Petersburg phobia conquered?

Readers of Fur Coat's most recent post may wonder whether its author ever actually made it to St. Petersburg. That detail appears ambiguous. It all calls to mind Freud's famous Roman phobia, as recounted in The Interpretation of Dreams. For years, Rome was the city that most fascinated Freud, the basis of the classical education his psychology borrowed so much from, and the destination of several abortive journeys. Freud claimed that what repeatedly turned him back, once just 50 miles from the city, was an identification with Hannibal and an antipathy for the Catholic Church due to its persecution of Jews.

Will the same fate befall Fur Coat? After years and years of intense identification with Russian culture and the Soviet experiment will physical proximity overwhelm him? Will he turn back at the Finland Station or press on across the border? We can only wait and see.

St. Petersburg Rules

Is there any better tourist destination than St. Petersburg? To read Bruce Lincoln's last book, Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia, one would expect "Piter" to outshine all other European cities, including Moscow. After all, St. Petersburg is a city of lovely canals and embankments and splendid baroque and neoclassical architecture. More than this, St. Petersburg is a city of tsars, revolutionaries, and, above all, poets. This is the city of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Nicholas I, and Alexander the Tsar Liberator. It's the city of Lenin, Trotsky, Kirov, and the Russian citizens who held out for 900 days against Nazi encirclement. And ultimately it's the city of Pushkin, Akhmatova, Brodsky, Blok, Bely, Gumilyev, and so many others.

But on a practical level, where should one go to find out what actually awaits the visitor who would like to see the Winter Palace and the Hermitage, the Bronze Horseman, Peterhof, the Nevsky Prospect, the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Neva River, the Admiralty Spire, The Mariinsky Theater, Church of the Savior of Spilled Blood, Kazan Cathedral, Yusupov's Palace, Smolny, the Mikhailovsky Castle, Tsarskoe Selo (Pushkin's Village), the Tauride Palace, the Finland Station, the Stray Dog Cafe, and other physical reminders and architectual moments of St. Petersburg's brilliant but tortured past? For clues, why not see what Mara Vorhees, the author of the Lonely Planet's Petersburg City Guide has to say?

As far as this blog post will go, let's just say that Vorhees recommends some Internet resources related to the city's past and present. These include the following:

www. encspb.ru
www.eng.gov.spb.ru
www.hermitagemuseum.org
www.nevsky-prospekt.com
www.petersburgcity.com
www.st-petersburg.com
www.sptimes.ru
www.mariinksky.ru

Politics, War, and Faberge Eggs

Solomon Volkov's Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under The Tsars delineates the complicated and evolving relationship between Russian autocracy and Russian cultural genius between 1613 and 1917.
This is a self-described prequel to another work, the Magical Chorus, which treats the same topic during the Twentieth Century. See my earlier blog post on this wonderful book.

Romanov Riches is a short book, and Volkov cannot claim to have analyzed any of the tsar's aesthetic predilections or cultural policies in any detail. Even so, Volkov manages to say something interesting and original about Catherine the Great, Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III, Nicholas II, and even Lenin. In just slightly more than 200 pages, we tract the collapse of imperial authority in the arts. Where the emperors once dominated almost every aspect of the art market, Nicholas II's patronage was often spurned by liberal or radical artists for ideological reasons. Moreover, by the turn of the century, wealthy bourgeois patrons competed with the tsar for role of taste-maker and patron of the arts. Volkov is well established as once of the most balanced and knowledgeable experts on Russian culture, and feels equally at home analyzing trends in ballet, music, theater, fine art, poetry, and prose.

This book, like his treatise on the influence of Stalin on Shastokovich, is filled with insights into the influence of high culture on state policy. How did Pushkin and Nicholas I use one another and who got the better end of the bargain? Why was Pushkin's death, as well as that of Lermontov, a political problem for the tsars? How did the government use Dostoevsky and Gogol, and were the risks of relying on these Slavophiles to make their case to the literate classes? And who couldn't be fascinated by the way autocrats read and understood Tolstoy? Tolstoy, of course, interpreted the Franco-Russian War of 1812 for the Russian public, but he also shaped public perception of the Crimean War with his Sevastopol Sketches, and of course had a lot to say about how Alexander III dealt with his father's murderers.

