We Shall Meet Again in Petersburg Osip Mandelshtam

Here today, gone tomorrow

This evening I'll requite my reading, and tomorrow I'll offset back the style I came, by train, and so plane, and then back in the motorcar from JFK. It's fun to travel, and I've enjoyed my uninterrupted nights, merely I'chiliad really looking frontwards to going home. Or at least arriving in that location -- I'm not actually looking frontwards to the craziness of planes and trains.

The automobile from the drome, though -- that will be something.

kinds of time

Iii sorts of time: everyday time, the time of habits and schedules; no-time, the stopped fourth dimension or timelessness of airplanes and trains; and, worst of all, the jumpy time of the transition from the habits of 1 place to those of another. I've only been here two weeks, simply information technology's been long plenty to establish a schedule, which has gone a long way toward making me experience at dwelling.

Nevsky, two ways

Walking downwardly Nevsky in one management: In that location are a couple of sketchy-looking people on the corner, and another coming toward me. I cross the street, thinking: If I go mugged, it'due south just going to happen. In that location will exist no police written report, and it will be as if there were no crime. Isn't the state'due south first duty to provide for the security of its citizens? Walking downwards Nevsky, dreaming of fascism.

Walking down Nevsky in the other direction: I've just come from a discussion of human rights abuses in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. For one hour, we listened to a reasoned argument, supported with ample evidence, that the corruption of prisoners in the "state of war on terror" was non the event of a few "bad apples" but that orders to violate nearly-universally recognized homo rights protocols in the interrogation of prisoners came down from Rumsfeld and fifty-fifty from Bush. The evidence is in, and information technology'due south overwhelming. There's a reason Bush won't sign international treaties or participate in world courts - he's afraid of getting a one-manner ticket to the Hague. My biggest question, at present, is this: Why is information technology necessary to get 5000 miles to a former Soviet country in lodge to have this sort of conversation? In club to exist presented with this testify and these reasons? In order to develop this kind of reasoned, empirical skepticism?

Because at home, we're lulled by something -- ease, familiarity, the feeling style out in that location in the heartland that the war doesn't really business organisation you lot and me. And it occurs to me, walking the other way downwardly Nevsky, that restarting the center of the heartland is gonna have something that's been unimaginable til now. A typhoon might do information technology, just probably not.

Walking down Nevsky, dreaming of revolution.

Nosotros shall meet again in Petersburg (Osip Mandelstam)

Chased past these lines by the poet Osip Mandestam who wrote these lines in the labor camp where he died:

We shall meet again in Petersburg,
as though there we'd buried the sun,
and for the first time, speak the word
the sacred, the meaningless one.
In black velvet of the Soviet night,
in the velvet of earth's emptiness,
flowers still flower everlasting, bright,
women sing, love eyes are blessed.

The urban center is arched there like a lynx,
the bridge-patrol stands its basis,
an angry motor dissects the mist
crying out with a cuckoo'southward audio.
I don't need a laissez passer for this evening,
I have no fearfulness of the baby-sit:
I'll pray in the Soviet night
for the sacred meaningless discussion.

[...]

trans. A. S. Kline

Dostoevsky's apartment

Establish it on a long walk beyond the Fontanka, on a street that also boasted a variety of sexual practice shops. Grit on the wind from somebody blasting away at a edifice v storeys up without a net. All this seemed very appropriate. Museum itself small-scale but impressive -- fifty-fifty contains the manual Anna Dostoevsky used to learn stenography, and so she could take Fyodor'southward dictation. An ambivalent journey -- without him, my imagination would be much poorer only he really was non a terribly dainty person, and information technology was hard to be in a identify jubilant The Author when I think there'southward much more to celebrate in The Piece of work.

Reading List #2

Info dump. Working fast on wonky keyboard, some links missing or broken.

Mark Danner, Torture and Truth
Ed. Tobias Wolff, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories
Mikhail Epstein, Cries in the New Wilderness
Mikhail Epstein, Afterward the Future
Andrey Platonov, The Foundation Pit
Eva Perkarkova, Truck Stop Rainbows
Ludvik Vaculik, A Loving cup of Java with My Interrogator
Arnost Lustig, Lovely Light-green Optics
Alan Levy, So Many Heroes (Prague Jump)
Sam Lipsyte, Home Land
Lermontov, A Hero of Our Fourth dimension
Bahktin, Issues of Dostoevsky's Poetics
Mikhail Sholokhov, And Tranquillity Flows the Don
Olga Sedakova, Poems & Elegies
Marcia Aldrich, "Hair," in Daughter Rearing
Robert Stone, Canis familiaris Soldiers
Adam Johnson, Emporium: Stories
Doctorow, Lives of the Poets
Richard Katrovas, Prague, USA
Leonid Tsypkin, Summer in Baden Baden
Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs
Everything past Glyn Maxwell

And, in the category of things I really should have read by at present:
Pushkin, "The Bronze Horseman," and Eugene Onegin
Dostoevsky, "White Nights," Poor Folk, Offense & Punishment
Gogol, Dead Souls

Neglect

For vi years I have been troubled by a dream of a large, elaborate business firm falling downwards, usually into a mosquito-infested bog. Sometimes I am on a footbridge over the bog, watching the shingles fall off. Sometimes I am inside the house, usually lost in a twisty hallway or trying to notice myself in i of the broken or badly foxed mirrors in the ballroom, where the boards are popping out of the flooring.

