Losing My (Civic) Religion

The days after November 9, 2016, were unlike any that I can remember. In conversations and on Facebook, people were not simply upset that their candidate had lost. There was a profound sense of disorientation. It turned into a constant refrain: We could no longer recognize the country we lived in. As I began to process my own feelings of shock and horror, I had a sense that for the rest of my life, I would see November 9 as a dividing line between Before and After. I kept thinking of one Russian phrase: perelom soznaniia, a “break of consciousness.” 

I found myself thinking of a letter to the editor that I had read in the archives earlier in the year. On February 17, 1986, the Soviet newspaper Izvestiia published an article by Russian writer Valentin Rasputin on the pollution of Lake Baikal by Soviet industry. Lake Baikal is the deepest, most ancient lake in the world, home to flora and fauna that can be found nowhere else on earth. Taking advantage of the new freedom of the press made possible by Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost’, Rasputin described the wanton pollution of the lake and destruction of surrounding forests by a cellulose factory with the tacit approval of government ministers and Soviet scientists. The next day, O.S. Alekseyeva of the city of Nikol’sk in modern-day Ukraine wrote a letter to the editor to respond.

Alekseyeva wrote to describe the “fearful pain” that the article had evoked in her soul. The revelation that an industrial combine was destroying—perhaps irrevocably—a national treasure may be something that might evoke a ho-hum reaction in many Americans today. But Alekseyeva was shaken to her core. She wrote that she could cry from helplessness. The ground beneath her seemed to have shifted: “I remember my Pioneer [Soviet equivalent of Girl Scouts] childhood—how proud we were, how we believed that our country was the most wonderful, where everything is planned, where chaos is impossible.” She wondered if there were still decent people who felt a sense of responsibility towards the present day and the future.

By RIA Novosti archive, image #793152 / Yuryi Abramochkin / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19448466

Alekseyeva does not seem to have been naive about the Soviet record on environmental protection. In her letter she wrote that she had already been reading for years about “carpet-bagger” administrators (vremenshchiki) who come to a place for a few years, destroy the area’s natural riches, and then retreat, never to be seen again. But, in spite of the evidence, Alekseyeva had been convinced that her country stood for something better. As anthropologist Alexei Yurchak pointed out, “many of the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialist life (such as equality, community, selflessness, altruism, […] and concern for the future) were of genuine importance” for Soviet citizens like Alekseyeva, even though these ideals were often violated in everyday life.

Rasputin’s article about the destruction of Lake Baikal seems to have pushed Alekseyeva over the edge, causing her to question her faith in her country to do the right thing. When Alekseyeva read about Soviet administrators and scientists colluding in the destruction of one of the world’s greatest natural wonders, she had to admit to herself for the first time that environmental destruction might not be a bug in the system, but a feature.

Alekseyeva’s situation as she reacted to the willful destruction of Lake Baikal by Soviet industry was perhaps not so different from mine as I reeled from news of Trump’s victory. I thought of Alekseyeva’s evocation of her “Pioneer childhood” a lot this last week. In fifth grade I memorized Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus,” which is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” I grew up believing that we were a country of immigrants, a country that gave my great-grandparents a chance to escape empires (Austro-Hungarian, British) and start a new life. I learned about Martin Luther King, Jr. in school, and heard Barack Obama declare that the arc of history bends toward justice. In undergrad I mentored Somali and Meskhetian Turkish refugees, helping them to apply to college. 

Of course I knew that there were deep problems with racism and xenophobia in American society. I’ve watched Sheriff Joe Arpaio repeatedly defy court orders to stop the racial profiling of people of Mexican descent. I’ve seen Flint, Michigan’s orange water on TV. I’ve seen the steady march of reports of police shootings of unarmed people of color. I watched as Trump proposed a Muslim ban, then suggested that all Muslims in America should be forced to register with the police.

And yet, in spite of all evidence, I continued to believe that these were aberrations to be overcome. Yurchak’s description of late Soviet society now sounds eerily close to pre-11/9 America: “For years that system managed to inhabit incommensurable positions: it was everlasting and steadily declining, full of vigor and bleakness, dedicated to high ideas and devoid of them.”  

