Saturday I had my first Printmaking class, noon to 4 PM, which is a shame because it means that my Friday nights are cut out early, but honestly this class is not a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon. I had a hard time finding it last weekend--it's in the studio that the "professor" shares with another artist, which is on the fourth floor of a standard apartment building off of the Sennaya Ploschad metro station. One of the uniquely Russian things about St. Petersburg is the courtyards--you often have to walk through an archway and away from the street, where it opens up into a courtyard that's shared by all of the businesses or homes around it. It's interesting but it makes it difficult to find certain places, especially on a Saturday morning after 3 hours of sleep and dancing all night.
But when I walked into Yuri Shtapakov's studio I suddenly felt so good, energized and awake and peaceful surrounded by so many objects of creativity and artistic tools. Yuri's enthusiasm was infectious as he invited us to make some tea (his) and have a cigarette (our own, if we had them). He didn't speak slowly, nor did he speak simply, but something in the clarity of his voice and his accompanying movements made him perfectly understandable. I was conscious that he was speaking Russian, but most of the time I stopped translating and just absorbed the meaning of what he was saying. He said that his favorite pieces of art are those done by people who "know nothing" about art, people who have never studied it and just let their creative ideas take control, because he sees an honesty in their work that is absent in a lot of experienced artists. We sat on mismatched couches in the corner of his studio, drinking tea and chain smoking (well, not me) while he flitted around and every few moments would jump up and say "Я сейчас вам покажу...--I will now show you..." and pull out another old piece of his to illustrate a point, or a work in progress, or a model for an installation that has yet to happen.
Then, Saturday night I accidentally stayed out all night--again, two nights in a row. I had meant to go home after the first wave and be home by 1 AM, but before I knew it the clock said 12:30 and I was still drinking and dancing with Megan, Joe, David, Lila, and Pasha & Roman, the guys we met on Friday night. Details are hazy, but 4:00 AM found me alone on the far end of Nevsky Prospekt, the only person on the street except for the bored taxi drivers and night owls who sometimes yelled down the street me, "Do you need a ride? Directions? You lost?", walking past the empty 24-hour cafés where the attendants were all asleep with their heads propped up on their hands behind the counter. I walked all the way up Nevsky, from end to end. I felt like a Dostoevsky character, tired and hungry, alone in this city where smiles must be earned. It took me over an hour, and along the way I ran into Roman, who did a double take and said "Why are you here?" and bid me goodnight after making sure I wasn't lost. At the other end I met up with my group and we got blini and tea at Chainaya Loshka, the Tea-Spoon, and took the first bus home to our dorm in Primorskaya at 6:03.
Sunday: we had an excursion to St. Isaac's Cathedral, which meant another night of sleep cut short. I met some excellent Russian girls--Olya, Tanya, Natasha, and Nadya, students at Smolny. The nap I had when I got home was on par with finding a bathroom after a pot of coffee and a long walk, in terms of relief gained.
Monday: I walked into my Impressionism & Postimpressionism class with Sarah and sat down to wait with anticipation while all the other students filed past us, late as are all Russian students (and Russians in general). The professor began talking in a low and fast tumble of words I didn't understand, and I began to feel a little panic rising in my throat. I'd expected to be able to hear at least a few words I knew--painting, artist, creativity, or even "Impressionism"--but it didn't seem that she would get around to that right away. I managed to pick out "Hegel" and then something about Lacanian analysis and the panic hardened into a little knot--Wow, I thought, unaware that there even were Lacanian undertones in Monet's Water Lilies and Van Gogh's Starry Night. About a half-hour into the class my eyes were glazed over and I was considering how to meet my Art History credit requirements without taking any Art History classes this semester when Sarah jabbed a piece of paper onto my desk. Do you also think we're in the wrong class?
And then the professor started talking about Marxism and I knew we were in the wrong place--there's just nothing Marxist about Degas' ballerinas! But we were too afraid to leave, so we just sat, fidgeted, and passed notes back and forth for another half-hour until the coffee/bathroom break midway through the four-hour period.
It turned out that our Art History class was a floor below us, and the one we'd been in was an upper level philosophy class called "Contemporary problems in ideology and knowledge" or something like that. That made me feel a little better about not understanding what the professor was saying, considering that I probably wouldn't have been able to follow it in English either.
Tuesday nothing interesting happened. I think I got some Uzbek bread for lunch, which was fantastic--they have these steaming hot little bread pockets filled with meat or cheese or chicken and tomatoes, like a hot pocket but fresh from a clay oven, for 50 rubles and only a 7-minute walk from the main Smolny building. It's my lunch just about every day.
Wednesday I had no class all day, so Joe and I walked around St. Petersburg, museum-hopping. We started at the museum in Dostoevsky's apartment off Sennaya Ploschad (and I don't know what Dostoevsky was bitching about--he had a pretty kushy place) and walked up the Fontanka to the museum in Anna Akhmatova's apartment, which was my favorite in terms of museum quality, while Dostoevsky's was my favorite apartment. Then we went to Pushkin's apartment on the Moika Canal, where our tourguide had a habit of spontaneously reciting Pushkin's poetry (in Russian, of course) with a grave face.
We had planned to go to the Nabokov museum as well, but it was almost closing-time by then and, as Sarah later said, we'd already made it through "The Trifecta" of Dostoevsky, Akhmatova, and Pushkin. We got some blini on Nevsky Prospekt and then I took the metro out to Sarah's apartment off Kirovsky Zavod to make a tart and eat dinner with her, her boyfriend Andrey, and our classmate Misha/Michael. It was a grand old time, as it tends to be with Sarah and Andrey. Aw friends! ^_^
Friday: we had a group outing to a bowling alley, where I won the first round (with a score of 100, probably among my highest ever!). Afterwards--details again are hazy, but I ended up in a karaoke bar by the Smolensky Canal that runs through Primorskaya, my neighborhood, a bar that resembled something between an old-west line-dancing hall and a day-camp cafeteria, more a tent than a building, filled exclusively with middle-aged people dancing waltzes and singing karaoke to Russian popular folk songs. We got a bottle of vodka between the 10 or so of us and somebody decided to sing "A Whole New World", which of course we all got roped into. We stuck around and possibly annoyed the regulars, and ran home at 12:50 to get inside the dorm before the curfew.
Saturday: printmaking class, which was again fantastic. We made our first attempt at printing, each creating our own templates and pressing them ourselves. It was fantastic. Partial results:
(mine is the metaphysical teacup)
Saturday for dinner we had a gigantic blini party, which meant I stood in front of the stove and cooked everybody blini for two hours, and after that we sat on the concrete shore of the Gulf of Finland in the fading light, playing music (a mandolin, violin, and guitar trio), singing, and drinking until just before the 1 AM curfew.
And today we had another cultural excursion to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where we saw the sarcophagi of most of the Romanovs from Peter the Great on down the line, and the prison cell where Maxim Gorky was held (among other things). We had lunch at a vegetarian cafe run by a religious cult (kind of like The Maté Factor!) and then I walked an hour back to the bus stop. Now I'm at Café Dubai for the free internet, drinking the last dregs of my Turkish Coffee (Кофе в Турке) and using this blog post as a distraction from my 30 pages of reading about the origins of the Impressionist movement, in Russian, for tomorrow afternoon's class. Thanks!
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