Coming to Leningrad is a fleck like waking in that dream. Or, SP is one identify where external reality matches upwardly with a bit of my private world, every bit if that world had found expression here, finally -- which makes me wonder if my vocabulary at abode is non limited in some profound way. As if perhaps I practice non however have a sufficient vocabulary for disorder, chaos and fail, even though I sense these things and tin can make pictures of them in my dreams.

It would be very American, I think, non to have this vocabulary. I wonder how many words there are in Russian for what I'yard talking near.

Thinking this way, I became curious about the etymology of "neglect," and certain plenty, its root (also shared with "lecture") ways "to pick out, to select." It's not quite the same affair as making something public (publishing), merely publishing involves selection and cartoon attention to what is selected -- which seems the very opposite of neglect.

Jane at breakfast

Jane eats a bagel in Bkyln, & I get to meet it, in near-real fourth dimension, hither in St. P!

Excursions to Pushkin, Peterhof

I did the touristy matter this weekend, taking group tours out to the summer palaces in Pushkin (aye, they actually did name a village after him) and Peterhof (which has another proper name in Russian that escapes me now).

In the Petersburg suburbs the spaces meant for public consumption (e.g., parks and paths) are kept upwardly very well, while those meant for private use (east.g., flat blocks) are in a terrible state of disrepair. Can't tell if this contrast is a holdover from the Soviet era or if things in the flat blocks have gone to hell for mail service-communist reasons. SO MUCH is needed in Russia -- doors, locks, windows, flooring, grout, tiles, paint. Probably also brushes, hammers, nails. Basic, basic stuff. The good news, I suppose, is that it's a large emerging market. On the other hand, since I call back the average monthly income in SP is well-nigh $300, Domicile Depot in Leningrad will probably have to wait. I did meet an IKEA billboard, though.

And so, after hour-long drives into the suburbs, we pull up exterior the almost extravagant examples of bizarre compages (baroqecture?) I accept ever seen... Both palaces were destroyed by the Nazis & so have been only recently (and only partially) rebuilt, to the melody of millions and millions of rubles. They are not bad tourist attractions, of class, and do generate lots of revenue for further restoration, but information technology was difficult to be in those palaces after seeing the bedraggled flat blocks on the way in. At that place's some new construction, new flat blocks, going on, simply it really seems similar the old ones are gonna merely stay in that location until they fall down...

Local accent?

I accept been listening carefully to how Russian is spoken in St. P, and at that place's a lot of stuff in the language that doesn't come up across in the grammar books. So I only had a conversation in Russian in which I added a small grunt to each of my assertions, and tiny, soft hisses to my requests. I was understood perfectly. As far as I can tell.

This ane's for Dad

Raskolnikov's apartment

Yesterday I took a walk along the Griboedov canal, following the route that Raskolnikov took, in Crime and Punishment, when he went to kill the pawnbroker. Along the way, I crossed the corner where Gogol's nose intersected with Raskolnikov on his errand, and I saw an astonishing street-level carved wooden door, huge and ancient, that had been slowly beaten into the sinking foundation of the building by the periodic floods in St. Petersburg.

But the about remarkable function of the walk was this: In that neighborhood, despite the rampant criminal offense and general lawlessness of St. Petersburg, two buildings stand wide open -- no locks on the gates or the front doors: the building that comprise, or may incorporate, Raskolnikov's apartment, depending on whose scholarly interpretation of C&P you happen to believe.

Isn't this amazing? A fictional flat in a wholly dreamed-up city, Dostoevsky's Petrograd, stands, in real life, wide open to pilgrims of all sorts, any day of the yr.

In the stairwells, pilgrims have left lots of graffiti, much of it speaking directly to Raskolnikov: "Crime doesn't pay," "Don't practice it!" and similar sentiments. Other visitors -- who probably would non be caught dead leaving a graffito anywhere in their own neighborhoods - take the opportunity to get out some attestation to their inflow: "Skateboarding is not a crime." Or: "Sono stata qui," remarks "Sylvia da Brindisi." Others, more competitive souls I guess, compete with Dostoevsky'southward genius past adding remarks whose sheerly arbitrary and gnomic character seem like efforts at something like literature, an effort to participate in a discourse that is "literary," whatever that means: "Polish on you crazy Napoleon."

Our bout guide does non invite us to get out a spoor, only he does non discourage us either. No one does. Instead, some people take pictures; I am distracted, and then bellyaching, by the whine of digital cameras, the dizzy fashion the flash goes off. A homo appears on the landing and slips backside a door, then the bolt clangs dwelling. We have no real business hither, what we've come to transact is only imaginary, and it's nonetheless a transaction, an experience of unfair exchange: one takes a moving picture, or a fleck of space on the wall. What, though, are we giving in render? On the way home, one of our group, an American girl, bumps into a Russian passerby and says, in English language, "Excuse me." I tell her, every bit gently every bit I tin can, that the Russian word is izvenitye, simply the endeavor is abortive, for the horse has already left the barn, and in the end I merely experience out of identify in the presence of characteristically American goodwill -- clumsy monolingual bonhomie and casually misdirected good intentions.

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