An Evening Retrospective of Russian Culture
While I’ve already posted about the Thanksgiving holiday’s celebrations, I haven’t reported on all the festivities, namely a very interesting Saturday night.
My acquainance and teacher Andrei Sergeevich invited me to an evening of folklore (in the Russian sense of the word, meaning Russian folk music, dance and culture) where members of his many choirs were gathering to celebrate (?). When he invited me, I didn’t quite understand if it was a concert or simply a tea time get together, so I decided to bring Lindsey along for back up (and in any event, an excuse to leave: “Oh, Lindsey has a headache, we have to go”).
It turned out to be an informal concert/get together. Andrei Sergeevich’s family (wife and three kids) put on a psuedo-concert and invited the audience to join them in singing any songs that we knew. I obviously didn’t know very many songs, but the nice thing about Russian folk music is you can sing along without reallly knowing the words, so I just belted the notes with some universal vowel sounds and had a good time.
Everyone also got up and danced. I learned some new moves with was quite fun. Lindsey, however, was TERRIFIED! Eventhough she took part in the Russian School choir last summer, she doesn’t like to sing and hate dancing even more. Of course, we were guests, so she didn’t really have an option in the matter.
Towards the end we played a Marco Polo sort of game where everyone stood in a circle and chose a boy (universally named Yasha) to stand blindfolded in the middle. Next, a girl (Masha) was chosen for Yasha to catch by saying “tuda….tuda” (over here…over here). It was very funny to watch Yasha chase after this girl (it was also incredibly Russian: girl-crazy boy runs after pretty girl.) Once Masha was finally caught, Yasha felt her down from head to toe and tried to guess who it was. If he couldn’t guess immediately, Masha returned the the circle and Yasha took the blindfold off. He had to then pick her out of the circle of people. Once he chose the right girl, the two of them stood back-to-back in the middle of the circle. Everyone counted “Paz! Dva! Sud’ba!” (One! Two! Fate!) and both of them looked over one of their shoulders. If they looked in the same direction, it was decided that it was indeed ‘sud’ba’ and they would get married. This game is usually for children, but we all played together.
It was absolutely hilarious to watch the boy run all over the place after Masha; well, at least it was until I was chosen to be Yasha. Unable to refuse such an honor, I dawned the blindfold and did my best to catch my Masha with little success. I was stepping on the feet of those in the circle, acccidentally grabing their various body parts thinking it was my Masha. Ugg. One word: embarassing. In any event, I think they enjoyed seeing the American kid making a fool of himself. Unlike my last post, I enjoyed this. Humiliation is a wonderfully quick way to endear oneself into the hearts of others, and I found myself laughing harder at myself than anyone else.
The Americans’ humilitation continued when Lindsey was chosen to be Masha. She tried to deny the offer, but our hosts would have nothing of it. When Yasha was feeling her all over to try to guess who it was, everyone looked at me uneasily. They all thought that she was my girlfriend! Andrei Sergeevich tried to lighten things up by joking:
-This kind of game would never happen in the States, would it? He asked as Yasha was feeling Lindsey’s legs. I laughed and told him no. Such a game would cause lawsuits back at home!
When Yasha correctly picked Lindsey out of the circle, they looked over the same shoulder and it was decided that fate meant for them to be together. Everyone laughingly gave me their condolences and we proceeded to have some tea and cookies.
I had concert tickets that night, so we couldn’t stay long for tea, said our goodbyes and went back to the metro. I was going to Klub Tochka to see 5’NIZZA play. (5’NIZZA is a band whose name is a play on words. In Russian, five is pyat’, so when read in Russian, their name is Pyat’nitza, the word for Friday. They’re from eastern Ukraine and sing a fusion of rock/rap/reggae in Russian). One of my biggest goals for my semester in Moscow was to see them live. I missed their last concert in October, so when I saw they’d be playing again, I bought my tickets immediately.
It was a strange musical journey that night from the oldest of Russian musical traditions to one of the newest, most populare groups in Russia. I met Marco and his friend Pablo, who was visiting, at the club. It was a GREAT concert and the club was wonderful to boot! There wasn’t a bad seat in the house. I was, however, a little confused by what was playing on the Tvs throughout the club. Half of them where showing what was going on on stage and the other half were tunned to Animal Planet. Strange combo, right?
