Азовская русалка

To market, to market

2008-10-24T04:41:00.003+04:00

I learn a lot about Russia every day. After all, that's what they pay me to do (by which I mean give me student loans to do). But occasionally I learn something so surprising that I feel the need to share it here. Today was one of those days; in Central Asian history lecture we learned that markets (in the sense of bazaars) didn't really exist in Soviet Russia until the mid-'80's!

This was shocking to me because markets were so much a part of my daily life in Russia. Longtime readers with nothing better to fill their brains with might remember my post about Sportivnaya market in Vladivostok; I'm pretty sure I also mentioned, at some point, the ever-changing bounty of local fruit at Taganrog's central market. I used grocery stores, too, but markets were my go-to place for almost everything from twine to cabbages to houseplants. My Russian friends encouraged market shopping, and most of them had their own particular market skill sets and habits. It never occurred to me that all of that sprung up (or was revived) just in the last 20 years.

(Geeky note: markets appeared in Soviet Central Asia, which had a more ingrained bazaar tradition and was also farther from the watchful eye of Moscow, much earlier, pretty much in the '60's when the Soviet agricultural program really tanked and the state started giving out private plots of land (dacha land) for independent subsistence agriculture.)

Monk Sighting!

2008-10-04T01:56:00.002+04:00

Remember my fascination with Orthodox monks? Well, I came across the link to a story about one today:
Wall Street Trader Becomes a Monk.

Putting salvation aside and looking at it from a purely secular/selfish standpoint, I think he made the right choice. I've never heard anything good about the lives of investment bankers and Wall Street types (well, except that they make a ton of money), but living in a 12th-century monastery and tending to a herd of cheese-producing buffalo sounds awesome. Smelly, yes, but awesome.

(P.S. - I notice he let them photograph him.)

Things I Lost and Am Finding Again: My Native Tongue

2008-09-26T17:48:00.006+04:00

Preparing to come home from Russia, I was in a mood to focus largely on the things I was going to lose upon leaving. Unsurprising. But once I got here, I was taken by surprise in rediscovering things I had lost by leaving the U.S. and am now regaining.

I was afraid that coming back to the U.S. would mean losing my Russian self and everything I had gained while I was there, reverting to being the same person I was two years ago when I set off. That, of course, didn't happen; experience has left its mark on me, and being in the U.S. doesn't erase that. Instead, it lets me keep what I've found and pick up the pieces I shed when I left. There were aspects of my personality, it turns out, that really did get lost in Russia.

One of those aspects was language. In Russia, I began to lose hold of the ways I define myself through language. I'm not a particularly eloquent speaker, but I'm a linguistic creature nonetheless. I really enjoy playing with language, appropriating language, observing the way my lexicon and manner of speaking changes depending on who I'm talking to, crafting written sentences to convey what I mean in the loveliest way possible. Speaking Russian all the time and speaking English primarily to non-native speakers really ties your hands linguistically. My Russian is not as expressive or varied as my English, and my English-to-Russians is not as expressive or varied as my English-to-Americans. Of course, I had my (few) American friends and this blog, but I was still speaking "as myself" in English much, much less than I do every day here.

I bet that's one of the reasons Seth and I were good friends (or much better friends, anyway, than two such different people would likely have been if we had met in the U.S.); we could talk to each other in a way that we couldn't really talk to anyone else. Usually that phrase is code for "we could divulge all our secrets and hopes and fears to each other," but here I actually mean it literally. We could bring out our full lexicon, constructions, mannerisms, humor, intonation, slang, cultural references – in short, all the tools in our linguistic toolbelts - and know we were being understood.

(Seth and I had different approaches to how we used English with Russians; from what I saw of his interactions with them, he kept on using those tools even when he wasn't understood, while I used a kind of pruned-back, twiggy English, shorn of markers of my unique idiolect. I can't say which approach is better, really, although I'm inclined to say that I went too far.)

Anyway, I've been generally dazzled by how bright, deep and complex the linguistic milieu is in my native land. I get to use all the tools in my toolbelt all the time now, and (to mix metaphors) my serves are almost always returned. I now draw immense pleasure from things like writing academic papers and from the way conversation flows in a group of people. I miss speaking Russian - sometimes a little, sometimes a lot - but I'm pleasantly surprised by how much donning my native language makes me feel like I'm in my own skin again.

Guilt/nostalgia post

2008-09-25T07:59:00.002+04:00

I feel really bad all of a sudden that I've just abandoned this blog. It would be nice to continue writing, but I'm not sure how realistic that is, since life is very busy at the moment. On the one hand, I'm sure I could make myself write something a couple of times a month, at least until I run out of backlogged stuff to say about Russia. On the other, I dislike infrequently-updated blogs as a matter of principle, and I don't particularly want to be the owner of one.

But then again, that sentiment itself is a bit outdated, since I appear to be the only person left in the world who checks the blogs she follows by clicking on them one by one from a bookmarked list. If my updates are fed directly to you by RSS (I'll come clean - I don't even know what RSS is. Yeah, I'll read about it sometime, but not until I'm done reading about Turkistan in 1916), why's it matter if I hardly ever update?

Free time po-russki and po-amerikanski

2008-08-31T00:39:00.002+04:00

This is, perhaps, the first in a series of posts on what it's been like to come back to the U.S.

The nice thing about hanging out with my Russian friends is that we never got smashed. We drank, of course, but getting falling-down drunk was never the goal. This might be surprising to Americans who think of Russians as big drinkers. There certainly is a widespread and firmly entrenched culture of drinking in Russia, but the flip-side of the country's huge alcohol problem is that there's also a pretty strong stigma attached to overdrinking, especially among members of the intellectual classes, and particularly the younger generations. I knew several young Russian guys who just didn't drink at all. When you're constantly seeing how it ruins people's lives, I guess that's a logical choice to make. (I'm not saying this to contrast with the crazy, drunken crowd I run with in the U.S., since I don't, really - but U.S. college/young adult drinking culture is disturbing, and it's nice that it's not really there in Russia.)

The other nice thing about my Russian friends is that hanging out didn't usually involve spending a lot of money. I can count the number of times I went out to restaurants with Russians on the fingers of one hand. The same for clubs, although that's partly just because I don't really like clubbing. (But even most Russians who like to go out dancing only do it occasionally, because it is expensive.) Russians hang out at each other's homes, and whenever the weather's good, they walk around. It now seems completely natural to me to just meet up with friends and wander aimlessly around streets, parks and beaches; it's weird to think that Americans just don't do that, and that *I* never did that before a couple of years ago.

On the other hand, the nice thing about being with American friends again is that Americans tend to have much fuller social calendars than Russians do. To be fair, this could be partly because I'm in a big city, while I was in the provinces in Russia. But Americans seem to like to have some kind of scheduled social event (lunch with a friend, drinks after work, a concert, a play, a museum, a cookout, the zoo...) practically every day, and certainly every weekend. I had forgotten about that. It's a bit overwhelming, in a way, but also really fun.

Belated Home Post

2008-08-17T20:11:00.002+04:00

I can't believe I've been home for two weeks and haven't written anything! I still have a few things left to say before I close up shop (I can't think of any reason to continue this blog from the exotic locale of Washington, DC, my new home). I will try to post them soon, although I've been quite busy lately with moving to DC and will soon be even busier with graduate school. Hang tight and check back when you happen to think of it!

Only in Russia

2008-07-31T23:24:00.003+04:00

My pilgrimage to Patriarch's Ponds was part of the self-guided "Walking Tour of Literary Moscow" suggested by my travel guide. I decided to do at least the part of the tour that I hadn't already seen on other trips to Moscow, and this is what I encountered:

(Please note the date - Thursday, July 31.)

Gogol Memorial Rooms - closed for repairs
Church Gogol attended - closed for lunch
Lermontov House-Museum - closed for unknown reasons
Church Pushkin got married in - SUCCESS!
Gorky House-Museum - closed on the last Thursday of every month
Aleksei Tolstoy Apartment-Museum - SUCCESS #2! I don't really care about Aleksei Tolstoy (note: not the author of War and Peace - that was Lev Tolstoy), but the museum worker was really nice and took me on a private guided tour.
Chekhov House-Museum (really wanted to see it since I've been living in Chekhovland all year) - closed on the last day of every month
Patriarch's Ponds - SUCCESS #3! Hard to screw up visiting a public park, really.
Bulgakov apartment-museum - SUCCESS #4! Very cool little museum, run privately, with lots of artwork, costume sketches, movie clips, etc. related to Bulgakov's works. And a live black cat. And a mailbox where you can put a letter to the Master. And tons of visitors! Not that surprising, I guess, since "Master and Margarita" is the favorite book of about 80% of young Russians I've talked to.

Then I decided to go to the Sakharov Center, a human rights research center/library/museum named for Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist/human rights activist. Alas, it is closed in July, as the workers are all on vacation.

To review, that's six strikes, but I think it's even more impressive that each one was a strike for a different reason. It was still a nice tour, since many of the buildings were interesting to look at from the outside, and going to all of those museums would have been museum overdose anyway. But I've decided to go back to the Chekhov museum and the Sakharov center tomorrow, since (barring any unpleasant surprises) they should both be open.

Горы, солнце, пихты, песни и тайги / Mountains, sun, fir trees, songs, and the taiga

2008-07-31T10:22:00.004+04:00

I doubt anyone uses this blog to check up on whether I'm alive or not, but in case you were wondering, I am.

I'm in Moscow now and am starting my extended leave of absence from Russia (a.k.a. moving home for grad school) on Saturday. I think if I could really grasp that I'm leaving, I'd be crying a lot, but happily for myself and everyone else, I only sort of half-grasp it, so I just kind of mope around. We'll see what Saturday morning is like, though.

Siberia (the reason for my extended silence) was AMAZING. The risk that I will run away and live on the shores of Baikal forever is now even higher than it was last year after Ulan Ude. I have tons of impressions from the trip (do we say that in English? I feel like maybe only Russians and Americans who have been in Russia for too long say that), which unfortunately makes it hard to write about, but I promise that I will. And there will be pictures. :)

But for now, I'm off on a little pilgrimage (read: two stops on the metro) to Patriarch's Ponds, the setting for the opening scene of Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita," which I finished reading yesterday... in Russian. It's the longest work I've read in Russian so far, at 413 pages. Gold star for me!

On the 4:40 p.m. Commuter Train to Rostov.

2008-07-10T23:53:00.000+04:00

I would like to write about how hard it is to be leaving Taganrog, but I have no idea what words to use.

Best Going-Away Present Ever

2008-07-07T18:42:00.002+04:00

From Lydia Arkadievna, the institute's Latin teacher (they make the law students take Latin).

A scarf. Actually from the 1980 Olympics. !!!! I can hardly believe she was willing to part with it. Needless to say, I love it. Late Soviet kitsch is a guilty pleasure of mine.

Oh, my colleagues are so nice to me! I will miss them.

(She also gave me a little calendar with Orthodox icons on it. It has all the fast days marked... I haven't counted, but at first glance it looks like the Orthodox devout spend more time fasting than not fasting. In fact, they're supposed to be fasting right now. Happy St. Peter Fast, everyone. June 23 to July 11.)

Aina's Beetless Borscht

2008-07-07T10:51:00.000+04:00

This is partly just for my reference, but I get a fair number of hits from people looking for borscht recipes, so I thought I'd post it here. I went over to my friend Aina's the other day and found her making borscht for her brothers. "If it's borscht, shouldn't it have beets in it?" I asked. "It can, but it doesn't have to," she replied. To Aina and to many Russians, borscht means 'cabbage soup,' not necessarily 'beet soup', as Americans tend to think.

This is all quite approximate. Russians aren't nearly as recipe-obsessed as Americans are; for example, I remember one of my classes laughing out loud at the fact that our recipes tell us to preheat our ovens, and my Russian girl friends often have to hide their skepticism of my ability to cook, since I appear to require instructions that are, to them, far too specific. Anyway, for soup, amounts don't really matter as long as you don't oversalt it.

Start by peeling and slicing three or four potatoes (Aina cuts them in half lengthwise, and then slices each half widthwise into centimeter-thick slices) and shredding a whole head of cabbage. Take a tablespoon or so of dried mint (she does this for her Turkmen father; mint is apparently prominent in Turkmen cuisine) and use your hands to mix it and some salt to taste into the shredded cabbage.

Put the cabbage and potatoes to boil in a 5-liter pot with broth for at least 15 minutes. Aina used meat broth, but no meat. I'm pretty sure any kind of broth would do. I didn't see how much she had in there, but it was enough so that the broth and the cabbage mixture combined almost filled the pot.

Meanwhile, grate a carrot with the large holes of a grater and chop an onion; put them in a pan with some vegetable oil over medium-low heat and get to work chopping three or four tomatoes. Add those to the pan, along with a spoonful of tomato paste for color; bring the pan contents (now quite liquid because of the tomatoes) to a boil while chopping some garlic to taste. Add everything to the soup pot. Now chop some fresh parsley and dill (maybe about half a cup chopped) and add that, along with some more salt. Let everything simmer for a minute or two more, and your borscht is done. Serve with a dollop of sour cream or mayonnaise in each bowl.

P.S. It seemed weird to me that Russians eat soup in the summer, but with some bread and a salad of chopped tomatoes/cucumbers/parsley/dill (ubiquitous in Russia from May to October) it made a nice, fairly light dinner. And it's quick, if you've got the broth on hand already.

One Thing I'd Like to Fix About Russia

2008-07-04T15:02:00.000+04:00

I know, it's not my place. Still.

I was hanging out with my friend Aleksei the other night when out of the blue he said, "Remember Andryusha?"

"Which Andryusha? The one who lived with you while he was looking for an apartment this spring?"

"Yeah."

"Yes, why?"

"He died last week."

"Are you serious?!?"

"Yeah. They had his funeral two days ago."

"What happened?!"

"Car accident. There was a drunk driver, and he had been drinking too, and the other guy swerved and he swerved to miss him and slammed into a pole. It was the day Russia beat the Netherlands."

"That's terrible! I don't even know what to say!"

"I know. I was totally shocked when I found out, too. The worst part is, he was just unlucky. I was in an accident on the highway, we were going 100 kph and the other people were too, and I got out with nothing but a scratch on my leg. But he died. If his car had had airbags, he'd probably still be alive. (pause) And if he'd been wearing a seatbelt, I'm positive he'd have made it."

...

I only met Andrei once or twice, but it was still shocking to be blindsided by that. It's hard to grasp how someone who was totally alive the last time you saw him, who had, as they say, his whole life in front of him (he was 22), could have suddenly just ceased to exist. And I feel terrible for him, for having his life cut so short, and for his family and friends. But the worst part is that this kind of stupid crap happens all too often in Russia. Almost 40,000 Russians a year die in traffic accidents. That needs to change. I once looked up the number for the U.S. and I believe it's somewhat similar, but we've got more than twice Russia's population, and I'm sure our number of cars per capita is much, much higher.

So many Russians, especially men, just don't wear seatbelts. Ever. How many taxi drivers have I watched put on their seatbelt as we approach the customs checkpoint at the edge of town and then unfasten it again as soon as we're past? Seriously, guys. The seatbelt isn't that uncomfortable, and the highway from Taganrog to Rostov in most places doesn't even have a center line or clearly defined shoulders. What's the point of risking it?

I won't even get into the traffic laws and people's tendency to follow them, except to say that it's one thing about Russia that most Western visitors seem to find legitimately shocking. I've been in cars that have hit 100 kph on city streets, 200 meters from a stop sign. Why? Because it's badass to drive that way, and if you get caught, you can give the policeman a hundred rubles and get off scot-free. (For the record, I do not ride with people who drive that way more than once.)

Judging by my friends and acquaintances, drunk driving isn't quite as common in Russia as I originally believed, but it's certainly not nearly as actively stigmatized as it is in the U.S. You can lay the blame on Andrei for driving under the influence – or for not wearing a seatbelt, for that matter, but how many of us would be doing the same thing if they hadn't beaten it into us how dangerous and stupid it is? We are lucky, my friends. They teach us to wear our seatbelts and they punish us when we do stupid things on the road. They sell us cars with airbags in them. They keep our roads in relatively safe condition. That's not what Aleksei meant when he said Andryusha was "just unlucky," but that's how I take it.

Это всё, что останется после меня*

2008-07-01T22:41:00.006+04:00

*This is all that will remain after me.

I moved out of my apartment yesterday. I've got ten more days here, but now that I'm living out of my suitcases in the institute's guesthouse, it really feels like the beginning of the end.

Goodbye, gas stove. You were a kasha-boiling and chocolate chip cookie-baking workhorse. Goodbye, window that required masking tape, caulk and strips of furniture foam to keep the drafts out this winter.

Goodbye, Khrushchev–era fridge with the contact paper coming off. I'm sorry I only defrosted your freezer box at the very end of our relationship. I say "relationship" because, for a machine so ugly and disgusting, I really grew to love you.

Goodbye, world's most comfortable fold-out bed/couch. Your winning combination of squishy soft foam cushions and reliably supportive wooden planks has earned a special place in my heart that no future mattress will ever steal.

Goodbye, living room/bedroom/home office/balalaika studio rolled into one. Goodbye, wardrobe with the video game stickers on it. Goodbye, curtain that is all that remains of the world's greatest Draft Dodger. Goodbye, hideous carpet and green wood-print linoleum. Goodbye, sewing machine table-turned-desk.

Goodbye, best views of Taganrog in the whole city. Goodbye, roofs and treetops, park, sea, factory smokestacks, wheat fields, road to Rostov and, on extremely clear days, Rostov itself.

Goodbye, entryway.

Goodbye, first real apartment.

Also, as today is July 1st: goodbye, Fulbright. We had a good two years.

Быть – или не быть? Таков вопрос.

2008-06-29T12:29:00.003+04:00

I went to a production of Hamlet yesterday in Rostov. It was a new ballet set to music by Shostakovich, and despite harboring no great love for Shostakovich, I really enjoyed it. I looked around on the English internet for stuff about it and couldn't find anything, so I translated these two articles I found on the Russian internet, for anyone who's interested in this sort of thing. (I could also share my thoughts, but I'm pretty inept at analyzing ballet. Mostly I just sit there and look at the dancing and listen to the music and feel happy inside.)

From "Rossiiskaya gazeta – Nedelya: Yug Rossii" No. 4678, 5 June 2008.

New Ballet "Hamlet" to Music of Shostakovich Premieres Tomorrow at Rostov State Musical Theater

This is a full-scale two-act show. The modern choreography, the musical material, the sets and costumes – everything has been put together masterfully. Even the most conservative audiences are sure to appreciate the unusual completeness of this unique ballet and the artistic courage of the troupe performing it.

The setting of the ballet is not medieval Denmark, but the 1930's-1950's, when Shostakovich himself lived and composed.

"The musical fabric of the ballet is composed of fragments of Shostakovich's First, Fifth and Tenth Symphonies, his musical score to the [Soviet] film version of Hamlet, and a few of his other works," explained Vyacheslav Kushchev, the artistic director of the theater. "Musical director and conductor Aleksandr Goncharov worked hard to shape these fragments into a musical whole."

For the leader of the Bolshoi Theater's ballet troupe, Yuri Klevtsov, "Hamlet" was something of a debut; not only does he dance the role of Claudius, but it's also his first time working as the assistant to the balletmeister-producer. Two other soloists from the Bolshoi join Rostov's company for the show: Viktoria Litvinova in the role of Gertrude and Aleksandr Smolyaninov as Hamlet.

From "Ekspert-Yug" Number 11, 9 June 2008

In Rostov an unprecedented event has taken place: they've put on a ballet of Hamlet to the music of Shostakovich.

Aleksei Fadeyechev, the head balletmeister of the Rostov State Musical Theater and a holder of the title "People's Artist of Russia," took upon himself several years ago a worthy, but difficult task: to find in Rostov, a city where dance as a performing art had always been somewhat amateur, a home for world-class ballet. And now the patient cultivation of his own school of ballet has begun to bear fruit. The premiere of the ballet Hamlet in Rostov should be a new source of local artistic pride. It clearly dismisses the common stereotypes of the city – slick economic resourcefulness, an overly easygoing character, devotion to popular culture. Rostov has a chance at becoming the theatrical capital of the Russian South; the only serious competition is from Krasnodar, with its ballet "school" led by Yuri Grigorovich.

The new reading of Hamlet uses the Stalinist period as a backdrop: marching, uniform-clad children; benevolently-smiling dictators; the hero – a true maximalist and romantic – struggling not to lose himself. The show leads the audience into a harmoniously constructed reality in which classical dance is "diluted" with Modernist eccentricity and spare, harsh scenery. At a press conference Fadeyechev promised journalists a "cruel Hamlet." If we consider that Ophelia hangs herself in full view of the audience at the very climax of the show, and that the ballet opens and closes on a funeral bier, maybe he's right. However, the general impression is not one of cruelty. The ballet is, in essence, a classic production of the 20th century – the summation of an entire epoch and an attestation to an already-mature tradition.

(A long interview with Fadeyechev followed. It didn't seem worthwhile to translate it.)

I did something Russian and took pictures even though we weren't allowed to take pictures. Obviously, they're not the greatest, but at least you can see the super-cool Stalinist-looking set:

This Entry Rated R for Foul Language

2008-06-27T11:50:00.002+04:00

It's all Russian foul language, but still. You've been warned.

I went out last night, briefly, for the Russia vs. Spain semi-final of the Euro Cup soccer tournament. (Russia lost.) By the time I went out at 10 p.m. (45 minutes before the match started), the streets were packed with people waving Russian flags, wearing white, blue and red face paint, drinking and generally making merry. Almost every car had a Russian flag waving out the window, and many of the drivers were honking madly as they drove down Taganrog's main street. "You wouldn't see anything like this in America!" one of the guys I was with exclaimed.

[Actually, it kind of bothers me when people who have never been to America say things like that. How would he know? Amara and I once made a list of Things Russians Think Are Uniquely Russian But Aren't, such as mittens and birch trees. But that's another story.]

Anyway, I think he's right that sports hooliganism with a patriotic tinge is something you don't really see in America; maybe that's because we don't participate in very many international competitions – except the Olympics, which somehow don't seem that conducive to drunken rioting – or because our internal rivalries (college basketball, NFL, MLB, etc.) take up all our energy. Either way, I don't regret our lack of sports patriotism or feel jealous when I see Russia's. It's a bit too much like nationalism (the bad kind) for my taste.

Still, it was interesting to be out in the streets, and in the huge crowd gathered around an outdoor café's projector screen where we ended up. I only stayed through the first half because I couldn't see anything and the cigarette smoke was nauseating, but it was still interesting to observe. The cheers people were shouting may have been the most amusing part. Apparently the lack of cheerleading in European football culture has been sorely felt.

Worst cheer:
Olé, olé olé olé,
Rossiya vperyod!

(Rossiya vperyod means "Russia – forward!" and is the equivalent of "Go, Russia!!!" But you don't need to speak Russian to see that syllabically, it doesn't quite fit in the space that would normally hold two more "olés.")

Most obvious cheer:
Nuzhen gol! Nuzhen gol!
("We need a goal! We need a goal!" I can't really fault them, though, since we have the same kind of thing: "We, we want, a touchdown, Bulldogs! We, we want, a touchdown!")

Other cheers:
Pobeda nasha –
Ispaniya parasha!
("Victory is ours – Spain is a toilet!" And not just any toilet - a parasha is a prison toilet, basically just a foul hole or bucket in the corner of the cell.)

Rossiya vperyod, Ispaniya sosyot!
("Go, Russia! Spain sucks!" I wonder if this is a calque from English?)

The dirtiest, which I couldn't help but giggle at, was simply a mass chant:
na khui! na khui! na khui!
It was started up whenever the Spanish team or coach was being shown. Khui (which sounds almost exactly like 'hooey') is the dirtiest of Russian dirty words, which is why it made me giggle. Literally it refers to a certain male reproductive organ, but, like English swear words, it can really mean any number of things. The above sentiment means something like "Go to hell!" or "F*** you!"

Anyway, I think I'm glad I went home at the half. Being stuck in the middle of a crowd of disappointed/angry drunk Russian guys at one in the morning wouldn't have been my idea of fun.

I Am Foreign, Not Stupid

2008-06-25T07:24:00.001+04:00

I was talking to a Russian acquaintance yesterday, recounting my story about the train mishap on the way to Pskov. I concluded by saying that "living in a foreign country is no good for people with an overdeveloped sense of personal pride." And how - last night after returning home from buying train tickets, I was standing outside my entryway talking to a girl who lives a few floors below me, when someone dumped AN ENTIRE BUCKET OF WATER on me from one of the apartment balconies. My ticket got wet, my copy of Master and Margarita got wet, the inside of my purse got wet, and of course I myself was absolutely drenched.

I don't really like the girl I was talking to - it's not a story worth getting into, but suffice to say that she's rude and disrespectful. When she "discovered" me in April she spent a week calling me nonstop in order to show me off to her friends, and giving my number to lots of teenage boys. Of course I ignored her calls once I figured out what was going on. Anyway, I suspect she was involved in the water-dumping. She and the crowd of friends she was with laughed heartily. Being rather shocked, I laughed, too, and did my best to pretend that I wasn't mad. I just said, "If you find out who that was, tell them I said thanks," and left.

Anyway. The title of this post is from a comment my friend Rita made on Rosa's personal page about her adventures and misadventures this summer in Cambridge (the link is not to Rosa's personal page, but to her candy blog). Sometimes I wish I had a t-shirt that said "I Am Foreign, Not Stupid" in huge letters. Obviously it's something you encounter in any country - all of us, if we're not careful about it, tend to treat people who speak with an accent or who don't understand the system as if they were a little slow. It's natural, I guess, and sometimes helpful. It's been good for me, anyway, to have to swallow my pride again and again; you can't exactly shout something like "You people have NO IDEA how smart I am!", no matter how much you want to. And it's been good for me to come to terms with the fact that people really do mean well when they ask me things like, "Can you figure out how to save my number on your cellphone?" or "Have you ever been to the train station? Can you get there yourself? Do you need help getting a tram?"

But with this girl and her adolescent friends it goes beyond that. They don't seem to have any dislike for me personally or for Americans in general - just the idea that foreigners are too dull-witted to notice or be offended when you're laughing at them. Of course, it's not worth getting upset about. If anything, I should feel bad for them, right?

Recovering English Teacher

2008-06-24T14:09:00.002+04:00

On Friday I had my last class.

Or actually, I had my last class on Thursday morning, because my Thursday afternoon and Friday morning crews did not show up. Not with a bang, but a whimper, I guess. (I don't blame them, I blame our institute's crazy and convoluted class/exam schedule.)

Yesterday I had my last department meeting, where I provided the champagne and cake and my coworkers provided me with this guy:

Hand-painted Cossack porcelain is pretty famous around here; this is a Cossack porcelain Cossack. The best thing about him is that he's actually a flask (the foam on his mug of beer comes off, revealing a spout). I'm not sure why this was the gift they selected for me – as far as I recall, I was usually sober at work – but I absolutely love him nonetheless.

What all this means, of course, is that I'm done being a Teacher of English to Speakers of Other Languages.* Forever, if I so choose. I tried to jump for joy as discreetly as possible. It's been a fun two years of teaching (most of the time), but it's definitely not the career path for me.

*One of the little things I find unappealing and/or laughable about this profession: certain terminology-minded English teachers apparently got really into political correctness. It's potentially insulting to the intelligence of your polyglot students to call it "English as a Second Language," and "English as a Foreign Language" has negative connotations of "otherness," inappropriate in our global village. You can't just call yourself an English teacher, either, because that means something totally different most of the time.

The Great Train Robbery, or How Not to Plan a Trip: Continued Again

2008-06-20T17:00:00.000+04:00

Part One: Some Bad Decisions On My Part

Part Two: Disaster Strikes

Part Three: No Action Film is Complete Without a Car Chase

Finally, at about 12:20, the train arrives at the appointed stop. I say goodbye to Viktor, the ticket lady, and everyone else who poked their nose into the affair. The girl and I get off. She seems pretty uninterested in me, but nonetheless immediately lassoes her boyfriend, who is waiting for her at the station, and makes him summon up a cab. By stroke of luck or magic, a cab comes rolling into this dusty little village within approximately forty-five seconds. Girl and boyfriend deposit me in the cab, for which I thank them profusely.

Here the journey could have become unpleasant, since Russian taxi rides usually are, but God apparently loves a fool and therefore granted me the only good cab driver in all of Rostov Oblast. He (the driver, not God) immediately grasps the gravity of the situation and promises to get me there on time. An Armenian from one of the outlying Rostov villages, he proves chatty, funny, and not opposed to the idea of me wearing a seatbelt (a great rarity among Russian cab drivers). We talk about politics, the Armenian language in Armenia and Russia, money. He does not rebuke me for not leaving earlier. We get caught in traffic (it turns out Pervomaiskaya is actually inside Rostov, just not downtown. Rostov is perpetually congested). Seeing that I'm getting antsy, he tells me exactly how much farther we have to go (four hundred meters). We finally pull into the station parking lot at 12:52. "Thank you so much! You saved me!" I gush as I hand him his four hundred rubles ($16). "You're not saved yet! Now go get your ticket!" he laughs before he speeds away.

I run into the station. There's no line at the ticket window. This is such a rarity that I'm convinced some higher power really is looking out for me. The ticket window girl, who does not have a bouffant, squints at my wrinkled computer printout. "Wow, why are you so late?!?" she exclaims. "That's a really long story!" I puff. She does not ask for details, but prints me a ticket in under two minutes. Gold star for ticket window girl!

So, in the end I reached the train at exactly one o'clock, with seven minutes to spare. If you want, you can pretend I defused a bomb MacGyver-style and captured the terrorists who planted it in those seven minutes, instead of standing outside my car and talking to Amara on the phone in loud English, thus earning the suspicion of my wagon's conductor (and breaking the ticket-lady rule I set for myself at the end of Part Two).