This is why 11/9 was for me a true “break of consciousness.” No matter how bad things got, I had never truly doubted that we shall overcome, someday. Now, I’m not so sure. What’s clear to me now is that there’s no going back to the way that things were before, and maybe there shouldn’t be.

Capturing Soviet Kazakh Architecture in Almaty

Almaty, Kazakhstan, is a great place to walk around with a camera. Soviet-era architects in Almaty were generous with their brightly-colored paint and exceedingly creative in their decorative touches. Add a touch of stately decay, and the buildings simply beg to be photographed.

Residential building in Almaty's Golden Quarter.

Stalin visits Lenin

One of the most appealing things to me about Almaty is the ubiquity of Kazakh patterns in the city’s architecture. Although the Soviet Union has a reputation as a “breaker” of nations, the story that Almaty’s architecture tells is more complicated. Having battled nationalists as they reintegrated the territories of the former Russian empire, Lenin and Stalin recognized the threat that nationalism presented to the fledgling Soviet state. As Marxists, however, they couldn’t let nationalist sympathies stand in the way of the international workers’ revolution. So, early on they adopted the strategy of granting the form of nations to the Soviet Union’s many ethnic groups without allowing them what every nationalist desires—independence. The many ethnic groups of the former Russian Empire were thus divided into republics named after the dominant group and united into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This new state promised to square the circle by reconciling nationalism and internationalism. 

Soviet territorial divisions, 1922-1936.
История России. Атлас. / Главный редактор Н.Н. Полункина. - М., ФГУП ПКО "Картография", 2004.

In order to achieve this lofty goal, the maxim “national in form, socialist in content” was applied to all areas of cultural life, including architecture. In the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic’s capital city of Yerevan, for example, architects developed a “neo-Armenian” and later a Stalinist “Armenian national style” based on long-standing Armenian traditions of church architecture and intricate stone carving. 

Monument to Stalin in Yerevan, Armenia.
It stood from 1950 to 1962.

If anything, this emphasis on national distinctiveness only intensified over the Stalin period. Soviet nationalities policy in the second half of the 1930s has been described by Terry Martin as “primordialim” because of its strong emphasis on the deep historic differences between nations. (Tragically, the very same pattern of thought that allowed some very inspired architecture to flourish also seems to have made it easier to brand entire groups such as the Crimean Tatars and the Chechens as inherently traitorous after World War II.) The later years of Stalin’s rule were the height of the national style in architecture in the various Soviet republics. In 1950, Armenia, the USSR’s smallest republic, erected the country’s largest statue of Stalin. The architect who designed the statue’s monumental pedestal, Rafael Israelyan, admitted later that the dominant inspiration for the base upon which the vozhd (leader) stood had been Armenian churches. 

Detail from the main entrance of the pedestal.
Image from Rafael Isralian.

As Dennis Keen explains in an excellent article, the Kazakh patterns that decorate Almaty’s buildings are inspired by the textiles that lined the interior of the portable Kazakh dwellings known as yurts before Kazakhs were forced to abandon nomadism for a more “civilized” way of life. While the yurt has disappeared along with the nomadic lifestyle, these intricate patterns have found a new life around windows and door frames and under the cornices of roofs.

I now present to you the most glorious examples of architecture in the Stalinist national style in Kazakhstan that I have been able to gather in the past two weeks. I took examples from both imposing government buildings and more humble private residences in order to capture the full range of these beautiful patterns.


 Unfortunately, many private residences are not included on the list of protected buildings despite their obvious architectural merits.

Residential building in the Golden Quarter.

I want this balcony.

Every Soviet socialist republic had to have an opera and ballet theater. These massive constructions symbolized the Bolshevik commitment to bring culture to the masses. Ballet still commands crowds of adoring fans in the former Soviet Union.

Almaty's opera and ballet theater.

Delicate patterns decorate the front of the opera house.

Another residential building in the Golden Quarter.
The overhanging roof reminds me of the Balkans.

