St. Petersburg Semester

Cruise 4

2008-11-25T05:45:00.000-08:00

The next day found us in Ulianovsk, nee Simbirsk. This remarkable town is designed to make the visitor never, ever again want to think about Vladimir Ilych Lenin.

In Ulianovsk you can-- indeed, cannot avoid to-- see statues of Lenin, photographs of Lenin, grocery lists written by Lenin's sister, the bed in which the little Lenin slept, the school in which he studied, and the fur coat which his mother wore to walk him there, preserved in a large glass case. The center, near the harbor, is taken up by what seems to be acres of Lenin memorials and a monumental Lenin museum, in the courtyard of which stands one of about five houses in which the Lenin (then called Ulianov) family lived, all of which are now museums. One house stands in a neighborhood some distance from the main memorial site, and some years ago the Soviet state decided to not only remake the house into a house-museum, but to restore the entire surrounding neighborhood to approximate the condition in which it stood during the Ulianov family's stay there.

Now the city center stands as a monument to a man about whom no one knows what to think. A couple of the older Russians in our group were openly disgusted by the display. If nothing else, the memorial park serves now as a reminder of the incredible monotony of the one-party state. The real deeds and life of the man are beside the point, when he is represented for three-quarters of a century as the hero-saviour of Russia. One almost feels sorry for the heros of the Soviet era-- Gargarin, Lenin, Gorkii, et. al.-- whose real earthly selves were hijacked to serve the purposes of the state they supported, or created.

More Cruise: Kazan

2008-11-25T05:19:00.000-08:00

After boarding our boat, the Akademik Glushkov, in Nizhny's harbor, we set off for a night's sail to Kazan, the next major port on the Volga. The capital of the semi-autonomous Tatarstan Republic, Kazan is a fascinating study of Russian multiculturalism, where ethnic Tatars outnumber their Russian counterparts by nearly two to one. The republic considers both Russian and Tatar as its official language.

The most obvious symbols of Kazan's mixed heritage are held within the walls of the kremlin near the city center. There a mosque and a church, both recently renovated, stand yards apart-- although, as a Russian professor in our group remarked somewhat wryly, the buildings are separated by a high brick wall. The day we were there, both Muslim and Orthodox weddings were being celebrated in the kremlin. It seems that the Tatars of Kazan, most of whom are Sunni Muslims, have picked up some habits from their Russian neighbors: just outside the mosque's doors, there was the requisite group of bridesmaids and best men swigging champagne to celebrate the union.

Tatarstan has benefitted hugely from Russia's oil boom-- almost half of the region's economy is based on oil production, and it is among the wealthiest parts of the nation. Exploring the city center, I was amazed by how western it seemed, not least because of the enormous black-glass shopping center that towers over the harbor. Further in there are older storefronts lined up along pedestrian avenues, many occupied by European luxury brands. In front of one a child no older than four was folded into the beggar's pose so often seen here, his head nearly touching his knees. Inequality in Russia rears up in the most inescapable ways.

A Cruise Continued.

2008-11-20T06:42:00.000-08:00

I'm splitting this up to make more room for pictures. Below, another one from the hilltop park. The river shown here is the Oka, which a few meters to the right would have joined with the larger Volga River.

And above, a newly renovated Orthodox church near the harbor, originally built by the Stroganov family. Until about thirty years ago, these pictures might have been illicit goods-- Nizhny was a "closed city" for most of the Soviet period, where foreigners were not permitted. Even selling street maps was outlawed until the mid-seventies, purportedly to protect the military research facilities then located there. The city wasn't officially opened until after the fall of the Soviet Union.

My dear America!: A moment of partisanship

2008-11-06T08:33:00.000-08:00

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...

2008-11-06T06:52:00.000-08:00

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.

Мой любимый памятник

2008-09-28T05:09:00.000-07:00

Sure, the monuments to Gogol, Peter I, etc. might be more "important" or "pertinent." But I have fallen in love with this little booth, erected in honor of Russians' obsession with the weather. The window displays the progression of barometric pressure over the past week, while the present is charted on the other side.