Anyway, that's all, fade to credits. Happy end, just like Hollywood! It was kind of fun, in retrospect. I haven’t had an "Is it Russia, or is it me?" moment in a long time, much less an entire adventure.

Stop! Grammar Time!

2008-06-20T14:36:00.002+04:00

Last fall I wrote about an interesting construction in Russian where a preposition appears to govern nominative case:

что за + noun-NOM.

Yesterday I encountered a piece of the puzzle I didn't even think to look for before. In the present tense, this construction lacks an overt verb, since Russian is null-copula in the present (copula refers to the form of the verb to be that connects a subject and complement; null-copula means you leave it out).

However! In the past tense, to be shows up in Russian, and brings verb agreement with it. Yesterday I said:

Я не знаю, что было за задача.
Ya ne znayu chto bylo za zadacha
I NEG know what was-3sg.-neuter PREP task.
"I don't know what the assignment was."

Without even thinking about it, I put was in its neuter form. Russian past tense verbs are marked for gender and number, and the neuter is what you use a) if the subject of the sentence is neuter, like okno "window", and b) in subjectless constructions. In this case, I chose the neuter form to make the verb agree with chto ("what").

But I was soon corrected. Apparently the past-tense verb should get feminine morphology here. That means it agrees with zadacha (f.) "task," not with chto (n.). This is meaningful because nouns that are inside prepositional phrases are not supposed to be able to govern the verb. That is, the verb isn't supposed to be able to agree with them.

Faced with this additional evidence, I'd say it looks more and more like:
a) the prepositional phrase here is actually "za chto," not "za zadacha," but it's been flipped around and become "chto za." Although the preposition coming after the noun is, as far as I know, totally anomalous for modern Russian.
b) za isn't actually functioning as a preposition at all.

I'm not sure which analysis I'm in favor of. The second strikes me as awfully... I don't know, sloppy, or something. The first is so weird, though. However, I have encountered, once or twice, mirror-image noun phrases of the common pattern [noun-NOM noun-GEN], where the genitive is used to denote "of the" or "of a." For example, "apple-GEN core-NOM"/"of an apple the core" instead of "core-NOM apple-GEN"/"the core of an apple." I made that example up off the top of my head and I don't know if it's useable; I haven't encountered this construction frequently enough to really understand where it's used.

(For Russian speakers: I'm not referring to that alternate genitive where you say "мамино яблоко" ("Mom's apple") instead of "яблоко мамы" ("the apple of Mom"). It was definitely the regular genitive, and definitely flipped.)

Also, in certain instances (e.g. on a menu), we encounter noun phrases where the noun comes ahead of the adjective that modifies it: сок яблочный (juice apple(adj.)) instead of the standard яблочный сок (apple(adj.) juice).

The existence of these flip-flops, even if they are only written forms (I don't think I've ever heard anyone say either one), makes me wonder if a flip-flopped "za chto" is possible.

Ugh, in writing this, I really can't believe how much syntax terminology I've just completely forgotten. The concepts are still (mostly) there, but I just don't remember how to talk about them. Maybe I'll re-read my old syntax textbook when I get home.

Despite forgotten terminology, I'm apparently still a language geek, as I had to make myself cut a bunch of irrelevant stuff out of this post: a paragraph on subjectless constructions, a paragraph on various Russian expressions of ownership, a paragraph on the genitive of negation, and a paragraph on gender identity in the GULAG and verbal morphology choices. Good grief, Leslie.

The Great Train Robbery, or How Not to Plan a Trip: Continued

2008-06-19T17:00:00.002+04:00

Part One: Some Bad Decisions On My Part

Part Two: Disaster Strikes

"What do you mean, Pervomaisk?" she responds. "You probably want to go to Rostov," and hands me a forty-eight ruble Rostov ticket and two rubles change. She's half started walking away when I stammer out, "No, I need to go to Pervomaisk. That's where my train leaves from."

"Well, we don't go to Pervomaisk. This train goes the western route to Rostov. Didn't you see that on the schedule in the station? You should read the schedule before you get on the train."

I don't really remember how this happened, but within approximately thirty seconds it became clear to everyone in the entire car that I needed to be at Pervomaisk by one o'clock and was now trapped on a train that was not going to get me there. Within the next thirty seconds, at least half of them had informed me, one at a time, that I ought to have left earlier.

The ticket lady was singularly unhelpful; she quickly vanished. Not knowing what to do, I planted my forehead against the train window, closed my eyes and tried to think. At this point, the guy next to me (Viktor from Stavropol, I will be forever in your debt!) said, "Excuse me... I'm not from around here, but what I'd do is get off at a station before Pervomaisk and see if you can't take a taxi from there. Obviously if you go all the way to Rostov and then trace back, you won't make it. But, I mean, I'm not from this region..."

"I'm not even from this COUNTRY!" I wail.

"I know. I can hear your accent," he replies. (Thanks, Viktor.)

Seeing that Viktor is nice enough to help the stupid foreign girl, my other neighbors perk up and offer up the name of the station where the western and southern routes to Rostov separate: that's where I should get off. I call Amara and inform her that I'm not going to make it to Pskov, ever. I am mostly joking. We work out that, in any case, I have until 7 p.m. tomorrow to reach Moscow, since that's when my Moscow-Pskov train leaves. So I can catch a different train if I have to, or even the 5 a.m. plane. Everything will be ok. Expensive, maybe, but ok.

I hang up and try to do some reading. I can't concentrate. Viktor, either seeing my distress or just interested in chatting with cute-but-stupid foreign girls, starts up a conversation which distracts me enough to keep me from crying. I learn that he graduated from college in 2006, works with computers, and was visiting a friend in Taganrog while on business in Rostov. He asks if I like Russia. ("Yes, except the trains," I say.) He reminisces about some Peace Corps Americans who lived in Stavropol in the nineties and refused to wear hats when it was cold. We joke that Taganrog does not follow the laws of Euclidean geometry; he got lost on his visit and was instructed to "follow Chekhov street til it intersects with Alexandrovskaya, which runs parallel." (Taganrog's main streets radiate from a single point, then bend to become parallel with each other.)

Eventually the ticket-lady wanders back and, apparently in a more helpful mood, explains where I should go to find a taxi once I get off. She also mentions, in case this hadn't already occurred to me, that I should have left earlier. I forgive her for this, however, when she leaves again and comes back with a girl who's getting off at the same place I am. (Note to self: ticket ladies wield great power. Get on their good side.)

Will Boris and Natasha get away with their dastardly plan? Will MacGyver fish the paperclip out of his pocket in time to defuse the bomb? Are we all just doomed? Find out tomorrow in Part Three: No Action Film is Complete Without a Car Chase!

The Great Train Robbery, or How Not to Plan a Trip

2008-06-18T22:02:00.002+04:00

That last post reminds me why I was taking a taxi to the train station in Rostov in the first place. (This was on my way to Pskov, in case that wasn't clear.) Basically, it's a story that involves me being stupid several times over, which is perfect blog fodder, no? I'll tell this story in three parts, because it's long.

Part One: Some Bad Decisions On My Part

First, I wait too long to buy my tickets and have to choose a train to Moscow that I don't usually take. This train leaves not from Rostov's main station, but from a station called Pervomaiskaya ("First of May").

I find out where Pervomaiskaya is from people at my place of work, which is pretty much the only smart thing I manage to do. It's a stop on the electric train route from Taganrog to Rostov, so all I have to do is take the electric train to Rostov and get off when they say "Pervomaiskaya". Simple.

So, my departure date rolls around. My Pervomaisk-Moscow train leaves at 1:07 p.m. By the time I get up, shower, and eat breakfast, I've long since missed the 8 a.m. electric train (electrichka) to Rostov; this leaves me the 10 a.m. express or the 11 a.m. non-express, which reaches the main Rostov station at 12:45. Clearly, I should take the express, but I don't move fast enough, and anyway, I realize that if it's an express, it might not even stop at Pervomaiskaya. And if the non-express gets all the way to Rostov by 12:45, it should get to Pervomaiskaya before that. I'll be fine.

I get to the Taganrog train station at 10:30 a.m., after stupidly taking a tram (slow) instead of a bus (fast) to get there. I delude myself into thinking that I have enough time to stand in line and get a paper ticket for Pervomaisk-Moscow (I bought my tickets online, but you absolutely must have a paper ticket to board the train) before catching the electrichka. There are four people in line front of me. Four people, thirty minutes. Ok. I stand calmly. After about three minutes I start tapping my foot. I start glancing at the clock twice a minute. I whisper mild Russian curses under my breath as the woman at the window fishes two birth certificates out of her purse to buy children's tickets for her kids. Nothing helps. Twenty minutes have passed. I text Amara: "I hate Russia. And I hate train stations. OF COURSE one ticket window is closed and the other is manned by a mentally deficient two-toed sloth masquerading as a woman with a bouffant." This takes two text messages to send, which goes against my text-messaging principles, but I don't care.

Four minutes before the electrichka is due to arrive, I jump ship. I'll have to get my paper ticket at Pervomaiskaya. I am praying that it actually has a ticket window and isn't some dusty half-station, nothing but a platform and a concrete enclosure with broken benches, rotting trash and stray dogs.

I get on the train and sit by a bookish-looking guy about my age. This is also actually a good move, although I don't know that yet. The ticket lady comes around.

"To Pervomaisk, please," I say politely, forking over a fifty-ruble note.

Stay tuned tomorrow for Part Two: Disaster Strikes!

Вова, знаешь, я люблю тебя...

2008-06-18T16:26:00.004+04:00

So I heard this song in Pskov and then again on the train home. I was struck by the choice of the name Vova, which is convenient because it sounds similar enough to the word "love" (lyubov') to make for easy lyric-writing. But it's also short for Vladimir. As in... Putin? The song goes something like this:

Vova, you know, I love you.
I don't need anything else.
I love you, and that's the best way
To always be under your power.

Vova, I'm ready to run into a burning hut,
Or stop a wild horse,
Just so that you'd come back again –
That will be happiness!

Upon hearing it, with the references to "power" and "coming back again" (which is exactly what the Putinophiles hope Putin will do after he cools his heels for four years in the office of the Prime Minister), I asked the Russian we were with whether she thought it was about Putin. She said no. I'm not so sure, though, and from a quick Google search, at least a few Russian bloggers agree with me. Ha.

I wonder if the group's next hit will be about Dima? Actually, that would be a good idea; if they wrote the lyrics right, it could serve as a thinly-veiled reference both to Medvedev and to bemulleted pop star Dima Bilan, who's earned the status of national hero (well, sort of) for having brought Russia its first-ever victory at Eurovision last month.

*****

That reminds me, the taxi driver who drove me to the train station in Rostov told me this joke about Putin and Medvedev:

So, after Medvedev is elected, Putin informs him that he's going to bestow on him his car, a Volga. Medvedev, who does not own a car, is rather excited about this. He eagerly takes the keys, opens the door and sits in the driver's seat, whereupon he notices that something is missing. "Where's the steering wheel?" he asks Putin.

"Oh, this?" Putin replies, holding up the wheel. "Don't you worry about that. I'm going to be the one doing the steering."

Yeah, more dark than funny. (The part about Medvedev not owning a car is a reference to the fact that when the candidates for president were disclosing their personal assets, his statement claimed he didn't own a car. Makes you look like a man of the people, you know? Of course, it turned out that his wife owned a Porsche or something.)

The taxi driver was mad that I refused to tell him a joke about Bush in return. I wanted to, but I couldn't think of one...

This One Goes Out to Amara

2008-06-17T18:15:00.006+04:00

I just got back from Pskov and Moscow. I was visiting a Fulbright friend and helping her move from the one city to the other, and that meant I was there for her last few days in Pskov. That was emotionally charged, since leaving involved taking stock of what it's been like, what the place and the people have meant to her and what she in turn has meant to them.

I love Russia and I have no regrets about spending two years here. I really can't imagine myself without this experience, even though I don't think I understand yet in precisely what ways I've changed. That said, there are some things that have been awfully hard about being here, things we've totally failed at. And getting ready to leave – counting our successes and failures, what we're taking with us and leaving behind – underlines them. Amara and I talked about that a lot this weekend.

Our host cities and all the people in them hold a lot of meaning for us, but what are we to them? Guests who came for a while and then left, really. It's sad to think about that in the future sense – imagining ourselves remembering, in the sharp relief of the meaningful, all the Russians we met and worked with and taught and made friends with, and then imagining those people's memories of us, soft and hazy, fond but unimportant. It's selfish, I know. But it's always painful to care more than other people do, and in that sense, we've taken a lot more from Russia than we could give.

But this feeling has relevance in the present, too. I spent a good part of this year trying to just be a normal person, someone who lives in Taganrog the same way other people do. It was only this weekend that I fully realized that that's what I've been trying to do. I also realized that I failed, and that the endeavor was hopeless from the start. If you come to a place for one year, your identity is cast as soon as you get there: you're a guest, a temporary fixture no matter how well you speak the language or know the area. This is all the more true in Russia, which is still relatively inaccessible to foreigners. An American in Paris is not exotic; in Russia, heads turn when you speak English on the street, and that makes you that much more of an outsider.

This exoticness colors every single one of your relationships, and I think that's the hardest thing of all. With the consciousness of you as an American right at the surface, it's hard to build friendships that are based on finer aspects of your identity. American society being obsessed with defining and glorifying individual identity (facebook, blogging, blah blah blah), it's pretty hard for an American used to a whole slew of labels – I-like-folk-rock-and-Dostoevsky-and-knitting-and-college-football-and-I-say-pop-not-soda-and-I-play-this-and-I-study-that – to be stripped down to that one single sticker on the forehead: MADE IN USA. It doesn't feel like much of an identity at all.

That said (and rehashed over and over, along with many other things), we still had some fun this weekend. Pskov is a beautiful city, very Old Russia. And even in bittersweet times, it's a pleasure to enjoy the fruits of a friendship based on something more than shared labels of any type. Thanks, Amara! We ended up on the same flight to Russia, and look what happened. We've been on at least four vacations together, taken dozens of stupid pictures of each other (and of the food we've ordered in various cafes, though that's mostly you), gotten tipsy or more on cheap wine, Baltika Number Nine and absinthe (though that's mostly me), and probably exchanged thousands of text messages in the past ten months alone. In case you didn't know it, I'm really going to miss you next year.

Us in a pedalboat on the Velikaya River. You can sort of see the Pskov kremlin, which ranks up there with the Lake Baikal region (despite being much smaller) as one of my favorite places on earth.

Trinity Cathedral, the church inside the Pskov kremlin, under a threatening sky. It didn't rain on us, though.

Another postcard-y view.

More on Happy Ends

2008-06-11T08:41:00.002+04:00

Since comments are not exactly pouring in, I will just tell you the reason I think the Russian "kheppi end", borrowed from English "happy end," is weird. It's because, at least in my dialect of English, one rarely says "happy end;" it's much more common to talk about happy endings. So it's odd that Russian didn't borrow that form. Seems relevant that end and ending mean almost the same thing; that they don't mean exactly the same thing (and they don't, I think) is a fine enough point that it doesn't interfere with understanding.

But how and why did that –ing get lost? Did the common appearance of the words (written) "THE END" (not "THE ENDING") at the end of films, stories and plays have some influence on it? Or maybe it was influenced by the relative cognitive difficulties of dealing with nouns that have verbal morphology on them? (I know, I should know what they're called. Gerundives? Anyway, Russian doesn't have them.)

Or is this just another of the many lexical differences between British and American English that have made me look dumb so many times in the last two years? (Seriously. You have no idea how many there are until you go about correcting what you perceive to be errors in Russians' English, only to find out that they're actually speaking correct British English.)

Внимание, уважаемые пассажиры!

2008-06-09T21:28:00.001+04:00

Posting just for the sake of having more posts is dumb. Good thing that's not what I'm doing. ;) What I am doing is directing your attention to the addition of a new blog to my links list ("Friends and Acquaintances") – YPMBluegrass, four of my college friends documenting their summer in Louisville, Kentucky. They're band friends, so you know they're crazy in the best possible way. Check it out if you know them, or maybe even if you don't!

To make this post not-completely-non-Russia-related, have I mentioned that the symbol @ in Russian (called a "sobaka," meaning "dog" – looks a bit like a dog chasing its tail, though I don't know if that's where the name comes from) isn't interpreted as a stand-in for "at"? Russians tend to read it almost the same way we read "e" (as in email, e-card, e-book), meaning something like "pertaining to the internet." So I've gotten my students good and confused before by writing things like "class will be @ 4 p.m." on the board. Complete nonsense! Crazy American.

Post Number 170 Is Still Not About Yalta

2008-06-09T11:18:00.000+04:00

Yesterday I learned the phrase солнечный зайчик/solnechny zaichik, which translates as the rather cloying "sunny bunny." This was the name of our relay team at the institute picnic I went on. I understood the "bunny" part, since we had two bunnies on our team ("bunny" being one of an inexhaustible store of Russian terms of endearment for small children), but what's with the "sunny"? Since there's a Zveri song with the same name, I began to suspect that it might actually mean something, and asked my advisor, who replied, "You know... like a spot of light from a mirror or something."

This probably isn't quite into the realm of Whorf and Sapir, but I had trouble grasping that definition, and am still having trouble clearly defining the phenomenon, apparently because it's something we don't have a name for in English. From her description, the spot of light you can throw onto a wall if you angle your watch face the right way is definitely a sunny bunny. But is the focused sunlight you can get from a magnifying glass also a sunny bunny? Is the spot of light on the floor from the sun shining through curtains? What about the patterns of light on the floor of a swimming pool? The spots from a disco ball? Those circles of light you sometimes get in a photograph where the sun is shining brightly?

A Google search for "solnechny zaichik" turned up photos (unsurprisingly), but also several pop songs and even a movie. It just feels cognitively weird, I guess, that this phenomenon or range of phenomena that I (and probably most other English speakers) rarely think about and have certainly never missed having a name for is so much closer to the surface of the Russian consciousness, simply because it has a name.

Also: I couldn't figure out why it was called a sunny bunny, until someone explained that it hops around like a bunny. Duh.

At least now the title of the Zveri song makes sense. Which brings me to another point: in this song, there's a line, "я хочу как в кино; там всегда хэппи энд/ya khochu kak v kino; tam vsegda kheppi end", which means "I want it to be like in the movies, where there's always a happy end." Kheppi end is a Russification of the English happy end, and one that's widespread enough to turn up in regular speech; I've heard, for example, "Она ищет своего хэппи энд"/"Ona ishchet svoyevo kheppi end"/"She's looking for her 'happy end.'" Meaning she's looking for happily ever after.

Without saying why I think it's weird, let me ask: does it strike anyone else as weird? If so, why?

Post Number 169

2008-06-07T18:43:00.000+04:00

Yes, I give myself an F for the getting-to-two-hundred-posts experiment. Four days with no posts is not a good way to start out, especially since I've got less than two months left here.

So, here is a post that's just about what's going on in my life, in case you were interested:
1. Teaching. Our semester goes until FOREVER. Russian schools and (it seems) almost every other university in the entire Russian Federation have finished their school years, but we haven't. I teach, technically, until June 21.
2. Why 'technically?' Partly because my students are all writing their term papers and studying for exams, so they show up to class, shall we say, intermittently. And also because I'm supposed to start working at an Embassy-sponsored summer camp in nearby Novocherkassk on June 16th. Technically.
3. Again with the 'technically?' Yes. Because a) I haven't heard anything at all from this camp so far, which leads me to suspect that it might not be happening. And b) on June 16th I'll be in Moscow.
4. I'm going on a(nother) trip! It's a trip to Pskov to see Amara/help her move to Moscow. She landed a great job there, which is awesome. But also sad, because it means she won't be in DC to goof off with me.
5. DC, right. Georgetown starts in late August. I'll be there for my birthday, probably doing fun things like choosing classes, moving into an apartment, maybe obtaining furniture. Perhaps I'll celebrate the same way I celebrated my third birthday, which is by going to IKEA and playing in the ball pit.
6. All the rigamarole of moving to DC is going to have to happen quickly, because I'm not coming home until early August. Why? The Great Baikal Trail. I've dreamed of working on it for as long as I've known about it, and now I'm going to! Baikal is pretty much my favorite place on earth, and in the process of getting there I might get to go back to Ulan-Ude, where I worked last summer. So I'm pretty excited!
7. That's in the second half of July, so the first half is wide open. Haven't really figured out what I'll be doing, but hopefully it'll involve some traveling, since I won't have an apartment in Taganrog anymore. Possibilities: Elista, Trans-Siberian out to Baikal, Petersburg (for the sixth time... unlike Moscow, it's a city I can't really get enough of). Moldova was a possibility, but now that I've promised not to leave the country again, I guess it's not.
8. Balalaika. In case anyone was worried, the lessons are still going strong. I was forced to perform last night at our institute's Russian Language Party (yes, again with the language-themed parties), which was well received despite my less-than-perfect performance of "Play, My Bagpipes" and "Hey, Get Home, All You Gossipy Women!" (Russian folk songs... no, I didn't know Russians had bagpipes, either). I guess foreign-girl-playing-Russian-folk-instrument is pretty much always going to be well received. Anyway, Mikhail Semyonovich has deemed my folk repertoire sufficiently large, and we've moved on to balalaika transcriptions of classical repertoire (a sonata by Paganini and a minuet by Boccherini that I guarantee you'd recognize if you heard it). Much harder than folk music, but also a lot of fun.

I guess that's all for now. Note to self: write about Yalta, and Taganrog's street names.

Sambek

2008-06-03T22:04:00.003+04:00

Other Blogger users will know that your Blogger account page tells you how many posts are in your blog and when the last one was published. Mine? 167, last published June 2.

I'm not really neurotic about round numbers, but wouldn't it be nice to get to 200 before I leave Russia? I doubt I can do it, but I'm going to try. I'm generally a fan of blogs that update frequently anyway, and would like my blog to be That Kind of Blog.

Without further ado, let us whisk ourselves away to the far-off village of Sambek, the pearl of Rostov Oblast. (Well, far-off for you. It's probably five to eight kilometers away from me.)

This backlit beauty is "Родина–Мать/Rodina–Mat'/Homeland-Mother", and I'll give you three guesses as to which war she's a monument to. She stands in all her Socialist-Realist glory in Sambek, accompanied by an eternal flame that doesn't burn and concrete tablets listing all the soldiers from the village who died in the war. There were a lot, as the Sambek heights were the site of the battle that (I believe) pushed the Germans out of the peninsula Taganrog sits on. My friend Sasha, who lives in Sambek, has a whole collection of mortar shells and even a bayonet and a helmet he's found over the years in and around his family's yard.

I went to Sambek on Saturday to go v shashliki (yet again) with Sasha and some of his friends. After our meat-grilling adventures were over, we wandered around the village for a bit. After a very rustic bathroom stop at one of our party's homesteads (indoor plumbing? what for?), they took me to Rodina–Mat', because it's the only interesting place to go in the whole village (pop. 3000). Sasha remarked that it's sad that there's nowhere for young people to go to hang out or anything. "Isn't there a cafe or anything?" I asked. Sasha explained that no, there's no cafe, and no shops besides little mini-mart grocery stores here and there. I then asked, rather foolishly, if everyone in the village either works in Taganrog or Rostov like his friends (computer programmers) do. "Some do," he answered, "but most work on the collective farm."

The collective farm? Seriously?

In theory, I knew that there are still collective farms in Rostov Oblast, but I was still somehow surprised to encounter face-to-face the "collective farm and attached village" socioeconomic plan. How does it work? Who owns the farm? How did the transition from socialism to capitalism affect it? I wish I knew the answers to those questions.

It's tempting to look at the sleepy little village and say that nothing's changed there in a half a century. But that's not true, and I think it's more interesting to think about what has changed. (Hmm, I sense another trip to the library coming on.)

Unfortunately, I haven't found one that goes to the Land of Make-Believe

2008-06-02T19:43:00.002+04:00

I had a very bad day today. It involved the Russian migration authorities. Actually, this year has seen a high ratio of bad days caused by the Russian migration authorities to bad days caused by any other factor at all. Fortunately, I'm not leaving the country again until I actually leave the country (semi-permanently), so this should be the last of them.

Anyway, I should have known it would be a bad day when I got on the tram this morning, handed my ten-ruble note to the conductor, and received only three rubles change. Seven rubles?!? It was five just last week! That's a 40% increase! So much for Taganrog's claim to the cheapest public transport in the Russian Federation. (For reference, the exchange rate is about 23.7 rubles to the dollar, so five rubles is about 21 cents and seven rubles is 30 cents.)

I don't know if we actually had the cheapest public transport; there are probably other cities whose trams and buses only cost five rubles. But you'd be hard pressed to find a ride for less than that, and it's usually more; in Rostov it's seven and in Vladivostok it was eight. I might be wrong, but I think it's actually nine(!) in Pskov. I've never ridden a tram in Moscow, but I hear you have to sell your firstborn child to get on. And that's after you've already taken out a second mortgage so you could ride the metro. (I think a metro ride is 21 rubles now. They seem to raise the price about once a month.)

So this post isn't a complete whine-fest, let's add trams to the list of things I will miss about Russia. Really, public transportation in general. Even small cities have extensive, cheap public transport systems, including buses, mini-buses, trams and trolleys. I think trams are my favorite, and not just because they're fun to ride. First of all, you never have to worry about getting stuck in traffic (although in Vladivostok that was not the case, because the streets were so crowded that people drove on the tram tracks all the time). Plus the routes are very predictable, they're more spacious than buses, and you don't have to shout at the driver to stop at your stop like in a mini-bus.

Sometimes on holidays they decorate the newer trams in Taganrog's fleet (there are three of them, shiny red and white with gray upholstery, tinted windows and orange handrails inside) with bouquets of balloons. It's always very exciting when they do that; I've actually seen pedestrians ooh and ahh as they clank by. Not surprising – I mean, everyone wants to ride the Party Tram!

My English dictionary doesn't give a clear distinction between trams and trolleys. In Russian, both are powered by cables, but a троллейбус/trolleibus runs on the street, while a трамвай/tramvai runs on rails.

Humphrey Bogart in The Yaltese Falcon

2008-05-29T19:15:00.004+04:00

Neither my parents nor I can apparently get enough of Yaltese falcon jokes. I'm not even sure why it's so funny, but it is.

Anyway, this is a cheater picture post, because I'm tired and have a lot of laundry and stuff I should do instead of writing about Yalta. So, here are some pictures that sort of sum up the trip, about which I'll write in more detail later.

The view from our hotel room balcony.

Livadia Palace, site of the Yalta conference.

Looking down from Ai-Petri ("St. Peter" in Greek), the peak that overlooks Greater Yalta.

The city boardwalk/beach.

Not to Be Confused with Malta

2008-05-22T21:58:00.004+04:00

We interrupt the planning for tomorrow's Poetry Party (whose idea was it to have a poetry party? Seriously. Wait, was that me? Oh, yeah. Good one. For future reference, poetry and partying mix almost as well as short legs and those ankle-strap heels that are so fashionable this season. Russians seem to be oblivious in both of these cases, though, throwing Pushkin-themed raves and wearing inappropriate footwear with reckless abandon.) Ok, that train of thought derailed in the parentheses. Let's start again: We interrupt the planning for tomorrow's Poetry Party to procrastinate, and also to share the good news/brag that I get to go to Yalta next week!!!

My oft-mentioned neighbor Seth is done teaching and is going to Yalta, and he invited me to come along! The powers that be, though annoyed that this means I'll have to de-register and re-register my visa again and miss two days of class, admitted that this is not an opportunity to be wasted, and gave me their blessing. My students are, of course, heartbroken, but I think they'll live, since they immediately started making plans to go sunbathing during our canceled Monday lesson.

You may remember Yalta as the site of that one conference they had at the end of World War II, or the setting for Chekhov's famous short story Дама с собачкой/The Lady with the Lap-Dog, or as a sanatorium-resort town for invalids dying of tuberculosis, like Chekhov himself. It's also a nice place to hang out, with lots of beaches and mountains. It also has wars, or at least one, and Tatars.

PS – It's also in Ukraine! It's not super-Ukrainian, since it was actually part of Russia until some bureaucrat's pen slipped during the Khrushchev era, but still. I've never been to Ukraine.

Survival of the Fittest?

2008-05-20T18:07:00.002+04:00

Lately I've been thinking about the ways I've changed in response to Russia, Russians and Russian, and wondering what's going to happen to the habits and beliefs I've acquired when I move back home. Only time will tell, of course, but in order to avoid thinking too seriously about it and making myself sad, I put together a silly little list of ways in which Russia has influenced me and failed to influence me. In no particular order:

Adapted: Eat salo (salted pork-back fat... like bacon, but just the fat) and beet-based dishes with pleasure.
Didn't adapt: Still refuse to touch caviar and jellied meat.

Adapted: Drink all soft drinks at room temperature.
Didn't adapt: Still require a drink with my meal instead of after.

Adapted: Wore a hat every time I went outside from November 1 to mid-March.
Didn't adapt: Still started wearing flip-flops at the first sign of spring.

Adapted: Think nothing of wearing the same outfit two days in a row.
Didn't adapt: Still can't bring myself to wear gold lamé, see-through shirts, or plaids and florals together.

Adapted: Put on makeup anytime I leave the apartment, even if I'm just popping into the grocery store.
Didn't adapt: Don't own any lipstick in shade #048 Bubble Gum Pink.

Adapted: Don't sit at the corner of tables, because it's bad luck.
Didn't adapt: Still sit on cold surfaces, because I know it's not going to make me sick or infertile.

Adapted: Consider just strolling around downtown not only a legitimate form of hanging out, but the platonic ideal.
Didn't adapt: Still have no desire to go nightclubbing. Ever.

