Raise High the Bell

There is something vaguely grotesque about following the news from home here... I get on line to check e-mail in the morning, and discover long threads of discussion about whether or not one can get "swine" flu by handling student papers.... So far Petersburg has bred no major forms of contamination, even though its literary reputation is firmly linked to all sorts of dread disease: just think of all those consumptives in Dostoevsky, Raskolnikov's feverish homicide, the bacillus-breeding islands in Bely's Petersburg that threaten to plunge the elegant boulevards of the capital back into the swamp they came from... Petersburg in the 19th century was rank with typhoid, cholera, rats, syphillis, suicide. The list of dead poets from our class yesterday is a sobering one (or alternatively, one to drive you to drink). In more or less chronological order: Blok, Khlebnikov, Gumilev, Esenin, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva... Handling paper turned out to be lethal in their case - but thank God they had the courage to handle paper and hold the pen...

The dark draws in upon us. I often awake these days to the high-heels-down-the steps of our upstairs neighbor, on her way to work. In the invisible early morning there's no doubt about the gender of those fast steps on the stairs. According to the on-line weather that I check, we're losing about five minutes of light a day. 8:30 now, with the sky above our roof top beginning to gray, and if I judge correctly by the mottle beyond the antennas and stove pipe, we may just get some clear sky. The weather site promises a break in the clouds. Even if we get sun, it's not clear I'll actually see it: as the earth rolls over like a sleeping giant, heading toward the polar darkness, the orb retreats in the other direction, so that even on those days when theoretically one could see the sun, it goes lower and lower. In this city of low buildings the horizon is still obscured. I'd have to walk to the river and stand on one of the bridges to get a broad view. If I want to do a sun dance, I'll have to do it there.

What do I see? Walking on Sunday to meet students at the Museum of Political History, I saw something extraordinary. The walk to the Museum took me down Liteinyi Prospekt, one of the main boulevards of the central city, and then left on ulitsa Pestelia, one of the many streets in Petersburg named after 19th century revolutionaries. This corner is one of my favorites: Joseph Brodsky - greatest inheritor of that line of brilliant, too-early-dead poets - lived in one of the mammoth fin-de-siecle apartment houses on the corner. The location gives you a glimpse of two gorgeous churches: the Preobrazhenskii Sobor (Cathedral of the Transfiguration) in one direction, and the Church of St. Panteleimon in the other. I headed for Panteleimon (he's known as a saintly healer) on my way towards the river: a lovely melon-colored building with white trim, restrained baroque with a cupola and a bell tower. In the Soviet era it had been closed and used as a warehouse - a not unusual fate for any religious building in those years, and in a way a blessing: at least it wasn't torn down. Over the past decade it's been repaired and repainted; on one earlier trip I wandered in to find the sanctuary thick with scaffolding, so that you had to make your way through a maze to come out face-to-face with the iconostasis. All those saintly figures standing there patiently, waiting for the work to be finished. Among them the lovely late 19th century icon of Sergius of Radonezh, tall and slender, looking calmly out from his wooded monastic silence onto the pilgrims who wander toward him from a different kind of forest. Even in the maze of scaffolding, I was his.

But last Sunday I was a different kind of captive. As I turned the corner I realized there was a huge crowd of people outside the church, more than a hundred, standing outside the main entrance and beside a huge crane. Traffic on the already narrow street was slowed but proceeding. There was a crowd on the far sidewalk too, cameras at the ready, looking curiously over toward church and crane. The reason for the crowd, I soon realized, was a bell: I'd happened upon the after-service blessing of the final "tsar" bell intended for the tower, and the crane was there to lift it. As I stood to watch (lamenting that I didn't have a camera, and that I had to meet my students in about half an hour) the rest of the congregation gathered on the sidewalk; one of the priests - in purple robes and neat black hat - came in and out, getting everything ready for the ceremony itself to begin. When everything was set a whole procession of priests and deacons emerged from the church door: there was a brief salutation and homily, and then the beginning of chanted prayers to bless the building and its bell. Little boys scrambled up onto the lower part of the crane; the congregation - young and old, women and men, in overcoats and hats and scarves - pressed in toward the priests and crossed themselves in prayer and celebration. At some point a guy got into the cab of the crane, and I hoped I might actually get to see the bell lifted. But there was still clearly a lot of praying to do, and I had my students to meet. And so I hurried on.