All in all, the Romanovs come off rather well in Volkov's history. Although military and political matters necessarily dominated their worldviews, most of these conservative autocrats were sensitive, well-read, polyglots with serious personal interest in participating in the arts. Some were even educated by Russia's greatest authors, including the historian Karamzin. Volkov's point is that political leadership of the Russian nation necessarily entailed cultural fluency if not cultural mastery.

Oblomovshchina

"God grant tomorrow be just the same!"

"Work is life's form, content, element, and purpose--at least mine. You've driven work clean out of your life, and what has come of it?"

This blog was partly inspired by the movie, Julie and Julia, in which blogger Julie Powell describes cooking 524 recipes from Julia Child's famous cookbook in 365 days. Although I loved the concept of Powell's obsessive blog as soon as I heard about it, I only saw the movie a couple of days ago. Loving Meryl Streep as I do, I enjoyed the movie a great deal. It also uncovered hidden memories of watching Julia Child's bizarre show with my mother when I was a child. It was hard to know what to make of Julia Child, with her powerful but unidentifiable accept. Without the benefit of a VCR, who could follow her complex recipes? I still wonder whether her show taught women how to cook or merely helped people to touch base with a deep sense of loss about the fact that they no longer knew how to do what she did, or even had time to make the attempt to cook real food.

Watching the film, it's time to reflect on the nature of this blog. Why did I decide to follow Powell's example and write about my evolving obsession with Soviet intellectual history? To my mind, blogging was an attempt to escape the fate of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov. See Elaine Blair's article in a 2010 edition of the New York Review of Books, entitled "The Short Happy Life of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov for an abbreviated description of that life: the novel is well over 500 pages long Ivan Goncharov's iconic character, Oblomov, retired from the civil service while still in his thirties. At this point, he devoted himself to leisure--not leisure in the ordinary sense of drinking, gambling, duals, and other equally pointless aristocratic pursuits, but leisure in the extraordinary sense of purposeful repose. Avoiding both work and entertainment, duty as well as pleasure, Oblomov does almost nothing from one day to the next and dreams of one day attaining an even purer state of indolence by perhaps living in the countryside. Eventually, although he drifts gently into family life, Oblomov dies, having "quietly and gradually fit himself into the simple and wide coffin of the remained of his existence." In some ways, the story of Oblomov is a metaphor for anyone who loves to read, since reading is one of life's most seductive forms of escapism. While Oblomov actually rejects literature in favor of an even more passive attitude toward life, reading is probably as close as most of us will ever come to the Oblomov's idyl. Blogging, of course, is a close relative of reading, and certainly blogging isn't any substitute for a plot in one's life, but it's at least an attempt to lift oneself off of Oblomov's comfortable bed from time to time.

Shklovsky's Revolution

Viktor Shklovsky's memoirs, A Sentimental Journey, cover the author's energetic participation in World War I, the February Revolution, the October Revolution, the Russian campaign in Persia, and the Civil War. Shklovsky's unorthodox approach to autobiography is ironic, poetic, and elliptical. His observations seem to reveal the essence of this revolutionary epoch on both the microscopic and macroscopic levels. The current of clever but understated cynicism that runs through A Sentimental Journey seems to perfectly portray the madness and horror of that extraordinarily fluid period in Russian history. Although Shklovsky, a Social Revolutionary in these years, ostensibly sympathized the Bolsheviks in their contest with the counter-revolutionary forces, his detached, sometimes indirect critique of Bolshevism is ultimately more damning than even Ivan Bunin's memoir of the period, Cursed Days. If this is how a young Leftist intellectual saw Lenin's Party, how much worse must they have been?


Shlovsky on the Nature of Revolution


"You'll see. Our Revolution will save the world."

"Everything was fine. We were all being swept along by a river and the whole of wisdom consisted in yielding to its current."

"I was happy with these crowds. It was like Easter--a joyous, naive, disorderly carnival paradise."

"In general, and Easter mood prevailed; everything was going well and it was believed that this was only the beginning of everything good."

"The streets seethed with impromptu meetings. Private life seemed pallid."

"One soldier said, "I don't want to die." With desperate energy, I spoke about the right of the Revolution to our lives. I didn't despise words then, as I do now."

"The Revolution had engraved its norms on his soul. He was like an Orthodox Christian."

"They hastened to inform me that they were for the commune. What they meant by that I don't know. Perhaps only communal pastures."