Adapted: Automatically ask "Who's last in line?" and say, "Ok, I'm behind you" to whoever replies when I encounter a clump of people who look like they might be waiting for something I would like to be waiting for.
Didn't adapt: Still only rarely work up the nerve to yell at people who cut in front of me. (Although Amara can attest to my one moment of glory in Murmansk, when I said, "Excuse me, young man, you don't have the right to cut in front of us!" Unfortunately, it turned out that he technically did have the right to cut in front of us, but I won't go into that.)

Adapted: Developed an appreciation for Kino and DDT.
Didn't adapt: Still hate Alla Pugacheva.

Adapted: Never (ok, rarely) smile to myself or do anything other than stare stonily ahead as I walk down the street.
Didn't adapt: Still say "thank you" to cashiers in stores when they're not expecting it.

Adapted: No longer offer to pay if I go to a café with a guy, even if it's clearly not a date.
Didn't adapt: Still feel bad about it every time.

Adapted: Let guys open doors for me; automatically walk through open doors ahead of whatever guy I might be with.
Didn't adapt: Still hold doors open for other people (which is weird because I'm a girl).

Adapted: Allow (albeit grudgingly) male students to take care of all classroom affairs involving the moving of furniture or the use of electronic equipment.
Didn’t adapt: Still cringe when people refer to women as "the weaker sex."

Adapted: Automatically suspect anyone with a lot of money of having obtained it dishonestly. (This one really weirds me out.)
Didn't adapt: Don't automatically suspect everyone from the Caucasus to behave dishonestly.

Adapted: Sympathize with nostalgia for the Soviet era, especially among the older generations.
Didn't adapt: Still believe in democracy.

Obviously, I'm kind of dealing in stereotypes here (although I would like to note that in class today, two of my six students were wearing see-through shirts). Don't take any of it too seriously. In other news, yay for Russian sports! Zenith, the Petersburg team, won some important soccer thing last week (not EuroCup, but something like that), and the day before yesterday the Russian hockey team won the world ice hockey championship!

A Russian Holiday

2008-05-17T09:09:00.004+04:00

On Victory Day I went в шашлыки/v shashliki (barbecuing) with a friend and some of her friends. We drove out into the countryside and found a spot by a pond near the village of Troitskoye ("Trinity"). "Do you do this in America? Just drive out into the country and find a good spot for a picnic?" one of our drivers asked. "Not really," I replied, and tried to explain how property ownership in the U.S. means you kind of have to find a place that's actually designated as public, like a park or campground. He seemed surprised, but also enormously pleased to have found an area in which, in his view, Russia one-ups the U.S. And I agree that at the very least, it's nice not to feel like you're probably trespassing if you walk through a field or build a bonfire on a beach.

On the subject of drivers, I was a little worried, because my experience has been that Russians are more ok with driving after drinking than Americans are, and since it was a holiday, of course we were going to drink. (An older American I was discussing it with holds that our stigmatization of it, like our aversion to littering, is something that's been beaten into us only in the last fifty years or so.) But neither of our company who were driving drank anything at all, much to my relief. I didn't know how I would have gotten home otherwise.

And on the subject of drinking, two things: one, there's this whole demographic of tough-guy eighteen-year-old boys who don't seem to really like me (largely, I think, because I'm American; in this case, also because Aina, the friend I was with, got mad at them when they swore in front of me, and not swearing eliminates about 90% of their means of personal expression). This doesn't really bother me, but whatever. But I discovered that, as if by magic, they really warm up to me if I take a shot of vodka. Ha. (Not that I'm going to take to the bottle to make people like me, but it's sort of a neat party trick...)

Second, it turns out that the spot we were occupying was kept up, if not exactly owned, by a guy who lives by the pond in a little shack with no running water. He keeps people from fishing in the pond, although whether that's under orders from someone who actually owns the pond is unclear. Anyway, we paid our due to him by listening to him recite poetry, playing checkers with him, and of course sharing our chicken and beer. In return, he helped us chop firewood and gave us some stools. At the end, he brought out a huge bottle of home-brewed vodka and proposed a toast with the men – "to veterans, for Victory Day!" The guys who drank with him took one whiff of their shots, waited til he wasn't looking, and poured them out on the grass behind them. I later managed to get hold of the bottle, and understood why – the stuff smelled like nail-polish remover. Hmm, "harmful or fatal if swallowed"?

Anyway, he asked me to take his picture with his favorite puppy (he had several wandering around), which is really the whole point of this post:

Awww.

Sorry, again, for the general lack of posts in the past week or so. All I can think about when I think about writing is that I'm leaving soon, and that's not something I'm really ready to write about. I'll try to do better, though! If you're particularly hungry for more of my adventures – and who wouldn't be? – my neighbor Seth posted some pictures from our day at the horseraces a few weeks ago. (Pictures that *I* took, albeit with his camera.)

Victory Day number two

2008-05-09T11:54:00.002+04:00

На братских могилах не ставят крестов,
И вдовы на них не рыдают,
К ним кто-то приносит букеты цветов,
И Вечный огонь зажигают.

Здесь раньше вставала земля на дыбы,
А нынче - гранитные плиты.
Здесь нет ни одной персональной судьбы -
Все судьбы в единую слиты.

А в Вечном огне виден вспыхнувший танк,
Горящие русские хаты,
Горящий Смоленск и горящий рейхстаг,
Горящее сердце солдата.

У братских могил нет заплаканных вдов -
Сюда ходят люди покрепче.
На братских могилах не ставят крестов,
Но разве от этого легче?..

There are no crosses on soldiers' mass graves;
And there are no sobbing widows.
There are only bouquets of flowers
And the fire of the Eternal Flame.

First they were marked by mounds of dirt,
And later by granite tablets.
Here there's no "individual fate" –
For here, all of our fates ran together.

And in the Eternal Flame are the flames of the tanks,
The burning peasant huts,
Burning Smolensk, the burning Reichstag,
And the burning hearts of the soldiers.

There are no sobbing widows at soldiers' mass graves –
We who come here are stronger than that.
There are no crosses on soldiers' mass graves –
But does that make it any easier?

Vladimir Vysotsky, 1964

(It's a song. The translation, somewhat loose, is mine.)

May 9th, День Победы/Den' Pobedy/Victory Day, is one of the most important holidays – probably the most important holiday, in the official view – of the year in Russia. I wrote about it last year as well, when I celebrated the occasion primarily by having a long, emotional conversation (well, more of a monologue, really, with me playing the role of the audience) with an elderly neighbor of Laura's.

I've spent a lot more time this year thinking and talking about World War II than I did last year. The memory of World War II was important in Vladivostok – caring about World War II is a requirement of morally correct Russian citizens, the same way, perhaps, that loving democracy or freedom of speech is a requirement of morally correct American citizens. Maybe. It's hard to find parallels, since our societies are so different. Anyway, people in Vladivostok care about World War II. The city history museum and the museum of the Pacific Fleet both have significant floor space devoted to it (like every museum in Russia, basically), and the city, like all Soviet cities, is littered with monuments – one to the naval ships that were lost, one to the civilian ships that were lost, the requisite eternal flame (every city has an eternal flame devoted to the war), etc.

But the main front wasn't there, and you can definitely tell once you've lived where the front was. Taganrog was occupied by the Nazis for a year or so, I believe; we have monuments to the teenaged partisans (which has a different meaning in Russian than in English) that participated in the Taganrog underground, plaques on buildings around town that were used as Nazi military headquarters and hospitals and such, and huge Socialist-Realist monuments in the villages around Taganrog where the front lines were. Furthermore, almost everyone seems to have a relative (or several, usually) who fought. I've heard stories from two or three people whose parents or grandparents fought at Stalingrad; unsurprising, since Stalingrad (now Volgograd) isn't that far away, but still strangely jarring, since it and the siege of Leningrad are the only WWII battles I'm really familiar with anymore (although I made a great salt-dough map of Iwo Jima in eighth grade). In short, the inherited memory of the war seems much stronger here than it was in Vladivostok. The kind of story I heard last year from the elderly neighbor turns out to be a genre in its own right; telling family stories about the war is a beloved pastime this time of year, one that's only becoming more important as the generation of veterans that Soviet schoolchildren used to present with flowers and gifts of thanks slowly disappears.

Strangely, there's no end of hand-wringing about the fact that the veterans are dying, especially among older Russians. I mean, I sort of understand it – people know the younger generations will eventually forget the war, and since the war loomed so large in their consciousness, that seems almost criminally irresponsible of them, not to mention dangerous. The trope that "we must remember, so that it never happens again," one that's probably been around as long as people have been doing horrible things to each other (so, always), is one that gets invoked a lot. How exactly Russians remembering their victory over the Nazis will prevent Nazism from returning is, I think, a question best left unasked. No point being too irreverent when you're a guest in a foreign land. But it's not like the fact that it was "the Greatest Generation" can be expected to prevent it from dying...

Anyway, in the same vein, I hear again and again how indifferent young people are to the war; but I've never actually found a young person who was indifferent. In the last few years, a new fad has emerged of tying "St. George ribbons" to your clothes, car antenna (to slightly weird effect if your car is a German, Italian or Japanese model), or purse. They're like the Russian version of those damn car-magnet-ribbon-thingies, except (so far) less annoying. They hand them out everywhere; at schools, the post office, the city government building, etc. They're meant as a symbol of remembrance, reverence and thanks. And the only students I have who don't wear them avoid doing so because they don't think it's right to wear a medal you didn't earn. (The Order of St. George was a tsarist military honor, and the ribbons are called St. George ribbons because they're the same black-and-orange striped pattern as the ribbon the Order hung on.) I don't agree with that logic, but nonetheless, their hearts are in the right place. Maybe I just have unusually upstanding students, though, and the young hooligans who refuse to give up their bus seats to veterans really do exist.

One of the most interesting things to me is that Russians often adamantly insist that the reason they care so much about the war is that it touched Russia to a much greater degree than America. That is most certainly true, especially in terms of human loss. The USSR won, but not without being almost totally crushed. But (and I can't take credit for this idea) the war's place in the Russian consciousness is also hugely influenced by the fact that the Soviet victory was seen and used by the government as the proof of the pudding – the pudding being the Revolution. Finally, it gave the Soviet people something very real to be proud of, and giving people something to be proud of (and investing time and money to make sure they are proud of it) is a good way to placate and control them. So the government did just that, and ideology eventually became habit.

I've had some interesting conversations with other Americans (by which I mean Amara) who think that the Russian obsession with the war is unhealthy. After thinking about that for a long time, I'm still not sure what I think. It certainly looks a bit silly at times, and sometimes harmfully so (witness relations between Estonia and Russia; last year, riots broke out in Tallinn and a PR volcano erupted in Moscow when the Estonians moved a statue of the "Soviet liberator" (who they justifiably call the "Soviet occupier") from central Tallinn to a cemetery on the edge of the city). However, I think it's still almost totally natural, government encouragement or no; when you're 23, it can be hard to remember that 60-odd years is not very long to get over such a tragedy, especially one that touched almost every single family in the country. I think the process of forgetting will be painful; unfortunate in some ways and helpful in others; and, in the end, totally natural. But the fact that it's a lot farther along in the U.S. than here doesn't really bother me.

Whoa, long post. I could write a lot (yeah, even more) about this. Maybe I'll get to in grad school?

Spring Cleaning

2008-05-05T09:29:00.005+04:00

I really like Russian cemeteries. I go for walks in one of the local ones sometimes, because it's quiet and green. (Is that weird?) Lately my walks have been less solitary than usual, because of an interesting Russian spring custom: after Easter, one should go to the graves of one's departed family members and have a "rememberance" (my somewhat awkward translation of поминки/pominki).

Like the Easter food I mentioned before, this formerly-religious tradition is a bit muddled. I've heard that it should take place nine days after Easter, that it should take place seven days after Easter; that it can take place any time from the Saturday to the Tuesday after Easter, and that the nine-day tradition is specific to Taganrog (it's not – it was the same in Vladivostok); I've also heard several different explanations for why it happens when it does. At any rate, it happens sometime around now, and both practicing and non-practicing Orthodox seem to participate.

Pominki, as I've been given to understand them, consist of drinking and eating to the memory of the deceased and leaving a little food and drink behind for them to enjoy. Besides happening every year after Easter, pominki happen right after the funeral (at home, not graveside like the Easter pominki); on the third, ninth and fortieth days after a death; six months after a death; and yearly on the anniversary of a death.

The yearly anniversary pominki don't have to be fancy; I recently had my first exposure to Orthodox funeral tradition when one of my colleagues brought in some little cakes and laid them out in our department office for the first anniversary of her mother's death. Whenever someone asked why they were there, she (or whoever was around) would explain; the person who had asked would then take a cake and say, "Царство небесное Татьяне"/"Tsarstvo nebesnoye Tat'yane," or "The heavenly kingdom for Tatyana," Tatyana being her mother's name. (I might have gotten the grammar on that slightly wrong, since it didn't seem polite to enquire about it, but the general idea is right.)

Anyway, the Easter pominki are a little more elaborate than that, but nowadays the most important thing about them seems to be that they're a chance to take care of your loved ones' graves. Significant grave maintenance is made necessary by several aspects of Russian cemeteries; first, Soviet-era gravestones tend to be made of painted metal, which requires frequent retouching; second, many plots are actually tiny fenced-in gardens – and even if they're not fenced in, lots of grave markers consist of both a headstone and a long, narrow flowerbox planted with real perennials, which obviously need to be tended; third, I've never really thought about who does the mowing and weeding and raking and the like in U.S. cemeteries, but whoever it is, they don't seem to have a comparable service in Russia, so it's up to you to do all that for your relatives' plots.

People try to do all that before the actual pominki, though, so for the past few weeks the cemetery has been full of people wielding rakes and spades and buckets of paint. A couple of babushki selling garish silk flowers and wreaths have even appeared outside the gates.

Some pictures of Taganrog's Old Cemetery:

The standard Soviet citizen's grave. Many are painted blue (because it's the color of heaven), but this one just got a fresh coat of green. The trend nowadays, though, is much more toward the granite (marble?) gravestones that are common in the United States.

Veterans got a star – the symbol of Soviet military power.

There are lots of rather makeshift-looking crosses, I assume because if you wanted to place a cross during the Soviet era, you had to make one yourself.

The typical fenced-in plot, which is often complete with a little bench and table for pominki.

A typical flowerbed-gravestone, which clearly shows three things: the common heaven-blue paint; how people do the paint job themselves; and how crosses were added onto the standard-issue Soviet gravemarkers. (It says "Tikhonov Vladimir M--- (I can't make out that word). 13.10.1910-15/XI 70. We love and remember you, your children.")

The church in the old cemetery.

All in all, I think yearly pominki are a nice tradition, although I can see where it could be a big burden when you're the only relative left in town and you've got eight or nine graves to take care of in different cemeteries.

Mailbag

2008-04-28T10:09:00.002+04:00

Devoted reader Paul, who has a history of asking interesting questions, unwittingly opened a can of worms a few posts ago, and instead of replying with the world's longest comment, I decided to make a post about it.

Paul writes, re: the Orthodox tradition of greeting people on/after Easter with "Christ is risen!":

"Interesting -- do (the remaining) hard-core communists have a different response to the greeting? E.g. 'Christ is risen!' 'No he isn't, dialectical materialism is!' Or something of that order?"

That's an interesting question.

Hard-core communists do exist, and probably form the most significant political minority in Russia. The ones I know are mostly elderly people, many of whom grew up in the Pioneers and the Komsomol before becoming Party members. That's not to say that they're communist purely by way of indoctrination – for most of them, their lives were materially better before perestroika came along and introduced them to a total collapse of their ideological system; the very worst of the bread lines; oligarchs and Mafiosi; and eventually a wealth gap that for the first time separated huge, visible chunks of society, rather than just distancing the very top layer of Party apparatchiki from the ordinary folks. Perestroika also freed them of their right to an apartment, yearly vacations on the Black Sea, free health care, their grandchildren's guarantee of a job after finishing college, etc. Furthermore, pensioners now tend to receive about enough money per month to cover their electric and gas bills, and that's it. Naturally, that's extra tough for people who grew up believing the state would always, at least in some sense, take care of them.

So while these people are in some ways very ideologically Communist, vocal atheism doesn't tend to be one of them. I can think of three reasons for that. First, the regime had already softened toward religion by the time they were old enough to be conscious of such things.

Second, religion has much less of a foothold here, and without the feeling that society is telling them they ought to be religious, the non-religious, unsurprisingly, have much less of a problem with religion. One friend told me that, while he doesn't believe in God, he answers his friends' Easter greetings with a polite "He is risen, indeed!" I can imagine the same guy in America feeling the need to state his position on religion in reply to an Easter greeting, lest his zealous friends take him for a Christian and start inviting him to youth retreats. The Orthodox don't really do evangelism, so a polite attitude toward religion is, in that sense, safe.

Third, many Western atheists tend to be vocally anti-religion because they dislike the things they see religion doing to society. For these old communists, religion is the least of their societal woes; they tend to focus much more on the horrors they've seen capitalism inflict. A common theme of their laments, for example, is how "people have changed" since perestroika. Everyone is chasing after money all the time, people have become crueler toward each other and less neighborly. (In that sense, maybe Paul's suggested answer to the Easter greeting is appropriate, but maybe it would be more like, "He is risen indeed! And so is dialectical materialism!") In the old days, you could always get your neighbors to help you out; now, everything is done through bribes and "connections." The difference between getting your neighbors to help you out and having "connections" is fine-grained; I think it has to do with perceived fairness. Getting your plumbing fixed first because you live next to Vanya the Plumber isn't seen as unfair; the guy who has to wait longer to get his plumbing fixed probably lives next to Sasha the Electrician. But these days you need connections in high places, and those are perceived as less egalitarian.

A lot of them seem to adopt a philosophical attitude toward religion; one elderly guy I know explained that religion "is not for us. It's nice, but after you've spent your whole life being told there's no God, you can't really turn yourself around and become devout. I go to church sometimes, believe whatever I manage to believe, but really, the whole thing is just not for my generation." On the other hand, old women comprise like 90% of the church-going population, so I suppose it depends on the person.

At any rate, the short answer is that the overt hostility of the "culture war" between the religious and the secular we see in the U.S. (and maybe in 1917 Russia, when one could, perhaps, imagine a young Marxist saying, 'No he isn't!') seems to be totally nonexistent in contemporary Russia.

Easter Confusion

2008-04-28T08:48:00.003+04:00

1. I did get "Christ is Risen"-ed several times yesterday - mostly by text message, which is of course the classiest way to spread the jubilation - and replied correctly. However, in case there are any nitpickers out there, I should mention that the version of the greeting I wrote in my last post is the Old Church Slavic version, and so far I've found the modern Russian version ("Христос воскрес!/Воистину воскрес!," without the hard sign or the "e" on the end) to be more common. But, Old Church Slavic being the language of the Orthodox Church, the former is what you'll find on banners hanging outside churches, decorated Easter eggs, etc.

2. The lovely giant cupcake I photographed last time, and subsequently ate half of: kulich, right? Right, and wrong! I later had two different people tell me that Easter bread is actually called paskha. Confusing, since I thought paskha was the pyramid-shaped lump of curd cheese and sugar. Finally a third person explained that the pyramid-shaped lump is cheese paskha (творожная пасха); kulich that's shaped like it was baked in a coffee can may be called kulich but is normally called (non-cheese) paskha; and loaf-shaped kulich is just kulich. However, I'm not sure that explanation holds water with everyone.

My conclusion is that there's a confusion in terminology that was probably brought about by a long period of non-celebration of Easter. This sort of phenomenon - where different people within one community have different traditions or different words for those traditions, and they all believe their version to be the historically correct one - seems awfully familiar to me, but I can't put my finger on an exact example from U.S. culture.

3. My opinion on the subject of drunk men on Easter was apparently incorrectly informed by my Western conception of piety. While I did not get hassled by any hooligans on the street, a friend of mine went to Easter service (at 3 am! yikes!) and reported that the majority of worshipers were, in fact, drunk men. Hmm. Guess that Lenten fasting can really get to you...

The same friend also gave me a mini-kulich (or paskha) she had made herself, as well as a pair of totally awesome woven Turkmen slippers her (Turkmen) dad had brought back from Turkmenistan! Aww. People are so nice to me here.

Cupcake?

2008-04-26T20:17:00.002+04:00

No, it's kulich! (coo-LEECH)

Tomorrow is Orthodox Easter; for the past few days, kulichi have been springing up in every bakery in town. While it may look like a giant cupcake, it's not quite that exciting inside:

Kulich, a sweet bread made with sour cream, sugar, spices and raisins, is a Russian Easter tradition, along with paskha (which just means 'Easter'), a pyramid-shaped mound of curd cheese, sour cream, eggs, and sugar symbolizing Christ's tomb. Both are made with all those rich ingredients to celebrate the end of Lent, which Orthodoxy takes extremely seriously. I'm not sure of the exact rules, but I think it's something like no meat and no alcohol for all 40 days, adding in a ban on oil, eggs, milk, and fish for the last week. Russians are often surprised when I explain that American Catholics usually only give up one food or vice for Lent and Protestants don't sacrifice anything. (Always looking for ways to bend the rules, one of my students suggested that a smart Catholic would just give up something they didn't like much anyway. I bet that trick has occurred to pretty much every kid ever made to observe Lent, and gotten shot down every time.) Then again, the relative laxity means that many more Americans than Russians actually observe Lent – I haven't met anyone here who actually follows it, which is why I don't know what the rules are. Without knowing really anything about religious history, my guess is that the rules relaxed in the U.S. in the 20th century, when nothing was really changing in Orthodox tradition because Russian Orthodoxy, based in the USSR, was largely underground.

But Lenten fast or no, Russians who observe the holiday celebrate Easter with gusto. Kulich and paskha are just two of the foods at the Easter table, which also, according to a friend here, includes "as many kinds of meat as possible. And vodka. Russians can't have a holiday without vodka." The Easter meal is eaten as early as possible – the religious go to midnight Mass on Saturday into Sunday (which seems to me to be jumping the gun a bit, but I guess if you've been fasting you just want to get it over with) and get Easter eggs and a loaf of kulich blessed by the priest. The blessed eggs are placed in front of the icon at home, and the blessed kulich can be eaten a bit at a time each day before breakfast, for spiritual cleansing. As soon as Mass is over, everyone goes home and breaks the fast with a feast.

This is at least what I've been told happens; it seems somewhat uncommon now, and several people have told me that they used to make paskha and kulich, or their mothers did, or their grandmothers did, but they don't have time or the desire to do so anymore. Paskha is allegedly quite difficult to make, requiring between one and three days and a special mold. There's no Easter bunny or chocolate associated with the holiday, although fuzzy chicks and plastic eggs and such do seem to be seeping in from the West.

On the amusing side: I was actually warned by a colleague to watch myself on Sunday, because there will likely be a lot of drunk men behaving like hooligans on the street. Hmm. It seems to me that if you're pious enough to abstain from alcohol for the whole 40-day fast, you're probably pious enough not to get blasted on Easter, but I guess I'll be extra careful not to walk down any deserted streets tomorrow.

Anyway, this year if a drunk hooligan or a happy babushka greets me with a hearty, Христосъ воскресе! (Christ is risen!), I'll know to respond Воистину воскресе! (He is risen indeed!), unlike last year.

Coming soon: a kind of Russian spring cleaning we definitely don't have in America.

The Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship: Better Than a Ouija Board?

2008-04-15T10:34:00.002+04:00

Fun fact: I looked up how to spell "Ouija" and learned that it's from French oui and German ja. I'll never forget how to spell it again. Ah, the power of etymology!

Two years ago, I was drifting aimlessly.

Ok, you're free to laugh. I realize it's hard to argue that you're drifting aimlessly when you're about to get a B.A. from Yale. What I mean is that I could see several different futures ahead of me, but somehow none of them seemed particularly desirable. I didn't feel like graduating and didn't feel like making any decisions about the course my life was going to take. I hadn't heard about getting the Fulbright yet, and I intended, if I got it, to turn it down. Nothing seemed like a better idea than wasting a couple of years in a non-threatening environment like a linguistics laboratory (not Russia, which is about as threatening an environment as is appropriate for a recent college graduate to venture into alone) while I figured out what I wanted to really do; but on the other hand, even that didn't seem like a terrific idea. I was totally stuck in the doldrums.

Enter Fulbright. Standing in the Yale post office, opening that thin envelope and seeing the word "congratulate" in the first line of the letter felt a bit like being unexpectedly shoved off a cliff and finding out you can fly: a lurch of disbelief, terror, and then a sudden exhilaration. At the disbelief and terror, I burst into tears. The exhilaration didn't do much to fix that, though I managed to calm down enough for my seminar ten minutes later that as long as I didn't open my mouth, I wouldn't start crying again. That may seem like overkill, but it really was a huge shock for me – Russia was not something I felt ready for, emotionally, linguistically or otherwise. But as soon as I opened that letter, I knew that my fate was sealed. There was no possible way to say anything but yes.

(That, despite the fact that I had spent months imagining how I'd coolly turn down the offer, convincing myself that there were no good reasons to go to Russia and a wealth of good reasons to play it safe and stay home. I'm good at fooling myself.)

So, two years passed, of which sixteen and a half months have been spent in Russia. It's now April 15th, which is the deadline for graduate school decisions. Reflecting on that while brushing my teeth this morning, it occurred to me that of our little cadre of English Teaching Assistants that arrived in Moscow two Julys ago:

A1 is about to get her MA in Russian and East European Studies from Stanford.
A2 stayed for a second year, and now it's looking like she might be in Russia next year, too. (She has an interview today, so send good interview vibes in the general direction of Moscow!)
J1 is starting an MA program in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Washington in the fall.
J2 is about to get his MA in Russian translation from Columbia.
J3 is MIA (the only one we've lost touch with).
S stayed for a second year, and is starting a PhD program in Russian history at Toronto in the fall.

And me? I'll be starting an MA program in Russian and East European Studies in the fall, at Georgetown University.

Granted, not all of my fellow ETAs were as Russia-ambivalent as I was, but nonetheless... I feel like you can go to France or Germany or Spain for a year or two to teach English and then move back home and get on with your life. Russia, on the other hand, doesn't seem willing to let you do that. The needle of fate swings and quivers, and then points east, back toward the Kremlin spires, the Volga, the steppe and the Urals and the Siberian taiga beyond, across Baikal and down the winding Amur to the oil rigs off Sakhalin and the smoking volcanoes of Kamchatka beyond. All in a direction you never saw yourself going.

Приходит время, люди головы теряют...

2008-04-13T20:34:00.003+04:00

Apologies for the lack of posts! I've partly been busy (the institute had its annual student conference this week, and we've got some short-term visiting Americans), and partly just been caught up in the glorious warm weather and sunshine of spring, which appears to make me both happy and lazy.

It's beautiful here. Taganrog is full of apricot trees and forsythia bushes, and they're all in bloom!

I tentatively admit that there are a few things I won't miss about Russia.

2008-04-08T14:07:00.002+04:00

This was the form I had to fill out in order to pay the fine for not registering properly as a foreigner (don't ask):

The humor of this form is most effective if you can read Russian, because then you will recognize that even in the places where there are words instead of endless strings of numbers, they aren't actually words, but abbreviations, such as "UFK RF in RO." That's apparently who I paid the fine to. As for the numbers, the first one is the individual taxation number, but as for the KPP, the OKATO code, the BIK and the KBK (a whopping 20 digits!), I have no idea. I assume they're necessary to make sure my 2000 rubles goes to the right place.

And of course, I couldn't make this payment at the police station where the fine was issued. I had to go to the bank, get the form pictured above, copy all the numbers and abbreviations into it from the form they gave me at the police station, and stand in line with all the people paying their electricity and phone bills. Hapless as I am, I got there at 12:15 pm. That was a big mistake, because the tellers go on a one-hour lunch break at 1 p.m. (yes, all of them – apparently the concept of shifts has gotten about as far in the Russian state banking system as it has in the Russian post office), and trying to get your bills paid as close to 1 p.m. as possible is apparently some kind of masochistic Russian sport. So there were about thirty of us in line, all hoping to dodge in under the wire. I was the second-to-last one to make it through. (Wish I'd been last – then I could have found out what the prize was.)

The sheet that the above form is lying on top of? My new alien registration. Or one of the incarnations of it. It might be the one that was filled out "incorrectly" (we didn't complete the bottom two lines because neither I nor my advisor could figure out what the **** was supposed to go there). That incarnation was later destroyed by the extremely crabby migration officer, who yelled at us for our incompetence and then actually took her pen and scribbled all over the incomplete form so that we had to start over on a fresh one. Yeah, I wish I were making that up.

How To Be A Dinner Guest in Russia

2008-04-02T17:56:00.001+04:00

It's not about manners, my friends. It's about strategy.

Why? Here's an example. Yesterday my boss and his wife invited me over for dinner. Over the course of four hours, I had:

whiskey

Appetizer course:
vermouth
radish salad
fish salad
tomato and cucumber salad
salami
cheese
olives

First course:
mushroom soup

Main course:
more vermouth
beef stroganoff
fried potatoes
peas and corn

Intermission:
short walk in the garden

Dessert:
three kinds of cake
chocolates
more vermouth
tea

Seriously, how is it all supposed to fit? I'm no slouch when it comes to eating, and I still have trouble getting through the gastronomic marathon that is the Russian prazdnichny obed (lit. "holiday dinner"). And you're not given a choice on any of it, either. I think the only thing on this list that was not served to me (as in, placed on my plate) was the cheese. Oh, and one of the kinds of cake. I really don't understand how Russians do it.

Suggestions (should you ever find yourself invited to dinner at a Russian's house):
1. Say no. Say it politely but forcefully. Be prepared to say it several times to the same offer. Be prepared to lie ("I'm allergic to mayonnaise!") if faced with a particularly insistent host.
2. Fast for 24 hours beforehand. I haven't tried this, but it might work...
3. Alternatively, research competitive-eating exercises and train for a week or two.
4. Pull the classic push-food-around-the-plate-instead-of-eating-it move, but be careful not to look impolite.
5. Elastic waistband.
6. Under no circumstances should you ever take seconds of anything. This may require saying no. See number one.
7. Be careful about complimenting the host's cooking too profusely, especially if saying no is your weak spot.
8. Conserve stomach space – drink as little as possible and chew thoroughly.