How much would one have to pray, how many people would have to say how many prayers, to sanctify this corner, this church, this bell? I'm prone to a certain sentimentality in such matters, which I'll try to curb here. But how can one not be moved by this spectacle? The church of the healer has been returned to its congregation; a congregation gathers to bless the bell, to see it lifted to a height from which it will sound out over the Summer Garden and Mars Field and to the River itself; to the FSB (erstwhile KGB) headquarters a few blocks away, to the tourists and shoppers and the people who live in the apartment building where Brodsky once lived. When I came back from the Museum later in the afternoon the crane was gone, the congregation had scattered, and the bell was in its place. And it was sounding, deep and resonant, a steady booming on its own - without as yet the company of the smaller, higher bells that hung there already. This was, I presumed, a test run, to check for whatever one checks after you've hung who knows how many tons of brass thirty meters up. It sounded fine to me - not as exuberant and celebratory as Russian Sunday bells, with their intricate patterns and interlacings of pitch - but the big one sounded good to go, ready to add its bass to their baritones and tenors.

And so I missed the raising of the bell, but I got to hear the bell itself. And I saw that congregation - a gathering of people of all ages, ten young priests and deacons (including one black man), a congregation doing what congregations do: taking care of its church, letting its light shine forth into the world. Whatever imperfections exist in the Body of Christ in the world - and they are legion - the fact that after fifty years as a warehouse this place named after a healer monk can raise its bell and gather a congregation seems nothing short of miraculous to me. I will not presume to know how they see their role in today's Russia. They understand their challenge better than I do. They live on that corner with a view to Brodsky's apartment and a bell tower as high as the headquarters of the secret police. My own prayer, as I stood there watching, was not only for them but for all of us. For the sustenance of faith and the courage of our voices.

May their bell ring deep and clear for years and centuries to come. And may the world hear its calling.

This will be - I promise! - a short posting. A few fragmentary thoughts, tags from a morning walk: I've decided that getting OUT in the morning will help my energy level. (Maybe I should qualify that "morning": I don't leave the apartment till 10:00; it's hard to get up earlier than 8:00 these days - it's only getting light around 8:30, and the light is a filtered gray.)

So two mornings in a row I've put on sneakers and my slicker (rather than the fancy yellow coat) and headed down Zagorodnyi to the park, where I do a few laps around the theater, along the paths and by the playgrounds and flower beds. This morning there was a crew of women planting bulbs, using a nifty shovel with a circular head to make just the right depth hole. There were five of them, wearing brown jackets and orange vests, working busily with shovels and rakes and piles of bulbs. They talked animatedly and seemed to be making good progress.

It's a pleasantly populated park, filled with trees that are starting to change color.

Busloads of school children arrive for the matinee at the Teatr iunykh zritelei (Theatre for Young Spectators), and some come on foot, in double-breasted lines with teachers trying to keep a semblance of order.

The park - both this one and one across the street, with a neat circular walkway and star-like pattern of paths extending from it - is filled with dogs and their owners, out for an 11:00 stroll. One of them, a young german shepherd, comes up to me and wants to play catch . When I finally get him to release his rather firm tooth-hold on my umbrella, he goes for my shoelaces; the grip is playful, but still I can feel his teeth on my toes. He doesn't respond to either Russian or English. Finally a woman comes around the corner and when I asks if he's her dog she seems to say yes, but protests that he's "just a puppy."

Some of the trees are yellow: larch and birch and some of the chestnuts. There are oaks and something that looks like linden, but they haven't started turning at all.

This park is vastly cleaner than when we lived in Petersburg in 2000: that fall I tried to go running here, but found the amount of trash too depressing. The air then was dirtier, too, and discouraged me from expending any more energy than I had to. And now the park is spotless - if muddy - and those women keep raking the star-shaped beds, and planting bulbs for spring.

City of Citizens

Autumn seems to have arrived.