Expanding access to higher education was another major priority of the Soviet government, resulting in the construction of university buildings both elaborate and modest. The government of Kazakhstan has shown a continued commitment to higher education by offering many Kazkahs scholarships to study in the U.S. and opening Nazarbayev University in the capital city of Astana. Nazarbayev University has attracted many U.S.-trained academics.

The Kazakh National Agrarian University was built in 1954.
The figures of students on the building are one of my all-time favorite examples of Stalinist kitsch.

Just like every republican capital had to have an opera and ballet theater, they also needed an Academy of Sciences. These institutions were prestigious research institutes where scholars dedicated themselves entirely to research and writing. (Membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, in contrast, is more of an honorific, and members still maintain university affiliation.)

The Kazakh Academy of Sciences is very well-maintained.

The spires on this building remind me of mosques. During the Soviet period this was the building of the consumers' union.

Taking pictures of residential buildings can be awkward when their inhabitants are looking out the window!

For infinitely more pictures of Almaty's wonders, great and small, check out Dennis Keen's website, Walking Almaty.

Reading for Language Learning

I usually think of my time in Russian-speaking countries as a time to charge up my language batteries. Sure, I use Russian basically everyday, either for my research or because something interesting pops up on my Facebook feed. This tends to be a pretty narrow range of source material—academic articles and newspaper articles, basically. My conversational Russian tends to decline over the course of the academic year because I just don’t speak it very much. Being in a Russian-speaking country gives me the chance to practice speaking again and soak up as much Russian-language input as possible. Plus, it’s a lot more fun to work on learning a language if you have the chance to go out and put things into use every day.

I’d been wanting to do some reading over the summer, mostly short novels by postwar Soviet authors that I’m interested in. Unfortunately, after a long day of sitting at the archive and reading letters and bureaucratic documents in Russian, these books just weren’t getting me motivated. 

Browsing in Respublika, a cool chain of bookstores here, I picked up a couple of novels by contemporary Russian writers—Pokhoronite menia za plintusom (Bury Me Behind the Baseboards) by Pavel Sanaev and Shpionskii roman (Spy Novel) by Boris Akunin. I’ve always wanted to get into contemporary Russian fiction, and these books looked promising. I started with Bury Me Behind the Baseboards. Written in the ‘90s, the book was a cult classic for years until it suddenly became a huge bestseller in the 2000s. It is the story of a sickly eight-year-old boy who is being raised by an overbearing grandmother who curses him out practically on an hourly basis. It’s basically a charming tale of borderline child abuse. Suffice it to say, I got to page 76 and threw in the towel. It just wasn’t working for me.

It was at that point that I dipped my toe back in the waters of All Japanese All the Time for some inspiration. For the uninitiated, the website is written by Khazumoto, a guy who taught himself Japanese in a couple of years mostly through immersion and flashcards. His methods are unorthodox, his sense of humor is warped, but the site is addictive. I stumbled across his article “Why the Way We Read Sucks, and How to Fix It” and it seemed like it was written to solve my reader’s block.

In the article, Khazumoto’s basic point is that we should control our reading, and not let it control us. Тhe way we are taught to read in schools as beginner readers isn’t always the best strategy for reading for the rest of our lives.  

"The style of reading that is typically taught and/or encouraged in school is all about:

• Hitting every single word.
• No change of pace or shifting gears.
• No skipping unless teacher says so. Any self-directed skipping is “cheating”, and is to be punctuated by feelings of guilt and remorse (aren’t these, like, synonyms?).
• Zero or severely limited choice in terms of start time, stop time and duration.
• Zero or severely limited in terms of reading material, with no option to change after initial choice.
• The order in which the book is written and presented is the One, True and Only Correct Order. You have no right to permute it or ignore it. You earn the right to read page p+1 only after perfectly reading page p.

It’s no wonder that so many adults never pick up another real book once they leave school. If you’d never ever been allowed to set or change the channel on your TV, and never been taught that you even had the right or ability to make such a judgment call, then you’d probably hate TV, too — no matter how many “TV-worms” (think: bookworm) told you that TV was the shizzle and that there were tons of great channels and shows out there."