Sadly, I failed at many of these, especially number one. But despite the fact that I stalled out during the soup and had a rough time rallying for the main course (really, it would all be so much better if they just got rid of the appetizers/salads – who needs three different variations on the theme of chopped vegetables in mayonnaise??), it was still fun. My boss and his family are what I would consider (and what they themselves consider) intelligenty, so the conversation – about politics, civil rights, the free press, the St. Petersburg theater scene, Taganrog architecture – more than made up for the fact that I sort of had to waddle home. And may not eat again for a week.

Things (I Think) Russians Do Right: Music Education

2008-03-29T20:10:00.002+03:00

I've been thinking about this for a long time. Over Christmas, I met up with Nana and Justin for lunch in Mansfield and, among other things, discussed our adventures living abroad. At one point, Nana asked what it is that Russians really have figured out. She was referring to neat things Russia has that America doesn't; one example she gave from Korea was ondol, or floor heating.

This is a good mental exercise/discussion point when you're living in a foreign culture, since it provides a balance for all the times said culture makes you want to bang your head against a wall. (I know it's not just me; Justin and Nana affectionately(?) refer to Korea as "the land of the 90% solution.") Unfortunately, at the time, I couldn't think of an answer. Not that I don't like Russia, and not that there aren't plenty of neat things about Russian culture. It's just that the technological and consumer innovations I was trying to think of – things like heated floors, online bill payment, parking vouchers for drivers of hybrid cars, or dual-purpose waffle iron/panini grills – aren't exactly Russia's forte. This is not shocking when you consider how recently the country had things like restructuring its entire government and economy on its mind. Plus there's all the bureaucracy, a leech that's been sucking at Russia's potential for efficiency and innovation since at least the time of Gogol.

But let's not dwell on the negative. The point is that you have to think outside the box a bit to come up with them, but there are plenty of enviable ideas that Russians have caught onto and the rest of us haven't. Today, I'll feature one that's near and dear to my heart: music schools.

Russia's system of music education was founded by Anton Rubinstein, as any Russian music school graduate can tell you. Having gotten a peek at it through my balalaika lessons, I think it's a great system. In America, if you want to learn a musical instrument, you either join the school band or orchestra, find someone to give you private lessons, or maybe buy a guitar at a flea market and try to teach yourself. In Russia, though, the musically inclined finish their day at regular elementary and high schools and then, three days a week, head off for a few hours at a public music school. Any good-sized city will have at least one; I think Taganrog has exactly one, while Vladivostok, which also had a college and a conservatory, had at least three or four. (In the villages, you're stuck with whatever they offer at the House of Culture. Sorry.)

The course of study at music school roughly includes your instrument of choice, a secondary instrument (sometimes one in the same family, but usually the piano), performance in the appropriate ensemble (band, orchestra, folk orchestra), ear training, the school choir, and music theory. Just like regular school, you have to show up for class and pass exams. It takes either four or six years to finish music school (I forget, but I think it's six), and when you do, you get a diploma that, among other things, allows you to enter music college, the next level of music education. (The conservatory is the third and final level.) Not everyone finishes music school, which means you get the knowledge (or some of it) but no diploma.

The disadvantage of such a rigorous system is that I think on the whole there are fewer musicians in Russia than in the U.S. system, where it seems like about three-quarters of us scraped away at a violin or made dying cat noises on a clarinet for at least a few years in middle school. The advantage, obviously, is that the average Russian musician is much better and more well-rounded than the average American one. (I didn’t even learn what solfege was until college...) Also, they provide the infrastructure for concerts and competitions for young musicians as well as a venue and means of support for professional concerts and recitals. Therefore, there are more of both the former and the latter than there are in the U.S.

I should also mention that I think, although I'm not entirely sure, that the same kind of system is employed for visual art schools. For sports, it's a little different – something about "Olympic reserve teams" that I don’t entirely understand – but the same concept of total dedication to and complete education in the extracurricular activity of one's choice.

Stay tuned for the next installment of "Things (I Think) Russians Do Right," which will probably be about dachas!

(The parentheses in the title are not meant to indicate uncertainty, but as an acknowledgment that a silly American making pronouncements about what's "good" and "not good" about Russian culture is a bit ridiculous.)

All Look Same?

2008-03-27T13:56:00.002+03:00

Scene: a Russian Orthodox cathedral, sightseeing with the visiting German girl and two Russian babushki. The babushki were buying candles to place in front of the church's icons.
One babushka said: "Girls, are you going to buy candles too?"
The other said, "Of course not! They're Catholics!"
I automatically replied, "I'm not Catholic, I'm Protestant!"
She replied, "Pfft, what's the difference?"
At that, I got a little defensive and said, "There's a big difference!"
She dismissed that with a wave of her hand and the pronouncement, "Well, you're all Catholics to us!"

At first I wanted to write about how annoying that was, even though I know that expressing annoyance at things like that is counterproductive. But I let it sit for a few days and now I feel much less annoyed. However, I'm still a little confused by it.

I understand why the babushka, and Russians in general, go for religious pigeonholing; to most Russians, Orthodoxy is a heritage as much as a belief, and something like 90% of Russians identify as Orthodox even though only a few percent actually practice. So it's understood that giving someone a religious label isn't actually a comment on their personal belief.

I also understand why she, individually, labeled us as Catholics. The Russian popular conception of Christianity is that it's divided into two camps – Orthodoxy and Catholicism. I mentioned this earlier, when people kept referring to "Catholic Christmas." (The funniest thing to me is that Russians often refer to America as a Catholic country, which is pretty ironic when you consider the stigma and labeling of "otherness" historically attached to Catholicism in the U.S.) So her conception of us as "white girls = Christians; non-Russian white girls = Catholics" was reflective of the average Russian view. (Unfortunately, Russians, especially older ones, often seem to forget that not all European-looking people have Christian heritage; that, I think, is the fault of a long history of institutionalized anti-Semitism.)

So what confuses me is why Protestantism is missing from the picture in Russia. I mean, you could argue that very few Americans know anything about Russian Orthodoxy, but I'm not sure it's really a parallel; the Protestant Reformation was a pretty major event in European history. In fact (correct me if I'm wrong), it seems like you couldn't really study European history without learning about the Reformation. Plus, it's not exactly recent news. So how has Russian society apparently failed to notice that it ever happened? Why do Russians seem fuzzy on the idea of what a Protestant even is?

I'm sure this ignorance is partly an effect of Soviet atheism. But it's interesting to ponder why it's manifested itself in this particular way: not uncertainty, but absolute faith in a completely incorrect fact. Then again, maybe that's just human nature.

The last thing the woman said to me still seems kind of rude. That's not so much a Russia thing as a babushka thing, though; since babushki have lived longer than the rest of us, they get to say whatever they want. At least that gives the rest of us something to look forward to about being old!

Checking in

2008-03-24T23:10:00.002+03:00

Yikes, almost a week since my last post! Sorry about that. I'll post something soon.

This is just to say that right now, I love the South. +19 (66F) today, and I got a text message from Amara up north that started with, "So the short-lived but fierce blizzard that we got while I was in the internet cafe..." I'm not anti-winter, but I was struck today by how happy the warm weather makes me feel, and how unpleasant the idea of still having snow on the ground sounds.

I hope it's similarly spring-like wherever you are! And happy (late) Easter to all who celebrated!

Notes on Underground...ish

2008-03-18T10:10:00.002+03:00

I was talking to my mom yesterday and mentioned that I have a paper due this week (for the institute's scientific conference – "Notes on Some Lexical Characteristics of the Emerging Russian Variety of English," a.k.a. BS) as well as a belated St. Patrick's Day lesson/event to plan. "Two deadlines? Sounds like procrastination's in the forecast!" was her reply.

Oh, Mom. You know me all too well. This post is the result of Procrastination Effort #1. (Only #1 because I only just started counting.)

On Saturday's trip to Chaltyr', which was actually a trip to Tanais, we also went to Rostov, since we were practically there anyway. This trip was for the benefit of a German girl who's here doing a three-week internship at the airplane factory and the institute. As our little party (me; Julia, the German girl; the institute's German teacher; the institute's driver; and the driver's 12-year-old daughter, Anya) was strolling in Rostov, talkative young Anya spotted a shop selling hip, punk-ish/Goth-ish clothes. "Hey," she said. "A shop for emos!" Not realizing that the word is a borrowing, she turned to us and said, "Do you know what an emo is? Emo comes from the word 'эмоция' (emotion), and it's these psychos who try to kill themselves."

Ha. If I didn't know what 'emo' meant, that wouldn't leave me with a very clear idea, but I was amused by her 12-year-old's view of the world. Then I started thinking: what exactly is 'emo' in Russia? I know it has a lot of similarities to the American emo subculture (if something that corporately driven and mass produced is really a subculture), but I wonder if there aren't also differences? That is, do these kinds of trends or movements tend to shift between cultures relatively intact, or do they change significantly in transit?

I don't have an answer, because I don't have any emo students or acquaintances to ask or judge by. It would be interesting to find out, though, because in general my impression is that deviation from the norm into a subculture is still a lot less common, and therefore more difficult, in Russian society than in American. As such, it seems like it becomes much more a part of a person's identity; for instance, walking down the street wearing Goth clothes in Russia, you stick out from the crowd more than you do in the U.S., thus subjecting yourself to harsher judgment. And that makes it more of an investment.

There are other differences, too; for one, Russia today is still emerging from a Soviet culture where overt nonconformity was discouraged; for another, Russians generally seem to take their hobbies and lifestyles seriously, adopting much less of a Jack-of-all-trades approach to their free time than Westerners do. A musician is a musician. An athlete is an athlete. Why would you try to be more than one? (Russians are often nonplussed by the fact that I play an instrument, go to fitness classes, and turn out knitted items on a regular basis. Not to mention the blog!) Considering all that, one would think that the kids who get into various subcultures would feel pretty proprietary of them, and that that in turn would lead to innovation.

But this, like the paper I'm supposed to be working on, is kind of BS. I'm no anthropologist.

Stereotypes are Bad, but Meat is Good!

2008-03-15T23:24:00.003+03:00

This post is kind of a hodgepodge.

1. Since it's been almost a week, I'll say that requests for my extra Птица тылобурдо cd are now officially closed. I received three, and based on the three contestants I've decided to go for a drawing rather than a contest to determine who'll get it. I couldn't come up with a Leslie-related contest (possible areas: knitting, Russian, linguistics, music) in which one or another of the contestants wouldn't have an unfair advantage. So, winner, I'll be contacting you as soon as I get around to actually doing the drawing.

2. The recent bane of my existence: a video circling the internet, dubbed into Russian, of Americans being interviewed saying stupid things. ("Where's the Berlin Wall?" "Uh... How the hell should I know?" "How many sides does a triangle have?" "A triangle doesn't have any sides," etc.) I've had three or four Russians bring it up and/or show it to me, and I have the hardest time trying to convince them that Americans aren't actually as dumb as that makes them look, and that we're actually no dumber than Russians are.

Recently:
A friend, checking that I'm not as dumb as those people: "Ok, then, where is the Berlin Wall?"
Me: "In Berlin. Or it was. They tore it down, so it's really not anywhere anymore."
Him: "Huh. They did? I didn't know that. Good for you."

Not that that proves his dumbness, either. Everyone has questions they're going to look dumb answering. But Russians who don't study English (and many who do) have a very negative, distorted picture of the U.S., and that picture includes the stereotypes that we're all fat and driveling idiots. Most Americans have a distorted picture of Russians, too, but at least Russians don't shoot themselves in the foot by posting videos of themselves wearing fur hats and drinking vodka with a trepak-dancing bear and a hammer-and-sickle flag in ten feet of snow while being oppressed by Evil Dictator Putin. Or videos of themselves saying, "Sitting on a cold floor will make you infertile!" "If Obama is black, that means he's probably stupid!" and other things that we would find as ridiculous/offensive as they find our collective inability to locate Europe on a map.

Anyway, enough ranting. On a lighter note:

3. Today I went to a miraculous place by the name of Чалтырь/Chaltyr'. I had heard it mentioned in passing by my students, who described it as "a village between Rostov and Taganrog" and "Russian Las Vegas." I assumed that the former was true and the latter some kind of joke, but it turns out that they weren't actually poking (too much) fun at it; it's where all the cool Taganrogers go to hang out.

It's an Armenian village that's been around since the time of Catherine the Great. I don't know whether people go there for gambling or quickie weddings, but they do go for shashlyk, which is Caucasian barbecue, marinated, grilled, and served with a sort of ketchupy sauce and fresh onions. Pork is the most traditional, but you can also get chicken, beef, lamb, or even sturgeon shashlyk. It's an adopted Russian staple, a versatile food that can be as delicious eaten off disposable plates in a beer garden as it is served as a holiday meal in a classier, more authentic restaurant. I think it's best when it's part of the ritual of "shashlyking", which consists of decamping to the country for a whole day of grilling and drinking. We did it once in February in Vladivostok; we almost froze to death, but it was amazing.

Anyway, shashlyking may be the most fun meat-grilling experience, but today's shashlyk was by far the tastiest I've ever had. Perfect marinade, perfect grilling, perfect sauce. It was the kind of meal where afterwards you want to just lie down and meditate on all the deliciousness you just ate. I also want to go back to Chaltyr' to go exploring – besides a long strip (Vegas?) of shashlyk joints, it looks like they've got at least one Armenian church, and a couple of stores with Georgian names (I think – unless Armenian uses that same writing system).

4. Finally, tomorrow I'm off to Rostov to give a talk on the 1950's in America, something I know next to nothing about. As I'm sure any grantee can tell you, giving talks on topics you know nothing about is one of the key aspects of the Fulbright experience. At least I have a film – a History Channel documentary – to help me along, and afterwards we're going out for Georgian food. Mmm, bean pies (lobiani) and cheese bread (khachapuri) – more of the Caucasus' little culinary miracles.

Russian Music Plug/Giveaway

2008-03-10T18:51:00.000+03:00

For Women's Day on Saturday, I went to a concert that one of my new students this semester invited me to. It was put on by a group called Птица тылобурдó/Ptitsa tyloburdó, and I ended up really liking them. They're a group of six women from Izhevsk, the capital of the Udmurt Republic, which is a region to the northeast of Moscow.

It's sort of hard to describe their music – they do some traditional Udmurt chants, some other ethnicky music (Russian, Finnish, Russian ethnic minorities), and lot of what they call "ethno-jazz," which I guess isn't a bad description. Much of the latter is based on the poetry of local bards. (A "bard" in the contemporary Russian sense is a poet-songwriter.) They use a lot of interesting percussion instruments, as well as hammered dulcimer, mandolin, bass guitar, and various members of the wood flute/ocarina/recorder family.

Anyway, I ended up getting their cds, and they accidentally gave me two copies of one of them (Пух и перья, their first album), so now I have one to give away! I'm a poor judge of what music people will like, so instead of just making a guess and sending the cd to a friend, I'll provide links to their music:

Птица тылобурдо on last.fm
Птица тылобурдо on poslushai.ru

and you, faithful reader or happenstance blog visitor, can let me know if you're interested. Maybe I'll think of some kind of contest to determine which of the interested parties (and I'm sure there'll be hundreds) gets the cd.

And for those of you who read Russian (or don't read Russian, but like looking at pictures), their website is here.

Musings on Trash and Democracy

2008-03-08T16:22:00.000+03:00

7:30 p.m., Smirnov Street, Taganrog: A woman and her young daughter are riding the tram. The daughter has a small piece of colored paper – an advertisement or somesuch – that she throws on the floor of the tram in typical toddler fashion. Her mother scolds her roundly for throwing it on the floor, picks it up, opens the window of the tram, throws it out the window onto the street, closes the window and sits back down.

I don't understand why Russians care so much about clean floors, but don't seem to care about having clean streets, sidewalks, parks, beaches, lakes or forests. Ok, I take that back. What I really don't understand is why Russians don't appear to make the connection between their individual actions and the condition of the environment in this country, which they are only too happy to complain about. Do Americans only make that connection* because of the government and educational system's concerted efforts to teach us conservation?

Since other things the government tries to teach us don't stick, I think the determining factor is instead our differing perceptions of the impact an individual can have on society and the world. That is, Americans avoid littering for the same reason that they vote, and Russians litter for the same reason that they don't vote.

Voting, of course, is a more complex matter, because it's also influenced by the American assumption that elections will be fair and the Russian assumption that they'll be rigged; on top of that, there's the American assumption that having politician A versus politician B in power will lead to different results, and the Russian assumption that all politicians are equally criminal/ineffective. Obviously, none of these assumptions is universal, but I think they're widespread enough to make a big difference. But are Russians' feelings about democracy specific to the political sphere and caused by actual corruption therein, or are they symptomatic of a larger disbelief in one's power to affect the processes at work in one's country and the world?

Anyway, that's two wordy blog posts in one day, which is really too much. I think I'm going to go for a walk and eat some ice cream. And then throw the wrapper in a trash can.

*By this I'm not saying that Americans never litter – I did Adopt-a-Highway in high school, so I've seen some of the random crap that people throw out of their cars – but I'm sure anyone who's ever been to Russia will agree with me that Americans litter a lot less than Russians do.

Wearing Ritas While Playing the Gomra.

2008-03-08T12:28:00.004+03:00

Over the past year or two, as my reading skills have improved in Russian, I've discovered a weird consequence of being able to read both Cyrillic and Latin script without conscious effort: unexpected processing errors when my brain gets confused about what alphabet it's looking at.

In normal situations this doesn't pose a problem, as what language I'm reading is clear to both me and the reading processors in my brain. However, occasionally you come across a stand-alone word that unexpectedly throws you off.

Let's start with an example of an intersection between the two alphabets: the brand name "Puma." Many Russians think (or joke that) it's pronounced "Rita," because Latin p looks like Cyrillic r, and Latin u and m resemble stylized or cursive versions of Cyrillic i and t. (So Рита in print becomes Рита in cursive. Looks just like English puma, right?)

But that's not really a processing error as much as an error in alphabet choice. For an example of my brain's processing problems, let's look at this tape measure:

My brain knows it's American, because I remember getting it in a box from my parents and because there's clear, understandable English written right on it. "Ok," my brain says, breezing past the white and gray text with no problem and getting to the yellow brand name, "we're reading in English!"

I do fine – K-O-M-E-L-O – until we get to that last letter. We're supposed to be reading in English, but that letter looks so much more like a Cyrillic p (п) than any Latin letter that the train derails. I get alarm bells and flashing red error messages, and the word basically refuses to be processed. If you've ever tried to remember what it was like to be really little and able to look at something without reading it, that's what this feels like to me. I can force myself to "sound it out," but I come up with "komelop." I can tell myself it says "komelon," even though I can't read it that way per se. I'm sure if this were a familiar English word – or even if it had a –g on the end to make it look like "come along" – that pesky п/n wouldn't pose a problem. But the way it actually is, I can't look at the word and automatically process it, which feels pretty trippy.

Edited to add: I just noticed that if you cover up the KO, you get 'melon.' Sure enough, if I block out those first two letters, I have no trouble reading the whole thing in English with no alarm bells or error messages or anything.

Today I had another interesting processing experience. I was listening to a domra album on my computer, and I clicked on the picture of the album cover in iTunes.

I glanced at this part of the cover:

I somehow noticed the English text in black before I noticed that Vladimir Yakovlev's name is written in Russian. My eyes traveling upwards from there, I caught the word домра (domra - the g on the album cover is an alternate form of cursive Cyrillic д/d) and got alarm bells going off in my head again. "Ha!" I thought. "Did they really write 'gomra'?!?"

This is interesting because it means that I noticed that the first letter of the word was "wrong" while failing to notice the Cyrillic r in the middle of the word that should have either tipped me off that this is a Russian word or made me think that they wrote "gompa," not "gomra." I guess this goes along with that trick where you can read a scrambled text as long as the first and last letters of each word are in the right place.

(By the way, I don't think putting half the Russian and half the English in each cluster of text is a good graphic design move.)

Relatedly, there have been a couple of interesting posts lately on Language Log about an emerging kind of slang in Russian – words typed in Cyrillic on a Latin keyboard. This amounts to something other than transliteration because, as any Russian student who's had to type an essay in Russian knows, the letters aren't in the same places on Cyrillic and Latin keyboards. Cyrillic f is on Latin a, Cyrillic t is on Latin n, etc. I found this especially interesting because my non-Russian-speaking father recently did the opposite – for Valentine's Day, he typed out "Roses are red / Violets are blue..." with his keyboard in Cyrillic mode and sent me the resulting nonsense. The next Pushkin? No, but an unwitting member of a group of linguistic innovators!

Finally, Happy International Women's Day to my female readers! I hope the day brings you lots of chocolate and flowers and no annoying holiday greetings like, "May you always love and be beloved by men."

Kind of Useless, but Cool

2008-03-03T20:28:00.002+03:00

If you've ever thought, "Gosh, I wish I could send Leslie a free text message!", today is your lucky day. Thanks to my ever-alert neighbor and bandmate Seth, I just found out that you can send me free text messages from your computer! Go here, and if you read Russian, ignore the fact that it says "Moscow/Moscow Region" – it works in the provinces, too.

You can get my number from my facebook profile or by emailing me for it.

In other news, the adorable Dmitri Medvedev (aptly, his last name means something like "Of the Bear," while Putin, I think, has to do with путь/put', 'way/path', a root you can also see in the word спутник/sputnik, 'satellite') was shockingly elected president yesterday. I took the news lying down, as I've been bowled over by some sort of head flu/stomach flu combo bug for the past few days. I'm interested to see what kind of president he'll be, and I hope he'll prove to be not just more adorable, but also a little less aggressive than Putin.

Sweet Billy Baroo

2008-03-01T21:32:00.002+03:00

In class this week we listened to a dialogue in which a character mentions his children, Jasmine and Billy. My students were completely stumped when I asked them what name Billy is short for. I finally gave them the answer, and they were quite incredulous that the name William (which they were all familiar with) could get turned into Billy.

That surprised me; almost every Russian name has a casual form like Billy, and some are just as far away phonetically from their original. As an example, let's look at the class of nicknames formed by (Consonant + Vowel) (CV) + sha:
Masha for Maria,
Dasha for Daria,
Pasha for Pavel,
Misha for Mikhail,
Gosha for Georgii,
Grisha for Grigorii,
Sasha for Aleksandr or Aleksandra,
Alyosha/Lyosha for Aleksei,
etc.

Usually – as in the case of Daria/Dasha – the (CV) in the nickname is taken from the stressed syllable in the original name. But sometimes – in the case of Grisha for GriGORii or Lyosha for AlekSEI, for example – the (CV) is not from the stressed syllable, making the nicknames a little harder to connect to their formal forms. A name like Lyosha/Aleksei is further complicated by the fact that the vowel changes, too. Unstressed ye becoming yo under stress is a common alternation in Russian, but not necessarily intuitive to a non-native speaker. So I could imagine that English speakers learning Russian would have trouble deciphering nicknames like Lyosha or Alyona (a form of Yelena), or other vowel changes in names like Ksyusha for Ksenia, Vova for Vladimir, or Toma for Tamara.

But I don't remember ever feeling quite as puzzled about those peculiarities as my students were about William/Billy. Why should that be so? I pondered some more, and eventually noticed that these Russian name quirks are all vowel alterations. Just like we have in Katherine/Kate or James/Jim. Aha! I tried to come up with a Russian 'Billy' – an example wherein the nickname begins with a consonant not found in the original name. I eventually did recall the completely bizarre Shura/Shurik for Aleksandra/Aleksandr, but that was all.

That, I think, must be why my students thought Billy was so weird. I don't have any information on whether vowel alterations are less marked on the whole than consonant alterations, but I suppose not really having one or the other in one's own language's naming traditions would make them seem more unexpected in another language's. Maybe next lesson I'll teach them Peggy for Margaret and Dick for Richard. Those seem weird even to me!

Speaking of names, the subject of middle names has come up several times recently. Russians don't have them, and I've been completely unable to explain why I have a name (or two names, actually) that no one ever calls me by. It's made me stop and think – why do most English speakers have middle names? Does it come from the tradition of giving a saint's name at baptism or confirmation? If so, when did the two practices diverge?

(Ok, I just finished writing this entry, only to have the nickname Zhenya, from Yevgenii or Yevgenia, fly unbidden into my head. (Zh here represents the sound in the middle of the word 'leisure,' a sound that is absent from the original names.) It weakens my argument, but I'll still maintain that consonant alternation happens a lot less in Russian names than in English ones.)

The Orthodox Palestinian Society: probably not what you think it is.

2008-02-27T19:46:00.003+03:00

I went to the library today to do a little research into something I'll blog about shortly (or eventually), and stumbled upon something else - a reference to Taganrog's past as a pilgrimage destination:

"And specially from every shire's ende of Russia to Taganrog they wende."

Just kidding. What it really said was:
"Just as streams flow to the sea, so too did pilgrims from different areas of Russia wishing to get to Palestine set out for our city."

...Yup. And apparently there was actually a group called the Православное палестинское общество/Orthodox Palestinian Society, which was dedicated to serving the pilgrims who came through Taganrog on their way to the Holy Land. No dates were given in the source I was reading, but it appears that this was fashionable (among a certain set, anyway) in the second half of the 19th century. Pilgrims would come down to Taganrog to catch a ship bound for Constantinople, and from there they'd head to Jerusalem to "bow at the grave of the Lord." Unfortunately, the ship for Constantinople was either not that good about posting its schedule or not that frequent, because said pilgrims often found themselves spending several days camped out here, sometimes without shelter. Orthodox Palestinian Society to the rescue! A noblewoman donated her house, and under the direction of a local shipping merchant, it was turned into a hostel for pilgrims, with ten spaces for men and ten for women, a small chapel, and a well-kept garden. Unfortunately, the house is no longer there, having been replaced by a five-story apartment building.

Beyond its face value as a quirky part of the city's past, this is interesting because passenger ships to Constantinople (or Istanbul, for that matter) no longer leave from Taganrog, but from Novorossiysk, down on the Black Sea coast. It's probably just as well for Taganrog; it's notoriously difficult to develop a booming tourism industry around pilgrims.

Happy Men's Day!

2008-02-23T15:02:00.003+03:00

Today, February 23rd, is Protectors of the Homeland Day. As you can tell from the name, this was originally a military holiday. Like a Russian Veterans’ Day, but inclusive of anyone who’s served in the military in either wartime or peacetime.

The day still has a military flavor; most of the cards you can buy for it are decorated with tanks, airplanes, or the orange-and-black striped ribbon of the Order of St. George. But because the Russian military has mandatory service, every man is technically either a past or a future Protector of the Homeland, so the holiday has become a celebration of all men.

However, for the past few decades, there’s been a dark shadow of corruption, disorder, hazing scandals, and widespread suicide among recruits looming over the Russian military. Many guys who can get out of service do so, either by staying in college and grad school until they're too old to serve or by bribing a doctor to give them a medical excuse. So there are a lot of men for whom the holiday’s rhetoric of military glory is completely inapplicable. These men aren’t excluded from the holiday, though; partly, I think, based on the assumption that Russia’s men will unite to protect her when need be. Nonetheless, it has reduced the holiday to a day of saying, "Thank you for being male!" to all the men in your life.

(Note: I have no idea whether women who serve are included in the celebration, or whether it’s truly become the masculine counterpart to International Women’s Day, a major Russian holiday, in the popular consciousness.) (Another note: that link is to a mail-order bride site, but it's still work-safe, and the Women's Day explanation is quite funny/Russian.)

The whole idea of this holiday as a "Men’s Day" kind of offends me. I’m not in the camp that believes that men have it markedly easier than women, but I do think that it’s silly to have holidays celebrating gender norms for either men or women. (So Women’s Day offends me, too, but less so, because there’s chocolate involved. Never underestimate the placating power of chocolate.) Really, "thank you for being (fe)male" largely means, "thank you for the ways in which you conform to society’s expectations for your gender." Especially after spending time in Russia, where I’m a foreigner and therefore very conscious of society’s expectations for gender performance, I don’t find that to be a good thing to thank someone for. Serving in the military? Yes. Being a mother or a father? Yes. Being "masculine" or "feminine"? Not so much.

There’s probably nothing I can say about Russian femininity that hasn’t already been said; it’s easy to think that men have it easier, but I’ve been surprised to hear several male American acquaintances express the same kind of frustration and alienation from Russian men that I, with my unpomaded lips, flat shoes, and unmarried-and-happy attitude, often feel from Russian women. Young Russian men are supposed to be "muzhiki", a word that sort of translates as "dude" or "tough guy", and that usually means a lot of drinking, no real show of feelings, indifference toward academic pursuits, objectification of women (a fellow Fulbrighter's students confronted him to ask if he was gay, partly because he doesn't flirt with his female students in class; he isn't gay, just American), and reckless disregard for both the law and safety.

Besides making it hard for American guys to make friends here, I'm sure this is a contributing factor to alarmingly high male unemployment, alcoholism, and suicide rates in Russia. Why celebrate the social forces that lead to such terrible problems? Why celebrate the ones that make women feel that beauty is their most important attribute, or that staying with a husband who beats them is better than having no husband?

(I'm sure there are readers who are saying, "But gender isn't entirely socially constructed! There are important innate behavioral differences between men and women!" I acknowledge that, but I don't think that's really what's being glorified on these holidays, and even if it were, I can't think of a convincing reason to do so.)

I'm not about to lead a crusade against the holiday – in the end, it's just a holiday – but I am saying I think this is all worth thinking about. To avoid ending on a sad note, I'd like to raise a toast to all the men in my life – my dad and brothers and grandfathers and uncles, my friends and students and coworkers, and you, dear (male) reader: not for being macho tough guys, but for being your wonderful selves.