The day before yesterday we had wet snow all day long, the kind of wet snow apropros of which Dostoevsky cites a Petersburg poet in Notes from Underground. Cold and cloying, penetrating to the bone, sloppy and slick on the sidewalk. The fact that all those literary referents accumulate around the snows of autumn - Dostoevsky, Nekrasov, whoever - makes it no less miserable as an actual experience. I forced myself out for a walk midway through the afternoon, bundled up and with umbrella in hand. Down Zagorodnyi Prospekt to the Vitebsky Vokzal - the elegant art nouveau train station that gets you to the Imperial Palaces at Pavlovsk and Pushkin, and beyond that to Belarus; then back and across the small park around the "Theater of the Young Spectator" - in the 1840's the regimental square where Dostoevsky was taken to be executed, an execution commuted by Imperial pardon to imprisonment and exile in Siberia. Once I'd slipped and slid across the park I ducked into one of the new "Commercial Centers" that have sprouted up over the last ten years. This one includes an "Oceanarium" and play area for kids, a food court and an array of clothing boutiques on the second floor. I browsed until I'd thawed out and then headed home, up ulitsa Marata - a street named after the French Revolutionary - across the street where David and the kids and I lived in 2000 (Sotsialisticheskaia), and along the pedestrian boulevard with the statue of Dostoevsky at the corner by the metro.

As even this brief excursion on a snowy day suggests, you don't go anywhere in this city without encountering mosaics of time, history, text....and the various troubles that have gone with the efforts of men and women of conscience to live in a repressive society. Add to that the troubles of contemporary Petersburg, in which commercial development becomes the latest in a long tradition of disregarding what might be best for the average citizen. On a day of mud and sloppy snow it's unclear just where the city is heading, and if the great leap forward into Capitalism bodes ill or well. Peter's bronze horseman leaps famously into the often murky air above the Neva and Vasilievsky Island, and generations of poets have been loath to answer the question of just WHERE he might be headed.

The question I wonder about is who decides. The burning issue of this autumn in Peter's city has to do with plans to build the largest skyscraper in Europe across the Neva - not quite from where the Bronze Horseman is - but upriver a half-mile or so, across from one of the city's loveliest and most iconic structures, the Smolnyi convent. The project has been undertaken by Gazprom, the state-controlled energy giant, and would house both their corporate headquarters and various commercial, housing and recreation centers. The British firm that won the design competition was following specifications that called for a 400+ meter structure - more than four times higher than existing city laws allow. The project and the design have been controversial from the beginning, but the past month has been pivotal, since the City Council has OK'd the project, despite protests from various leading cultural figures, the UNESCO World Heritage Site committee, and the Petersburg chapter of the Russian Council of Architects. The results of a poll from last week indicate that over half of St. Petersburgers disapprove of the project (only a quarter support it). Approval of the project, which has been the darling of Petersburg governor Valentina Matvienko, now heads "upstairs" to Moscow, where the Federal Committee on Culture must approve it. Interestingly enough, the preliminary indications are that there might be some resistance there - with the Committee expressing concern that laws have been violated in approving the project. Those laws clearly state that nothing is to be built over 100 meters tall, or that in any way interferes with the historic skyline and "cityscape" of this extraordinarily intact, extraordinarily horizontal city.

Which brings us back in a sense to the question of just who will decide.

On Saturday - a day of glorious fall sun, when stunning weather miraculously coincided with the weekend - I attended a demonstration intended to remind the city that someone other than Matvienko and the City Council should decide. Leaders who break the law lose the right to rule. The demonstration also served as reminder that there are things more precious than the Gazprom development - which various speakers referred to in terms borrowed from the Old Testament prophets: Moloch, hellish, monstrosity. Beyond the anti-capitalist rhetoric, there was also an attempt to remind the city (both the government and presumably the people) of its distinct history and identity, and of the rule of law. In a Russian context this can sound like tilting at windmills. But I care too much about the city - and about Russia - to dismiss this gathering as quixotic. There is something here in process that speaks to (some) Russians' longing for legality and integrity of process; but there was also something that spoke wonderfully to how those protesting compose a language of resistance that is theirs alone. It's an extraordinary language, a 2009 version of Turgenev's velikii, moguchii, pravdivyi russkii iazyk: a powerful, truth-telling language that's the creation of a motley, well-organized, peaceful gathering of lovers of St. Petersburg on a sunny fall afternoon. This is civil discourse, trying to build a civilized process and a humane city-society. It's inflected with Petersburg traditions and global culture, in a patois that is uniquely their own.