Around 4:30 in the morning, I left Marco and Pablo trying to teach two blond Russian beauties how to salsa on the dancefloor. Since the Metro was closed, I hailed a cab (well, it was actually just some guy in a car. This is a very common practice in Russian and completely safe). He was the coolest cabbie I’ve had so far in Moscow. He was originally from Syria but spent a number of years in Australia and Norway before coming to live with his Russian wife in Moscow where he studies Neuroscience. He spoke with an Australian accent and his speech was full of the mandatory ‘fuck/fucking/fuckers’ that I expect any foreigner would pick up living in Australia for seven years. It was a great ride, especially considering the fact that most cab rides I take are horrible awkward because I don’t like speaking in Russian to strangers (it’s much harder to speak a foreign language to strangers, although I am getting better about this as practically everyone I meet/talk to is a stranger).
I had a Shuarma (it’s a doenner for those of you in Berlin now) on my way home and went to bed full and completely satisfied with my evening. Perhaps Russia isn’t as bad as I thought.
Turkey Day, po-russkii
Unlike my friends and collegues back in the States, I took no breaks from school this week to gorge myself in the oldest of American traditions. It’s a pity, though; I really could have used the break to reevaluated and fully appreciate the many good experiences and opportunities that living in Moscow has given me, especially since this week was filled with those days that made me wonder what the hell I was thinking when I chose to come to this place.
I guess the beginning of my week wasn’t all that bad; the problems really started on Wednesday when, if I were still at Middlebury, I would have been home in Kansas for the holiday weekend. It was a relaxing enough day. Of my two classes, one was cancelled, so I took the opportunity to get some nap-time in before my marathon three-hour night class. It was difficult to get up from my 2.5 hour-long nap; I almost convinced myself not to go, but knowing this class was my mainstream and only met once a week, I told myself it was too important to skip. Man, that’s the last time I don’t trust my first instinct.
I took my seat in the first row of the classroom; the professor has a low mumbly voice with a lisp, so I can usually only understand him when I sit in the front. The lecture started on a relatively good note. I was one of the only people in the room who had actually come to the last lecture, so when the professor asked for a recap, I was his go-to guy in a way. The new lecture started and I was somewhat scared. The subject was “the concept of love in the slavonic world” (this class, by the way, is called ‘Problems of Ritual Symbolism in the Slavonic World’); as such, I knew there would be a lot of ancient Russian and Old Church Slavonic vocab and etymologies (both these languages are dead and fiercely hard for even Russians to make any sense of although they are the parent languages for modern Russian, and in Old Church Slavonic’s case, the entire family of Slavonic languages). It didn’t go as bad as I would have expected. I was understanding the etymologies and taking more notes that I had all semester. This must have been due to the fact that I’m a fan of linguistics and jumped with curiosity at a lecture that wasn’t about random rituals of country Russians or demonology.
With twenty minutes of class left to go before the break, the professor passed out handouts with examples of ‘love’ words given in the form of sayings and poems. Sayings can be my worst nightmare sometimes since they tend to be so idiomatic. This was one of those times. The first example was built around ‘pop’, a word I didn’t know which means priest. The only time the noun form was used (as opposed to a verb or adjective made from this same root word) was in the genitive case, ‘popa’. Now, any Russian speakers or people familiar with what a ‘popo’ is might understand my confusion. This word appeared to be the genitive form of ‘toosh/butt’ meaning it meant ‘of the toosh/the butt’s’. Being incredible confused, I asked my neighbor what this word meant – ‘PopA? Eto sviashchennik’ (PopA? That’s another word for priest). Realizing that the accented syllable was different for ‘Of the priest (popA)’ and ‘Of the butt (pOpa)’, I saw my mistake. Nonetheless, I remain a little suspect of a language whose word for priest is so similar to its word for ass. This example should also give you some idea of why Russian is so hard to learn. Stress can change the meaning of many words and if that weren’t enough, stress changes in many words when they appear in different cases. Unlike the Romance languages, there are no accents in Russian to indicate where the stress lies. Well actually, there is one, but it’s never written, so basically you just have to know where the stress in words is or sound like a fool. Take a wild guess as to which is the more common of these two possibilities.