(And for protecting the homeland, naturally.)

Random.

2008-02-21T23:10:00.002+03:00

Happy International Mother Language Day, everyone!

I almost missed it, but thanks to Language Log, I was informed of it with one point five hours to spare! I’m celebrating by writing this post in my own mother tongue, English.

...Yeah, English seems like a kind of lame language to celebrate. The UN says, “All moves to promote the dissemination of mother tongues will serve not only to encourage linguistic diversity and multilingual education...” I’m not sure I agree with that, unless either their idea of dissemination or their definition of a mother tongue is different from mine (under which every living natural language is someone’s mother tongue).

Anyhow, sorry I haven’t been posting very often. February has actually – despite its worldwide (or northern hemisphere-wide) crappy reputation – been fabulous here: above freezing, with clear, sunny skies and breezes that aren’t exactly warm yet, but nonetheless carry the promise of spring. But in spite of the great weather, I’ve still been in a February mood (that is to say, cranky and anxious for it to not be February, or for that matter March) and haven’t really felt like writing. I think it has to do with the beginning of the new semester, because my mood has been steadily improving throughout the month as I’ve gotten into the swing of things. But now I’m on an internet “diet,” trying to make the last 30 rubles on my internet card last ‘til the end of the month (curse you, leap year! and you, too, ever-falling value of the dollar!). So I can’t promise a glut of posts just yet.

On the bright side, the great weather has allowed me to move my exercise routine (if one can really call it that) outside, and I’ve been taking long daily walks in parts of central Taganrog that I’ve never seen before. I’ve discovered that the city beach is a mere 20 minutes from my apartment on foot; that there’s a museum I didn’t know existed 1.5 blocks from my apartment; and that there’s a whole network of mud roads with quaint little brick houses and stray dogs in all the yards just a few blocks from the town’s main streets! Charming. (Except the stray dogs. Not a fan of stray dogs.) Another way in which a Russian city of 275,000 people is not at all like an American city of 275,000 people. I’ll try taking some pictures so I can show you all soon!

Other good things have been happening, too – my students are doing well, I got into grad school, and I recently had my most successful semi-scripted American holiday party yet (for Valentine’s Day, naturally). This weekend is my half-birthday, which I’m really too old to get very excited about (maybe there’s something to be said for being halfway to age 47, but I’m not sure what it might be), but it’s also a three-day weekend, which you’re never too old to get excited about! Hooray!

Still haven't found what I'm looking for...

2008-02-19T11:24:00.003+03:00

I’ve noticed recently that people have started finding my blog by googling all sorts of different search strings; some appear to be looking for information about Taganrog, and the search for “balalaika lessons” has come up a lot as well. I suppose that’s inevitable as I add more and more posts, and more posts about things, like Taganrog and balalaikas, that not many people write about in English on the internet. I like helping people, and I realize that just from my entries, these googlers probably can’t find what they’re looking for. So I’ve created an email address for myself (see the info section) that you can use to contact me if you have a question you think I can answer.

However, please note that I cannot answer any questions about the азовская русалка, the alleged mermaid in the Sea of Azov (still one of the most popular referring strings), except to reiterate that she is not me. And I’m not her.

Good people

2008-02-15T21:19:00.003+03:00

It happens about once a week or so that someone asks me whether life in America is better than life in Russia. For diplomacy’s sake, I have a set answer for that. It’s easier to make a good living in America, I say; for example, we have fewer eighty-year-old women getting down on their hands and knees to scrub floors so they’ll have enough money to buy bread. But on the other hand, I say, “the people are kinder” in Russia.

In the Russian value system, this is a pretty high compliment, so it tends to assuage any ill feelings they have about Americans’ relative wealth. Unfortunately, it’s not strictly true.

The real situation is more interesting, but also a lot harder to explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced both cultures, and therefore less useful in terms of diplomacy. Contrary to the general Russian image of us, I happen to think that we Americans are very kind – not because we’re a special breed of people (although Russians subscribe to the notion of “national character” shaping individuals’ personalities), but because American society values certain types of kindness and encourages it in its citizens. Russians, for the same reason, are also kind, and it’s really not the *quantity* of goodwill that’s so refreshing to me, but the ways in which it’s expressed.

I’ll make the generalization that in Russia, it’s a lot more acceptable than in the U.S. to express unsolicited concern for others. Americans tend to find it insulting if you tell them that their winter coat isn’t warm enough, give them handouts of food or clothes, or really offer to help them do anything that they could reasonably be expected to do themselves. In Russia, though, these are the kind of actions you perform to show that you care about someone, even on the level of, say, coworker. Coming from a culture where these things aren’t done, I’m left feeling almost overwhelmingly cared for and valued. (Of course, it’s occasionally annoying; I am, after all, American, and therefore prone to feeling like I should just be allowed to do it myself once in a while.)

Anyway, I’m thinking about this because I’ve been around a lot of really good, kind people this week. Every time I leave the university I think, “I should write a blog post about how nice the doormen are.” It’s probably not worthy of a whole blog post, but the six or eight doormen who stand guard at the university in 24-hour shifts are almost all a) fascinated by me and b) really, really friendly. Their faces light up when they see me come in. They all know all about my family and ask about them on a regular basis. I had a mood-lifting conversation with a different doorman every day this week.

Last night some students (most of whom aren’t in my courses) invited me to their Valentine’s Day/birthday party. It always makes me feel good to be included in their activities because, to be honest, I’m a little boring when I speak Russian. I’m never entirely sure why someone who only speaks Russian would really want to be friends with me. When I try to express complicated thoughts, I tend to trip over my words, and my sense of humor often gets lost in translation. It seems like it should take a lot of patience to like me. And yet, these students, who seemingly have no desire to practice their English with me (a refreshing change), continue to welcome me into their circle.

And finally, today I had a Valentine’s Day party at a local high school. I’ve never met a group of people who seemed so eager to find things to like about me. They were really responsive to all the activities I had planned, they asked tons of questions, made sure I was well-fed on Russian cafeteria food (um, yum?), and gave me a tour of the school, introducing me to basically every teacher in the place. A little egoistic, I guess, but it’s a very nice feeling to be that popular.

Most of the other people I interact with on a regular basis are also really nice to me, from my coworkers and students to my landlady and balalaika teacher and the women at the place where I do my photocopying. So I guess I’m just feeling grateful that I landed in a town that has so many kind, well-meaning people. I definitely don’t feel like I’m lying when I tell people that I love Taganrog because it’s the “warmest” city I’ve ever lived in.

Russians Will Be Russians

2008-02-11T23:21:00.000+03:00

You're probably here because you were hoping for a new post. Well, be careful what you wish for! Don't worry, though, I'll be back to the usual picture-laden goodness soon.

I started thinking about collective memory and cultural consciousness when Amara and I went to the Museum of the Blockade in Petersburg and got into a discussion of whether Russia's lingering obsession with World War II is unhealthy. The topic came to mind again this weekend when I attended the annual celebration of the Taganrog Pushkin Society. I was invited to recite a Pushkin poem in English. If you're unfamiliar with Pushkin, don't feel bad; there's a reason. In Russian, Pushkin's poetry may be truly great, but like most poetry, it loses a lot in translation.

So to review, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin is a poet from the early 19th century, a genius credited with being the first to use ordinary vernacular Russian to write great literature; a dissident and friend of the Decembrists who was exiled two or three times for his anti-tsarist writings and remarks; a true romantic, constantly bankrupt, in love, and getting huffy over questions of honor; and a dashingly tragic figure, having died young in a mysterious duel that's widely perceived to have been orchestrated by the authorities. To top it all off, he had great sideburns.

In a roundabout way, Pushkin got me thinking about cultural consciousness, a term I sort of made up and that I'm using to mean a person's conceptualization of what the culture they "belong to" or identify with actually is,, or is made up of. For me, that culture is primarily "American;" in certain instances, I may also be conscious of (and fashion myself to be a member of), say, Midwestern, semi-rural, and Ivy League subcultures. For you, my American reader (although I recognize I've got some non-American readers – hi, Celine!), it's probably American and some other things along racial/ethnic/gender/political/geographic lines. American society is delightfully fragmented like that.

Russian society, I'm becoming increasingly aware, is not. Although I might be making a risky generalization by saying this, the emphasis is placed to a much greater extent, both officially and popularly, on a homogeneous "Russianness," which is in turn much better-defined than our "Americanness."

Communist ideology clearly has a good deal to do with this, but I think the general idea of the Russian state as an entity of fundamentally ethnic origin plays a role, too. But that's interesting, because Russians certainly talk a good game about being a multi-ethnic country. I know this because they like to compare Russia and the U.S. as the two great melting pots, and it is true that Russia, as a state born out of an empire, is multi-ethnic. But there's no real public dialogue about that – nothing comparable to the ubiquitous multi-culturalism of the U.S. that has white Germanic schoolchildren in Ohio making paper dragon masks for Lunar New Year. The history and cultural memory all seems to be fairly monolithic, with its roots firmly in the Russians and their language. That comes back in part to history – Russia is actually a state born out of an empire born out of an ethnic group – and in part to Communist ideology, because after a brief multiethnic lovefest in the '20's and early '30's, Stalin decided that Russification was the safer route. Either way, it creates an interesting creature: a country that clearly claims its multiethnicity (in vogue nowadays; historically, the theory of communism as an ideology transcending national boundaries was probably a major motivator) while simultaneously claiming its Slavic past as its one true heritage.

This push for a defined Russian heritage has led, among many other things, to a sort of deification of the main figures associated with that heritage. Combine Pushkin's use of Russian at a time when many in Russian society were speaking French, his popular appeal as a writer whose poetry is both good and accessible, and the characteristics that made him a great figure for the Soviets to claim as a legitimizing predecessor to their cause – anti-tsarist, repressed by the regime – and you get a perfect Russian hero, who has been packaged and sold as such by the educational establishment for at least the last eighty years or so.

Because of that, the love and reverence for him even today is absolutely incredible, and of a magnitude totally foreign to English speakers. Our reverence for Shakespeare? Not. Even. Close. I was at least peripherally aware of that, but it was really interesting to go to this Pushkin celebration and see all the various ways he was invoked. One woman gave a tirade about the decline of culture in which she castigated a popular cultural TV show for not including enough Pushkin. She blamed the authorities' tight controls on the media for that; her implication was clearly that by rights, Pushkin ought to be included in every cultural program. She finished by thanking Pushkin for "gifting us with our velikii moguchii russki yazyk," (a common collocation that translates as great, powerful Russian language). The idea of a national literature being needed to legitimize a language is familiar to me – the Estonian language, for example, came to be seen as more than a "peasant dialect" only when people began writing literature in it – but the idea that Pushkin "gifted us" with Russian (and the assumption that follows from that, that there was no Russian literary tradition before him) strikes me as absurd.

A man then got up and said, "It's all very well that we remember all his love poems, but let's not forget that he was also a dissident. And if he were around today, the powers [i.e. the government] would not be pushing us around the way it is!" He then read a poem written in honor of the dedication of some Pushkin monument or other to prove his point. I was thrilled, as I always am, to hear real Russians – supposed by the Western media to be politically comatose – complaining about politics, but still, the idea that Pushkin himself would single-handedly change the political situation in Russia today seems even odder than the language claim. I feel that these kinds of assertions must have some kind of value outside their absolute truth value, but I can't really articulate what it is.

Also interestingly, the mysterious figure who lured Pushkin into his fatal duel by sending him an anonymous note labeling him a cuckold was overtly cast as an eternal, evil archetype – not a person per se, but a constantly-threatening force for destruction that represents the fundamental opposition between civilization and culture. (I didn't know they were fundamentally opposed...) But also as a person, and the embodiment of the Romantic hero: on a hunting expedition, he allegedly shot down every pigeon in a flock. I admit, there might have been some sort of language barrier there, because that part doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Anyway, the only real point of this essay is that Russians' concept of their cultural heritage, their interaction with it and the role it plays in their lives are totally different from Americans'. I feel like I've only scratched the surface – for example, the way this shapes language policy/teaching/self-policing is another big can of worms - but this is already really long. So I guess I'll just let it peter out by saying that I was pretty surprised to find that after all my time here, there are still parts of Russian culture that really baffle me. It certainly made for a fun evening, though! (Although to be honest, that was helped by the fact that they put way too much rum in the flaming punch.)

Petrozavodsk, a Little Slice of Scandinavia in Russia (Travelogue)

2008-02-06T16:52:00.000+03:00

I am a huge fan of Karelia, the region northeast of St. Petersburg of which Petrozavodsk (called Petroskoi in Karelian) is the capital. Or a huge fan in theory, anyway – since we were there in January, we didn't get to see too much of the region's famed beautiful nature, or Kizhi Island. But it's home to the Karelians, a Finno-Ugric people (though there aren't too many of them around anymore – the Finns sided with the Nazis in World War II, so there was a lot of fleeing/deportation to Siberia), and I love random minority cultures/languages. Plus, we got to see at least a little nature in Petrozavodsk, in the form of Lake Onega, one of the world's largest lakes (though by no means as large as, say, Baikal or the Great Lakes). And Petrozavodsk itself was a pretty, cozy little capital that really did give me a weird Twilight Zone feeling that I was half in Russia, half in Scandinavia.

Shout-out to geology folks – Petrozavodsk boasts a lovely, if well-hidden, Pre-Cambrian Geology Museum, the surprise highlight of our two-day stay. It's in the Academy of Sciences, and you have to ask for someone to take you up to the fifth floor and let you in. They did so for us, and then some: a geologist from the Academy (Russian scientific research is conducted not at universities, but by the government-backed, nationwide Academy of Sciences) gave us an almost-two-hour tour! He was very careful to explain things thoroughly, since neither Amara nor I is a geologist. I did have one semester of geology, and some stuff came back to me during the tour, but I was still glad he kept it simple, since I was having to deal with Russian geology terms like месторождение, which looks like it should mean "birthplace" (место = place, рождение = birth) but actually means "mineral deposit." He never figured out - or never let on to figuring out - that we weren't Russian. Besides being oh-so-kind and accommodating, he was also adorable – probably 65 or 70, and no taller than I am. All in all, we were really glad we went, considering we did so kind of as a joke.

Me posing awkwardly with the particular type of quartz sandstone that's native to the area. It was used in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow and St. Isaac's Cathedral in Petersburg.

I don't have pictures from these, but Petrozavodsk also has an ok art museum and a very good regional history museum. The regional history museum has an exhibit on the Finno-Karelian saga, the Kalevala, that appears to be best viewed while on psychedelic drugs. At least I assume that would improve it. It was way trippy. According to the exhibit notes, it was supposed to "affect not visitors' minds, but their senses." Right. There were also less-trippy exhibits of Karelia's abundant prehistoric cave drawings, and a huge collection of stuffed animals (taxidermy, not teddy bears), where we learned all sort of new words for animals, from loons and auks to otters and wolverines.

Let's see, what else does Petrozavodsk have? Well, being on the shore of Lake Onega (whence the name of Pushkin's character Eugene Onegin), it has a long shoreline park with a bunch of sculptures, many donated by sculptors from PZ's sister cities around the world. The weather was nice and the park interesting, so we spent a lot of time there. The lake was frozen, but a friendly local warned us that going out on it like all the ice fishermen were doing was probably at least a little dangerous, so we didn't.

The view down the lakeshore path.

"Whisper a wish" - a wishing-tree sculpture. Hopefully it understood the wish I whispered in English!

"The Fishermen," by a sculptor from somewhere in Minnesota.

Amara looked like a lion when she posed with this sculpture. I'm a little too short to look like a lion.

It also has a street named for and monument to Yuri Andropov, the last [edit: second-last] Soviet leader before perestroika. Apparently there were protests when the monument was unveiled in 2005, so Amara and I decided to show Andropov a little love (to the amusement of a passing elderly gentleman).

All in all, it was a very nice town. The café and restaurant scene was surprisingly good for such a small city – we even ate at a slightly touristy, overpriced but delicious Karelian restaurant, which had many reindeer meat offerings which we did not try, plus traditional Karelian savory pastries filled with millet which we did. (They were delicious, even though pastries filled with grain does seem a little odd.) With lots of trees and the lake right near the center of town, I can see how it'd be great in summer. I'd really like to go back and see more of the surrounding area; hopefully I'll somehow get a chance.

[Edit: Thanks to Seth for pointing out my mistake about Andropov, nit-picky though it may have been!]

Letting the pictures do the talking.

2008-02-03T17:40:00.000+03:00

1. Petrozavodsk:

Kite skier on Lake Onega.

2. Murmansk:

Polar noon.

I am so happy I took that trip. More to come when I don't feel sick/blah.

Murmaaaaaansk!

2008-01-25T12:09:00.000+03:00

Hello from Murmansk, everyone!

I can't write much since I'm a) paying for internet and b) more interested in getting out and on with my day than composing a blog entry, but I thought I'd say hi. Being above the Arctic Circle is pretty amazing. No Northern Lights (Murmansk is, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the best-lit Russian cities I've ever seen, so there's a lot of light pollution at night), but we've witnessed the entire 4-hour course of the sun (this time of year, it rises at 11am and sets at 3pm), gone on what I consider a legitimate polar expedition, complete with whipping wind, drifting snow, and sub-zero temperatures - never mind that we were still technically within the city limits - and just generally had a great time. Add in that thrilling sensation of being in a place that's truly off the beaten track (one of my favorites - no surprise that I came to Russia, I guess), and you have an amazing winter break trip. I can't wait to show you the pictures when I get back to Taganrog!

But first: Moscow - ho! We leave this evening for a (YUCK) 40-hour train ride and then a few days of conferencing. I'll be home next weekend.

Time

2008-01-15T21:03:00.000+03:00

One thing I've really noticed in the past few years is the way time seems to dilate and contract as it goes by. This is true of life in general, not just life in Russia, but it seems especially noticeable when, like I am now, you're in a situation that you know will last for a limited time. At first, the entire duration stretches ahead of you, its vastness and possibilities apparently limited only by your own expectations of what's going to happen. Then the year begins to pass, and that vast, amorphous chunk of time contracts into a series of discrete moments and a list, surprisingly short, of the things you managed to get done and the things you didn't. What's in front of you still has that widened, unfocused perspective, as long as it's far enough away, but time seems to be flowing faster and you start to get the uneasy feeling that nothing is going to last quite as long as you were led to believe. Before long, the little bubble of contracted time you float along in will bump right up against the end of your stay and you won't have any vast, fuzzy future time in Russia left to savor – just a lot of packing and a ten-hour plane ride home.

Lucky for you, though, the human capacity for memory is limited, and because of that, autumn will already have re-expanded to almost its former proportions before the last snows of winter have melted. The discrete moments become less discrete, with the best and most memorable ones swelling to fill much more time than they first seemed to, bleeding together at the edges. It becomes harder to tell whether drinking beers with your friends on the beach, watching Chekhov at the theater, or finally managing to make a really good joke in Russian were things that happened once or over and over, for a few minutes or hours or days on end. In grammatical terms, it's a shift from the rigidity of the preterite – "It happened." – to the more forgiving past imperfect – "It was happening." And in your memory, it all keeps happening and happening.

Sorry, I know that's not at all the kind of thing I usually write here. I guess I'm feeling a bit sloppy and sentimental; we're halfway through the academic year now, I've submitted all my applications for things to do for next year, and I can see the future hurtling toward me (and contracting) at an alarming rate. On the bright side, a confluence of factors made this past weekend one of those ones that will definitely expand in memory, and maybe end up defining the whole of January 2008 or even the whole winter for me. Mostly in good ways.

The best, I think, was the New Year's party I played unsuspecting host to on Sunday. I was under the impression that a few of my students were coming over to watch a movie and eat some peanut butter cookies. But a lot more people came than I thought I had invited (sort of my mistake, sort of not), the person who was supposed to bring the movie forgot it, and it turned out to be Old New Year's Eve. (That is, New Year's Eve according to the old Julian calendar.) So I had a party without stressing out about planning a party, and it was great. We sang, we toasted the new year with champagne, we made noises about playing charades but never actually did it, we roamed the streets in search of New Year's trees and then danced around them in the traditional way, we took up a collection to buy new year's party food and drink, and we came back to my apartment to toast the new year again, this time with vodka. I think from now on I'll try to keep myself in the dark about all my parties.

And now I'm headed off for (another!) vacation – my much-anticipated trip to Petrozavodsk and Murmansk followed by the midyear conference in Moscow – so hopefully there are more great memories to come! There probably won't be any new posts for a couple of weeks, though – sorry!

2008-01-09T17:06:00.000+03:00

Ok, just one more picture post and I promise I'll shut up about the cold and my cold apartment and all that other boring stuff. I just had to show you the latest addition to my arsenal:

It's a partition! My living/bed/all-purpose room is sort of L-shaped, with a nook extending from one edge of a big rectangle. That nook is where my computer desk and couch (the one that's not a sofa-bed) are, but since it's directly opposite the windows and door to the balcony, it gets a lot of draft. No more! Now when the wind comes back, I can hole up there with my little electric heater and be toasty warm.
My friend Amara dubbed it "adult" and "Martha Stewart-like," especially since I actually had the curtain tailor-made. (Of course, she points out, Martha would have made the curtain herself.) Admittedly, its classiness sort of clashes with my hillbilly Draft Dodger and '70s decor, but on the bright side, if feng shui is all about balance, my apartment must score a perfect 10.

Just Saying...

2008-01-09T09:41:00.000+03:00

So I'm planning this trip up north, and out of curiosity I decided to check the weather. What did I find?

It's warmer in both Petrozavodsk (-7 C/19 F) and Murmansk (-2 C/28 F) than it is here (-11 C/12 F)! And the forecasted highs for both places continue to outstrip ours for the next ten days. (Let me remind you that Murmansk is above the Arctic Circle.) Looks like I'll be warming up on this trip!

I'm not really complaining - since the wind shifted here, my apartment is a lot warmer, and I don't have to go outside all that much. And now everyone who was worrying in the fall that the "cold" Southern winter would shock my poor American system (in America, you see, we have only sun and palm trees) is busy assuring me that they haven't had a winter this cold in years and years. That makes me feel a little better about my shock at how cold it really is here.

Merry Orthodox Christmas!

2008-01-07T20:05:00.000+03:00

Most Christmas traditions familiar to Americans, like Christmas trees, gifts, and Santa Claus, happen at New Year's in Russia. The main tradition associated with Orthodox Christmas seems to be a form of mock-begging in which children go from door to door on Christmas Eve with a bowl of кутья/kut'ya, a wheat-based porridge with chocolate, fruit juice, nuts, raisins, and various other sweet stuff thrown in. They offer the master and mistress of each house a taste of the porridge, and in exchange they're given candy, money, or some other treat. This is supposed to bring good fortune to the house for the next year. Not surprising that this is the kind of tradition that weathered the Soviet era, I guess, since it seems innocuous and non-religious enough to have not been seriously frowned upon.

Anyway, I knew about this, at least peripherally, but somehow I didn't think to buy candy so I'd be ready when kids came to my door. So it caught me off guard last night when the doorbell rang as I was sitting in my kitchen knitting with the oven turned on for warmth. I opened the door to a group of little boys, who shouted some kind of incomprehensible verse at me.

"Excuse me?" I said, probably looking as baffled as I felt.

[Incomprehensible verse!] they shouted again. (I think it's something like "The carolers have come, open the gates!," but you sure couldn't tell from the cacophony of prepubescent voices.)

"Oh." I stammered. "Ah. I see. This is your Christmas, right? The thing is, I'm a foreigner, I didn't know..."

"Will you try our porridge?" interrupted the oldest boy (thankfully, before I crashed and burned too badly).

"Umm... sure. Ok. Yeah, hang on," I said, feeling pretty sure that that's not what you're supposed to say, and went to fetch a spoon. I got the spoon, and then proceeded to spill the porridge awkwardly all over my sleeve and the floor as I pried off the Tupperware lid. I declared it delicious, and then continued to stumble through the encounter:

"Ok, so, now I'm supposed to give you something, right? See, I didn't know... I mean, I didn't buy any candy. But if you'll just wait one more second..."

"Oh, uh, that's ok, we understand," the oldest boy cut in, probably plotting the group's escape from this babbling person in her porridgy sweater, but I had already wandered off to retrieve some quarters from the depths of my suitcase: "Ok, so, the thing is, I'm American, right? So here are some American coins. They're for you. Thank you. Merry Christmas. Thank you. Goodbye."

Christmas only got better from there: I was prepared for the next two groups of kids who came by, and when my supply of quarters ran out I went over to a student's house. We took some kut'ya to her godmother, where we were rewarded with 100 rubles each (about $4 – score!) and a sack of candy. We used the money to buy wine (although I vetoed the idea of drinking it on the street) and proceeded to one of her friend's houses. Another Christmas tradition is apparently that Christmas Eve is the best night of the whole year for fortune telling, so this friend's mom told our fortunes over wine, cake, and more kut'ya.

I'm fairly sure that neither of these traditions is exclusively Russian. The going door-to-door can be found in various cultures, I think, including medieval Europe (which is probably where it comes from). As for the fortune-telling, isn't there an Alexander Pope poem about that? It's not Christmas, but some saint's day in early January (which would coincide with Orthodox Christmas, anyway) when maidens are supposed to dream of their future husbands. Maybe it's not Alexander Pope. Whatever. (Edit: try John Keats, Leslie. "The Eve of St. Agnes.")

Anyway, my fortune was neither great nor bad. I'm supposed to lose my passport or big money sometime in March or April, which makes me wonder if this woman somehow knows me – it seems like not a year goes by where I don't lose a relatively large sum of money. (That $50 from this past summer? I still maintain that TSA stole it out of my suitcase.) On the bright(?) side, she gave me advice about grad school (both of my top choices are good) and husbands (look for a Russian one, not an American).

So that was all yesterday (Christmas Eve), and then today I had a massive Christmas dinner with one of the guards from the university and his wife. Our university, like many institutions in Russia, employs men to sit by the door and check your ID as you walk in, so as to keep out the riff-raff. One of these guys is a retiree whose son and daughter-in-law are in the U.S. doing PhD work at... Bowling Green State University! (That's really close to my hometown, for those not in the know.) I took them a big package of Russian stuff from their parents when I went home for "Catholic" Christmas, and in return their parents invited me over for Orthodox Christmas!

The parents are really, really kind (they both call me заенка, a Russian pet name that translates as "bunny"). We had a nice dinner, drank some champagne, sang some Ukrainian folk songs, and they sent me home with pounds and pounds of preserves from their garden – raspberry jam, pickled tomatoes and zucchini, salted cucumbers – and a big ol' slice of liver pie. (Sad but true: most Russian party food seems to be stuff I don’t really like, such as liver pie, fish (fried, baked, stuffed, chopped up in salads, salted, pickled), meat jello, and salads made with entire jars of mayonnaise. But I've made it through the big holidays without offending any hosts – I even ate two slices of liver pie today! – and at least now I have the preserves to look forward to.)

Cold Comfort Addendum: You Win Some, You Lose Some

2008-01-04T21:38:00.000+03:00

I decided not to move in with my landnobility (landlord+landlady...I know, lame joke), on the grounds that not being able to eat what I want, sleep when I want, play my balalaika when I want, etc. would drive me nuts. Instead I've launched total war against my leaky windows; so far, that looks something like this:

I know it's ugly. I know it's not a triumph of engineering. But the Draft Dodger (I named it myself!) is a triumph of resourcefulness - I think I could make Eagle Scout with this thing. You can't see all of it, but so far it uses my extra bath towel, plastic sheeting, bubble wrap, a lot of masking tape, the hideous wall hanging (just a big piece of furry fabric) that used to hang in my living room, both of my 70's-era leopard-print armchair covers, the cut-off bottoms of my too-long yoga pants (I knew I kept those for a reason), a hand towel, a whole bunch of furniture foam, two postal boxes, and the remnants of my blue vinyl cabinet liner material. The room is still drafty, but a quick test shows that it is indeed significantly colder between the Draft Dodger and the window than in the room, so progress is being made. I tentatively declare victory.

As for losing some, I went to the movies with my advisor, Nastya, today. As I approached our appointed meeting place and waved to Nastya, she gave me the most horrified look I have ever seen on the face of a fellow human being. This look seriously stopped me dead in my tracks, and I knew before she even opened her mouth what it was about - I promised her back in November that I would get a Russian winter coat, and I haven't yet. And in fact, I didn't actually intend to (I was hoping she'd forget about it, or magically become more reasonable). I wanted this to be a Point of Principle, an instance in which I was not going to give an inch to the Russian fear of cold. But ultimately I think keeping the peace is more important than asserting my will; plus I thought Nastya was actually going to start crying right there on the street if I didn't give in. So we went to the shopping center together and I got a down coat, which is thankfully both much cheaper and significantly less heinous than last year's Russian winter coat, of which I do not speak anymore.

Cold Comfort

2008-01-04T12:10:00.000+03:00

So, one thing I didn't mention in my last entry is that it is really, really, really cold in my apartment. (You may think, "what does that have to do with an entry about Moscow?", and you'd be right – but since my apartment temperature is basically the only thing I think about these days, I was still tempted to somehow work it in.)

When I left Taganrog, this was not a problem, as it wasn't very cold here – probably right around freezing – but now the temperatures are in the low teens and we have a relentless east wind blowing in off the bay. Unfortunately, my apartment windows face the bay, and I'm on the ninth floor, where it seems (may the meteorology gods smite me if I'm wrong) the wind is even stronger than at ground level. This has caused my apartment's temperature to drop from its usual "merely chilly" into the range of "intolerably cold." I don't have a thermometer, but I'm guessing it's in the high 50's in my living room and the low 50's in my kitchen.