I have fallen off the wagon, so to speak, over the last weeks, and am preparing an enormous entry covering that time, which included a 10-day cruise along the Volga, among other notable excursions. Prepare yourselves, dear readers, for tomes ahead.

ALL ABOUT ME.

2008-09-28T04:16:00.000-07:00

For those of you who aren't members of my immediate family (or for those members of my immediate family who might need a refresher), I am a third-year student in Reed College's Russian Department. I'm spending this semester studying in St. Petersburg, at the ACTR/RLASP (Advanced Russian Language and Area Studies) program, which is run by American Councils in conjunction with Bryn Mawr College and St. Petersburg's Russian State Pedagogical University (The Gertsen Institute). You can learn more about ACTR's excellent study abroad opportunities, as well as apply for the spring term or next year, at www.actr.org or at www.acrussiaabroad.org.

I was very lucky to be awarded a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, which made possible my term abroad. The Gilman International Scholarship Program is an amazing resource, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and Bureau of Education, to make study abroad possible for undergraduate students of all economic backgrounds. The Gilman Scholarships are awarded to select undergraduate students who are eligible for the Federal Pell Grant (if you're not sure if you receive or are eligible for this grant, you can find out at www.ed.gov/programs/fpg/index.html). Thanks to programs such as the Gilman Scholarship and the Fulbright-Hayes Program, students for whom study abroad might otherwise be out of reach are enabled to travel and study internationally. The Gilman Scholarship Program is of special interest to students of Russian, as beyond the scholarships of up to $5000 per semester available to all study abroad participants, the Program offers a Critical Need Languages Scholarship of up to $3,000 to students of Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and other languages of domestic interest. To apply for the Gilman International Scholarship or to learn more about it, go to www.iie.org.

Besides enabling students to study abroad, the Gilman Program encourages a more profound experience abroad by requiring all scholarship recipients to complete a follow-on service project, a proposal of which is part of the application. The service project is meant to spur wider interest and knowledge of study-abroad opportunities, and may be geared toward one's college community or a wider audience. Hence, piperinpeter.blogspot.com. By writing this blog, I hope to make known the benefits of study abroad, particular to students of Russian language and culture. Moreover, I hope my experiences will encourage students who think that study abroad is beyond their reach to apply for the many programs and scholarships available to us. While studying Russian may at times seem an arcane task, we Russian majors will actually be a vital part of America's economic and political future. In this "globalized" world, bilingual Americans with cross-cultural understanding are a key component of our nation's continuing prosperity. Our generation carries the burden and the privilege of coming of age in a time when knowledge of diverse cultures and languages is vital, not only to personal and national economic success, but to each individual's comprehension of his daily life.

Aside from all that, blini with red caviar are delicious beyond one's wildest imaginings, and available on every block in Petersburg.

2008-09-21T09:16:00.000-07:00

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.

My classes are exhausting and very good. From 9:30 to 3:30 I study grammar, phonetics, area studies, conversation, and “slovoobrazavanie” (“word-education”). The professors are paragons of patience, teasing meaning from our garbled sentences, kindly correcting our innumerable mistakes, and nearly fainting with shock and joy when one of us manages to utter a phrase correctly. I’ve learned to value above all else this gorgeous, melodious phrase: “Absolutno pravil’no, Pai-per!” Three out of five classes consist of only myself and three other girls. At first I thought this would be dull, but it’s been wonderful to have allies at the university, who will commiserate when, for instance, our phonetics teacher informs me that after two years of Russian study I still cannot pronounce correctly the word for 3, or 4, or 1.

Now, after three weeks, I look back fondly on those days when I thought that I spoke Russian. The disillusionment of being surrounded by native speakers for the first time, and confronting the paucity of one’s hard-earned language skills, does eventually pass. Now, more often than not, I find my inability to communicate basic information in this damnably difficult language humorous rather than soul-crushing. Moreover, every day it does get easier; every day I understand more and say “Shto??? Eshio raz???” very slightly less. There are also those victories which buoy me for days: on Thursday, I managed to give directions to a Russian tourist, which I think were at least partly right. Since then I have had to work hard to suppress a broad prideful grin at the memory.

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"