"The regiments knew nothing about freedom of speech; they regarded themselves as a single voting entity. Those who opposed the majority were beaten up."

"Why didn't we understand that we can't fight with such crap at the front?"

"Comrades, what are you doing! Is this really the way to fight capitalism? Capitalism has to be fought efficiently."

"If you don't believe that there was a revolution, go and put your hand in the wound. It's wide."

"The laws had been repealed and everything was being revised."






Shklovsky on Suffering

"When I arrived in Moscow on the nineteenth of this month and brought some bread (ten pounds) to a close friend, he began to weep--He wasn't used to bread."

"Hunched over, with mechanical gesture of a tired animal, they picked through the garbage looking for something edible."

"...the others died as quietly and slowly as only the infinitely steadfast human being can died."

"There's a Cossack. In front of him lies a naked baby, abandoned by the Kurds. The Cossack wants to kill it. He hits it once and stopds to think, hits it again and stops to think.
They tell him: "Finish him off."
And he: "I can't. I feel sorry for it."

"The commander, Ivanov by name, defended himself for a long time with a saver before they cut off his head and gave it to the children to play with." (Referring to the Kurdish campaign).

"One morning when I got up and opened the street door, something soft fell to the side. I stooped down and looked...Something had left a dead baby at my door. I think it was a complaint."

"...the way the city had grown quiet. Like after an explosion, when it's all over, when everything's blown up. Like a man whose insides have been torn out by an explosion, but he keeps on talking."

"In general, it was a time of local power and local terror. People were killed on the spot."

"There was cholera in St. Pete, but people were't being eaten yet."

"I saw a beggar pull a piece of bread out of his sack and offer it to a cabby's horse. The horse turned it down."

"Once beef was issued. What a fantastic taste it had! It was like the first time you slept with a woman. Something entirely new."

"Our hardships kept piling on; we wore them like clothing."

Shklovsky on the Bolsheviks

"A man should worry less about history and more about his own biography."

"Who are you for--Kaledin, Kornilov or the Bolsheviks?" Task and I would have chosen the Bolsheviks. However in a certain comedy, the harlequin was asked, "Do you prefer to be hanged or quartered?" He answered, "I prefer soup."

"The show "Russia" was over; everyone was hurrying to get his hat and coat."

"The Bolsheviks were very weak, too, but the ship was listing on their side."

"When the Boksheviks left the front wide open without signing the peace treaty, they were hoping for a miracle, but the man consumed in fire didn't rise from the dead. And the Germans walked through the front door."

"And so some cracked safes, some headed east to joint Wrangel and Denikin, others were shot and still others hated the Bolsheviks with a hatred so salty that it kept them from spoiling."

"And on the horizon, promising to crush us all, loomed the hungry Bolsheviks."

"Bolshevism thrives in foreign climes"

"It was said that the French had a violet ray with which they could blind all the Bolsheviks..It was said that the English had landed in Baku aa heard of apes trained in all the rules of warfare...People held their hands about two feet off the ground to indicate the size of the apes. They said that when Baku was taken, one of these apes was killed and it was buried with a band playing Scottish military music and the Scots cried. That's because the instructors of the ape legions were Scottish."

"His father had died after the October coup. His uncle had shot himself. He left a note: "The damn Bolsheviks."

"It's fantastic how much more stupid a state is than an individual."

"The Bolsheviks entered a Russia that was already sick, but they weren't neutral--no, they were a special kind of organizing bacillus, but of another world and dimension."

"The Bolsheviks held out, are holding out, and will hold out, thanks to the imperfections of the mechanism which they control. However, I am unjust to them. Just as unjust as the deaf man who looks at people dancing and thinks they're insane. The Bolsheviks had their own music."

"And at this moment, with my life in fragments, I stand before the ordered consciousness of the Communists."

"It was like two voids attacking one another. There were no Red and White armies. That's no joke. I saw the war."

"A nation, however, can be organized. The Bolsheviks believed that it's the design that matters, not the building material. They were willing to lose today, to lose biographies, in order to win the stake of history."

"They wanted to organize everything so that the sun would rise on schedule and the weather would be made in their chancellery. It's easy to see how the Bolsheviks made the mistake of mapping out a plan for the whole world on paper.


Shklovsky on Russia

"It was Russian imperialism--what's more, Russian imperialism, which is to say, stupid imperialism."

