Showing posts with label St. Petersburg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label St. Petersburg. Show all posts

Thursday, June 23, 2022

"In 1940," by Anna Akhmatova

 The Penguin Selected Poems of hers, translated by D.M. Thomas, is a great intro to her poetry in English. Somehow she survived WW2 and Stalin's terror--many of her compatriots did not. The Akhmatova House in St. Petersburg, Russia, is now a museum. And there is a Joseph Brodsky room near the entry. You go through a small tunnel just off the street to get to the house, and the walls are covered with poetry graffiti. It's as if everyone has agreed to put only poetry graffiti up there; pretty cool. 

A reading of a short portion of "In 1940", with short video:

Akhmatova poem



Friday, March 20, 2020

Woman Standing on Brown Stones

brown stones in garden
sunlight look warm. they're
cold. when she stands on
them butterflies swarm & you
look at her bare feet.

who is she? isn't that
the point--to know her
standing there without
knowing name or story?

instead to eat cabbage soup
in a stinking room & dream
of her remote poise, which
unpredictably gives way
to gasping giggles. you

can barely afford your rent
in Brooklyn or St. Petersburg
& you're in "love" with a woman
who doesn't exist in a garden
you tend in your mind. it
might all work out, who knows?


hans ostrom 2020

Friday, December 6, 2019

And the Smiles Don't Disappear

In another century, you walked
across Litenyny Bridge,
St. Petersburg. Snow with notions
of rain fell tangentially then.
You'd come from Sweden
expecting nothing. The city
was scuffed, stained, and strained.
Puffing buses spewed black exhaust,
hauling hardiest people. You
were on your way to the Finland
Station, because of what you'd read,
not what you'd lived. The river
was white. And beautiful.

Now in this century, lights
of St. Petersburg have bloomed.
The Bronze Horseman's vision
of the City has been buffed.
Hope's been hauled up out
of sad pits. People breathe
and laugh, walk to school
and work in good clothes.
Fresh vegetables for all.
Revolution enough, but don't
tell Lenin. When in St. Petersburg,

you must look for Akhmatova's
house--well, one she lived
in. Because you like living,
you seek beet soup in September
as rain with notions of sunshine
falls in a kindly way on  massive
monuments and canal water, on
people's hats and umbrellas--
on their smiles, which do not disappear.


hans ostrom 2019

Thursday, October 31, 2019

Their Dominion Today

Always the birds, to haul you back
from history, splendor's clutter,
and your grasping mind. On a steel
bench outside Catherine's Summer
Palace, near a lakely pond,
I get an ear buzzed by a sparrow
on its way to pick over grain
tourists tossed to ducks.

A black and grey raven lands
close on a bench-back, cocks
its head to cast a cold eye
of inquiry. Sun warmth,
oaks, willows, and breeze suggest
Central California to me.
Our landscapes are so much
more similar than our politics
force us not to be. Here

is here. Birds live in their
own geography and polity.
They know they can't eat
history or nest in ideology.
Today is their dominion
outside St. Petersburg.


hans ostrom 2019
revision

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Fyodor


Fyodor, I think we would have gotten
very drunk together, and that
wouldn't have done either of us
any good. Still searching, but
I haven't yet found any writer
more delighted than you were
to dig into the muck
of consciousness. Others may
dig boldly or conscientiously,
some timidly, but you--
you did it in your prose with glee.

When I read your novels,
I get depressed and thrilled.
I get weary and joyful.
For about 45 seconds,
I may even become Russian.

I visited a "Dostoyevsky House"
they've created on your behalf
in St. Petersburg. It wasn't
bad at all. I bought a postcard
based on a painting of you.
I never sent it to anyone. Jesus
Christ, what you would have
thought of tourists! Lord,
help me: what you would
have thought of my
calling you "Fyodor."

Tolstoy overhead everything
that was said. You
overheard everything
that went unsaid.

Your books are as modern
as Dickens' aren't. You're
a brawler in prose.
You're also dead. What a
goddamned shame. Or is it?
It's so hard to know.


hans ostrom 2015




Thursday, April 26, 2007

St. Petersburg, Russia

When I had an appointment as a Fulbright lecturer at Uppsala University, Sweden, in 1994, I was determined to get over to Russia. The proximity was simply too tempting for an American of my ilk.

There it was, a few miles across the Baltic Sea; there it was, the Great Ogre that had dominated the political consciousness of my American generation. Russia. If you were of what's called the Boomer Generation, your politics might be simplistic or sophisticated, left, center, right, or out of the park (anarchist), but your politics would nevertheless have to register the great atomic equation of global politics: the U.S. versus the U.S.S.R.

It's hard to think of something the Cold War didn't inform. It affected daily headlines, every level of politics, television, literature, culture High, culture Low, the economy, dinner-conversation, whether the U.S. decided to support or invade a nation, any nation, or not--and so on. To some degree, you can even trace the current war in Iraq back to Eisenhower's decision to depose an Iraqi leader, way back when, based on Cold War "logic." The Bay of Pigs, Oswald's connection to the Soviet Union, Kruschev's shoe, the six-foot-tall Russian fashion model (Veruschka--was that her name?), The Man From U.N.C.L.E, James Bond, Dr. Strangelove, strange words like the Kremlin and politburo: all of such stuff was the furniture, however tacky and badly arranged it might be, of my consciousness. I had to go to Russia.

