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
