Hard to believe that we have been here over a month already. Time when you're traveling has a tendency to expand and contract accordion-style, so that it feels as though you've been away much longer than the calendar says. And given that we've been to Siberia and back in the past three weeks, that sense of unreal amounts of time and space is only magnified. When we got to Irkutsk on September 7 there was a bit of a chill in the air, but it was warm by the afternoon and the trees were still green. During our ten days out on Lake Baikal the birches changed to brilliant golden yellow, and the day that we left Bolshie Koty (a village right on the lake) the winds and waves were picking up; by the time we were nearing Irkutsk it was snowing and right around freezing. Now we're back in Petersburg, with what feels almost like late summer... there are still flowers blooming around the city, green grass and leaves on trees, rain that has an edge of autumn but isn't yet really cold. The only real measure of time changing is the shrinking amount of daylight. When my alarm goes off at 7:00 it's still dark, and the wedge of light - more grey than blue - that I can see out our kitchen window doesn't really show up until almost 8:00. The days are twelve hours long, but shrinking fast.
It is w
onderful to be here, wonderful to settle into a routine, wonderful to revisit places that I've known for years now. Aslaug (my colleague from Bates) and I are living in an apartment in the center of town, on Vladimirsky Prospekt. We're minutes from Nevsky - the city's central shopping street and "place to be seen" (made famous by Nikolai Gogol's short story, "Nevsky Prospekt"). But to get to our apartment you walk through one courtyard and then another, so that it's almost as quiet here as when were on Baikal. Mornings when I'm sitting here having coffee in the kitchen I can here the bells at 9:00 from the Vladimir Cathedral. But there isn't even the faintest sound of traffic or city noise. It's a wonderful combination of quiet and convenience, refuge and central location.When David and the kids and I were here in 2000 we lived not all that far from here - maybe seven or eight blocks farther away from the city center. So part of what I'm acutely aware of, when I'm out strolling the neighborhood, are the ways in which this part of the city has changed in the past 9 years. There's nothing as dramatic as the changes in the previous decade, i.e. the years between 1990 and 2000: that was the decade of chaotic transformation and economic collapse - but they were also the years when the Soviet facades finally gave way to new small businesses, cafes and stores and banks. The difference between 2000 and 2009 is simply one of scale: the neighborhood is a wonderful melange of old and new, building restoration and transformation. There's a statue of Dostoevsky brooding over the pedestrian street outside the
metro station; a posh new commercial complex across the street where Aslaug and I go grocery shopping; lots and lots of small coffee shops with good cappucino and tempting pastries; the beautiful baroque yellow domes of the Vladimir Cathedral; a thriving "peasant" market where you can get fresh farmer's cheese and a staggering array of fruit; and the hustle and bustle of people on their way to work, women out shopping, business men on cell phones, elderly women with shopping bags, kids running home from school with their jackets flapping... It is a feast for the senses - and I find myself repeatedly stunned to tears by the variety and energy of it all. So much of this seemed impossible to imagine twenty short years ago.What seemed impossible? virtually everything I see on this brief walk around my neighborhood. Pick whatever center or starting point you want: the Orthodox church where people come and go freely, with the neatly kept garden and a brisk, neatly bearded priest in a dark jacket who comes walking out the gate talking on his cell phone; women browsing through a staggering array of cosmetics and high heels and lingerie; bookstores packed with Russian literature and foreign novels and books about gardening and body building and esoteric philosophy; streets bumper to bumper with all kinds of cars - not just the fancy Mercedes and BMW's that the "new Russians" drove ten years ago, but Toyotas and Fords and new-model Ladas. My students have no memories of the grey Soviet monotony, the consumer wasteland, the incredible waste of human creativity and hope that characterized so much of life in 20th century Russia. So when they look at St. Petersburg they often see a glass "half empty" - the city's grime, the unkept courtyards, the apartment buildings in need of plaster and paint, the graffiti. But I'm always seeing something else: the grime, the garbage, the grit - but also the energy and determination to make something of life and of this place. Flower boxes on a pedestrian walkway where there's a monument to Dostoevsky - whose critique of socialist revolutionaries made him a pariah in the Soviet era: who would have believed this possible twenty years ago? And around the corner we can buy mushrooms and dill from women who have come into the city early this morning, with the vegetables and flowers they have grown on their tiny dacha plots.
I'll have more to say and reflect on in future posts... now that I've figured out how this works (remarkably simple!) I'll try to send updates periodically. For now I'll share some pictures of St. Petersburg and Siberia, and wish you all lovely autumn days and the time to enjoy them!
Bolshie Koty, village on the shores of Lake Baikal, Siberia.