When I explained my confusion regarding the whole ‘priest/butt’ problem, my neighbors definitely thought I was a fool. I was disappointed; I shared my misunderstanding with them (‘Oh, so it’s the PRIEST’S (popA), not the BUTT’S (pOpa)!’) because I thought it was funny and they could laugh with me about it. On the contrary, they laughed AT me.
New Rule for Mike in class: keep your damn mouth shut.
I was understandably upset and decided that it would just be best to spend the remaining fifteen minutes of class looking down at my handout as though I actually understood something. The professor continued lecturing on the remaining axioms and aparently notice my bowed head.
-Well, Mike, this must be hard for you to understand the sayings – he said in Russian before translating into English for my poor, ignorent American self. I was insulted, infront of the whole class no less. I had to prove myself, show them that I could indeed speak Russian. SAY SOMETHING, MICHAEL! ANYTHING!
I pulled a comment out of my ass on the new axiom we were descussing. It wasn’t thought through. It wasn’t inspiring or enlightening, but it was something. No one agreed with me, but I didn’t care. I just needed to prove to them that I understood in some way what they were talking about. So much for Mike’s new Rule.
I returned my gaze to the piece of paper before me. I’ll admit it: I was sulking. I wanted to walk out of the classroom right then and there, but since there were only ten minutes left, I decided to sit through it if for no other reason than to deny them the joy of knowing that they ruined my Thanksgiving Eve.
While watching the time tick away on my watch, I hear the proffessor say my name (not Misha, but Maikl, the Russian version of my English name. Maikl sounds very foreign in Russian discourse and sticks out like a sore thumb). In his mumbly-lisp voice I only understood one other word besides my name (‘odnopolnii’ – same-sex) before the classroom burst out in laughter. I had no idea what was so funny, but judging by the fact that he said my name in a sentence without looking at me, it was clear who the butt of the joke was. Seven minutes left.
I started to look at the poems printed on the handout. In the first one, there were maybe two words that I didn’t understand. Of course they were the most important words in the poem. I was so emotionally exhausted that I didn’t get my dictionary out to look them up. After all, it was already T-5 minutes and counting.
Sitting quietly in the middle of discussion, I heard the proffesor say Maikl again; this time he was looking at me.
-Maybe you have something to say about this poem?
If I were naked, this would have been my worst nightmare. I didn’t have anything left to prove; the class of so-called anthropologists, people who should be culturally tolerant and interested in trasnational understanding, had already judged me as another stupid American. Nothing I could say would convince them otherwise. I looked the professor in the eyes:
-U menia net slova.
The class once again erupted in laughter. If I were to somehow translate the miniscule grammatical mistake I made into English, it would sound something like ‘I don’t have any word’ or ‘I don’t have word’.
The teacher corrected me –Net slov – and continued lecturing until the fifteen-minute break before seminar started. I was out of that hellhole of a university faster than you can say ‘silly American’. The teacher would have to find someone else to make fun of for the next 1.5 hours because I was done! I had enough public humiliation for one night. Anyway, I had tickets to the symphony, which was infinitely more appealling.
I saw a concert of the Four Seasons with two of my friends from the Middlebury program. First they played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and then another piece called ‘The Four Seasons in Buenos Aires’ (it may be of interest to know that Russian has no word for ‘season’ in the winter/spring/summer/autumn sense of the word. They have to say ‘The Times of the Year’). It was a pretty good concert although the encores lasted longer than the concert itself. Both of the two soloists played encores and then the orchestra itself played two. This was unbelievable for both me and my companions who have significant musical experience. The orchestra didn’t just play an encore (which is strange enough), but TWO encores, both of which were full pieces (i.e. – at least three movements). Needless to say, we left before the second encore; it was getting late.
On the way back to the Metro station, a DVD caught my eye on the street. Moscow has countless street vendors of pirated DVDs that I usually don’t buy because of the quality of picture and bad dubbing. This DVD was, however, enough to make all three of us stop. It was ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ (which doesn’t come out in Russia until December 22nd!). It had apparently just hit the streets in Moscow that day, as the vendors were quick to point out after noticing our interest. They promised the best quality of picture and sound; it even had an English soundtrack!
