirely different Russia than is apparent in Petersburg’s crowded streets and grand palaces.