Of course, dedicated readers may remember that I taped my windows back in October. On days that are merely cold, not windy, that sort of helps, but the problem with taping your windows with masking tape is that the adhesive, already not exactly the greatest in the world, breaks down completely when hit with the combination of cooling surface temperatures and cold air currents of any strength. So the windows are still nominally taped, but that hasn't stopped it from being breezy enough that the candles I had burning yesterday were guttering.

So the reason I'm writing about this (besides the fact that it's the only thing I can think about) is that this morning my landlady called and suggested that I move in with them for a week or so until the windy weather passes. I can't decide what to do – on the one hand, it would be nice to be warm for a while, but on the other, I think I might like my independence too much to be able to just move in with people I hardly know. If it weren't the holidays, this wouldn't even be a problem, since I could just hide out at work or the library all day. Hopefully some kind of solution will present itself before 7 p.m., when I'm supposed to call and let them know what I've decided. In the meantime, I'm going outside to warm up.

Moscow Believes in Pictures

2008-01-04T02:09:00.000+03:00

Apparently I have an artist's temperament when it comes to blogging – I've got plenty to say and plenty of time on my hands, but in the last few days I just haven't felt like writing. So I'm trying to get back into the swing of it by starting with the easiest post format – pictures!

My relationship with Moscow has always been a little complicated. It has a long-standing rivalry with St. Petersburg, my first Russian love: Peter I moved the capital from Moscow to Petersburg in the 1700's. Two hundred years later, the Bolsheviks moved it back and devoted a lot of energy to eroding Petersburg's position in the popular consciousness; by now, the state smear campaign is long gone, but now the two cities have developed a sort of rivalry between their ruling political classes (Putin and his gang are Petersburgers). Even Tolstoy got into the fight, using Moscow – an ancient Russian city that grew up more or less organically – to symbolize the natural and the Slavic, and Petersburg – a younger city planned by Russia's first great Westernizer – to symbolize the artificial and European. Nowadays the rivalry focuses more on Petersburg as a cultural city and Moscow as a commercial one (especially from the pro-Petersburg side; those who prefer Moscow still invoke Tolstoy's stance).

It's true that Moscow is very commercial, and its commerce has developed around the "New Russians;" that is, the post-Communist business elite. Since practically everyone who's riche in Russia is nouveau riche, conspicuous consumption is the order of the day, and it shows – nowhere in the world makes me wish I had money quite the way flashy downtown Moscow does. When you compare it with the historical feel of downtown St. Petersburg – after all, it was the capital for 200 years, so a lot of the events most sacred to students of Russian history played out there – Moscow's bling can start to feel a little culturally bankrupt. Add to that the sheer unmanageable sprawl of it (it's the largest city in Europe), and the less-than-positive associations Westerners tend to have with the Russian government – and the Kremlin is, after all, the heart and soul of Moscow – and it can be a hard city to like. I spent a long time trying hard to like it as much as I like Petersburg. I eventually realized I just couldn't, and then spent a long time hating it with all the fervor that seems to be in fashion among non-Muscovites (both Russian and foreign).

But on the other hand, I've now spent significantly more time in Moscow than Petersburg, and I know the city pretty well. And if you can look past the bling (shield your eyes), the claim of cultural bankruptcy is totally absurd; for Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress, Moscow has the Kremlin; for Petersburg's Church on the Spilled Blood or Kazan Cathedral, Moscow has St. Basil's; for Petersburg's Aleksandr Nevsky Monastery, Moscow has Novodevichy Convent; for Petersburg's venerable Hermitage and Russian Museum, Moscow has the equally venerable (if smaller) Tretyakov and Pushkin museums. Arriving in Moscow still doesn't give me the same giddy feeling that arriving in Petersburg does, but with all the fond memories I have there and all the great things I've seen, I've finally grown out of my fashionable anti-Moscow attitude, and I like the city a little more each time I visit.

The other thing that complicates my relationship with Moscow (I promise we're getting to the pictures soon) is that it serves as my gateway in and out of Russia. Russians love to say that Moscow "isn't Russia," and on my way out of the country I tend to agree with that. The lifestyle and pace there are completely different from the rest of the country, in more than just a big city/small town way; getting to Moscow feels like I've already got one foot back in the West. But Moscow changes on my way back into the country – fresh from America, the pure Russianness of the city is what I feel most of all, from the fashions to the smells to the flood of Russian voices, the intonations I recognize even when I can't make out the words. This dual face makes Moscow feel like a portal into another dimension, especially since traveling between the two countries really does feel less like a move from one spot to another on the same globe than like a shift in the nature of reality. (For this effect I blame the disconcerting speed of air travel more than the actual degree of difference between the two cultures, although that's also not insignificant.)

Right, so that's where the pictures (sort of) come in – spending the day in Moscow between my flight from the U.S. and my train back to Taganrog, I took a picture of a New Year's tree. That gave me the idea to write a post about how weird it was to leave the U.S., where the holidays were already kind of winding down, and arrive in Moscow, where the run up to the New Year (the biggest holiday of the year in Russia, bearing more than a passing resemblance to American Christmas) was in full swing. And *that* started me thinking about all the reality-shifting that happens in Moscow.

Anyway, here is the picture:

This is in GUM, a gorgeous, castle-like building on Red Square that used to be the state-run department store but is now an extremely ritzy shopping mall. I spent an hour or two there just wandering and watching the rich buy Burberry and Chanel and Cartier and just be their rich, fur-clad, diamond-studded-cell-phone-bearing selves. Everything was really decked out for New Year's, and they even had a live jazz combo playing, dressed in Santa suits!

The gee-I-actually-do-kinda-like-Moscow part of this post was brought to you by the other way I occupied myself that day. Sandwiched between a long plane ride and a long train ride, I really wanted to spend some time outside, so I went to Kolomenskoye, the 17th-century tsars' country residence on the Moskva river (it's not in the country anymore – you can get there from the downtown in about 15 minutes by subway). It's now a "museum-reserve," so sort of a big park with a lot of old state-protected buildings on it. Kolomenskoye was actually one of the very first places I visited in Moscow, back in the summer of 2006 with Amara on our second or third day in the city, so it was very nostalgia-inducing.

This church was being renovated last time I was in Kolomenskoye, but now its scaffolding is off and it totally dominates the landscape along the ridge by the river. It was completely closed up when I was there, and it's still very, very new-looking, which somehow added to the bleakness of it on this bleak December day – it made it seem not just deserted, but as if it was never used at all.

And those are actually all the pictures I have. I hope you don't feel cheated after reading that whole long post! I guess it turns out that I couldn't get myself to write anything because I had too much to say – so check back soon for something (hopefully) shorter!

(The title of this post is just a silly play on the title of the film Москва слезам не верит, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears.)

S Novym Godom!

2008-01-01T18:37:00.000+03:00

I've dreamed of celebrating New Year's here in Russia pretty much ever since I started learning Russian. This year, I finally did it! I will write more about that – and about several other things that I've been meaning to get to – soon, as the benevolent Putin has given his subjects (and hangers-on like me) nine days of vacation as a New Year's present. To amuse you until then, though, this is what I woke up to at 11 o'clock this morning, as my friend Aina's mom poked her head into the room where I was sleeping:

Her: Leslie, get up and drink with us!
Me: What? Drink? You mean like wine?
Her: Of course, wine! What else?!
Me: (groaning and burying head under pillow) I don't understand.
Her: What's there to understand? Ah, you want to sleep more?
Me: No, no, I was already awake. But I got drunk (lit.: напилась/napilas', "drank my fill") yesterday!
Her: And your point is...?

Happy New Year, everyone!

Merry Catholic Christmas!

2007-12-25T15:02:00.000+03:00

Although the time stamp on this post will say 3:00 p.m., I'm writing at 7:00 a.m. EST on Christmas morning. Merry Catholic Christmas, everyone!

I've been meaning to write for the last few days (and will write something more substantive soon), and the stillness of Christmas morning before the rest of the family is awake (except technically only my younger brother is still asleep - apparently we're all gift gluttons in this family) seemed like a good time to do it.

In my several trans-oceanic(?) flights, I've learned that jet lag from different time zones manifests itself differently: going 8 hours forward to Moscow time may require a long nap or two, but is otherwise not very challenging; the fifteen hour backward jump from the Russian Far East to the eastern U.S. manifests itself through total circadian confusion, normal bedtime and wake-up patterns paired with severe insomnia around 3 a.m.; and the 8-hour backwards hop from Moscow back to Ohio means total narcolepsy that kicks in between 8 and 10 p.m. and a tendency to wake up at 6 in the morning. I don't know why that particular change is so hard, but it's happened to me twice now.

As for "Catholic Christmas," that's what the Russians call our December 25th celebration. Russian Orthodox Christmas, thanks to the same calendar that gave us the October Revolution when the rest of the world had already turned their calendar pages to November, is on January 7th. While researching the history of Christmas trees for my party, I read on the History Channel website that Russians "celebrate Christmas on Epiphany (Twelfth Night)," but that is completely incorrect. Lesson: don't believe everything the History Channel tells you, kids. Anyway, the Bolsheviks changed their calendar to jive with the rest of the world, but the Russian Orthodox Church remained unswayed (they're not so into change - I mean, look at the Great Schism).

So, I don't know why the Catholics get to claim our Western Christmas ("So you're going home for Catholic Christmas, not Orthodox Christmas, right?" "Yes." "Are you Catholic?" "No, Protestant." "Ohh... wait, is Protestant Christmas the same day?"), but I figure it's not my job to correct the Russians. Anyway, my younger brother just came downstairs, so it's stocking time! Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and to those who don't, I hope you can find a radio station that's not playing non-stop Christmas carols (oh, America...).

In which my balalaika teacher continues to be the best

2007-12-17T22:59:00.000+03:00

In addition to walking me to the tram stop after my Tuesday lesson - we had black ice, and with my less-than-perfect post-knee surgery balance (which may or may not be all in my head) and a fear of falling instilled by numerous painful spills on Vladivostok's slippery hills last winter, I'm pretty tottery on ice – Mikhail Semyonovich gave me a copy of an mp3 anthology of balalaika music compiled by some French balalaika enthusiast. Well, he gave me volume one, anyway, which is over sixty hours of recordings spanning from Vasily Andreev, the late-19th century father of the modern balalaika, to the best examples of the contemporary school of balalaika (including my teacher's teacher and two of his students!).

Besides enjoying listening to all this music, I'm getting a huge kick out of the jpegs of record and cd covers that are included with the anthology. Many of them are shining examples of Soviet graphic design (which I love):

And then there's a whole genre of balalaika-player-superimposed-on-Russian-scene:

Plus one where the balalaika player is actually standing in the Russian scene:

I am really digging the contrast between Mr. Necheporenko's stern demeanor and the flowing pink script in which his name is written.

And then the many that were clearly designed by musicians, not graphic designers:

(Ok... uh... grab your balalaika... and... uh... stand... uh... oh, here's a nice-looking column. Yeah... stand here. No, a little to the right. Ok, ready? Smile! No... wait... maybe you should look a little more serious. Um... ok. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. One, two... three! Hmm. Do you think we need to take another shot? Probably not, eh?)

There are bad costumes:

(Le Trio Star Treque?)

Russian folk costumes galore:

And finally, two of my favorites, both non-Russians:

When I make it big, I can *only hope* that my group has a name as awesome as "Bibs and Vanya."

... And that I have a style consultant as skilled as Petro Ivanovitch's of "The Ivanovitch Gypsies."

Sadly, Petro ended up with a receding hairline; on the bright side, he got a solo album:

And this is only the "Balalaika" folder – I haven't even uploaded "Domra" (a related Russian folk instrument) or "Ensembles." And there are three more volumes after this one!

My (Half-)Week in Pictures

2007-12-15T20:27:00.000+03:00

First I stayed up really late Wednesday night to make these:

(Russia, being a nation that sources its sugar from sugar beets, lacks the molasses necessary to make gingerbread cookies, so I just used store-bought cookies.)

Then I stayed up really late Thursday night to make these:

(Recipe courtesy of Nana's great-great grandmother, via Nana; cookie cutters courtesy of my great-grandmother, via my grandmother/mother/DHL)

Then I invited my students over to help me frost and decorate:

(Katya)

(Masha)

(Olesya and Andrei)

(Polina was also there, but there are no pictures of her - or me - because our main duty was to stand around eating frosting – not a very photogenic occupation.)

In the end, we came up with this:

(Finished houses)

(Olesya's masterpiece, a tiny snowman named Del'finchik ("Little Dauphin") for his vaguely French-looking hat. His eyes and nose are meticulously chipped-off pieces of M&M candy shell.)

And then I spent about ten minutes fudging a "script" (see end of previous entry) and we had a party!

(There were probably about 30 people!)

(I was festive.)

Ramblings

2007-12-13T22:11:00.000+03:00

Having already had a bad encounter with Russian bread flour at Thanksgiving, wherein I used it to make a pie crust and it refused to roll out and I had to serve pumpkin pies without crusts, I shopped very carefully when I was buying supplies for Christmas cookies.

If it weren't so much work, I'd take and upload a picture of my bag of bread flour and show you just how tiny the word хлебопекарная (bread-baking) is on it; apparently they consider bread flour the norm here, or they just don't want you to notice what kind of flour you're buying. Anyway, that's how I got duped the first time, and I decided not to get duped again. The only other option at the grocery store (or the market) was labeled 'blini flour.' (Blini are Russian crepes.) I checked to make sure it was made from wheat (some traditional blini are made from buckwheat flour, but the word "wheat" on this package was in a font at least ten points larger than "bread-baking" on the other package) and bought it, figuring that it was probably more like all-purpose flour than bread flour is.

Well, I got home this evening and began happily measuring it out for my sugar cookies, at which point I noticed that this flour was... sparkly. Hmm. Almost as if it had granulated sugar in it.

I paused, my measuring cup dangling precariously (ok, not that precariously... I'm not prone to seizures or anything) over the mixing bowl. Do I check the ingredients on the flour bag, or just dump it in, hoping I'm imagining things? I had bad luck last night with forging ahead when I knew I was wrong (it involved trying to delude myself that the soft peaks in my royal icing were actually stiff peaks, and mortaring together two entire gingerbread houses before admitting to myself that the icing wasn't going to harden the way I wanted it to). The sting of this failure, which required pulling apart the gingerbread houses, beating the icing for another ten minutes, and re-mortaring, imparted the small modicum of logic usually absent from my kitchen frolics (or rampages, depending on who you ask). I looked at the packaging before dumping.

And it turned out that despite the fact that this stuff is clearly labeled МУКА (flour) in enormous letters on the front of the bag, it is not actually "flour" in the traditional sense of the word. Ingredients: flour, dried eggs, sugar, salt, baking soda, vegetable fat. So basically, it's Bisquick. I am very indignant about the fact that I came so close to ruining my cookies, not to mention that I now have a kilogram of Bisquick that I don't even want! I think it should count as false advertising!

The story has a happy ending, though, because I went out and bought real flour (bread flour again, since that's apparently the only kind available) and the cookies, which are from my friend Nana's recipe, are great! Unlike the pie crust, they rolled out just fine.

If this entry is a little random, it's probably because I got very little sleep last night (because of the gingerbread house debacle). It's been a strange day. I haven't done much of the sleep-deprivation thing since college, and I forgot how strongly it affects me. Unfortunately, I will probably also get very little sleep tonight, because tomorrow is the Christmas party for which all this ridiculous baking is happening. And I haven't written the script yet.

(Don't get me started. The fact that Russian parties require scripts is one point on which my cross-cultural tolerance is very, very low.)

Thanksgiving Trip, Part 2 – Pskov, Izborsk, Pechory, Moscow

2007-12-08T19:23:00.001+03:00

Now I'm just procrastinating, and I'll probably regret it tomorrow when I have to do my whole weekend to-do list in one day, but... you can't work all the time, right? (If you could really call what I do "work.")

So after we returned from Estonia, I hung around Pskov for about two and a half days. It was pretty murky/icy/wet there (in fact, there may have been some swearing and a minor temper tantrum about this $#%* country and its @#$% lack of *!&@ functional sidewalks on the way back to Amara's apartment from the bus station), so the pictures aren't great, but here they are anyway.

Here's Pskov's kremlin. It's my favorite kremlin ever. It's really beautiful. See? Inside:

From the outside:

From the ramparts:

So Amara convinced me that it would be a good idea to climb up on the ramparts to get a good view of the river. I did so, not considering that I am a total wimp about jumping down from things (I'm afraid it'll hurt...), so there was a Moment in which I couldn't figure out how to get down and wouldn't let Wes help me. But they were patient:

And they even helped brush off my coat when I finally got down (the muddiest, but safest, way possible). Aww, what great friends!

We saw Wes off on the train to Moscow→Kazan, and the next day while Amara went to work, I took a day trip to Stary Izborsk and Pechory, two villages near Pskov.

Stary Izborsk (Old Izborsk) has the oldest stone fortress in Russia! It's from around the 13th century.

I was the only tourist there that day (it was snowing), so I had the place to myself. There's something to be said for wandering around old fortresses and villages completely alone. The silence was amazing. And when I did run into people (locals), they were all so friendly! It wasn't the most exciting tourist destination ever, but for those reasons, it was still well worth it.

Izborsk also has twelve springs named for twelve virtues (wealth, happiness, health, etc.). Or eleven virtues plus "the spring of maiden's tears," actually. They aren't labeled – you're just supposed to intuit which is which. I drank a tiny, tiny bit of the water (in case it does have magic properties) and immediately regretted it, being the cleanliness-obsessed American I am. No parasites yet, though, so hopefully I'm ok. On the other hand, I'm not measurably wealthier or healthier than before... but who knows which one I drank from?

Pechory, a name derived from the Russian word for "caves" (пещеры/peshchery), has the oldest continuously-functioning monastery in Russia. (It achieved that status by actually falling in Estonia, not the USSR, during the years between the World Wars, the time when most other religious establishments in the Soviet Union were being closed, looted and turned into museums of atheism.) It's also pretty geographically unusual – it's nestled in a ravine that used to house hermits' caves! Here's me in the skirt they made me put on over my pants:

A view from beyond the walls:

And the chapel (red building), holy well (green pavilion), and entrance to the caves (yellow building).

The former hermit caves are catacombs, and have been for centuries. The air inside allegedly preserves the bodies of the monks and famous/good people who are buried there. I couldn't go in because a) I wasn't in a tour group and b) I'm not Orthodox. I'm not so into lying about religion, but if a tour group had presented itself, I might have either tried, or tried to argue that being baptized Methodist is *practically* the same thing as being baptized Orthodox. Oh well. Caves are kind of creepy, anyway.

So that was Pechory. It was much cuter and more charming than my pictures captured, and if you're ever in the area, it's worth seeing.

When I left Pskov, I got to spend about 12 hours in Moscow between trains, during which time I wandered extensively:

(The Kremlin from Bolshoi Kamenny bridge – the Kremlin's not my favorite, but I have to admit it's pretty impressive looking) and finally visited the Tretyakov Gallery, probably Moscow's most important (and famous) art museum. Many of the treasures of Russian art are housed there, and it was fantastic to see them in person! Besides tons of nineteenth-century Russian art, I even saw Andrei Rublyov's famous Old Testament Trinity icon! By the end of the day, my feet were killing me, and I was happy to get on the train back to Taganrog. And thus ended my Thanksgiving trip. (Well, after another 17 hours on the train. But I was asleep for most of that.)

Teaser: my next trip should have even murkier photos, because if all goes as planned, it will be up to Murmansk (above the Arctic Circle!!!) sometime in late January. I can't wait!

Russia Votes for Putin

2007-12-08T12:19:00.000+03:00

Sorry it's been a while! It seems like as soon as I got back from Estonia, I got totally flooded with goals and deadlines: with Christmas shopping and knitting, institute Christmas party planning, finishing up the grad school applications I meant to finish back in October, writing another article for the institute's newspaper (I wrote an article entirely in Russian back in November, by the way! My first published work in Russian!), stepped-up balalaika practicing so I can give a "concert" when I go home (family, steel yourselves), and helping one of my students rush to submit a grant application to spend a year at a U.S. university, it seems like every waking hour this week has been allotted to the service of some pressing goal. Ha, and my students ask me if I get bored living alone in my cold little apartment. Not a chance.

Since my illegitimate free internet has vanished, I might not upload my Pskov pictures until I go home; instead, I bring you a Politics Post (yay!).

First up, devoted reader Paul asked me my thoughts about the recent Russian Duma election. Well, Paul, I'm glad you asked. I think. My thoughts are rather confused, but I'll do my best to at least condense a few of them here.

Having read the fascinating but rather one-sided Anna Politkovskaya, and being an American who, like many of my compatriots, maybe tends to put a little too much trust in the picture of the world the American media presents, I spent a lot of the run-up to these elections with a very sour outlook on Russian politics. Putin, who is adored by a large sector of the population, frankly terrifies me, and a lot of what you can read in American newspapers about the elections seemed to be confirmed by what I observed here. (If you haven't seen any news about the elections, Google it, you'll find plenty.)

I was especially shocked on my recent trip through Moscow and Pskov just a few days before the election. For some reason, United Russia, Russia's ruling party (and, at least since a few months ago, the party of Putin), didn't advertise all that much in Taganrog. Some billboards here and there, posters in every shop window, but nothing too blatant. (For Russia, I don't count posters in every shop window as blatant.) Moscow and Pskov, though, were both total United Russia lovefests. Enormous billboards on every block, flags on street lamps, banners hanging from buildings, and all for United Russia. The Western media says that opposition parties had a lot of trouble securing advertising space, and I can believe it – I saw a few LDPR and A Just Russia posters here and there, and a noteworthy smattering of Communist Party posters, but that was all. A Just Russia, while an alternative to United Russia, is in no way an "opposition" party, since it's also pro-Putin and was in fact created by the Kremlin. LDPR, which ironically stands for "liberal democratic party of Russia," is a nationalistic party whose leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, alternately spews misogynistic, anti-Semitic and Russian chauvinist venom in such a ridiculous manner that he's basically a caricature of himself. The party is mostly seen as a joke, so it serves the convenient function of an opposition party without posing a threat to United Russia's power. That means that except for the Communists, no real opposition parties (and others do exist) had any visible advertising.

As a friend mentioned in his analysis of the elections, United Russia's advertising really pressed the concept that a vote for United Russia is a vote for Putin. The reason for this was probably that while many Russians love Putin ("Putin is great. He's made Russia strong. That's why your media hates him. America wants Russia to be weak," is a refrain I've heard over and over and over), no one seems to like United Russia. Understandably – Russia doesn't exactly have a history of kind, loving ruling parties. This United Russia = Putin setup worked because of the structure of the election: each party prepared a list of candidates; voters then voted for a party, and the seats in parliament (the Duma) were divided according to the percentage of votes each party received nationwide (minimum requirement to get any seats at all is 7% of the vote, raised from 5% four years ago – according to Politkovskaya, this change was made to further silence opposition voices, since most opposition parties get very few votes). Based on that, the top one or two or ten or fifty names on a party's list actually get seats in the Duma. Putin was Name #1 on United Russia's list. This led to ads like a picture of a hand checking box number 10 on a ballot (United Russia's box), which had the United Russia logo and Putin's name in big letters; or the most blatant, an ENORMOUS (covering the entire side of a building) banner looming over Manezhnaya Square (right off Red Square) in Moscow that said, "Number 10 – Moscow Votes for PUTIN!" – no mention of United Russia at all. And what a prime location! Most amusing and confusing to me was a banner I saw hanging over a bridge in Moscow. It simply said:

Voting in the Duma elections proceeds by party lists! Vote for party and its leader!

Russian has no articles (a/the), so that could be translated as either "Vote for the Party and its leader," or "Vote for a party and its leader!" It wasn't clearly associated with any party, but it did have a Russian flag in the same squiggly shape as the Russian flag on the United Russia logo. Subtle psychological advertising, or am I reading too much into it? I really can't say.

At any rate, with my American indoctrination and the clearly lopsided advertising, I should have had very negative view of the elections. What ended up tempering this point of view? Well, human psychology, mostly. First of all, all of the Russians around me were utterly complacent about the election. As my boss at work said when I asked whether the mayor of Taganrog had been re-elected (which I'm sure he was, since I didn't even see any advertising for either of his opponents), "I have no idea. What does any of this matter? It's completely irrelevant." Most Russians seem to feel that life will proceed in more or less the same manner no matter which corrupt politicians are controlling the public coffers. At one point my students got into a heated argument about whether Putin was really good for Russia or not, but even that seemed to be a point of philosophy rather than a call to action. And it's surprisingly hard to feel worked up about something when everyone around you is saying it's nothing to be worked up about – you start to feel a bit crazy for caring.

Second, and more frightening, was how much I could feel myself relaxing my views when I watched Russian media. The television media is totally controlled by the state, so all the election news was very positive – except when they were talking about opposition leaders, of course. Even though I was consciously aware of the spin they were putting on it, I could tell that the constant association of United Russia and Putin with security, order, and positive emotions had an effect on me. Very 1984-ish.

By now I've done enough reading of American Russia scholars to know that many of them don't like the purely negative image of Russia the American media serves up, and I guess I tend to agree. Putin has done good things for Russia, or at least, good things have happened to Russia while Putin has been in power. All the same, I don't like the cult of personality that's been built around him, the media's insinuation that he's the only one who can lead Russia, or the general direction he's taken Russia in in terms of human rights and democracy. I'm especially suspicious of his dealings with the Chechen Wars and the related terrorist acts, and I'm not particularly impressed by his international relations skills, which seem to be built on strong-arming, bravado, and endlessly repeated rhetoric about not letting other nations push Russia around. And the elections? Despite the hypnotic power of the French and American election observers the news showed saying, "They were so clean! Very democratic!", I'm not ready to call them fair by a long shot.

(Well, that was long! I guess my Estonian political post will have to come separately.)

Eestimaa (Estonia) Adventures, Part the First

2007-12-01T23:19:00.000+03:00

I'm back! Sorry for the long silence. I was on a pseudo-Thanksgiving break trip to visit my friend Amara and spend a long weekend in Tartu, Estonia with her and another Fulbrighter, Wes. And now I'm going to tell you about it. Or at least, a little bit about it. I'll try to keep it readably short. But it was an amazing trip, so it'll be hard not to gush.

So, why did we choose to go to Tartu? Well. They say Tartu, a smallish city in the south of Estonia, is the "spiritual capital" of the country. It's historic and picturesque, with plenty to do and see. It's also a students' city, the home of Tartu University, which is the country's oldest and best; plus Amara and I had both already been to Tallinn, the capital.

But that begs the question: why Estonia? For me, there were two main attractions:
1. Crazy language. The Finno-Ugric group (including Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian) is one of the only language families in Europe that's not Indo-European, i.e., not at all related to other modern European languages;
2. Folk mitten-knitting tradition.
Linguistics and knitting? Sign me up! From trying to figure out the case system based on street signs and restaurant menus to drooling/squealing over handknits in souvenir shops and museums, I was basically in geeky paradise all weekend.

Estonia has many other draws, though: it's the most Europeanized of the post-Soviet states, very clean, modern, and well-off, with well-developed tourism; it's nearby, and both of the languages I can speak are widely spoken there; no visa is required for U.S. citizens; and finally, it's JUST SO DARN CUTE! Seriously, a very cute little country. A nice reprieve when the sprawling hulk of Russia is starting to weigh on you. (It happens to the best of us.)

And what did we do there? I could write a book about it, but it might be more interesting if you just take a look:

The center of Tartu's Old Town is Raekoja Plats, or Town Square. The pink building is the town hall.

All the streets in Old Town were like this. So cute!

Tartu's oldest Lutheran church. Estonia was under German control for much of its history, so the Reformation came here swiftly. The church is noteworthy for its more than 1000 original 16th-century (I think?) terra cotta figures.

Tartu Ülikool (Tartu University)'s main building, the "symbol of higher education in Estonia." There's an attic room where they used to lock students who broke the rules, with authentic 19th-century graffiti (mostly in German, the language of instruction until well after Estonian came to be recognized as a legitimate language and not just a local "peasant dialect" in the mid-1800's) still intact!

The hill in the center of town, Toome (dome) hill, has all sorts of interesting stuff, like the remnants of really, really old fortifications, plus the observatory where the idea for the Struve Geodetic Arc (it's ok, I didn't know what it was, either) was conceived...

...great views of the Old Town...

...Toomekirik (Dome Church), a Catholic church that lay in various states of disrepair for centuries after the Reformation took hold, and now houses the university museum (formerly the library) and a tower you can pay about a dollar to go up...

...an ancient sacrificial stone from Estonia's pre-Christian days...

...and a little hill called "Kissing Hill," where Wes proposed to me and I pretended to be surprised. (Note: not an actual proposal.)

All that wandering around outside made us hungry (and thirsty!). Fortunately, Tartu's restaurants, cafés and bars blow Russia's (even Moscow's, since you have to be an oligarch to afford to eat there) out of the water. Highlights included a French crepes café, three different marvelous coffee/pastry shops, a decent Indian place, a fun pub inside an old gunpowder cellar... and a bar called "Place Beer Colors." Maybe you can tell from the trippy name that this bar was trés hip. It specialized in beer cocktails (I had never had one before, but they're surprisingly delicious!), and each table had a button in the middle:

...which you could press to order a half pint of A Le Coq, the ubiquitous local brew. Fancy!

Oh, yeah, and when we weren't busy with wandering, food, or drink, we found time to stop by:
the Estonian Postal Museum
the botanical gardens
the Tartu Toy Museum
the 19th-century Citizen's Home Museum
the Estonian National Museum
and the Tartu City Museum.

That's a lot of culture for one weekend! The Tartu Toy Museum and the National Museum were particularly fantastic. The adorable toy museum had a collection of Russian wind-up toys; several dollhouses, including one built and furnished entirely during a father's decade-long hideout from the Soviets, for a daughter he had never met; wooden folk toys; bizarre Estonian puppets from the national puppet theater; an extensive stuffed dog collection; a cool-looking playroom for kids; and much more. It was so much fun! At the National Museum I kind of freaked out and took 25 pictures like this one:

Folk mittens galore! I also bought two pattern books from the museum shop, so Estonian folk mittens may soon be coming to a pair of hands near you! (If you would like them to come to a pair of hands on you, holler.)