Considering the experiences of the Swedish, French, and German armies, among other people, I can't say it was difficult to get there. But it was complicated. After all, Leningrad had been St. Petersburg again only for three years in 1994. Things were shaky in the former Soviet Union. The Swedes tended not to travel there; many colleagues at the university, for example, had never been to the Soviet Union, in spite of Sweden's neutral status. Also, St. Petersburg existed, after all, because of the Russian army's having defeated the Swedish army in 1703, if I have the year right. After the defeat, Peter the Great built a fort on the site, and a city followed the fort--rather like the way things happened in the U.S.

But through a Swedish travel agent, I was able to get a visa, get a flight on SAS, buy a certain minimum amount of rubles--and book a room in a new tourist hotel, chiefly to stay on the safe side. The travel agent, newspaper accounts, and other sources seemed to agree that Russian cities had become as dangerous as American ones!

It was a thrill to have these things called rubles in my pocket because they were always in the pockets of characters in spy novels. Also, it's fun just to say, "ruble."

At Arlanda airport in Stockholm, there was almost no one at the gate. In fact, at one point, there was (in addition to me) only several famous tennis players: Bjorn Borg, Jimmy Connors, and John Lloyd. They were apparently headed to St. Pete for an exhibition. They were getting major $ to go there. I hadn't been invited. Celebrity athletes were apparently in greater demand than obscure American professors. Go figure.

In the St. Pete airport, some kind of Russian dignitary met the tennis players. She was a short, middle-aged woman with a lot of spunk. She walked up, and looked up, to Conn0rs and, counter-intuitively started scolding him for being early. He seemed amused, and I immediately had a good feeling for the country. The woman may well have been late, but she wasn't going to do something predictable like apologize. She was going to put it on him. I took a Mercedes taxi to the hotel on a big boulevard--Nevsky Prospekt.

Visiting St. Petersburg was like visiting a mansion that had been closed for many years. It was a city that desperately needed fixing in all sorts of ways, but its bones, if you will, were grand. If Paul Bunyan had designed Paris, St. Petersburg might have been the result. Massive avenues, huge buildings, wide canals, hard, cold wind like Chicago's. I can imagine designers bringing drawings to Peter the Great, who would shout, "Well, that's fine, but make it bigger!"

People were fixing things as best they could, with 19th century tools, like wooden wheel barrows. Older women, with great dignity, strode stalwartly to church. People sold things, anything, on the streets. Rolls of toilet paper, soap. I gave all my hotel-soap away to beggars, and dumped as many of the rubles I had had to buy back into the economy as I could (although of course people liked American dollars even more). At a restaurant, I paid with a credit card. A Russian couple were seated next to me. The man paid in rubles, and the waitress returned several times to work out the bill because--this is the sense I had--inflation was something they were tracking by the hour.

Of course, I got only the merest taste of the city, but I loved the taste. Not unlike Italians, Russians seem able to mix absurdity, comedy, and tragedy into almost every moment of life. They seem unfathomably resilient. . . . I loved hoofing it across the long bridge to the famous train station with its Bolshevik history, Finland Station, which seemed charmingly cramped and folksy. What a scene that must have been, however, when Lenin arrived. . . . At the grand museum, the Hermitage, which the Finns were helping to rebuild, a chip of stone had fallen off an outer wall, and I picked it up and kept it. . . . I visited a house that Dostoyevsky had lived in; it was now a museum; what a thrill. A literary nerd, I love visiting authors' former abodes. . . The tennis players stayed in the same hotel, and McEnroe later arrived, looking very perplexed and put-upon. I set a silly goal of getting the autographs of Connors, Borg, and McEnroe all on one page, and I managed to get it done. The first two were easy, but I think McEnroe signed only because he saw the first two signatures. I found the process amusing. . . . The best thing, though, was just to be in a real place, the streets of a city in Russia, that had been so heavily mythologized, so bizarrely filtered through the lenses of the American media's versions of the Cold War. As I customarily do when I travel, I often just walked around, buying hot drinks and cheap books, getting a whiff of the city, looking at the light (all cities seem to have their own quality of light), watching people work and talk. Reality can have enormous appeal. . . .


. . . A symphony I have not heard but now must hear is Shostakovich's "Leningrad" Sympony (number six?), from 1941. . . .

One poem that came out of my quick trip to Russia appears below. I've published it before, but without the stanza about the woman selling things on the street. The magazine editor didn't like it. I fully agreed with her at the time. Today I like the stanza again. Tomorrow I might agree with her again. That's the way it goes.

Here's to the ordinary Russians I encountered but didn't really meet. Here's to the big shaggy novelists, Fyodor and Leo. (This year I've been re-reading Crime and Punishment and War and Peace, the former with a student book-group, the latter on own--the third time through, I think). Here's to Sonya from C & P and Pierre from W & P. Here's to peace. Here's to Petrograd (1914-1924), Leningrad (1924-1991), and St. Petersburg. Here's to countless soldiers who died invading or defending Russia. Here's to Putin, who may be no bargain, but at least he's not Stalin. And here's hoping I get back to St. Pete, this time for more than three days.

St. Petersburg, Russia



A stain on

linen is a flower

represented

if we see it so.

So we saw it so.



A train at

Finland Station

was a hope

represented

when we saw it

from the frozen bridge.




The old Russian

woman’s cough seemed as

deep as pneumonia. Still

she stood, posture bold,

selling bars of soap, rolls

of toilet paper,

on the sidewalk, Winter.


Famous tennis players—

Connors, Borg, McEnroe—

paced the lobby of

Hotel Nevsky Prospekt,

caged in opulence, waiting

for the Exhibition Match. They were merely the latest


invaders, would be gone by

the next evening on SAS

to London, and St. Petersburg’s

massive avenues continue, grandly, to yawn.

© 2007