The Cold War 2008

When I was in St. Petersburg last time, having arrived in the middle of winter to a warm apartment, I didn’t get to participate in the endlessly enjoyable party game known as “Get the heat on in the first place.” St. Petersburg runs on a centralized heating system whereby the city government controls the temperature of every single building in the city. A person can buy a space heater, but there is no way to turn on (or for that matter off) the heating system installed in the home. So for the last two weeks or so, during which weeks the warmest day was about 13 degrees Celsius, which was positively balmy compared to the others, there’s been a steadily increasing drama about when the heat will come on. It started with rumors that they expected the weather to get warmer soon, which is why they were delaying turning on the heat. Then I heard that the law stated that the heat went on after three consecutive days of temperature under 8 degrees Celsius, and so our five consecutive days of 9 degrees didn’t cut it. About a week ago they turned on the heat in hospitals and kindergartens, which raised hopes, but it has so far come to nothing. At this point the heating in my home is still off, although there are two people in my program whose heating came on this week, which gave them serious bragging rights over the rest of us. Finally my host mom late this week plastered the whole building with bright yellow flyers, explaining the fifteen phone numbers and kiosks and mailing addresses available to people who want to complain about the heat, hoping that if enough people call they’ll get annoyed and turn it on. I think that is all hope.
Also, I can’t decide whether the amusement that comes from this quintessentially Russian-bureaucratic to-do is worth the fact that I’ve been shivering my buns off for all but the 10 minutes that I’m in the shower for the last two weeks. It certainly doesn’t make the act of getting those shivered-off buns out of bed and to class on time any easier!

Shakespeare a la Ruse

My host mom and I were watching TV tonight, and some old-looking period film came on. It was really obviously a movie from the seventies, and I thought it must have been an adaptation of the Iliad or something like that. It had the look and feel of Ben Hur – slow as molasses action, sweeping views of an orange-tinted countryside or cityscape, etc. Most remarkably, the language was simple enough that I understood it just fine.
And then, all of a sudden,
Diana (my host mom): Oh! This must be a Shakespeare play.
Annie’s head: Hah! Yeah right.
Annie: Oh, yeah maybe…
** several minutes pass, in which the acting is boring and the language is, too**
Annie: So are you sure this is Shakespeare? It’s just that the language is so simple, I can understand everything, and in English Shakespeare is really complicated.
Diana: Oh, yes, this is Shakespeare.
Annie: But they’re talking in prose, and Shakespeare only wrote poetry.
Diana: He wrote plays, too.
Annie: Right. But the plays were written in verse.
Diana: Well, parts of them were, but some sections were in prose.
Annie’s head: No they weren’t.
Annie: Oh, really? That must be the translation because I’m pretty sure Shakespeare only wrote verse.
Diana: No, it’s not the translation! Here, I’ll show you (opens a translation and begins to read aloud to me. She finds after flipping a few pages a section in verse and takes this as a victory.)
Annie’s head: I’m going to cry.
Annie: Yeah… All I’m saying is that this is really different from English-language Shakespeare. In English, the whole play sounds like that, not just certain sections.
Diana: I believe you! But all the same, *insert about 15 minutes of dialogue about how she learned English in school, school in the Soviet Union generally, one of her favorite childhood films, the plot of said film, the biography of the main actress of said film.*
Annie’s head: Damn if that woman can’t talk!
Diana: Here, I’ll show you a book of poetry. I think we’re having a misunderstanding because sometimes Shakespeare wrote in free-verse. That’s poetry that doesn’t have meter.
Annie’s head: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Why haven’t I learned to say iambic pentameter in Russian yet??
Diana: So this is a book of Russian lyrical poets, who wrote in the post-Pushkin decades.
Annie’s head: Shakespeare was writing two centuries before Pushkin was born! And he was not writing in post-Pushkin free verse!
Annie: Yeah, that’s interesting. Look, I’m pretty tired. Goodnight!

By the way, for the interested, the movie turned out to be A Comedy of Errors. This calls to mind a story that sjba told me about a girl he went to high school with – when they were reading Pushkin (Eugene Onegin) in their literature class her parents (of Russian-speaking heritage) forbade her from reading it. That story was kind of silly when I heard it two or three years ago. But I understand now.

What is a nerd to do?

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in Russia to study Russian with the long-term goal of studying Russian literature. Russia has a pretty beastly literary tradition. I would argue that they have the best of the best, which ain’t bad for a country that didn’t get any literary fire under their buns until the late eighteenth century. But what a fire! Pushkin really started things off with a bang on the poetry front, and Gogol sure held his own to get prose going, and then comes Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, and Chekhov, which are the ones that Americans know, and then the twentieth century rolls around and all of a sudden seriously top-calibre poets are a dime a dozen and they all sit around helping each other out, and then you’re inundated with ungodly good prose writers who all sit around bickering about what literature is, and you’ve got brilliant literary critics around for the whole ride commentating on every writer’s every move, underground or otherwise, and the coolest thing about this infinitely rich and varying and developing literary culture is that Russians would read this stuff. Top-quality literary journals abounded and people actually read them, and hand-printed copies of censored literature circulated with, considering Stalin, relatively reckless abandon, and poets were rockstars and novelists were politically important. And then socialist realism happened and pissed all over everything (pardon the expletive, but there’s no other way to describe it. Imagine the New York Times being taken over by Newsweek for sixty years. Or Starbucks being taken over by Dunk’n Donuts. Or The Beatles by the Backstreet Boys. And then multiply that by a bajillion.) And then in the seventies a few good authors appeared and printed some stuff, and then the crickets started chirping. And the crickets are still at it.

