As if these were adventures

Books! A brief interlude: for a reason somewhere between convenience and nostalgia, I picked up On The Road when I finished Master & Margarita and found myself in need of a new bus-and-metro book. I've never read Kerouac before, and after Bulgakov his writing was especially refreshing in its honesty and irreverence. I flipped the pages with gusto and with each adventure I read, I got a stronger urge to document my own--as if these were adventures. But adventures or not, they don't write themselves.

Incidentally, after I finished On The Road, I skimmed an awful translation of Gorky's A Sky Blue Life and Other Stories, putting it down after the first few tales because it was clear that in Russian the writing would be beautiful, but whoever translated it did so without a trace of tact. Each sentence was stilted, in quality and clarity only a step above free online babel-fish translation. The prose came off as bald and intangible, without atmosphere or emotion. The lesson learned in throwing that aside: no matter how good the original, a good translation can make or break the deal. No wonder Nabokov caused heart palpitations in the literary world with his prose translation of Eugene Onegin--for all y'all non-Russian lit buffs, Pushkin's original was written in verse. I'd prefer a beautiful prose translation to an artless literal one , but purists were scandalized and many maintain he desecrated the novel. That said, now I'm in the first few pages of Andrey Bely's 1920's Symbolist masterpiece Petersburg--or rather Robert Maguire and John Malmstad's translation thereof. Far more appropriate reading material!

So last weekend found me in between all this, having just finished On the Road and just coming to the conclusion that A Sky Blue Life was uninteresting, and thus without a good book for the 5-hour bus ride to Pskov. Pskov! An ancient Russian city that makes America look like a bouncing baby, and to hear our guide Mikhail Ivanovich tell it, one of the most glorious cities on earth. Better than Paris, better than Tokyo--and New York? Psh, that's not even a city. And I can't really disagree with him, Pskov is pretty impressive. The oldest city we've got is what, 300 years old? 400 if you count settlements that have been no more than tourist attractions for the past century or more. St. Petersburg is 300 years old and it's considered "young" by Russian standards. It's still finding its feet. Now Pskov? Pskov has over 1,000 years under its belt. You can't dispute that for seniority.

The excursion to Pskov was one of the Bard-Smolny Cultural Events, which meant free meals, fancy lodging, and traipsing around the city with Mikhail Ivanovich all day--but there's only so much you can take of doing everything in a giant group. And our group was giant! Not only the vast majority of the American students (about 30), but also ten or twelve Russian students made the trip, as well as our program coordinators, and one gaunt, bearded Russian History professor who informed us early on that our first tour-guide--whose name I didn't catch--hadn't a shred of credibility, and spent the rest of the weekend raising his eyebrows and correcting her under his breath. Apparently she had claimed that Saint Olga founded Christianity.

We left Petersburg at 8:00 Saturday morning (and allowing an hour and a half for the commute I woke up at 6), gathering in the dawn at the feet of the largest statue of Lenin I've seen to date. Petersburg is strange in its statuary: It seems like every block in this city has its own statue of Lenin, or bust of Voltaire, or oversized anchor on a pedestal. While these seem to be the most popular themes, there are monuments to Soviet heroes tucked away everywhere in the most unlikely of places. Cosmonauts, explorers, foremen, writers--just today I came across a larger-than-life bust in military garb, perched on a craggy pedestal with a bronze camel curled sanguinely at its base: a tribute to some man who explored central Asia? All this aside, this statue of Lenin was most impressive that morning, right arm flung forward (pointing towards the glorious future of Communism, no doubt) as if the proletarian commander of the troupe of groggy, duffel-toting students clustered beneath him.

The weekend, quite frankly, was made up a series of fantastic meals at nice restaurants, interspersed with long periods of walking around and looking at ancient things. They always feed us so well as a group, especially when there are Russian students along! Lunches consist of a salad and a main course, often soup, followed inevitably by tea and usually by dessert. Most of the cultural excursions are worth going to, but even if they were entirely dull they'd be worth it for the lunch with which each one concludes. But I digress...Pskov is around 50 km from the border with Estonia, historically serving as a guard city, and is thus encircled by a millennium-old stone wall and fortress. I zoned in and out of Mikhail Ivanovich's tour and more than anything just enjoyed the crisp, clean sunlight and solemn peaceful feeling I imagined radiating from the tired old stones. There's just something about sitting on a wall that's been unchanged for over 1,000 years that put me in a quiet and unhurried mood.

Friday night after dinner I joined forces with a few of our girls and sought out the infamous Banya--a Russian tradition that's among my favorite aspects of this culture. The Banya is a public bathhouse where visitors alternate between sitting in a suffocatingly hot sauna where they beat each other with birch branches (to stimulate circulation, see?), and pouring icy cold water over themselves or jumping into a similarly icy cold pool. The process is repeated as the visitor desires. Risley: imagine Pool if it were funded by the Russian government.

We spent Sunday at Izborsk, cite of another ancient fortress and an incredible panorama spread out beneath the guard towers--rolling hills and a flat horizon, trees lazily changing their leaves on the banks of a pristine reflective lake rippled only by flocks of swans floating barely in motion. I imagine this landscape unchanged a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years ago. The phonetics instructor Svetlana Borisovna, upon our return, told us with a note of sincere tenderness that the view from the ruins at Izborsk is, for her, the most beautiful Russian landscape, the symbol of all of Russia, the place that feels most like Homeland. I don't know if it's possible, but I imagined I felt something like that as I spread my gaze over that beautiful, serene place untouched by the heavy pace of history.


All my Russian classes are canceled this week due to some bureaucratic error in the university's system--which is a pretty standard occurrence here--but this week is as full as ever due to my inimitable talant for over-scheduling. I have Impressionism today and Photography on Friday, and I'm volunteering for the art-center Pushkinskaya, 10 on Wednesday and for the Hermitage on Tuesday. Pushkinskaya, 10 is hosting an international contemporary art festival starting next weekend, and my job is to help the non-Russian artists navigate their time here, whether that means hanging paintings, buying art supplies, or taking them to the hairdresser. After the festival starts on the 24th, I have 4 shifts a week as a дежурник, or attendant, in the gallery. Hopefully that means talking with visitors about the show, getting familiar with the pieces exhibited. I'm looking forward to meeting the artists and working so closely with them! It's really exciting having the opportunity to be involved with such important institutions in the art world. The Hermitage, though, to be honest, is far more exciting in theory than in practice--I spent an afternoon working on artists' biographies in English last week, and it felt like doing homework in Uris computer lab. At least my résumé is getting its first real field-related addition, um, ever. The Hermitage, too, is about to open a new show, on tour from the Saatchi Gallery in Britain, and I'm helping compile the information regarding that. Links, if you're interested: This is the Saatchi Gallery show, and you can find the "Level of the Sea" Festival here.

Hopefully, though, all this won't interfere with my intentions for a whirlwind trip to Estonia in the second half of the week...plans are in the works, but not concrete quite yet, so I'll put off any more detail until I've got tickets.