And of course a lot of what I love about it is the way it draws classic Petersburg culture(s) into a mosaic of new meanings...

Petersburg: The Northern Venice or the Northern Shanghai?
Okhta Center - My Precious
Petersburg is a Classical City: ceterum censemus gazpromcitiem esse delendam
All Power to the Laws
Saint Petersburg YES; GazPutinBurg NO

And over these playful amalgams of irony and anger sound the speakers' words: speakers from an organizing committee that included all comers, including the Communists (the exception is Limonov's New Bolshevik Party); they quote Joseph Brodsky and Dmitrii Likhachev, a scholar and champion of the city's culture; they write new lyrics to Beatles songs and denounce city councilors who refused to adhere to existing laws. They call for Matvienko's resignation; they ask the thousands gathered to think about what it means to act as "genuine citizens and free people"; they point out the power of monied interests to destroy the city's greenspace; they read poems and refer to the city's tragic and heroic past. They pass petitions and ask people to wear blue ribbons and call for "massive non-violent protest."


Most of all I'm struck by the languages they use, playful and pointed, visual and verbal, languages that draw on the Soviet past and high culture, rock music and communism, the local and the global: one poster shows the great eye of Mordor on top of the GazProm tower, a panoptic eye reaching out over Smolnyi; another one imagines the angel atop the Peter and Paul Fortress breaking the "gaz-scraper" in two; a local rock musician has written a song called "GazPromBaiter" - suggesting that Russians have become Gastarbeiters of the Kremlin. It's a biting and powerful song, that challenges the people who start singing along to think what they've traded for full stomachs and stability.

And along with this mix of pop culture and the Soviet past (one fellow in a gas mask wanders through the demonstration; two guys standing beside me regret they hadn't thought of that - gas masks were standard issue in Soviet civil defense gear) there are poets and film makers and Dmitrii Likhachev, looking mournfully down from a sign on the assembled crowd. Likhachev, medieval historian and cultural conservator, textologist and student of monastic libraries and the culture of laughter in pre-Petrine Russia. Perhaps there is no more fitting juxtaposition than Likhachev and the rock musician and Tolkein's demonic tower: it is time for new laughter in Russia, and a culture that is perhaps finally willing to get over its humorless fatigue at Soviet pseudo-politics. This is a new body politic, making their way towards defending a place they love for many different reasons, figuring out how to make common cause.

I have no idea whether it will make any difference on the shores of the Neva, whether the Okhta Center will be successfully challenged by these fine citizens - or by the Federal Ministry of Culture - or by UNESCO. But something, I want to think, is being created here, that will have impact, and will flourish. A city isn't built in a day, and neither are citizens. In a city whose founding myth involves the imposition of Imperial will and a populace driven to madness or insurrection, maybe there will be a new story.

On this one Saturday afternoon, it seems wonderfully possible.

City of Yellow and Gold

This is a city of yellow and gold.

Not just because fall is finally beginning to touch the leaves, brushing the tops of oak and birch. When we left Siberia three weeks ago, the birches had already turned to brilliant gold, so that the steep hillsides above Baikal were mosaics of green and amber. But here the fall is slower, almost indifferent: the days keep relatively warm - some mornings it's 10 celsius by our kitchen thermometer - either an anomaly of living close to the Finnish Gulf or a consequence of climate change. In either case it's hard to complain about dry weather and warm temperatures at this latitude.

But the city is yellow and gold in any weather and at any time of year, most beautifully when the skies are grey, or when there's snow on the ground and precious little light in the sky. Then the yellow walls of buildings - all shades and admixtures of brown, mustard, curry-colored and marigold - and the golden domes and spires of the city (St. Isaac's, the Admiralty, the cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress) stand out like beacons of warmth and brilliance. The city generates its own light and warmth, even when its bizarre northern location denies it both.