I realized this was the problem I was having with reading in Russian. I was like a person watching TV who wasn’t letting themselves change the channel until long after they were bored. While the strategy of hammering your way through a book come hell or high water may work if you absolutely have to read that specific book, if your goal is just to get more Russian text into your brain, then you have to be prepared to abandon reading material as soon as you notice that it is dragging you down. If you’re not having fun reading something, you’re not going to want to do it, and you’ll eventually sabotage your own language-learning project. So, I resolved to give myself permission to ditch Bury Me Behind the Baseboards. 

Luckily, this decision coincided with my discovery of the comics section at another great bookstore, Moskva. Comics, both locally-produced and imported, have just started catching on in Russia in the last few years. Previously, they were only available in bootleg translations (“scanlations”) on the internet (for example, this translation of Scott Pilgrim was a true labor of love). In another one of Khazumoto’s articles, “You Can't Afford Not to Buy Japanese Books,” he makes the point that buying books is an essential part of the language learning process. It’s not optional—it’s fuel for your fire. This conveniently helped me justify buying a bunch of different Russian comics (mostly translated, including Blue is the Warmest Color, Scott Pilgrim, and Adventure Time).

So now I’ve been working my way through a big stack of comics. My method—again borrowed from All Japanese All the Time—is to look up any words that look interesting, and then copy entire sentences into a flashcard program called Anki. I’m pretty picky with what sentences I decide to put in Anki because making the cards is time-consuming, but it really helps to learn vocabulary in context.

Finding the comics has actually become an adventure all its own. I was surprised to discover that Moscow has multiple comic book stores. I checked out two: Chuk i gik and Rocket Comics. Both are pretty bare bones compared to your usual packed-to-the-gills comic book store in the states, but the staff was really nice and ready to offer suggestions. Ultimately, I think the only way to keep improving your language skills is to find a hobby that you can do in your second language. When you have a hobby, language learning doesn’t feel like work. Moreover, it helps you find other people with similar interests, which in turn makes you feel more at home in a foreign country. (Example: after chatting with the comic book store guy at Rocket Comics and expressing an interest in local Russian comics, he gave me a whole stack of them for free!) Overall, I think an ounce of creativity in designing your own personal language-learning project goes a lot farther than a pound of discipline. 

Well, Volume One of Scott Pilgrim (color edition!) is calling my name, so I think it’s time to wrap this up!

Moscow on the Fourth of July

After a very satisfying dinner of burgers, fries and onion rings at the American-style restaurant Corner Burger, I came home to my dorm room and was struck with a sudden desire to listen to a song by DDT, a Russian rock band. 

This impulse is unlikely to surprise any of my Russian-speaking friends, as I make no secret of the fact that I basically think that DDT's lovable lead singer Yurii Shevchuk walks on water. DDT came out of the ‘80s Leningrad rock scene, which also gave birth to other legendary russkii rok bands as Kino and Akvarium. Their first hit, “Ne streliai” (“Don’t Shoot”), was a protest against the Afghan War, and they have been writing hummable anthems—political and personal—ever since.

The song I wanted to listen to was one of DDT's most popular songs: “Rodina,” which translates as “homeland” or “motherland.” It came out in 1992, when Russian morale and prestige was at a nadir. The Soviet Union had collapsed. The public conversation about the legacy of Stalinism that had simmered since the late 1950s had come to a rolling boil after glasnost’ freed the press from censorship. “Rodina” is an effort to find something worth singing about after the long process of coming to terms with the political violence of the twentieth century. This is salvage patriotism.

Yurii Shevchuk sings "Rodina" at Bolotnaia Square.

(Dmitrii Bykov is having way too much fun in the background here.)

The singer starts off with a wail:

God, how many years have I been walking without making a single step?  

God, how many days have I searched for that which was always with me?

The next stanza evokes the victims of the Great Terror of 1937, when the dreaded “Black Marias” visited people during “restless nights.”

Black headlights at the neighbor’s gate.

Trap doors, handcuffs, a torn mouth.

How many times did my head roll

From the overflowing executioner’s block?

Against this background, Shevchuk launches into the chorus:

My native land—  

I’m homeward bound. 

Let them cry that she’s a freak, 

We still like her! 