"Russia was beginning to break down into its primary factors."

"People will ask, how did Russia permit such things to happen?"


Shklovsky's Guide for Living

"It's good to live and sniff the road of life with your snout."

Mandelstam Versus Stalin

"Mandelstam sailed through life with a cargo of manias. He lived in terror of his muse and his erection one day deserting him. He lived in everlasting fear of fear."

"Russia, the running riot we know and loathe and love and fear, is reserved for Russians."

"You have to have lived through the thirties to understand, and even then, you don't understand."

"Where are the swans? They went away, the swans. The ravens too? They stayed, the ravens." Marina Tsvetaeva, cited by Robert Little.

In life, Stalin triumphed over everyone; his brutal victories over his rivals was, more often than not, complete. He was once quoted as saying that there was no greater feeling in life than slowly and carefully plotting the destruction an enemy. The evidence of Stalin's capacity to deliver vengeance on his real and perceived rivals is everywhere; probably Stalin annihilated more opponents than any other figure in human history. Trotsky was killed with an ice pick; Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Kamanenv died as a consequence of elaborately staged show trials.

Hitler, Stalin's ultimate enemy, suffered at the hands of Stalin too. Oliver Hirschbiegel's German-language film, The Downfall, shows just how bad things got for the Fuhrer and his allies. In the final tens days of his miserable existence, Hitler was reduced to berating his generals in a small bunker for their inability to carry out his brilliant strategic decisions in the face of overwhelming odds. According to the film, which is based on a great deal of first-hand accounts by bunker survivors, Hitler even praised his nemesis, Stalin, for having the foresight to liquidate his military leadership prior to the advent of hostilities. Soon, even Hitler recognized that, despite his best efforts at averting the perceived catastrophe, the German people as a whole had been bested by a ruthless opponent, the Russians, who would soon overwhelm the decadent Western powers as well. "I didn't just do this for the Germans. Not just the Germans."

Stalin died, apparently, of natural causes. Stalin lived by the sword but did not died by the sword. Rather, he wet himself and lay paralyzed for hours, starring up in wrath--as his daughter tells us--at those who eventually surrounded him.

While he was alive, very few people can be said to have voiced any opposition to Stalin's reign of terror and lived to tell about it. Khrushchev, Stalin's greatest historical opponent, was a fawning admirer--one of Stalin's closest advisers--while Stalin lived. Osip Mandelstam, the unlikeliest of heroes, did oppose Stalin, although he, like so many others, died for his troubles. His act of defiance was odd, a simple epigram or satirical poem, repeated to a number of literary friends despite the omnipresence of political informers in every segment of Russian society. The poem, which became known to Stalin almost immediately, read as follows:


We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer.

His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders--
Fawning half-men for him to play with.

The whinny, purr or whine
as he prates and points a finger,

One by one to be forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.

According to Robert Little's The Stalin Epigram, a novel which relies heavily on the memoirs of Mandelstam's widow, Mandelstam's poem was a courageous act of existential defiance by an artist who believed that art and truth-telling were nearly synonyms. The novel, which is told from the point of view of multiple actors, including Mandelstam, Pasternak, Akhmatova, and his wife Nadezdha, but also Stalin and Stalin's personal bodyguard and others, tells the story of Mandelstam's decision to speak out against mendacity despite the danger and, more importantly, despite his own innate cowardice. Of course, Mandelstam suffered grievously for his bravado, being arrested, interrogated, banished to Voronezh, intimidated into writing pro-Stalin poetry, arrested again in 1938, and allowed to die in a transit camp.

On Russian Bureaucracy

"If you tell my story, make it funny. Don't make it pathetic, like the way it was..."

Lovers of Tsarist or Soviet literature will be relieved to know that Russian bureaucracy isn't dead. Take the experience of a friend who wants to go to St. Petersburg for an academic conference in late July. This woman, let's call her Madame S in the spirit of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, realized that she's required to secure a visa. This seems like an odd request: Americans and Canadians rarely need a visa to travel anywhere, and certainly not anywhere in Europe. Still, the visa request is reciprocal; and one can't quite blame Russia for demanding that foreigners are treated as poorly as its citizens are treated abroad. But see how difficult the request can be. When my friend went directly to the Russian consulate to secure this visa, she ran intro trouble--nothing dramatic, just low-level bureaucratic noise. The consulate, beautiful and stately on the outside, is dim, windowless, and unadorned on the inside. On Madame S's first visit to the consulate--and the forlorn guests of the consulate told her nobody ever avoids at least a second visit to the consulate before securing a visa--she encountered an old woman who refused to answer any questions, and a skinny, pale-faced man with sad eyes, black hair brushed down over his sickly forehead, and the general countenance and demeanor of a serial killer.