Maybe travel always involves a measure of the chameleon, or camouflage: most places I've traveled I want not to stand out, not to be immediately recognized as an American, not to cause heads to turn. Some of the students I've traveled with over the years have made that hard - either because of their oblivious loudness, the way they travel in packs, their shorts (despite all my advice to the contrary) and backpacks and collegiate insignia. There's no way NOT to be perceived as an American - and not just AN American but a whole pack of them, like wild dogs that might be rabid.

But when I'm walking alone I'm always hoping people don't see me as foreign. I've spent decades, after all, working on my Russian accent - the aural part of "not standing out." Trying to get that soft l, or the appropriate syllabic stress, or the elegantly rising and falling intonation of a question. So that even if people don't think I'm quite Russian, they won't think immediately that I'm American either. Once in 1985 I struck up a conversation with a Russian in a train station, and he kept refusing to believe I was American - which I think had more to do with the unlikeliness of encountering a U.S. citizen in a provincial train station at the height of the Reagan era than with the infallability of my Russian l. He was sure I was Estonian, with the chut'- chut' difference in my accent and my non-Russian features.

On the street, though, the camouflage is visual rather than linguistic. People do come up to me and ask for directions, but they come up to Aslaug as well, perhaps even more frequently: the consensus is that she looks very Russian, with her well-coiffed hair and strong cheekbones. Not the case with me. I treasure all evidence to the contrary, though: in March of 1985 I was waiting at a bus stop on Srednyi Prospekt not far from our dorm. As I stood there in a state of mild distraction an elderly woman came up to me and whispered Devushka, vy ne znaete, kogo oni vybrali? Girl, do you know who they've chosen? The they was the people who made decisions in Moscow. The who turned out to be a relative unknown named Mikhail Gorbachev. Standing at the bus stop for a bus that refused to come, I got taken for a Russian who might know something about the future. But of course none of us then - neither Russians nor Americans - had any real inkling of what the next few years would hold. Or how much that unknown Party activist from Krasnodarksky krai would wind up changing Russia for ever.

At the time I was just pleased that she'd thought I was Russian. The old woman, an unwitting messenger of that unexpected, so long desired (to quote Akhmatova in very rough translation), and what I remember is the old brown wool coat with the hood, a coat old enough and drab enough, clearly, that she thought I was a local.

All of this is simply prelude to the news that I've bought a coat. And not any coat but a yellow coat, mustard colored or closer to camel, depending on the light. An extravagant and wonderful purchase, from a small boutique I ducked into to avoid the rain, where the shop girls brought me green tea and obligingly brought out one coat after another, convinced that they'd find me something I'd want to walk out in. Raglan sleeves and offset buttons, big and brown, as though it's a pea coat with buttons on only one side. No collar, just a stand-up neck, nice stitching around the sleeves. Knee-length, of wool and cashmere. I feel elegant and warm and camouflaged: or perhaps it's not camouflage but a kind of chameleon shift, a shade of self that is every bit as "real" as that other Maine self that goes around in the tired old green and purple coat that I bought at Beans' at least ten years ago. So it's not camouflage - which implies a kind of deception - but a shining forth of the yellow-ish, gold-ish me that slips into this cloak of warmth and radiance.

A city of yellow and gold: the domes and the walls, in a stunningly diverse palette of hues, varying degrees of brightness and dust. A city where there are yellow buses and bananas hanging on fruit kiosks and (what I realized only AFTER I bought the coat) a surprising number of women wearing yellow coats, which is perhaps THE color of the season. Mine, however, is decisively the most beautiful. Blowing down Nevsky like an autumn leaf, snagged from the top of a birch in the Alexander Garden, a spark of light on a grey day.

Would you be able to pick me out of a crowd?

Aslaug and I have made an extraordinary discovery. Last night - a Friday night, we were both more or less exhausted after the week of classes and assorted questions and crises with the students - we decided to have a walkabout in our neighborhood. Aslaug has decided (following my example) to buy shoes, I'm thinking about a winter coat. Our neighborhood, as you already know, seems to be the epicenter of footwear commerce in St. Petersburg, and is also fairly well-endowed with zhenskaia odezhda (women's clothing) stores. So out we went.