Okay, photo show is over... for now. For more pictures, you can check my facebook page or bug me when I get home for Christmas (so soon, I can hardly believe it!). And check back for some brief thoughts on Estonian history and the Estonia-Russia relationship, which is hopefully interesting to someone other than me. And after that, pictures from the Russian half of the trip: Pskov, Izborsk, Pechory, and even a little bit of Moscow!

A Thanksgiving Excerpt: In Search of Turkey

2007-11-21T01:17:00.001+03:00

This entry is not perfect - for one thing, it's really long - but I'm leaving tomorrow for a vacation in ESTONIA (woo!) and I wanted to post it before I left. Enjoy, and have a great Thanksgiving, everyone!

Turkey is not, to me, the most important part of the Thanksgiving meal, and I would have happily just left it off my party menu. But in all of my classes, the first thing my students said when I asked what they knew about Thanksgiving was, "You eat a big turkey!" I figured I would be in trouble if I didn't produce the bird, so I scouted out the market.

The place at the market where you go to buy meat is charmingly called the "meat pavilion." Here I should mention that I am sort of living a vegetarian lifestyle (without being a "vegetarian" in the moral sense – I eat meat if someone serves it to me), so I hadn't been in the meat pavilion yet, and looking at raw meat isn't something I'm really used to. When I got there, I found that it smelled overwhelmingly like raw meat, there were stray dogs roaming the aisles, and it was full of rows and rows of men hawking meat laid right out on tables in the open air. They all seemed to be selling the same two things, too:
a) cat-sized mammals, completely skinned except for one black paw that was left on so that you could tell they weren't cats; and
b) chickens, uniformly displayed in such a way that you got a nice view down their necks and could admire how great their internal organs looked.

Eww. I later found out that those mammals are nutrias. Nutrias? Yes. Nutrias. Anyway, I also found several turkeys, but since I don't know how to cook a whole bird, my oven is about the size of a standard microwave, and there's no room in my fridge for a whole turkey, I decided that wasn't going to work. I picked a nice, easy stovetop recipe for turkey breast tenderloins with caramelized onions instead. Unfortunately, I only found one turkey breast tenderloin in the whole of the glorious meat pavilion, sitting unwrapped and rather freezer-burned in a freezer case that was otherwise full of poultry organs. This was on my Wednesday scouting mission. I returned to the same freezer case on Friday and asked the attendant if she had any turkey breast.

"Oh, sure," she says, reaching in deep past the piles of chicken hearts and excising from some hidden crevice the same breast I saw on Wednesday.
I wrinkle my nose. "Is that the only one you have?"
"Yes, it's the last one. But it's fresh. Extremely fresh, even. We just got it in, actually. See, it doesn't smell at all. And look how high-quality it is, nice and fatty."
Just the fact that she was saying this about such a sad-looking hunk of meat was, I felt, an insult to my intelligence; add in the fact that as she said it, she was brushing off all the bits of freezery gunk stuck to it, and the nutria-induced queasiness I was already feeling, and I just couldn't buy.
"It's OLD," I said, and stalked away.

The next day – the day of the party – I returned to the meat pavilion, hoping one of the other freezers would have some turkey. Alas, it was not so, and I returned defeated to the same freezer. As luck would have it, the same woman was working, and believe me, she just exuded glee as she informed me that their turkey breast had sold yesterday, and wasn't I sorry now that I had called it old and refused to buy it? I sighed and told her she was right (even though she wasn't), and asked if they had any other turkey. "Just wings," she said, showing me one. They looked acceptable. Wings, breast – what's the difference? I bought two, anxious to get home and get cooking. It was only as I was walking away and she said, "I know you'll be happy with them. They make great soup," that I realized my mistake. In all of my Thanksgiving dinners (and I've had a lot, because my family eats two every year), I don't think I've ever eaten, or even seen, a turkey wing. And if they're used for soup, that probably means they're not all that meaty or the meat's not all that good. I peeked into the bag. My suspicions appeared to be confirmed.

This mistake on my part just galvanized me: I was going to make a good turkey dish if it killed me. I returned to the scary nutria-filled, non-freezer half of the pavilion and, without even trying to haggle, plunked down 600 rubles (24 dollars!) for the smallest turkey I could find (5.5 kilos, or 12 pounds).

I then spent a good hour or so bent over the illustrated how-to guide in my Betty Crocker cookbook, hacking away at this poor turkey with the only sharpish knife I have, trying desperately to extract some nice breast tenderloins (how can something be both a breast and a tenderloin? I'm still not clear on that). Since this is an instance in which saying that I totally butchered it might imply that I did the job well, I will be specific: I butchered it in the figurative sense. It was like, I don't know, a turkey horror film or something. I gave up on Betty around step four, when she instructs you to cut through all the rib joints on either side of the spine (Betty, you say that like it's even possible to FIND the rib joints) and started bushwhacking, with surprising success. But if there's some entry-level FSB hack in charge of spying on me, he or she definitely got a good laugh that day.

So in the end (sorry, I'm tired and this is getting long, so it is not going to have an exciting conclusion) the recipe turned out fine, or at least my guests said it did (I didn't eat any of it), but I was left with the rest of the turkey which did not fit in my fridge. Being a cheapskate by nature, I cringe to admit this, but I coarsely hacked apart the rest of that $24 turkey and fed it to the cats that live outside my apartment building. As for the wings, they were taking up my entire freezer, so last night I made them into turkey broth, which is now taking up less than my entire freezer. All's well that ends well, I guess. But if there suddenly appears a holiday that requires roasting a nutria, I am putting my foot down.

Happy Anniversary!

2007-11-20T23:32:00.000+03:00

Remember that time I got hit by a car?

Well, I sure do. And it was one year ago today!

Waiting for the ambulance at the neighborhood triage point, Utkinskaya Street, Vladivostok.

I'm surprisingly excited about that. On the one hand, the ensuing broken leg fiasco was pretty miserable in many ways. But on the other hand, it was definitely an adventure all the way – from flying through the air at the intersection of Okeanskii and Fokina, to two nights in a Russian hospital and a brief moment in the sun as the focus of an embassy panic, to my "medical evacuation" on three first-class flights that got me out of Russia and across the Pacific in time for Thanksgiving dinner at Grandma's, to readapting to life in America from the vantage point of my mom's chair in the family room, to getting packages and visits from caring friends, to surgery and physical therapy and finally to my triumphal return to Russia, a whirlwind winter tour of Pskov, Petersburg and Moscow on a crutch.

It was boring at times, and there were a few low points where all I could feel was soul-crushingly sorry for myself (never a good way to feel), but so many people were so, so nice to me. Especially my friends in Vladivostok, who went to the hospital with me, brought me food and things to do, railed against the crappy driver who hit me, tried to talk some sense into me when I said I wasn't going to go home, and ultimately packed up my stuff for me and sent me off with tears and homemade blini. Those three days would have been a total nightmare without them. And my parents, who not only put up with their cranky, immobile daughter reinvading their house, but basically did everything for me for two whole months without complaining even once. Thanks, guys! I really appreciate how great you are.

So anyway, I look back on it now without any real sense of regret or sadness. It made my year just a little more bizarre, I guess, and now it's a good story, capable of shocking and horrifying pretty much anyone. I'm not a very shocking/horrifying person on the whole, so it's good to have in my arsenal.

And because I believe that you can never be too dorky (well, maybe you can, but I haven't hit my ceiling yet), I got out an eyeliner pencil and decided to show you how my knee is feeling:

Thanksgiving!

2007-11-17T20:47:00.000+03:00

I didn't disappear! I've been really busy because I decided on Wednesday to throw a Thanksgiving dinner today (Saturday). (I'll be out of town on Thanksgiving proper.) I sort of made that decision on a whim, and while I don't regret it, I definitely didn't find out until about a day after I made it just what I had gotten myself into. I've spent all of my free time the last three days cooking and cleaning, staying up past 1 am two nights in a row to get stuff done (long past my usual granny-bedtime).

But it was worth it, because it went really well!! (Except for the squash casserole, which no one ate. I think they were afraid of it.)Anyway, the last of my twelve guests just left, and now it's time to do the most pressing cleaning up, like reassembling my couch-bed and putting away leftovers. Then do nothing for awhile. That sounds like a great idea.

Anyway, this holiday involved many amusing and blog-worthy adventures, which I'll share in a while.

Veterans Day

2007-11-11T18:35:00.000+03:00

Since most of you know me in real life, you probably already know that I have a brother who is serving in Iraq. I'd like to share something he wrote in his latest email update:

Before I tuck myself under my cadet green blanket for the night, I would like to ask a favor of you all. As Veteran's Day approaches, most of America will celebrate with a day off or perhaps the purchase of a new car. As Americans, we enjoy the truly rare luxury of an all-volunteer military force. While it means that those who wish to do other things with their lives are free to do so, it also means that much of America is totally disconnected from her own military. There was a time when everyone knew a veteran. Now, the veterans are harder to find. Without putting too fine a point on it, for all the sturm and drang over the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, most Americans are untouched by the harshest realities of the conflict. While it's comforting to know that our country is not embroiled in daily misery over the war, it does highlight the disconnect between the country and the military.

Most people would be surprised to learn (as I was) that the number of veterans of both conflicts numbers over 1.5 million. It's well known that almost 4,000 servicemembers have been killed in Iraq. However, the advances in medical care on the battlefield have meant that those who would have died of wounds even ten years ago now survive. But they survive to face the loss of limbs, eyesight, and even cognitive function. In the past four years over 9,000 servicemembers have been evacuated from Iraq with traumatic injuries. Many of you often ask what to send us to support the troops, which is always appreciated. But my request of you this Veteran's Day is to take the time and money you would spend to send a care package and use it to support those warriors who are back on American shores. The Wounded Warriors Project is a group which provides support, care, and comfort to wounded veterans and their families. They assist family members in the months following a traumatic injury, allowing them the financial wherewithal to travel across the country to their loved one and stay by his/her side at Walter Reed or Brooke Army Medical Center, not to mention the support and comfort they give to the wounded. Please consider making a small donation to their efforts. There are many, many families of soldiers who have been through terrible pain as a result of their loved one's service. So in lieu of a care package, please take some time this Veteran's Day to support our recovering veterans.

I felt a little hesitant about posting this; having family in the military and having gone to a pretty liberal university, I've felt the heat of the dialectic of this war more than many civilians, and it's not something I enjoy or seek out. Is supporting veterans a political act? I can't answer that question for anyone else, but from my point of view, it's first and foremost an act of kindness.

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"You think you have it bad? You should see how bad things are for X!" During my time in Russia, I've been tempted to say this over and over again (about pollution, race relations, women's rights, and a slew of other problems that Russia faces at ten times the scale of America), but by now I've realized that if it's ever a healthy attitude, it's only healthy in very small doses. Nonetheless, I'd still like to share a little bit of what I know of the Russian army. As my brother mentions, we do live with the luxury of an all-volunteer military force. Luxury or basic human right; no matter what it ought to be in an ideal world, I never had much perspective on what a luxury it really is in our world until I came to Russia, where people often react with shock and disbelief when I tell them that no one in America is forced to serve.

The Russian military still works by conscription, and many young men do whatever they can to get out of service. That may sound cowardly, but after all the horror stories I've heard about the army here, I can't judge them. Hazing of new conscripts is rampant in the army, and it sometimes results in death. Anna Politkovskaya collected plenty of accounts, but I can provide examples even without resorting to the writings of a journalist many in Russia are ready to automatically discredit as blinded by bias. (If you're interested in her accounts, you can find them in A Russian Diary.) My friend Sasha, who grew up in a village not far from here, had a schoolmate who voluntarily enlisted after graduating. Sasha says he talked enthusiastically about serving in the army, but after only a few months, "he returned in a coffin." According to Sasha, it was a case of suicide after excessive hazing; Politkovskaya maintained that many such "suicides" are cover-ups of cases of accidental death during hazing. Either way, it's horrific.

Furthermore, Russia's messy, drawn-out wars in Chechnya have been the stage for unspeakable atrocities (on both sides, as the Russians I meet who are even willing to speak about Chechnya are quick to point out). Again, Politkovskaya devoted a lot of ink to this topic, especially to the fates of those who return from service in Chechnya, and again, her version matches what ordinary Russians I know have to say. In short, those who return from Chechnya return psychologically broken – stereotypically, they become alcoholics, drug abusers and criminals, and it's not long before many of them end up in prison. They receive a little help from the government – about 40 bucks a month and special privileges like free bus passes and stamps – but that's all. No one wants to associate with a veteran, much less hire one, since it's considered likely that he's unbalanced. Armless or legless veterans slumped on the street or wheeling themselves onto metro cars to beg for change are a common sight. Russia still lacks a tradition of large-scale social movements, and those who want to help these young men (and women, but mostly men) really struggle to do so.

So on this Veterans Day, I'm feeling especially thankful that I come from a country where the military is professional and accountable, and a society that values social awareness, activism, and a free press. In my country, people don’t ignore wars they find unjust – they shout at each other about them. Any whiff of corruption or scandal is splashed across the front pages of the newspapers; and as my brother mentions, almost everyone knows how many Americans have died in Iraq. It can get overwhelming, and there are certainly those who long for those good old days when the world was black and white and wars were causes that uniformly united the nation. (Was that ever really the case?) And plenty of us wish we didn't have quite so much corruption splashing across those newspaper pages. But it's a lot better than silence, and my time in Russia has taught me that sadly, that's still an alternative in the world today.

2007-11-11T10:13:00.000+03:00

While sitting here wondering why the call from Martha Stewart inviting me to co-author a cookbook hadn't come yet, it occurred to me that there's one thing most good food blogs have that mine doesn't have... Thanks to Julia for that second link!

If your first thought was, "a good cook," you are correct! But you're also a smart aleck. What I was thinking of is pictures!

It's actually pretty difficult to make food look appetizing, surprisingly enough. It seems like there are always splashes or splots or crumbs to deal with. But I did what I could with the not-so-abundant natural light we have around here (cloudy, cloudy, cloudy, every single day), and now my borscht post (scroll down) has some pictures.

Another post is coming later today, with actual content, so check back!

Genderbending Wordplay, or One More Thing I Don’t Get about Russian

2007-11-08T21:02:00.000+03:00

Russian past-tense verbs are marked for gender and number, but not person. That means there are four forms for every past tense verb, for example:

упасть/upast' – to fall.

упал/upal – fell-masc.
I fell (if the speaker is male), you fell (if 'you' refers to a male), he fell, it fell (for objects that are grammatically masculine).

упала/upala – fell-fem.
I fell (if the speaker is female), you fell (if 'you' refers to a female), she fell, it fell (for objects that are grammatically feminine).

упало/upalo – fell-neut.
it fell (for objects that are grammatically neuter), fell (in subjectless constructions).

упали/upali – fell-plur.
We fell, you (plural) fell, you (singular formal) fell, they fell.

Got it? Ok. Just two small observations:

1. This gender marking causes problems for little kids, like a boy I saw in the library who was running around shouting, "I'm leaving! I'm leaving!" (Past tense – to say "I'm leaving," you say, "I've set off.") Except he was using the feminine form. His grandma gently corrected him: Я пошёл, солнышко. Ты - мальчик. ("[correct masculine form], honey. You're a boy.") In a country where the task of raising children falls mostly to women, I have to wonder if a lot of Russian toddlers take longer to gain command of the masculine past tense form than the feminine. Hmm.
Edit: I realized this probably isn't that clear to most people. What I mean is that children who hear women say "I + [feminine verb]" all the time and rarely hear men say "I + [masculine verb]" could get confused about whether the past tense -a ending marks gender or person. But after thinking it over, I don't think that's all that likely.

2. Today I was sitting in the foreign languages department when one of the other teachers got up to leave. "Ok, I'm leaving," she said – except she used the masculine form! When she left, I asked the remaining teacher, a Russian language professor, why she had done that. She explained: "Everywhere we go, we have to speak properly. All day long, nothing but speaking properly. Sometimes you just want to let go and play around with the language a little. If you say something like that, and people know that you actually know how to speak correctly, it's funny. It's funny to say the wrong thing in moderation." I was dissatisfied with this explanation. I mean, I don't understand what exactly is funny about it. Maybe that's because we don't have an equivalent in English – something you can say that would be grammatical if you were someone else, but isn't if you're you. So I wonder: (a) if speakers of other morphologically rich languages do the same thing; and (b) if it's primarily gender marking, rather than, say, number marking or case marking, that gets played with. And if so, do men do it, too? HMM. I'm intrigued.

(You can tell by all the posts that I've had a lot of work to do/procrastinate on. Hope you're enjoying it!)

And an Amusing Addendum

2007-11-06T20:46:00.000+03:00

PS – I recently noticed that I apparently picked the right title for this blog. There was a mermaid in the Sea of Azov at some point (and by “a mermaid” I mean “a tabloid story about an alleged washed-up mermaid”), and now a few people a week find my blog by Googling «азовская русалка.» So it's a good thing I've clarified that I'm not a mermaid; wouldn't want to confuse anyone.

And by the way, if you verb a proper noun like Google, do you end up with... a proper verb? If so, is that a relatively new animal, or are there older examples of such neologisms that I just can't think of at the moment? And is it still called a neologism if it's just a recategorization of an existing word into a different part of speech?

Ok, I'm done wasting time now. Over and out!

The Cold War(s) Continue, Or Pride Cometh Before a Fall (in Temperature)

2007-11-06T20:15:00.000+03:00

This morning my landlady thoughtfully called me just as I was walking out the door (how does she do that?) to inform me that it was -2 degrees (28.4 degrees Fahrenheit) outside and that I should wear a hat to work. I rolled my eyes a little, but heeded her advice. Because actually, -2 degrees does feel pretty cold right now. Plus, I think it's safe to assume that I would have been in for a scolding at work if I had walked in with no hat on.

I would like to say to the weather: what is this?! This is supposed to be the south. I was expecting -2 degrees, yes, but not for another month or so. So I think the weather is mocking me – it must have heard me say that I’m not going to buy a warmer coat and decided to show me how cocky I was being about the local climate. Fine. Whatever. I was wrong, but I’m not going to break. (Southern) Russian winter, go ahead and hit me with everything you’ve got – I know how to knit, and I'm not afraid of you.

Borscht!

2007-11-04T19:38:00.000+03:00

Borscht! Comrades, we have missed our window of opportunity for to kill Doug!
-Svetlana Rootski, 'Neath the Elms (If you don't get the reference, don't worry... it's not worth explaining.)

Lately, my procrastination/relaxation method of choice has been cooking, and surprisingly, my recent experiments have mostly been in the realm of soup. (I've spent most of my life hating all soups except plain Campbell's tomato.) So far I've made a decent but too-thick split pea glop, a tragically overspiced pumpkin lentil soup, and some vegetable stock, and today I decided to try out borscht, a Ukrainian soup that's a standard of the Russian diet. It's delicious, and it contains two vegetables – beets and cabbage – that I think are underutilized in the U.S. (Note: I have no idea why the word "borscht" usually has a -t on the end, since the Russian word, борщ/borsch, doesn't. Maybe the word was borrowed through Yiddish.)

I've had a recipe for borscht for more than a year now, written out for me by a friend and sometime student in Vladivostok, but I've put off trying it because 1) like many Russian recipes, no amounts are given; and 2) it requires making beef stock, which I never really felt prepared to do (I don't even know how to buy red meat, much less cook it, and canned broth isn't available here). But now that I've become acquainted with the art of soup-making and have seen a few other borscht recipes that did give amounts, I decided I could try it out. I replaced the beef stock with vegetable stock, because I still don't know how to make beef stock, and I don't really do meat in general nowadays. That doesn't make it inauthentic – meaty borscht is much more common (and quite tasty), but some Russians do make it without meat.

Although I feel like borscht is usually identified by its beetiness, you actually only need one medium beet, julienned. Boil it in 3 cups of water with a quarter cup of vinegar, a tablespoon of sugar, and a teaspoon of salt until it's tender. I boiled it for about half an hour and it was still a little too firm for my taste. Drain.

While the beet is boiling, cook three medium-sized carrots, cubed, and two small onions, chopped, in a tablespoon of oil. Set all this aside.

Boil one third of a head of green cabbage, shredded, and three smallish potatoes, julienned, in 2 quarts of vegetable stock for 10-15 minutes; add the beet and sautéed vegetables and some spices and cook another 10 minutes or so. I used a spice blend called "spices for Ukrainian borscht," which contains dill, salt, pepper, paprika, parsley, celery seed and dried onion – I think the dill is the most important part for making it authentically borschty. I also added about 2 tablespoons of vinegar because I didn't think it tasted quite as sour as it should. Also, my vegetables-to-stock ratio was really high, and I would probably add another half liter (=1 pint) of liquid if I had a bigger pot.

Before serving, add chopped fresh garlic (I skipped this part because I don't like raw garlic), and top each bowl of soup with a dollop of sour cream and fresh chopped parsley and dill if you have them. Voila!

(After making this beautiful pot of more or less authentic borscht, I completely bastardized it by adding two cups of cooked kidney beans to make it more filling. Russians usually eat soup as the first part of a meal, but I eat it (with some bread) as a whole meal, so without the meat I felt like beans were a good addition. Plus I just really like the combination of cabbage and kidney beans.)

In from the Cold

2007-11-03T20:58:00.000+03:00

It feels like ages since I've written! I guess that's partly because I've been writing fairly regularly for the last few months, and partly because this was emotionally a pretty long week. Bad news from home, continued gross weather, and a very stressful Halloween party combined to make me pretty miserable for several days, but things perked up immensely toward the end of the week, and I'm feeling not just not-bad-anymore, but actually really good now.

So. The windows in most Soviet apartment buildings, quite frankly, suck. They're old and made of wood, which means they're warped and usually don't shut all the way anymore. The paint on the casements is thick, uneven, chipping, and probably lead-based. Also, there was apparently a shortage of painter's tape in Soviet times, because the window glass is always streaked with paint and the locks have big spatters – sometimes so big that they prevent the lock from working properly – on them. The paint is mostly an aesthetic issue, but the warping is definitely structurally problematic, especially in windy seaside cities like Vladivostok and Taganrog.

So when cold weather comes, people deal with their leaky windows in one of two ways. The lucky ones can afford to renovate their apartment with "plastic windows." (When I first heard this term, I thought it meant the glass was plastic, but it actually refers to the casements.) Plastic windows are ALL the rage in Russia right now, often the first thing home renovators splurge on. They seal. They lock. They don't require paint. "Do you have plastic windows?" is one of the first questions that comes up when the conversation turns to apartments; an answer of yes, it is understood, translates to a warm, happy home, while an answer of no translates to freezing your butt off.

Or it would translate to freezing your butt off, if the crafty Russians hadn't come up with a draft-stopping solution. (Of course they came up with a draft-stopping solution. They believe that living in a drafty apartment is tantamount to suicide.) Starting in September, folks around here started making noises about taping their windows shut for the winter. At first I was confused, but never fear! I didn't have to wait long for them to start warning me to tape my own windows for the winter and explaining exactly how to do it. Some recommended regular clear tape; others swear by masking tape; still others advised getting my hands on some special insulated window-taping tape.

I missed all this last year because I spent the fall and winter in a nice, renovated dorm. But this year, I live in a real Soviet apartment, and my windows are the crappiest of the crappy. The ones in the kitchen have half-inch gaps even when you close them as tightly as you can, and the locks don't work. (Don't worry, I live on the ninth floor.) By last weekend, despite fairly warm outdoor temperatures, my apartment was unlivably cold. Too lazy/busy to tape, I tolerated it by wearing my hooded sweatshirt on top of a wool sweater, but when I had a student over for tea on Saturday and she nearly froze to death, I decided something had to be done.

This meant a trip to my favorite men's-only hardware store, where I got foam padding and two-inch wide masking tape (I made this difficult choice based on the fact that it was the first kind of tape I found). I cut the padding into strips, taped them into the cracks in my windows for heavy-duty draft blockage, got maybe a little overzealous and caulked the hinges of the leakiest window (the padding wouldn't go in), and presto! raised the temperature in my kitchen at least ten degrees Fahrenheit in thirty short minutes. My landlord came by the next day to empty the air out of my radiators (this is a continuing saga, because everyone else's air apparently rises into my radiators, preventing the hot water from reaching me and heating my apartment) and praised my work. Gold star for me!

The next day, to solve the non-functioning heater problem, I bought a little electric oil-filled radiator, and gave my advisor nervous fits by carrying it home by myself. (I still don't see what the problem with that is.) And now, finally, my apartment is toasty warm. Except that now that the door to my balcony, which was at least as leaky as the windows, is sealed off, the electric heater is shut in my bathroom with my wet laundry, making the bathroom toasty warm so the clothes dry faster. Not very energy-efficient, but then, the other option is waiting a week for my clothes to dry every time I do laundry.

Next cold-related task: convincing my advisor, who shamed me into switching my fall polarfleece jacket for my winter coat this past week, that said winter coat is thick enough to see me through the Taganrog winter alive. I've survived both Ohio and Connecticut winters in it, plus a very, very cold few days in Petersburg last January, so somehow I think it'll be ok. But she thinks I'm out of my mind. And so the battle of the cultural attitudes toward cold continues.

Dorky Music Moment

2007-10-28T08:01:00.000+03:00

I was pretty surprised when my balalaika teacher said on Friday that we were going to practice flagellato. In turn, he was pretty surprised that I didn't appear to know what flagellato was. When he showed me, I realized that I did know what flagellato was – the problem is that we don't use the Italian word for it. This happens a lot: he's always asking me silly questions like, "Do you know what forte and piano mean?," because Russian and English don't borrow all of the same music terms from Italian, and it's hard to know which ones will be shared by the two languages. Anyway, flagellato is playing on the harmonics!

In this context, harmonics are the special spots on a string where, if you apply a light touch (not pressing the string all the way down like you do to play a normal note) and pluck just so, a high-pitched "ghost note" will sound. To explain rather vaguely, they have to do with dividing the string into even ratios like 1:1 or 1:3. (Yeah, physics was never my favorite subject.) Bassists use harmonics to tune their instruments, since you can get the same harmonic note by touching different spots on different strings. That way, you can tune your A and D strings to each other by playing a harmonic A on both of them and matching the pitch.

So the exciting thing here is that there's a balalaika technique called "artificial harmonics." The only "natural" harmonics you can reliably get on a balalaika are octaves and fifths above the open string – others exist, just like on any length of taut string, but they're hard to coax out. Not to be deterred from playing entire melodies on harmonics, enterprising balalaechniki came up with an alternative wherein instead of using your left hand to divide the open string into the proper ratio and your right hand to pluck, you finger any ordinary note with your left hand, touch the string at the octave of that note with the index finger of your right hand, and pluck with your right thumb. Voila! Harmonics of any note you please! Maybe physics should be my favorite subject!

Выступление и наказание, часть 2–я

2007-10-26T17:25:00.000+04:00

So I get to the conference and the woman in charge greets Seth and introduces herself to me.
"You'll be presenting in English, right?" she asks.
"Yes," I say.
"Ok," she replies, and turns to Seth. "And you - you'll be presenting in Russian, I hope?"

Now, she clearly has no reason to assume that I don't speak Russian, especially since she knows Seth does and we both have the same position. (Potential reason(?): I look like I'm twelve. This is an ongoing theme in my life. I forgot to mention that when Amara and I went to the Chekhov museum, they tried to sell me a high school student ticket.) But since this is what I wanted, I don't complain. In fact, I do a little inner cartwheel that things turned out so well on the English-presenting front and take my seat.

BUT, I should know better than to ever think anything is going well until it's over and all danger of anything going wrong is completely past. (This is kind of a Russian attitude - I mean, we're talking a culture where you aren't supposed to celebrate anyone's birthday even one day in advance, in case they die before their real birthday.) I get up to the podium and this woman introduces me... and then says that she'll be translating for me.

GRR! If she had said that when I walked in, I would have told her I'd do it in Russian and brought my Russian notes up to the podium. But she didn't, so I didn't. I got through it fine, and in fact it was way better than my last translating experience, but I've learned my lesson: from this day forward, I will always ask what the working language of the conference is before I write my whole presentation in English.

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Today it's a dark, rainy, gray day, the kind we've been having for about two weeks straight now. It's perfect for setting that nice gloomy autumnal mood, but I'm getting a little tired of it. Maybe that's partly because the radiator in my apartment doesn't really seem to work unless I drain all the smelly brown radiator-water (and accumulated air - does it accumulate air because they turn our water off every night at midnight?) out of it every day. AWESOME.

Also, yesterday's class: one student. Today's class: one student. English club: three students (two of whom were the students from yesterday's and today's classes). Tomorrow's class: being Saturday, one student *if* I'm lucky. I don't mind one-on-one work, but sometimes, especially on gloomy days like today, I wonder just who I'm here for.

Anyway, it's balalaika lesson time, which is bound to cheer me up even though I have to walk through the rain to get there! (I know, I shouldn't say that until all chance that my balalaika lesson will somehow kill me has passed.)

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Edited, 8pm, for content and to add that the balalaika lesson did cheer me up. In fact, it was a great lesson. Take that, gloomy day!

Bыступление и наказание

2007-10-25T22:48:00.000+04:00

(That title doesn't translate at all – it means "presentation and punishment." But in Russian, "presentation/vystuplenie" sounds almost exactly like "crime/prestuplenie" - get it?)