-And how much does it cost?
-300 rubles (about ten bucks). This is a deal for ANY DVD in the states, but a little expensive for the street-sold knock offs one finds in Moscow. The vendor saw our reaction to the price.
-And there’s a two-week guarantee! This made me laugh for the first time the whole night.
The three of us talked it over and decided we could find it for much cheaper at Gorbushka’s. We said our thank yous and walked away. We didn’t get two meters before the guy came running after us.
-You know, for you, I can go as low as 250 rubles.
This was still too expensive and we continued walking.
-Ok, 200! But that’s it!
Now that’s what I wanted to hear! I handed over my $6.50 in rubles and walked away a happy man.
-Ahh, vy khitrie (Ahh, you guys are clever), Where are you from?
-America. Apparently we can be cunning sometimes, not just silly or stupid.
After such a horrible day at school, who knew all it would take to make me feel better was some Vivaldi and Harry Potter?
I returned to Sarah and Lindsey’s dorm room and told them about my day. It was relieving to have friends with such sympathetic ears. Besides the bottle of vodka and frig full of beers, they said they had something that was sure to cheer me up.
What was it you ask? Harry Potter of course! They had apparently bought it at the same stand as I did! We laughed so much, I forgot all about my professor and mean classmates. We watched the whole thing and I went to bed happy again.
(As a side note, I was a little disappointed in the newest Harry Potter film. I haven’t read the books, but even I could tell they left a lot out).
The next day was Thanksgiving, and Lindsey and I were on a mission to find a Thanksgiving meal. After much searching, we ended up at the Starlight Diner, a popular expat hang out with wonderfully authentic, if not overpriced, American Diner food. The American haven’s Thanksgiving dinner (750 rubles – over $20!) included butternut squash soup, turkey, mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, stuffing, grilled vegetables and of course pumpkin pie. We added a bottle of Soviet Champaigne to top things off and had a grand old time!
As is tradition, Lindsey and I listed all the things we were thankful for. An abridged version of the list: friends, family, the Starlight Diner, football players, Elvis Presley, and Forrest Gump. We discussed the possibilities of Russia having its own holiday devoted to giving thanks, and historical circumstances aside, we decided that it simply wasn’t possible. Russians just don’t have a lot to be thankful for. “I’m thankful for all the dictatorial regimes that have cursed and tormented my people for centuries!” It just doesn’t sound right, does it?
The evening was rounded off by a private screening of ‘Wallace and Gromit’ in Lindsey’s dorm room.
On a related note, the MiddKids here in Moscow are organizing their own Thanksgiving celebration. Because of scheduling conflicts, Thanksgiving will be celebrated today (Sunday) at Chris’s house. We’re going to have a turkey, apple pie, mashed potatoes, green bean caseroile and Beste’s world famous Company Hashbrowns (unfortunately, I couldn’t find packaged hashbrowns anywhere in Moscow, so we’re using freshly shreeded potatoes. I hope it turns out all right).
Happy belated Turkey Day to one and all. I hope the holidays gave you some needed relaxation to get through the rest of the semester. Just remember: Christmas will be here before you know it!
Comrade Theodore Dreiser
This is a follow-up to an old post entitled Problems in which i described how my hostess scolded me for not 'know my own classics'. By this, she meant that it was a shame that I didn't know who Theodore Dreiser was. I asked all my American friends if they had ever heard of him or if they could name one of his supposedly phenomenal works. Only one recognized the name but could not think of any of his books/essays. Some others recognized "An American Tragedy" and "Sister Carry", but had no idea who the author was. The surprises continued when i asked my Russian acquantances about Teddy; they ALL knew him, without exception! He's apparently read by all children in school. Confused at this strange contrast, I asked Chris, my RC (Resident Coordinator), and he had an interesting and logical response. Below is a copy of his email:
Misha,
About Dreiser. Very funny that that came up. Of the American writers that Russians know well (Dreiser, Hemingway, Faulkner, O'Henry, Steinbeck are the ones I hear the most frequently), Dreiser is the one that American knows least. He's one of those guys that gets at most a single sentence in an American history book, or even lumped in with other writers of the 1920s. The only book of his that I know is "Sister Carrie" but I haven't read it and I don't think people read it anywhere in schools these days. I think it's about a prostitute and was really controversial when it first came out but now doesn't seem so shocking. It's in the same sort of tradition as "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair, it's one of those books that is famous for its role in history but no one actually reads.