This doesn’t only mean that contemporary Russian literature isn’t as mind-blowingly good as the Russian literary tradition has set it up to be. It also has the following two practical manifestations on my life that I’m going to whine about now. The first is the institution of the bookstore. Every bookstore caries a couple sets of “Russian Classics,” and “classic” is pretty broadly defined to include all the heavy weights, including the ones who weren’t read in the Soviet Union, so that’s good. Other than that, though, there will be about two or three shelves of Russian prose, two-ish shelves of prose in translation, and then about eight billion shelves of detective novels, romance novels, and tripe. So if you want to get a lesser-known work of a well-known author, you’re more or less out of luck. For example, Osip Mandelshtam was one of those fantastic poets of the early twentieth century that I mentioned. But he also wrote some important literary criticism. I was trying to buy a collection of his essays, and was having trouble finding anything. So I asked a salesclerk for help finding Mandelshtam’s prose. The answer was, “Mandelshtam was a poet.”

“Yeah, I know, but he wrote literary criticism, too, and that’s what I’m looking for.”

“Mandelshtam was a poet.”

“Right. A poet who also sometimes wrote prose? I’m looking for his prose.”

“Mandelshtam was a poet.”

I’m probably being super naive and idealistic, but I feel like that wouldn’t have happened thirty years ago.

The second situation is that I’ve been trying since I got here, diligently, to find a contemporary literary journal to read. I know they’ve got to be out there. The Russian “thick” journal is a Russian institution! But they are not on the shelves with the detective novels, and they are not in the big “press” stores, and they certainly aren’t in the little newspaper/magazine kiosks at the metro. You can believe me, because I’ve asked no fewer than 50 separate people for different journal titles. On the advice of a literature teacher on my program, I’ve begun a search for the journal “Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie”, which means maybe “New Look at Literature” or something like that. The journal goes by “NLO” for short. Really fun coincidence: “NLO” in Russian more commonly stands for “Neizvestnij letjajushij objekt,” or something similar enough, which in English is “Unidentified Flying Object.” So I’m looking for a magazine called “UFO.” Great. Imagine having the following conversation three times a day for two weeks:

“Hello, do you have the literary journal “Novij mir (New World)?”

“No.”

“Okay, what about the literary journal UFO?”

“Oh yeah, we’ve got UFO, that’ll be 12 roubles.”

And then you’re handed a tabloid about aliens. They must think I’m a pretty odd bird referring to a tabloid about aliens as a “literary journal.”

So today was a particularly unsuccessful literary purchase day – I was looking for “Speak, Memory” by Nabokov, which I couldn’t find, which is outrageous, and then looked for UFO at about ten places with no luck (unless seeing a cover picture of a crashed alien spaceship is lucky). And this is on the heels of my most excellent compartive literature course, about which I will write one of these days, so I’m a little riled up about the whole “state of Russian literature today” question, which is maybe why this post is perhaps a bit over the top? Ask me about Russian literature on a day when I don’t want to punch a newspaper kiosk lady in the face and I’m sure we’ll have a perfectly pleasant conversation.

Did you know that I speak Russian pretty okay? Because I sure didn’t!

It seems that I speak Russian better now than I did the last time I was here. Go figure. This fact has affected my life in three ways, which ways I will now take the liberty of investigating for you.

First, I am in a constant state of amazement at understanding 90 instead of 60% of the things people say to me or the things that I read. I spend a lot of energy rationalizing to myself that this particular Russian just speaks clearly or this particular author is just especially easy to read. I’m beginning to think, however, that that’s not actually what’s going on here. I think I might just be getting pretty good at Russian? So the development of this theory makes every day a little bit more exciting.

Second, I’ve noticed that a much smaller percentage of the weird looks that shopkeepers give me are looks of uncomprehenion or bafflement. Weird looks persist, but they seem to have less to do with my not being able to make myself understood.

Finally, in addition to being able to communicate okay, I seem to have cultivated my Russian persona to the point where people think it’s a good idea to ask me for directions. The terror that this turn of events has produced in my life knows no bounds. A total stranger walks up to me and I hope against hope that I’ll understand enough of the words to know what they’re looking for, and then, in those increasingly common but still rare instances when I actually know where they need to go, I hope against hope yet again that I’ll be able to overcome my shock and surprise at being in a conversation with this person that I’ll be able to dig deep and find the words to tell them where to go. I’m getting better, but I think these poor souls would still be better off finding somebody else to talk with. Yesterday a young woman asked me how to get to a hotel that happens to be across the street from my apartment, so I told her to go “correctly, that is forward, and then turn correctly, that is to the right, and you’ll see it (informal “you”).” For those non-Russian-speakers in the audience: “correctly” is “pravilno”, forward is “prjamo” and right is “pravda”. I don’t usually mix up these words, but all sorts of things spring out of a person’s mouth when he’s under pressure.