Even though she’s not a beauty, 

And puts her faith in scumbags…

Having affirmed his love for his homeland despite the horrors of the past, he turns his gaze from the victims to the remorseless perpetrators.

God, how much truth is in the eyes of the state’s whores! 

God, how much faith is in the hands of the retired executioners! 

Don’t let them roll up their sleeves again, 

Don’t let them roll up their sleeves again!

Shevchuk makes it clear that it isn’t easy to love his native land, to navigate the narrow waters between despair and cheap patriotism. He looks long and hard at the past and asks people to make a different choice.

I had never made this connection before, but on the Fourth of July the message of that song reminded me of nothing so much as the mission of one of my favorite bands, the Drive-By Truckers. For those of you unfamiliar with them, the Drive-By Truckers are a band from Alabama with grungy guitars and amazing songwriting. Their concept album Southern Rock Opera is a series of interconnected songs about the state of Alabama. Throughout the album, but especially in the series of songs “Birmingham,” “The Southern Thing,” “Three Great Alabama Icons,” and “Wallace,” songwriter Patterson Hood dissects Alabama’s history of racism and tries to forge a new form of Southern pride based on a different set of values than the ones espoused by Alabama governor George Wallace during the era of segregation. It’s hard to sum up a series of songs that concludes with Wallace meeting the Devil in Hell (apparently, the Devil’s a southerner—and drives a Cadillac), but this quotation from “The Southern Thing” comes close:

You think I'm dumb, maybe not too bright 

You wonder how I sleep at night 

Proud of the glory, stare down the shame 

The duality of the southern thing 

In the spoken-word piece “Three Great Alabama Icons,” Hood explains that it was only when he left Alabama did he realize the dire need to address this topic:

“…and you know, race was only an issue on TV in the house that I grew up in. Wallace was viewed as a man from another time and place, but when I first ventured out of the south I was shocked at how strongly Wallace was associated with Alabama and its people. Racism is a worldwide problem, and it's been like that since the beginning of recorded history, and it ain't just white and black, but thanks to George Wallace, it's always a little more convenient to play it with a southern accent.”

In the end, Hood envisions a future where "no man should ever have to feel that he don't belong in Birmingham," the epicenter of Wallace's segregationist south. You can agree or disagree with Patterson Hood’s raw and uncensored attempts to redefine Alabama identity in his lyrics, but I have to say that I find what he and Yurii Shevchuk are trying to do a lot more compelling than the two usual reactions that we often see when confronted with the ugly side of our native land: vigorous, flag-waving denial or the “screw it, I’m moving to Canada” brand of despair.

“Any truth told without love is a lie,” Yuri Shevchuk reminded the crowd at Bolotnaia Square at the protest for clean elections in Moscow on February 4, 2012, after singing “Rodina.” 

“We will be human beings,” he told them. “We will try.”

Reading on the Moscow Metro

Likbez-era poster

The Soviet Union prided itself on being “the most well-read nation” on earth. The Soviet obsession with books and reading might not have been particularly well-known during the Cold War, but it’s quite predictable when you think about it. The Bolsheviks, after all, were the radical red-headed stepchildren of the intelligentsia of the Russian Empire, so it’s not too surprising that when they came to power they sought to bring culture to the masses. That meant everything from ballet to good table manners, but especially literacy. All corners of the Soviet Union were drawn into the campaign to liquidate illiteracy (likbez) throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The old Russian classics (some of them, at least) were published in great quantities alongside the new classics of Socialist Realism. Joseph Stalin considered writers “engineers of human souls;” he considered himself literary-critic-in-chief. His critical opinions, of course, could be matters of life and death. As the political atmosphere became less poisonous over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, literature and literary criticism became one of the main venues for discussing the country’s past, present, and future. Literary works like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in the literary journal Novyi mir in 1962, became lightning rods for debates over de-Stalinization. Books were cheap, but works by the most popular authors were often hard to get your hands on. If you wanted something special, like a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s cult classic Master and Margarita, then there was always the black market. Reading was a very popular activity through the last decades of the Soviet Union. Starting in the mid-1980s, it became even more important when glasnost’  opened up a plethora of previously-banned topics and works of literature for public discussion. Circulation of literary journals went through the roof; the revelations between the covers of journals and books caused many to experience a perelom soznaniia, a profound break in their consciousness. 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was considerable anxiety over Russia’s continued status as a well-read nation. A chorus of voices lamented “Deti ne chitaiut!” (“Children don’t read!”) According to one expert on Russian children’s literature with whom I have spoken, however, the concerns were overblown. In fact, deti chitaiut. (Children read.) Although I can’t claim that my methodology is at all scientific, I will say that the tradition of reading seems to be alive and well in Moscow—on the metro at least. Although I often see people reading on buses and the T in Boston, my impression is that reading while commuting is more popular here.