He was probably read frequently in the Soviet Union for the same reason that the American Civil Rights Movement got so much press - because his books reveal the bad side of America. If he wasn't a socialist himself, he was strongly associated with the socialist movement. His popularity probably declined over the course of the last century along with the popularity of socialist thought in American intellectual circles.
So you can tell Tatiana Nikolaevna that although it's true that Americans know their own literature worse than Russians, no one cares about Sister Carrie anymore, and while Soviet schoolchildren were dutifully reading it to highlight the evils of the capitalist system, Americans had already forgotten about it.
The only other thing I know about Theodore Dreiser is that he was discovered by one of my favorite writers H.L. Mencken, a famous journalist from the Baltimore Sun - most famous for his reporting of the Scopes Monkey Trial - who founded a magazine called the American Mercury where Dreiser's writing was first published.
See you tomorrow at the banya. 6:40 in front of Bolshoi.
Chris
I'm Koo-Koo for Krimea!
During our second train ride, we slept much more soundly since there were no boarder crossings involved. This was, of course, only after we made it to sleep. Around eleven o’clock, we realized that we hadn’t snatched up our blankets in a timely enough fashion and two of my sputniki were left blanketless. Chris was already off in dreamland, so we were left to fend for ourselves. Since there’s power in numbers, Adam accompanied Marco to the front of the wagon where the attendent kept all-night office hours. Much to their surprise a fat Ukrainian man, not the wagon attendant, opened the office door looking quite perturbed.
“What?!” he yelled.
“We need some blankets.”
“There are no blankets!” he snapped back. Adam and Marco could clearly see the treasure of heavy blankets stacked up against the wall next to a woman dressed like a hooker. This style of dress is not uncommon in Russia or Eastern Europe in general, but finding it on a disheveled women in the wagon’s only cabin with a door rose some suspicions.
“What do you mean? There are some blankets right there,” they pointed out.
A slammed door was the only response they got. It was time to call in the reenforcements, that is, the closest thing we had to a native speaker, Gigi. The three of them returned to the front of the wagon and made the same request.
“You can’t have any!”
“We paid for those blankets,” Gigi instisted, more comfortable with arguing in Russian after growing up in a Russian household.
“I paid too!” was the man’s response. The three of them weren’t sure if he was refering to the fact that he bribed our attendent to use the room or to the fact that he had a hooker in there with him, who by now was naked from the waist down.
Luckily, the late-night triste didn’t last too long and our friendly wagon attendent returned and willingly gave us the blankets. For the record, there was no appology involved in this exchange.
Fourteen hours later, we found ourselves in Krimea. We all rushed to the nearest, clear bathroom we could find (being the one in the nearby McDonalds. It has come to my attention that outside of the States, McDonalds’ bathrooms tend to be the cleanest, free toilets one can find) and proceeded to stretch our legs out walking through the Simferapol’s market. We quickly found a café to get lunch at and wait while Chris bought our return tickets to Moscow. It was there that we made our first Krimean friends – the stray cats. Moscow’s problem of wild dogs is at least twice as worse and due to cats in Krimea. We fed the kittens that probably lived nearby and knew quite well what they could get from gullible tourists passing through.
After paying the bill, we received a call from Chris. Everything that could go wrong at a train station in a post-Soviet country did go wrong. After waiting in line at the trainstation’s ticket counter, he was told that said counter only sold tickets for trains departing that same day. He had to go across town to a different trainstation to get the tickets where he found himself waiting in another line for over an hour only to have the window closed on him when he was next in line. At this point he called us. If we waited for him, we wouldn’t make it to Yalta in time for our tour, so he put Gigi in charge and told us to find a ride to Yalta and make contact with our tour guides there. He’d meet us as soon as he could.