After an hour and a half of high heels and puffy jackets (at one boutique for some reason the salesclerk took a shining to Aslaug, and kept bringing her assorted baggy sweaters, none of which were flattering. I think maybe she decided Aslaug was the one with money) we were hungry, and decided to check out the Czech beer restaurant - pivnoi restoran - on the corner of the block where we live. Pleasant if smokey atmosphere, several tables of friends gathered at the end of the work week, two women in their 40's enjoying a night out, and us. Hockey on the TV, excellent pilsner, sausages and kraut for me, a pork steak for Aslaug. Contented and with full stomachs, we headed home.

And coming out of the Czech beer place, what should we see across the street but one of the myriad "memorial plaques" that coat the city - a plaque I've walked by numerous times but in the other direction, so I didn't see it. And lo and behold, in this house that's adjacent to the house we're living in, Dostoevsky lived for two years, in the early 1840's. Didn't just live here but became a writer here: it was in this little corner house, one of the new dokhodnye doma (apartment blocks) that were being built in increasing numbers throughout the city, that he wrote his first work, Poor Folk.

This delights me, for many reasons. Dostoevsky is the great poet visionary of this city, after all, the one whose insights into human character and the dynamics of social interactions still seem so compelling. I think of him frequently here - particularly when I encounter the down-and-out, the dispossessed, the raggedy, reeling drunks and their motley companions. Last summer when David and I were here we stopped to have supper one evening at an outdoor cafe on Sennaia ploshchad - Haymarket Square - the formerly seedy center of "Dostoevsky's Petersburg." Now it's been cleaned up and made into a commercial center, with small kiosks and a big mall and numerous mid-level stores. We sat at our cafe and had a pleasant simple supper of soup and bread, and when I'd almost finished my soup - the bowl still had perhaps a half a cup of broth and vegetables in it - a towering man in a dirty overcoat, with an unkempt beard and an unsteady gait, approached our table, picked up my bowl, and drank it down. Once I got over my shock, and realized that he had no intentions of harming me in any way - he was just very hungry and had thought I was finished - I ran into the cafe, bought a pirozhok (little pie) and ran off after him, to give him something more to eat. The whole scene - the invasion of "my" space (I'd paid for it, after all), the towering unkempt figure from another world, the sudden impulsive compassion (one of those irrational acts that utilitarians in Dostoevsky's novel heap scorn upon) - seemed to me (and still seems) to come straight out of the pages of his novels. The streets of this city can still seem, at any moment, to be those pages. He saw very deeply into the realities of the modern world, and of modern cities in particular. Petersburg's unpredictability, its refusal to keep categories in place, its constant provision of spectacular crossings of boundaries: all of that is straight out of Dostoevsky.

But the other reason that this memorial plaque just at our corner so delights me, is that I have spent the last few weeks remembering the very work that Dostoevsky wrote here: I've been thinking of that first novel, Poor Folk, and its unobtrusive-to-a-fault "hero", Makar Devushkin.

Devushkin is one of the previously nameless and faceless "little men" of the Imperial Bureaucracy, whose inner life is given voice in a series of letters he writes to a woman who lives across the courtyard. She writes back. He falls in love. He declares himself but is ultimately bested by someone of higher rank and greater fortune. The little epistolary novel ends with disappointment in love and a despairing glance into a future that seems to promise little.

So even before I realized that Dostoevsky had lived virtually in this very courtyard (how I wish I could erase that virtually!), I had been looking across our courtyard at the windows opposite, wondering about the lives of the people who live there, trying to discern from the plants in the window, the lace curtains, the hours of their lights on and lights off, just who these folk might be: poor, rich, young, old? Reading the frames of the windows (newly installed replacement windows with their bright white frames might suggest people of some means); the bits of newspaper stuffed between the double frames of the lower windows - suggesting on the contrary people of modest or no means, trying to keep out the winter drafts. In the early warmer days of our stay, the top windows were always left open, and on one day I was convinced that the owners of the top floor apartment had acquired some exotic animal, which spent its afternoons preening its neck out toward the sun. It turned out to be the long leaf of a potted plant, swaying in the wind. And now it has its long neck turned away from light and air, flattened by the outer window that the inhabitants have decided to keep shut, as October brings chillier mornings and grayer skies.