Since starting out as an ETA, I've had to get up in front of people and talk more times than I can count. Maybe that seems obvious, since – duh – I'm a teacher, but even if you take out all the lessons I've led, I've still made at least two dozen presentations. There was the time I had to present my senior project research to the phonetics department at DVGU and ended up getting drunk on Soviet champagne beforehand (no, it's really called Soviet champagne); the time I had to speak about Emily Dickinson at a poetry reading; the times (four) I've had to give "Welcome to the World of English" speeches to students or prospective students; the times (two, once in English and once in Russian) I've had to talk about my Iceland research at scientific conferences; the time I had to give a surprise lecture to local English teachers on English grammar (I did not talk about English grammar – I still wouldn't know a gerundive if it bit me); the time I had to talk about American Fulbright programs for Russians... the list goes on and on.

That was one of the things that scared me most about Fulbright – we went to the orientation before coming to Russia, and returning grantees talked about having to make stuff up about Che Guevara or the mortgage system like it was no big deal, and everyone else seemed to think it was no big deal, but I felt sure that I would rather be poked relentlessly with sharp objects than have to stand up in front of people and talk about something I didn't feel qualified to talk about. This begs the question of whether I was really the right choice for English Teaching Assistant, but now that I'm a safe fourteen months in, I think it's a moot point.

And besides, teaching pretty much squishes that fear response within a few weeks (although I still have days every now and then where I just don't feel like my lesson plan is solid enough and I consider running and locking myself in the teachers' bathroom), so by now I'm so used to getting up and talking in front of people that I actually volunteer to do it. Take tomorrow, for example. I am going to Rostov, purely out of the goodness of my heart (ok, and the promise of McBreakfast), to speak at a conference on improving Russian higher education in the humanities based on American standards.

This is something I actually am qualified to talk about, at least sort of, since I know plenty about both American and Russian higher education. So where's the problem? Umm, the problem is that I'm lazy and didn't start writing the Russian version of my presentation until today. About the time I got to the third paragraph (1.5 hours in) and realized that I just don't know how to translate "grade point average" (either words or concept) and had already used the same phrase for "to give a grade" four times in two sentences, I texted Seth and asked him to tell them I had come down with malaria. He responded: "Give the talk in English and they will love it."

Hmm. Why didn't I think of that? I guess now that I've given two talks in Russian more or less successfully, I feel like I have to do it in Russian. Amara confirmed this when I complained to her of my translating woes: "If you have time, do it in Russian!" she texted back. Crap. On the one hand, I feel like she's right – nothing makes you feel lamer than being the only person at the entire conference who doesn't present in Russian, even if you are one of only two foreigners present. But on the other hand, I can't say nearly as much in 10 minutes of Russian as I can in 10 minutes of English, what I do say will have lots of mistakes in it, presenting in Russian means standing there reading from my notes while presenting in English does not, and I can't express myself clearly in Russian, at least on the issue of the American grading system. (I can definitely express myself clearly on the issue of drivers who don't stop for pedestrians in crosswalks, as that guy in the green Volga found out today.) So, is it really worth the ego stroke of being able to say that I speak Russian well enough to present at a conference, if I actually... don't?

I'll let you know when I decide. Trouble is, I just remembered that there is one bad thing that can happen if I show up and refuse to give the talk in Russian: they could assign me a translator on the fly. That happened to me once before. She knew more about Emily Dickinson than I did, or thought she did, so she kept embellishing what I was saying and saying things in Russian that I had wanted to be my next sentence in English. It was SO horrible. So I think I'll at least make some notes I could stumble through in Russian, in case of emergency. And now, I'm going to go give myself a gold star for wasting half an hour writing this instead of working on those notes.

In memoriam, etc.

2007-10-20T22:39:00.000+04:00

Let's have a moment of silence for my long hair (may it rest in peace on the floor of the big barbershop in the sky). Yes, it's the anniversary of my most drastic and worst haircut ever; those of you who were reading my blog last year might remember this haircut. If you reread that old post, ignore the part where I said I liked it. I was just being optimistic. It was a TERRIBLE haircut, and I spent the better part of the year growing it out. Fortunately, the true low point of the style came in late November, when I was unable to walk and didn't care what I looked like.

But by now, I can look back on it all with amusement (the haircut, not the broken leg), and I celebrated the anniversary yesterday by getting a trim. Perhaps fittingly, this trim was basically a version of the haircut Laura suggested I get on that fateful day last year, when I didn't listen to her and instead asked the stylist to copy a cut I had seen on a model in a knitting magazine (lesson learned: get knitting patterns, not haircuts, from knitting magazines). So now my hair is as short as possible in the back without resorting to razors (I articulated this desire at the salon by saying "as short as possible without bzzz bzzz" – not fluent, but effective communication), angling down to chin length in the front. Nice.

On to other things: the Moldovan wine last night was good. It was homemade, and I don't know if it wasn't fully fermented, or just weaker than regular wine, but it tasted like more of a grape juice/wine hybrid than straight-up wine. Good thing, too, since they kept pouring me more and more.

Finally: Amara's visit was wonderful! It's hard to say what the best part was, but I think the part that I was most surprised about was our trip to Tanais. It's a really interesting little dig/museum, we got to interact with a drunk old guy who thought we were Russian (I brought out my Ukrainian alter-ego, Olesya, again; Amara became Tamara→Toma→Tomochka, although not by choice), the sun finally came out after hiding all week, we met some friendly stray puppies at the train station, and the train ride back to the city along the coast was beautiful.

The dig site. Excavated walls from the Greek settlement 3rd century BCE – 5th century CE (this part being from the 2nd or 3rd century CE).

Not an excavated tower – just a reconstruction – but it shows how nice the weather got.

Some impressions of the rest of the week:
Rostov: Georgian food and Updike read-alongs!
Azov: Rain. Cold. Mammoth skeleton! Misbehaving Russian child. Drunk women stealing begonias from city gardens! Old fort walls!
Taganrog: Chekhov-palooza! Silly seaside photo shoot, discovery of a delicious Chinese restaurant.
Boris Moiseev: Is this guy for real? Heart-shaped Russian flags. "Live sound" that clearly was not live. His parting benediction: "May you always be happy and loved during this short, beautiful word: life. And as for me, I will continue to get down on my knees and pray to God that not one bitch (!) ever keep us from living, loving, singing and dancing." Umm? ...Definitely worth the price of admission, though.

Take a deep breath and repeat: "Your problem is not my problem."

2007-10-19T19:23:00.000+04:00

For Pete's sake, I should have taken up the domra... What is it with people wanting English lessons in exchange for balalaika lessons?

Not my teacher, Mikhail Semyonovich, of course. I can't imagine he'd have any use for English. But he seems to have told a colleague of his that I'd tutor her grown son, who works with computers and wants to "perfect his spoken English."

I did my best to politely explain that according to the terms of my grant, I'm not allowed to earn money. Why did I say that? It's true, but what I should have said was that I am not interested in spending my free time doing the same thing I do with my non-free time, which is also the truth. Of course, when faced with the money problem, he came up with the solution that this colleague will pay for my balalaika lessons in exchange for the English lessons. Déjà vu, anyone? At least I wouldn't have to teach him Spiderman vocabulary and play endless games with his Scooby Doo trading cards like my last balalaika-exchange student (God willing).

Right now I'm just mad, because his reaction to my refusal seemed to indicate that he has indeed already told this colleague that I'll do it. (Well, your problem is not my problem, Mikhail Semyonovich!) And I'm determined that when I meet this woman at a balalaika concert next Wednesday, I'll say no. No more letting people co-opt my free time because I don't know how to say no.

Anyway, off to drown my anger in Moldovan wine at the home of one of my students, who is half Moldovan and half Turkmen.

Fulbright Reunion!!

2007-10-13T14:04:00.000+04:00

This might not really be blog-worthy, but I'm just so excited: Amara's here to visit!

It all started sometime last month, when posters for an upcoming Boris Moiseev concert started appearing around Taganrog. I knew nothing about Boris Moiseev beyond what Amara, a true Russian pop culture maven (I think she knows the lyrics to more Russian pop songs than I do American ones), had told me. Which is that he's really flamboyant and pretty cheesy, as you can kind of see from his website even if you don't read Cyrillic.

Since Amara and I text back and forth all the time (we're pretty good friends, since we were both here last year; plus text messages are really cheap), I soon mentioned to her that he was coming, and joked that she should come visit and we could go to the concert together.

To my surprise, she took me seriously, and despite the hurdle of the concert being on a Wednesday instead of a weekend, she decided to make the trip. She got into Rostov today, where I'll meet up with her and Seth, and tomorrow we'll all head to Azov, a fortress-town built by the Turks to keep the Russians off the Black Sea (thanks, Lonely Planet). I come back tomorrow evening, and she'll come down on Monday after my classes are done and we'll see the Taganrog sites, including the Chekhov family house-museum and general store-museum I haven't been to yet, and Tanais, a Scythian/Greek archaeological dig not far from here. And then on Wednesday we'll go to the concert!

When I told my colleagues that I was going to a Boris Moiseev concert, they were pretty horrified. I try not to do too many things that make them think I have no common sense (it's hard - not because I lack common sense, but because the definition of common sense is often culturally determined), but I think that might have been one. As mentioned before, being gay is not OK in Russia. Apparently last time he gave a concert here, the local Cossacks protested. I kind of hope that happens again; I'll be sure to have my camera with me.

Anyway, just thought I'd share what's going on in my life. :) Off to Rostov!

How Much Is Voting Worth?

2007-10-12T13:54:00.000+04:00

I think many people would agree that the right to vote is pretty valuable. If we're talking in terms of societies, maybe it's priceless. Certainly plenty of human lives have been lost over it. If we're talking in terms of individuals, well, I'm sure almost anyone could be bought, depending on the price and who's doing the buying. (Would you take ten million dollars if the only condition was that you could never vote in a government election again?)

But in this case, we're not talking about the right to vote. We're talking about how &%*@ long it takes for mail to get to Russia and how expensive DHL is.

Sadly, Congressman Paul Gillmor, my district's representative, passed away last month, leaving a vacancy in the House. We're having a special election in December to fill the spot, and I would like to vote in it. That requires three steps:

1) Getting my signed absentee ballot request to the Board of Elections.
2) The Board of Elections getting an absentee ballot back to me.
3) Getting the filled-out ballot back to the Board of Elections.

Simple, yes, but assuming we do it all on the up-and-up and don't have my mom forge any signatures or vote for me (probably a good idea, since my voting materials inform me that electoral fraud is a fifth-degree felony), that's a lot of mailing back and forth. My options appear to be air mail, which can take about a month, and DHL, which takes three days but costs more than 1900 rubles (about 80 bucks). The lady at the post office told me today that I can also use the Russian Postal Service's "very expensive" Express Mail, but I was previously told that that was only for mailing stuff within Russia, and when I asked her if I could really use it to send something to the U.S., she didn't answer me. I'll have to investigate that further.

Anyway, I have plenty of time before the ballots are even available, so I sent the ballot request by regular air mail, which cost 95 cents. Even I'm not too cheap for that. The plan for step two is to have the ballot sent to my house and DHL'ed to me by my parents. It has to be back at the Board of Elections 10 days after the election, and the absentee ballots are released 15 days before the election, so if it gets here in four days (11 days before the election), I have 22 days to get it in. Still not enough time for air mail to be safe, but plenty of time for DHL.

And now that I think about it, my parents have Power of Attorney for me while I'm gone, so maybe they actually could legally vote for me. AND I just remembered that for federal elections, you can just do a write-in ballot at the embassy, which would probably require going to Moscow but would at least mean spending a lot of money on a train ticket to a city that's fun to visit instead of just spending a lot of money, period. I'll have to look into that.

In any case, I'd like to know – would you shell out $160.95 to vote?

A Linguistic Puzzle, or Cockiness Ill Becomes Me

2007-10-09T20:26:00.000+04:00

Sorry to everyone who thinks this post is boring, which may well be everyone.

A few years ago in my introductory syntax course, we were learning about government and binding.

(What that is exactly isn't important; just know that it has partly to do with cases and noun declension. My readers will be familiar with noun declension if they've studied Russian, Latin, German, or any other language where you have to memorize a bunch of different noun endings.)

Anyway, we learned that one universal linguistic principle is that verbs and prepositions can never govern nominative case. Nominative case is the ending the noun has when it's the subject of the sentence, but the object of a verb or preposition can never be in nominative case. (That is, in the phrase "to give a gift," gift can't be nominative; ditto for house in the phrase "in the house.")

It was only later that I learned that you can't always trust "universal linguistic principles," and with two years of Russian under my belt at the time (that is, enough time to know nothing but still believe you know everything), I was pretty dubious when a grad student – a native speaker of Russian – raised her hand in class and said that in Russian there are prepositions that govern nominative case.

I won't share exactly what I thought of this declaration; suffice it to say that it was neither very charitable nor very wise. And I got my comeuppance, so to speak, in the form of this puzzling construction, which has been a thorn in my side for the past six months or so:

Что за невоспитанный мальчик?
Chto za nevospitanny mal'chik
What PREP ill-bred-NOM little boy-NOM
What's with this ill-bred little boy? or Why is this little boy behaving so badly?

I overheard a mother saying this to her misbehaving son on the bus last spring in Vladivostok. (His crime: trying to pull his wool hat off.) Despite the fact that I've heard the construction many times since, I still can't quite put my finger on what it means, so that gloss might not be quite right. But it sure looks like the preposition za (which has several meanings, such as "behind," "beyond," "to," "for") is governing a noun phrase in the nominative. But prepositions CAN'T govern nominative!

One solution is that za is actually governing chto ("what"), which has the same form in nominative and accusative case. In that case, "ill-bred little boy" is the subject of the sentence and the word order is highly unusual. But I've never come across another instance in Russian of a preposition following rather than preceding the noun it governs. (Doesn't a language have to be head-initial for that to happen? My syntax is rather rusty.)

Another solution is that I'm mishearing it, and that grad student was talking about a different construction.

If anyone has an insight, I would be happy to hear it. Russian native speaker linguists (here I am looking at Michael, who may or may not read this)? People who like syntax more than I do?

As a side note, воспитание/upbringing (like the oft-cited ремонт/renovations) is a word that gets a lot more airtime in Russian than in English, and seems to have much deeper and wider roots in the cultural soil. I'll try to write about it sometime if I can make it into an interesting post.

Вот что я люблю

2007-10-09T20:20:00.000+04:00

McDonald's: looks the same inside as a nicer American McDonald's. Yes, you have to pay for the ketchup (ten rubles, about 40 cents), but it is American ketchup rather than Russian. Yes, there are "local-market" foods, at least at breakfast, and they're blinchiki. Yes, there are Happy Meals, and they appear to come with the same toys as American Happy Meals. I don't really know how much McDonald's costs in the U.S., but here, my Egg and Cheese McMuffin, hash brown, ketchup and coffee was 122 rubles, or $4.91.

It was pretty McTasty.

For big-city folk, McDonald's seems pretty run-of-the-mill, though (as my Petersburg host mom said) perceived as classier than it is in the U.S. But for many Russians it's apparently still a novelty and a big treat, since a tourist agency ad I saw on the trolley today offered three exciting attractions on its trips to Novocherkassk – a visit to the cathedral, admittance to the museum of Cossack history, and – a stop at McDonald's!! Same for tour agencies in Vladivostok advertising trips to Harbin, China, if I remember correctly.

Billions and Billions Served

2007-10-06T17:41:00.000+04:00

By my count, I've been in Russia for a total of almost exactly a year: one week the first time, on tour with my college concert band; one month the second time, studying with the Yale Summer Program in Petersburg; nine months of last academic year (for an eleven-month grant... stupid leg); and seven weeks so far on this grant.

Tomorrow (drumroll, please), I go to Russian McDonald's for the first time.

Ok, it's not that big of a deal, but I think it's kind of funny. I'm not a big McDonald's fan in the U.S. (despite what many of my students think, which is that all Americans eat fast food all the time; considering what they see of mass-exported American culture, I really can't fault them for thinking so. But I will try to convince them otherwise by feeding them homemade cookies). I've had several chances to go to McDonald's here that I've passed up. Surprisingly, we didn't have one in Vlad, though we did have a joint called "Magic Burger" – or just "Burger," in the local parlance – which I regrettably never visited. But there are McDonald's aplenty in Moscow and Petersburg, and even, as I learned a few weeks ago, in the not-very-big Cossack capital of Novocherkassk. (I'll blog about that trip eventually.) I also hear tell that there's a very attractive one in Sochi, complete with palm trees.

Anyway, I'm going to Rostov-on-Don tomorrow to give a presentation on my Fulbright experience at the American Corner library (which I'm currently procrastinating on by writing this post). Seth, my Rostov cohort, has promised a trip to McDonald's beforehand for McBreakfast. McAwesome! I'm not even really sure what to expect of this little blended-culture adventure. Will it look like American McDonald's inside? Will it be as classy as my host mom in Petersburg always said Russian McDonald's is? What will the local-market dishes be – hearty soups, maybe? Blinchiki and kasha? Do they have Happy Meals, and if so, what kind of toys do they come with? And do you have to pay extra for the ketchup packets like you do in most Russian restaurants? I'll be sure to report back.

Do you like puppets?

2007-10-02T22:41:00.000+04:00

The Kremlin does.

Because that link will soon vanish (thanks for being stingy, Moscow Times):
Putin has announced his intention to run for the State Duma (Parliament) in December's elections, and also mentioned that he might become Prime Minister when his second term as president ends early next year. (The presidential elections should be in March.)
Background: like in the U.S., Russian presidents can only serve for two terms. Well, almost like the U.S. - they can only serve two consecutive terms, meaning that in four years Putin can run again. But since the Russian government seems to think changing the constitution is about as serious as changing one's socks, for a long time no one was really convinced that Putin was actually going to give up power. So, this is good news because the constitution is going to remain intact, but bad news because - well, see the title of the post. I could write more about this, but to be honest, I'm a little scared to. Especially after reading A Russian Diary (review forthcoming, if I ever find the time to finish the last twenty pages or so).

(This next part is a tiny bit more controversial than what I usually offer on this blog. Just to warn you.)
Also, I was disappointed in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation when I read today that one of their slogans is "Better Red than Light Blue." In Russian, "goluboi/light blue" is a slang term for homosexual. The article I was reading went on to explain, "this slogan refers to the light blue color of the United Russia (Putin's party) flag, and not at all what our readers were probably thinking." Umm, correct me if I'm wrong, but if all of your readers make the same association, then the association is there. I don't know why I would expect a political party in Russia - where gay rights lag far behind gay rights in the U.S. and most of Europe - to be above a hurtful double entendre that would probably still be acceptable in many circles in America. But it still disappointed me.

Out in the Cold

2007-09-30T12:26:00.000+04:00

Today's post is dedicated to one of the cultural differences between Russia and America that I have real trouble coping with: the Russian attitude toward cold.

Or, more accurately, it's the Russian attitude toward cold combined with the Russian concept of where the line is between one's personal business and everyone's business. If it were just Russians being fanatical about staying warm, I wouldn't mind – it's the fact that they're fanatical about ME staying warm.

One might expect that a northerly country such as our fair Russia would face cold weather with aplomb, much like the alleged Alaskan schoolchildren who go outside to play without jackets on as soon as the mercury inches its way up past 32 degrees Fahrenheit. But one would be wrong. Russians fear cold and its effects on human health much more than any other culture I've encountered (which, granted, isn't all that many). Cold weather is always something to talk about, and occasionally something to brag about, but it's never, ever something to laugh about.

Why? Of course, I don’t know, but considering that the attitude seems outdated rather than completely foreign (that is to say, it belongs to the American past as much as to the Russian present), I suppose it's because people always take a keen interest in whatever aspects of their health they feel like they can control. For example, fad diets will always loop in and out of fashion in any society that believes that controlling your weight is the key to good health. As the harmful effects of chemicals and additives have been getting more and more press in Western society, there's been an upswing in interest in organic foods and homeopathic medicine. And in a society where most people have either limited financial resources or limited medical knowledge, the very simplest means of ensuring one's health – like staying warm – are the ones that get the most attention.

Being a little cold doesn't bother me, so in college I wore flip-flops and skirts without stockings as long as I could get away with it in the fall, and the flip-flops usually came out again sometime in March. I don't think that's especially abnormal for college students. No one ever bothered me about it, except maybe the occasional, "Hey, aren't your toes cold?"; in that sense, at least, Americans stay out of each other's business. But here, just by getting onto a public bus in flip-flops on a chilly day, I've been cowed into shame so deep that I turned around and went home to change instead of going on to my destination. No one said anything – people don't really converse on public transport here – but the looks were so withering I couldn't take it.

A few other examples of how this attitude plays out:

1. Yesterday, I didn't have time to dry my hair before getting to my 9 a.m. yoga class. It was probably about 60 degrees out, so I put a bandana over my head before leaving the apartment That's more than I would do if I were in the States, but again, there would have been the withering looks. Anyway, I got to yoga and a friend who takes the same class exclaimed in horror, "You have wet hair!" I calmly replied, "Yes, that's why I'm wearing the bandana." (Note, dear reader, that my hair is not even chin-length, so the bandana almost completely covers it.) She eyed me with doubt and said, "Well, be careful. The weather this time of year is really dangerous."

What makes 60-degree weather more dangerous than 20-degree weather, I have yet to determine. I think it has something to do with temperature fluctuations, which is another thing Russians fear.

2. A grantee from a few years ago had significant trouble with her hosts. We heard a lot about this at last year's orientation, and I sort of came to believe that her hosts were some kind of ogres. The story I got from the hosts, who I met while working at a summer camp (they weren't ogres), was that one of the things they fought about was that this girl refused to wear a hat in cold weather. To a Russian, that is tantamount to, say, voluntarily infecting yourself with tuberculosis, and after that display of carelessness, the university never could stop doubting the girl's common sense.

3. In August, Amara and I went to the Armory in the Kremlin to check out the coronation gowns and Faberge eggs. Standing in line for tickets, we were behind a funny little group of two young moms and two or three kids. One of the kids, Aslan*, was about a year old, and cute as a bug's ear. But on this hot August day, the poor child was dressed head-to-toe in a fuzzy polar fleece sweatsuit. He didn't make a fuss about it, which I think must be because young Russian children are ALWAYS overdressed. Come September first, I'm sure his mom stuck a hat and knitted stockings on him no matter what the temperature. If she hadn't, both she and her son would have been subject to scolding by whatever babushki were in the vicinity. (Everyone's business is a babushka's business.)

4. Last year, teaching Slava (my balalaika teacher's son) English, we were playing "Memory" on the floor, because there weren’t any tables big enough for all the cards. I should have known better, because halfway through the game his mom walked in. Uh-oh. "WHAT are you DOING?" she cried. "Get up off the floor RIGHT NOW! Do you want to get SICK?" The floor, you see, is cold. Sitting on it will either a) give you the flu or b) render you infertile (only if you're female, though). I'm pretty sure if either of those were true, there'd be no human race by now, but whatever. By now, I've been completely broken of sitting on the floor, because you'll definitely get withering looks for it. Better to stand, or lean against a wall.

But I'll never forget getting into Moscow from Petersburg at 4 a.m. and having to wait in the train station for the Metro to open at 5:30. I still had my crutches, and after three days of walking around Petersburg all day (after not really walking anywhere for two months), my legs were exhausted. But I just couldn't bring myself to sit on the floor with all those people around. After one of the worst half hours of my life, I caved and sat on my luggage.

5. In a similar vein, I was sitting outside the consulate in Vlad on a cold June day, waiting to be let in to say goodbye to the consulate folk before I left. There was a long line because it was a visa interview day. The only thing to sit on was the concrete road blocks that surround the front entrance, so I sat there. After casting me sidelong glances for a minute or two, the consulate guard came up to me and said, "Hey, what are you doing? That block is cold and dirty!" "It's ok," I assured him, demonstrating that I was sitting on a grocery bag. "I brought a plastic bag." This pacified him; apparently a plastic bag is a better barrier between the cold and my internal organs than is the part of my body that was specially designed for sitting.

6. This one's so common it's almost a cliché, but Russians don't put ice in their drinks. Cold drinks are believed to cause sore throats (which are called ангина/"angina" in Russian – another interesting word history). I've heard the same thing about ice cream, but I've also heard that it's good for sore throats. And I recently saw an ice cube tray for sale in a kitchen store, so maybe this attitude is slowly dying.

7. My most positive experience with Russians and cold – after swimming in frigid Lake Baikal (for about thirty seconds) this summer, my host insisted on putting a couple of shots of vodka in me to warm my internal organs back up. Hmm, not a bad tradition...

I could go on. Oh, how I could go on. The endless conversations about apartment temperature, the endless debates about whether my American winter coat will be warm enough. But this is already pretty long, it's noon and I'm still in my pajamas, and writing it has made me cold, so I think I'll go get dressed.

*I don't know where the families were from – maybe one of the –stans, maybe Tatarstan (which doesn't count as of the –stans, because it's inside Russia) – but Aslan is a name from one of those central Asian Muslim cultures. Isn't it ironic?

A Clam in High Water

2007-09-29T15:47:00.000+04:00

Man at tram stop: Девушка, балалайка опять в моде? Hey, is the balalaika back in style?
Me, smiling brightly: Нет, совсем не в моде. Nope! Not at all in style.

This exchange made me happy – it's the first time, in either Russian or English, that I've had a remotely snappy reply for someone who's made a smart remark about the instrument I was carrying. And that actually happens a lot when your instrument is six feet tall and you're only five foot two, or when your instrument wraps around your body. (I sure know how to pick 'em, eh?)

Yes, the balalaika is about as square as you can get in Russia. Kind of like klezmer in the U.S., or maybe the banjo – awesome, yes, but totally not stylish. I've had to assure a fair number of people that yes, I am aware that playing the balalaika doesn't make me "more Russian," and yes, I realize that most Russians don't know how to play the balalaika, and no, I am not trying to imitate anyone from the American film version of Dr. Zhivago. I realize that comes with the territory when you're a foreigner studying an instrument that Russians assume is a stereotype of their culture, and it doesn't really bother me. But almost every time I walk down the street with the balalaika, either a five-year-old child or a drunk eighteen-year-old dude will point and crow with delight, "BALALAIKA!" Really, I should start carrying "Captain Obvious" stickers to hand out.

So if I'm not trying to make like Lara and I don't like being pointed at, why do I play the balalaika? I actually don't have a good answer for that. When I got to Russia, I missed playing music, and someone suggested taking guitar or accordion lessons, and then I found out that accordions (also a Russian folk instrument) were expensive and balalaikas were cheap, and things sort of went from there. Not to say that I don't love it with all my heart. It's a fascinating instrument. Besides being shaped like a triangle, its main characteristic is the variety of ways in which you can get it to make noise – strumming with the thumb, wagging the wrist up and down and hitting the strings with the index finger, pizzicato and "two-sided" pizzicato, a fancy finger-spreading technique called a drop, a tinkling tremolo, a vibrato made with the right hand instead of the left, a sharp pluck made with the left hand instead of the right.

Anyway, I just got set up with a new balalaika teacher and had my first lesson. The faculty director of the institute's student club, who is herself giving me singing lessons (she's my kind of singing teacher – she prints off the lyrics to a bunch of folk songs, Okudzhava and Vysotsky, and we bash through them together with little to no regard for anything resembling technique), found him for me at the local music college. I'll admit, when I heard that my new teacher was a man, I had brief visions of a dashing young balalayechnik (who doesn't?), but Mikhail Semyonovich is seventy if he's a day. All the same, I'm really excited to have him for a teacher. All of my most effective music teachers and language teachers have had the same M.O.: be very, very kind, as well as honest and serious about your student's performance, and the student will want nothing more than to not disappoint you. This is exactly the kind of guy Mikhail Semyonych seems to be. He's very quiet and calm, takes care to correct every serious mistake I make, criticizes without judging, always checks whether I understand him, and addresses me, at least for now, на вы [using the formal 'you' rather than the familiar, which would be well within his rights considering our age difference]. I walked home from my lesson smiling all the way, despite the drunk eighteen-year-old dude who pointed and crowed, "BALALAIKA!," because I know I'm going to learn a lot from him.

One last thing: I learned today that a scale (as in do-re-mi etc.) is called a гамма/'gamma' in Russian. If anyone (linguists? music theorists? eh?) has any idea why that might be, I'd be interested to hear. (If you think the fact that I got through a whole year without knowing the word for 'scale' says something about my last balalaika teacher, you'd be right.)

Clarification

2007-09-21T11:21:00.000+04:00

I should have made clear in the last post what "political repression" is. It means the Gulag. Or, for the less fortunate (or possibly more fortunate, if you consider what life in the Gulag was like), "ten years without the right to written correspondence," which I've learned in the course of my research actually meant execution by firing squad. But the families of those who were shot often didn't find that out until near the end of the ten years.

Also, a reader named Kostya, who I don't know (but I assume he's Russian), made the following comment:
Well. The American Civil War ended like 150 years ago. The US of A definitely solved all the problems with Confederate symbols, didn't it?

To which I respond:
I wasn't criticizing Taganrog for not changing the street names. I just think it's funny, if you consider the post-Soviet response to Communist ideals and figures, that it was Lenin (who still has a shrine on Red Square and a statue in essentially every city in Russia) and not Dzerzhinskii (who has, what? a vandalized statue with a missing nose somewhere in a sculpture garden in Moscow?) who got his street name taken away. (To be fair, Dzerzhinskii has a little more than that, including, probably, streets in a lot of cities, but I think the statue, which is in the sculpture garden next to the new Tretyakov gallery, reflects his popularity pretty well.)

Besides the fact that people still fly confederate flags, there are roads, monuments, etc. all over the American South dedicated to Confederate leaders. I would argue that it's a slightly different phenomenon than that of retaining Communist names in post-Soviet Russia (slightly more akin to a defeated Chechnya keeping monuments to its failed revolutionaries, if that were to happen sometime in the future). But I see your point.

I decided to post that here instead of leaving it in the comments because I feel bad that sometimes I forget that things I write here can be insulting to Russians. I don't mean to be!