On our own! How invigorating, right? We negotiated a microbus ride to Yalta, about two hours away, with one of the many men camping out infront of the train station. It was an amazing ride that gave us our first real view of Krimea’s mountains, the villages perched in the mountains, wide valleys and numerous vineyards all hidden in the winding landscape. We felt truly alive riding through the Tsars’ old paradise but not necessarily because of the scenary. All the mountain roads were about three lanes in width. This is to say that there were two lanes going in different directions and a middle lane used by everyone for passing. Our driver knew we were late for our excursion and was looking for a good tip, so he basically turned into the Ukrainian version of Mario Andretti (although I’m still not completely sure he needed an excuse to speed). Long story short, after the first hour, I gave up on looking out the window; it was simply too frightening.
We made it to Yalta in one piece, found our tour agency and immediately started our tour of Yalta on our way up to the old Tsarist summerhouse. Summerhouse is really too modest a term for this royal residence; it was more of a mansion. The second floor houses a museum to the Romanov’s that preserves the mansion’s atmosphere of everyday life alongside family photos and personal artifacts of the Empire’s last royals. The first floor is the home to yet another museum to the Yalta Conference, which took place in the mansion in 1945 (?) when the Allies decided the capitulation of Germany. I wouldn’t describe myself as a ‘history-buff’, but I enjoyed the exhibition. Much of the mansion’s tsarist glory was preserved after the Revolution and seeing the original documents was actually really cool. In case you were wondering, I liked Churchill’s signature the best.
After the museum, our tour continued onto the boardwalk were we got our first up close view of the Black Sea. It was around sunset by then, and the view was just amazing, especially after nearly two months in drearyMoscow. We were so taken by the sea-side atmosphere, that we even took this photo (belongs on Middlebury Schools Abroad website, maybe?):
After dinner, we drove another hour to where we’d be staying. Our host’s name was Andrei Pavlovich, and like many Krimeans looking to make some money off the tourist industry, Andrei rented out his guest house to travellers. He grew up in western Ukraine, a traditionally anti-Russian, ethnically Ukrainian area of the country, but after years of living in Krimea (always a favorite vacation spot for wealthy Russians and Soviets alike, which remained a part of the Russian Federation until Yeltsin officially gave the peninsula to the Ukraine), he seemed to have become quite Russian-friendly. Like most of the older generation, Andri Pavlovich was very fond of recounting his personal history and views on history at large, and we listened politely. His manner of speech was very relaxed and the timbre of his voice had such a soothing quality that I actually enjoyed listening to him. His house was situated in Simiez about a seven-minute walk from the sea. We woke up every morning and had breakfast on the balcony with the Black Sea’s majesty providing a beautiful background.
Although it was already halfway through October, Liza and I still went swimming in the Black Sea. The water was great!
Pusking and I at the Fountain of Tears in Bakhchisarai. The water drips down like tears in this fountain, constructed by the Khan in memory of one of his dead mistresses.
Our life in Krimea was relaxed. Aside from a day trip to Bakhchisarai (the old Khan’s fortress) and the 2,000 year-old city of Chufatkale, we lived at the slow pace of life on the sea, lazily waking up in the morning pondering over tea what the day would bring us. Unfortunately, our time in Krimea was all too short. Our last day there, we went wine tasting, as Krimea is known, among other things, for its wine. I can’t say that I liked the wine very much. Depite the fact that the wineries add no sugars to their Musckats or even dessert wines, they were all entirely too sweet for my taste (thanks to the climate and kind of grapes that grow there).
It rained that day, and I like to think that Krimea was mourning our departure. We drove back to Simferapol and boarded our train back to Moscow. It would be the longest train of the trip, and my life in general – altogether a 24-hour ride. We got back to Moscow around eight o’clock the next night, and strangely enough, it was a relief. We all felt for the first time that we were returning to something familiar, a Metro we knew and a language that we could actually comprehend; in a way, we came home. It was a wonderful feeling that encouraged me for the two weeks of classes and midterms I had ahead of me before the next break.
I’m already halfway through that second break and tonight will be leaving for a weekend in Petersburg with friends. Be looking forward to impressions from Peter’s city: as European as Russia gets.
