Soooooooooo sleepy.
It's dawning on me that I might never get a full night's worth of sleep again. Or that I might never be satisfied with 8 hours again; every morning I feel like I was awake all night, and every night I resist sleep until my eyes close on their own.
I worked diligently all week: Interviews every day!
Irina Dudina--we drank mors in the ballroom of a renovated palace/theatre. She claims to be the first artist after the fall of the Soviet Union to point-blank address contemporary Russian politics with a satirical, critical eye in her art.
Ivan Sotnikov--he drank sour white wine out of a box until drunk in his musty, cluttered apartment/studio while I searched for an excuse to excuse myself and he showed me crude, primitivistic paintings that I just didn't get.
Ilya Gaponov--he and his wife Katya
Sasha Terebenin--he suggested I might want to live in St. Petersburg forever; I told him I want to buy a dacha in the countryside, raise goats and grow watermelons
Yuri Shtapakov--he chainsmoked, shirtless, throughout the interview, cracked jokes with the ease and grace of a well-settled rock star.
Manya Alekseeva--I took a marshrutka from a far-away metro station, hoping beyond hope that I was going in the right direction. She directed me over the phone and I gave myself up to god (figuratively) and my spotty recognition of the unfamiliar street names that I had only incompletely parsed. She met me on a dusty street corner in billowing Israeli pantaloons and squishy foam sandals. Her house is in an area of town that over the past 20 years or so has slowly been developed, unofficially, into an "artist's village"--artists moved out there because it was cheap and there's a lot of space to create large projects without interruption or the constraints of four close, pressing walls. Manya hosts art shows in her enormous, decaying living room and has monumental sculptures haphazardly strewn around her lawn. I joined her outside for a post-interview cigarette (her, not me) and we clicked perfectly on historicism: the historian's most important task is not just the rote, accurate chronicling of events; a good historian approaches their work the way an artist approaches theirs, as a project, as a proizvedenie, a work of art that says something.
Veronika Rudyeva-Ryazantseva and Andrey Rudyev--a funky young couple, both contemporary artists, whose work rarely coincides. Veronika, a video-artist, asked me to sing a Russian song for her present project. We climbed up onto the roof and she filmed me singing "Gorod Zolotoy"--the Golden City, with the golden spire of Petropavlovsky Krepost' glinting in the background.
Andrey Khlobystin--whose verbosity began the moment we sat down and continued, uninterrupted, for 40 minutes. He's writing a book right now that attempts to answer all the questions that I've been dreading addressing: What is contemporary art? What is Russian art? Is there a characteristic that unites all of Russian art? Is Contemporary Art a purely international phenomenon? He's brilliant and he suggested quite a few interesting, convincing ideas about the nature of Contemporary and of "Russian", as an attribute. His book is in Russian, I believe, but it's going to be a very, very important source for my thesis. I can tell. He spoke at an almost incomprehensible pace, giving the slightly comical impression that the words were building up behind his mouth and exploding outward, but not quickly enough to prevent the growing traffic jam. He has too much in his head to take his time; these thoughts are URGENT. By the end of our interview (he bowed to me, sensai-style, before locking the door behind me) I was tightly-wound, strung-out, and exhausted from the sheer effort exerted to comprehend and keep up.
So, by Thursday my brain was fried (and I really get it now, Dove: "Professor, can I be excused? My brain is full."), and I gave myself the whole weekend off. I haven't given work any more energy than it took to write this post since Thursday afternoon. I deserve it; aside from conducting 9 interviews in 5 days, scurrying all over the city to meet artists at their leisure, I had some urgent, unrelated-to-research business to take care of. On Tuesday night, my acquaintance Pasha brought some friends over to project a movie on our wall. Pasha asked if he could try out my violin and, thinking nothing of it, I showed him how to hold it and then turned my attention elsewhere. An hour later I picked it up--and panicked to hear a raspy, breathy, squealing tone coming from my usually acoustically pleasant bow. I grilled Pasha until he admitted that he had been stroking the horsehair. Upset, exasperated, angry, I explained that the horsehair is NEVER to be touched, that the oils from your hand ruin the hair and it requires specific substances and some level of expertise to clean it, neither of which I have. He apologized and offered to pay for the repair, so we spent all of Thursday morning at a stringed-instrument shop getting my bow professionally cleaned. Just in time, in fact; Mitya had invited me to a picnic Thursday night at which he and I were to be the entertainment--ukulele and violin, with vocal accompaniment. I was expecting a messy gathering of young hooligans of the kind that gather on Palace Square--but it turned out to be a charming family gathering in honor of Mitya's best friend's brother's birthday; other than Mitya and Vasya nobody was familiar--except, oddly enough, Philippe, the director of Smolny Institute (for those whose memory needs a jolt, that's where I studied last fall). Turns out that Vasya's brother works at Smolny; what a bizarrely small city this is sometimes.
Picnics and street concerts (last night Mitya and I made enough money for wine and dinner, which we ate on the roof with two of his friends, under the lightest sprinkling of rain and the most beautiful wind, singing and playing and learning songs from each other until late, late, late...) and spontaneous excursions to Peterhoff; interviews and farewells (the law students from Cleveland are peacing out) and reunions (Katey's back and it is so wonderful to see her!) and it is time for a long, long sleep, which I doubt I'll ever get.
I've got two weeks left in St. Petersburg. I plan to use them well.
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