I have been living in Dostoevsky's courtyard all this time, watching the windows of these people who are my "neighbors" but whose lives I do not know, about whom I can only guess. A shadow of an older woman, seeming to touch some black frame on a far wall, her back turned to me. Is she sewing? Is she cleaning something? Is there some other person there whom I can't see, who she's talking to? The city gives us questions and no answers. I start to become like those other characters in Dostoevsky, dreamers who think up stories for people whose actual lives they will never know.

And when I walk down the street this morning to put money on my mobile phone (instrument of communication with people who live elsewhere, not across my courtyard), who do I see when I'm coming back but Mr. Marmeladov, the father of the prostitute from Crime and Punishment, swaying slowly along the pavement of Vladimirsky Prospekt, weaving his way over to the wall to steady his progress. He doesn't have hay in his hair; he doesn't seem to have slept on a barge in the Fontanka; but he's drunk at 10:00 in the morning, unshaven and unkempt, with a backpack looking incongruously athletic or collegiate, as though he's setting off for a Saturday hike.

When we first came to Petersburg students were struck - and repulsed - by these Dostoevskian shadows on the city's streets. Drunks and the down-and-out, dirty and homeless, people who seem to have given up what small measure of hope they ever had. Dostoevsky's great and fundamentally Christian impulse is always to see these folk with the eyes of compassion, and often with humor, an impulse connected to forgiveness, and humility. He brings them across the thresholds of our own privileged and protected lives, into our oh-so-jealously guarded private space, so that they drink our soup, tell us stories, show us their faces and remind us of their own complex humanity, and our own.

Kakie shoesy

Our students are convinced that all Russian women wear 4-inch heels. It's an understandable conviction: the stores along our street are filled with displays of elegant and often quite expensive ankle-busters. Walks along the nicer thoroughfares are accompanied by a symphony of clicking heels. When we visited the Hermitage last weekend the guide pointed out that visitors are no longer required to put on felt slippers to protect the parquet. The administration decided it was simpler to refinish the floors than to get almost a million people to put felt slippers on over their street shoes. I sort of miss the awkward whoosh of visiting a museum in those slippers: you slide along teh highly-polished parquet, concentrating as much on keeping yourself upright and the slippers on your feet (they never fit very well) as on whatever objects might be in display cases or on the walls. The Pushkin Museum in Petersburg - my other museum foray last week - still requires that you put them on, despite the fact that most of their floors have carpets. But not the Hermitage. It's not clear just how they repair the floors, though: the hall that holds their collection of Leonardos has floors that look almost like bubble wrap, with thousands of little dents where women's stilettos have left their mark.

In reality, however, despite the striking number of shoe stores with astronomic heels (and similarly astronomic prices: you have to wonder who is spending close to 5,000 roubles - $172 by today's rate - on gorgeous patent blue shoes), and despite all those clickety-clacking women whose ability to maneuver on an additional 12 centimeters is remarkable, it turns out that not all Russia women wear spike heels. I can confidently announce this as empirical fact after my morning survey of the metro last Monday. I decided to defer my morning reading of Arumenty i fakty - the tabloikd newsweekly I often pick up in the metro newstand - and observe ground-level habits of the (female) natives instead. Easy to do, not obtrusive, and with startling results: it turns out that less than half of the female population wears spike heels. There are as many if not more women wearing those sensible flats that I myself tend to put on in the morning. And the women in sensible shoes aren't all above 40 (though the numbers of women over 40 wearing spike heels are predictably miniscule). There are lots of young women - college age, young professionals, sharply dressed 30-somethings - who have chosen not to torture their backs and ankles for the fashion statement. They're wearing flats and pumps and sneakers and neat spike-less boots, moving along with click-less sure-footedness and only slightly less elegance than their spiked sisters. I was impressed, and a bit surprised, by my findings.