Suggested listening. I think the Alkaline Trio cover is better,

but this video takes the cake.

One of the nicest suprises I had after arriving here was the realization that I could read my Kindle on public transportation without looking the least bit strange. E-readers have caught on in Russia in a big way, and any metro car is likely to hold at least a couple of people with e-readers and tablets. While many use their phones to play games and use social networking sites, my observations from surreptitiously (shamelessly?) looking over people’s shoulders suggest that many people also read on their phones. I see many older people using e-readers, although they seem more popular among the younger generations.

It’s hard to know what people are reading on their e-readers, but luckily for us nosy bookworms, paper books are popular as well. I once saw a woman in high heels reading a biography of Churchill, a punky-looking guy reading Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, and another young woman reading Jane Austen all in the same night. Ray Bradbury seems to be quite popular, which is not surprising considering the popularity of science fiction in the former socialist bloc. Newspapers, sold in machines in the stations, are another popular choice.

My commute

A number of factors (besides the aforementioned national pride) probably contribute to the prevalence of reading on the metro. First of all, many people commute long distances in Moscow, which after all is quite a massive city. Metro rides in excess of 30 minutes are completely routine, and even a full hour seems to be common. Second, the metro is often loud—attempting to talk or listen to podcasts can be pointless on some routes. Reading is simply the most obvious choice of distraction. 

The eternal escalators

Some people take their reading game to a whole other level on the metro. I’ve seen certain pros manage to read more or less continuously throughout station transfers. As the Moscow metro is quite crowded, especially at rush hour, this is no mean feat. There are usually bottlenecks around the escalators, where people trudge zombie-like to get on the escalators. I’ve seen people read all the way through the escalator crush. As anyone who has visited the former Soviet Union likely knows, metro stations are located quite far underground. The top three deepest metro stations in the world are all located in the former Soviet Union. That means that the escalator rides are rather long, so people read on them too. On top of that, I’ve seen more walking-while-reading here than probably in my entire life up to this point—and I go to Harvard.

I’ve been taking advantage of my 45-minute (one-way) commute to catch up on my pleasure reading. After a year of sad deprivation (thanks, general exam!), it’s been fun to actually use my Kindle again. So far I’ve read Seveneves by sci-fi master Neal Stephenson, The Masque of the Black Tulip, a Regency-era romance/mystery by Lauren Willig, a former Harvard history grad student, and The White Ship by Soviet Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov. I have to make two transfers on my commute, which means I’ve been keeping it light and simple so that I don’t lose the thread of the plots even when reading the books in bits and pieces. My current book is Metro 2033, a post-apocalyptic horror novel set in…wait for it…the Moscow Metro. I’ve still got 62% left to read, but expect a full review coming soon!

On the Move

This summer I’m doing archival research in Moscow, Russia, and Almaty, Kazakhstan, to gather material for my dissertation. The topic I’m working on right now—I have six more months until I have to actually commit it to paper in the form of a prospectus!—is the impact of rapid urbanization on Soviet society and culture in the decades after World War II. Over the course of the twentieth century, the societies that made up the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union went from being overwhelmingly agrarian to predominantly urban. Millions of people went from living in small communities of wooden houses and working the land to living in big cities of high-rise apartments and working in factories and offices. The project I am envisioning right now examines how this dramatic experience of mobility, both physical and social, played out in the sphere of culture in fields such as literature and the preservation of historic landmarks.