This insouciant and sickly man, who became Madame S' bureaucratic tormentor, spoke neither English nor French very well, and took frequent smoking breaks. While never overtly rude, his mournful eyes seemed to mask a simmering anger. The play between tormentor and tormented occurred in four acts. In act one, Madame S was informed that the consulate did not have any visa applications and so applicants needed to go home first to print one off. Fortunately, one of the consultates supplicants, who had her own tale of woe predicated on the fact that her bank couldn't issue an acceptable certified check or something similar, offered Madame S an extra visa form to fill out. But even this didn't do the trick: Madame S' passport photo was deemed too large to qualify for the application and she was sent back out into the street.

Almost two hours later, our heroine returned to the consulate with a completed application and new photo. Fortunately, even with the absence of nearly two hours, her number hadn't even been called yet. When it was called, Madame S dashed up to the Russian official but, alas, he strode out of the room without apology to smoke. Upon his return, he announced that the new passport photo was not valid either; apparently propriety demanded a different ratio of head to background space. As the workday was ending, Madame S left the consulate and returned the next day, but sadly there was no way to know that the consulate was now closed for two days on account of a national Russian holiday. On her fourth visit to the consulate, Madame S arrived forty-five minutes early but this time was told that, contrary to previous information she had received from Russian academic authorities, she could not easily receive a tourist visa since she was, at least partially, traveling for business reasons.

Not even the required hotel "invitation" was enough to satisfy Official Russia. Madame S did what many of us would have done: she cried like a baby and left the consulate, and Montreal, without a visa. The story isn't unusual: nobody in the consulate had a more satisfying encounter with the visa process. Moreover, while waiting in line, Madame S learned from ethnic Russian travelers that she should expect more of the same, or worse, in Russia itself. Apparently the land of the Hermitage was no tourist paradise. One needed a minder, or guide, to navigate the city. One shouldn't even talk in public for fear of letting others know one's vulnerable status as an outsider.

If Russia has such esquisite appreciation for bureaucracy, its no wonder that she also has connoisseurship in the art of the queue. During the Soviet era, people lined up to wait for goods and services with superhuman patience, as if people could receive religious absolution at every store, government depot, or street corner. Vladimir Sorokon's novel captures the spirit and existential meaning of the Soviet queue. According to Sorokon, Soviet citizens spent, on average, about one third of each day waiting for something. In such conditions, money was meaningless: only time, and your place in the line, mattered. As Sorokon points out, both Russia's private and public history is related to standing in line. In 1896, Nicholas II was coronoted but 2,000 people were crushed to death as a monstrous line for "coronation gifts" spun out of control. At Stalin's death in 1953, history repeated itself, although nobody can be sure exactly how many Soviet men and women died in the orgy of mourning. Russians are accustomed to waiting in line. As Orthodox believers, they stood for services that could last several hours. As Soviets, they waited for "food, goods, tickets, vacations, toilets" and even prison beds.

In Montreal, Madame S experienced the queue as a demeaning expression of the bureacrat's power, and certainly Soviet citizens felt demeaned by the scarcity that pervaded their lives. In Sorokin's fictional queue, Russians resent the store employees who are lackisasically distributing the goods, hate those who precede them in line and therefore diminish their chances for receiving anything,, and despise those that enviously follow them and watch for opportunities to cut in line. On the other hand, Sorokin's queue isn't without merits. At the local level, those in line help each other by trading information--or at least wild rumors--and holding places for comrades who wish to step outside the line to buy alcohol or even simultaneously take up a place in a second line. The line was also a place for political or philosophical discussion. As one person in the line reminds those around him, one shouldn't be so quick to admire either the American economic or political system. In America, one can criticize Ronald Reagan freely but be fired for critizing his boss. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the hegemony of the queue collapsed. Now people were confronted with radical consumer choices. Where once people made due with three types of sausage, they now had 333 sausage selections. The downside to this consumer paradise is that many people can no longer afford that which is theoretically available to them.