One of the things about this shoe focus is that my own position vis-a-vis the shoe wearing masses of Russia has changed fundamentally since the Old Soviet Days. In those thankfully long-gone days I tended to be the one wearing nice shoes. When people on the street picked you out as a foreigner, for reasons that seemed inscrutable (how did she know I wasn't Russian?), it might have to do with what we used to call your carriage - the way you bear yourself, the ease and openness of the way you move and look around you, even the way you stroll along with your coat unbuttoned. Or it might have to do with your shoes. walking once down Nevsky Prospekt - I think it was in 1983 - in my obviously non-Soviet birkenstocks, I was approached by a Russian man who started walking alongside me, looking at my feet. he was clearly impressed by this previously unseen footwear: kakie shoesy!! What shoes!! the novelty of the sandals given birth to a novel word: Russian has lots of perfectly good terms for shoes and sandals (the generic obuv', women's tufli, summer sandaly, domestic and comfortable tapochki; the list goes on) - but he called my birkenstocks shoesy in honor of their novelty and non-compliance with other categories of things you put on your feet. Did I want by any chance to sell them? I didn't want to, of course, though I could probably have made out extremely well. It was one of the few times in my Soviet Russian experience that I was invited to participate in the ubiquitous black market. Not for high heels, clearly, but for these flatter-than-flat, unattractive but comfortable German sandals.

Nowadays I'm the one in dowdy shoes, shown up by Russian women's elegance and class, head to toe. It's not just that my hair is showing signs of aging (the language teachers in Siberia encouraged me to die it: your skin is so young! you just need to color your hair!) but that the flats I bought with me - in which I can comfortably walk ten miles a day, blister-free - are worn at the toe and across the bridge where my foot is widest. And they were never particularly attractive to begin with. I bought them for comfort, not for chic.

So Monday afternon, finally brought to heel by the heel-wearing masses of female St. Petersburg, I bought new shoes. Nothing too dramatic, nothing too elevated, just a bit of patent and a nice low heel. A kind of elegant loafer, one-inch elevation, fake snakeskin (at least I hope it's fake) across the top - the top which is called, according to my internet investigations - a vamp. Coming home from the Institute after classes I decided to try my luck at Gostinyi dvor, the big shopping arcade in the middle of the city. If it was too expensive I coul dhead across the street to Apraksin dvor - a more anarchic, usually cheaper version of modern Russan commercial life, a sprawling and now largely indoor warren of small shops run by non-Russians (the shopkeepers are mostly from the Caucasus). One of our students in 2000 dubbed it Scary dvor - but like all of Russia it's much less scary now, less muddy and more organized.

As it happened though I found my shoes in Gostiny, in almost the first shop I looked at. While the window displays may be filled with high heels and top-end prices, it turns out there are lots of more down-to-earth alternatives inside. I quickly identified three candidates for my sensible but slightly more chic demands; figure out that I probably wear a 39 or 40; and found a sales clerk who was pleasant and quick. I put them on; they fit! (my feet are almost always too wide for American shoes) and within 15 minutes I was out the door, having only spent 1500 roubles - a little more than $50. At Apraksin dvor I bought shoe polish and some new knee-high stockings. I felt like a new woman, ready to slip into this newly-purchased elegance and click right along with the rest of the city's women.

The funny thing about all this is that putting on new shoes really does make me feel transformed. I love the way the shoes click - when we went to a concert on Tuesday night, at the stunning new Mariinsky concert hall - I made this lovely sound on their beautiful blonde floors. I feel sharper and smarter, a tiny bit elegant and well-put together. I don't feel like I have to hide my feet. And it turns out they're not bad for walking; not quite as comfortable as the old worn brown pair, but not painful, either.

My theory about Russian women's elegance on the streets is that in a country where so much is out of your control, where the facades of buildings and apartment house courtyards are often in desperate need of plaster and paint, where home may be a tiny apartment in a Soviet cement block, the one thing you can control is how you look. Russian women just don't go out of the house without looking put together. Its less a matter of what they've got on than how they wear it. And they often look gorgeous - not just young women with their stiletto heels and slender frames - but older women, with their appropriately-colored hair and sensible but still elegant shoes. The world they can put together and control, the one where they can be beautiful, the one where they can feel absolutely fantastic about themselves, is this world of clicking heels and neatly-tied scarves, well put on makeup and well-coifed hair. Post-feminist American women might scoff. I'm less inclined to.

As in so many ways, I admire them, envy them, and want in my own small way to emulate them.

And so I've got a pair of sharp new shoes.
Listen to my heels click: aren't they beautiful!?