One area where former peasants made their voices heard the loudest was literature. A group of Russian writers, all born in villages, began writing about their village backgrounds in a movement that was dubbed “village prose” by literary critics. Starting in the mid-1950s and gaining momentum in the 1960s, these authors wrote about issues affecting rural life in a lyrical style that struck a chord with millions of readers who had undergone many of the same experiences. Their fictional works, highly critical of the Soviet management of agriculture, were embraced by both reformists who sought to liquidate the legacies of Stalinism in Soviet life and conservatives who advocated a return to the traditional Russian values of the countryside.

Valentin Rasputin

The literary style itself petered out by the end of the 1970s, but Russian village prose writers remained some of the most popular writers in Russia into the early 1980s. When Mikhail Gorbachev loosened censorship restrictions, many of the submerged political currents came to the surface. One group of village prose writers, including Valentin Rasputin and Vasily Belov, became associated with the far-right, anti-Semitic Russian nationalism during perestroika while another group, including Sergei Zalygin, sided with the reformists. There is a tendency today to read political polemics into village prose of the 1960s and 1970s; for me, it’s much more interesting to understand what the writers were trying to say about the experience of being uprooted from one place and having to make a life in a new and alien environment.

It was with this background information in my head that I came to Valentin Rasputin’s 1976 novel, Farewell to Matyora, probably the most famous work of village prose. “Farewell to Matyora is, next to Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and ‘Matryona’s Home,’ the most important work of literature written and published in the Soviet Union between Stalin’s death in 1953 and the beginning of glasnost in 1985,” writes Russian literary scholar Kathleen Parthé. The book tells the story of an elderly woman who is forced to abandon her home because the construction of a new hydroelectic dam will result in the flooding of the small Siberian village in which she lives. The novel chronicles the villagers’ attempts to come to terms with the obliteration of their homes and their forced resettlement to a larger, more modern town.

The novel has many strikingly lyrical passages, and this one really made an impression on me as I was reading it on the T in Boston a few days before leaving for Russia. In the pages preceding this, Rasputin describes the villagers’ last harvest in Matyora.

“They would harvest and take away the hay, and the cows would eat the last blade by spring, but the songs after work when it seemed that it wasn’t them singing, not people but their very souls uniting into one—they believed so deeply and with holy fervor in the simple lyrics and raised their voices so strong and united—that sweet and troubling awe in the evening before the beauty and horror of the coming night, when you no longer remember who you are and where you are, when it seems that you’re gliding silently and smoothly above the earth, barely moving your wings and following a blessed path revealed to you, acutely aware of everything that floats below; that quiet profound ache that appears from nowhere, the ache that comes when you realize that you didn’t even know yourself until this very minute, didn’t know that you were more than what you carry within you, that you were also what surrounds you, the ache that isn’t always noticed and is sometimes more terrible to lose than an arm or a leg—all this would be remembered for a long time and remain in their souls as un unsettling light and joy." —Farewell to Matyora, Valentin Rasputin, trans. Antonina W. Bouis, pg. 115

I was reading that at the same time as I was moving out of the apartment where I had lived for two years. Two years in an apartment is nothing compared to an entire lifetime in a Siberian village, but I still felt weird when I handed the keys over to the new tenants, knowing that after that moment I could no longer go back to the place where I had eaten, slept, cooked, and studied for the last two years. Overall I was happy to leave the place behind—we had endured three weeks of barely functioning heat in that apartment in February—but when I read the passage above, I understood exactly what Rasputin meant by “the quiet profound ache that appears from nowhere.”

The idea that in some way our surroundings form a part of our identity isn’t one that we encounter much these days. It’s much easier to think of pop culture narratives in which the intrepid hero or heroine sets off to conquer the big city than stories in which the protagonist stays put. Whether we’re living in late capitalism or late socialism like Rasputin’s villagers, it seems that moving around is an inevitable part of life. It’s rare to find art that describes the experience of staying home. 

Off the top of my head, the only one I can think of is the Canadian folk-punk band the Weakerthans, who write odes to the open prarie from the unglamourous post-industrial city of Winnipeg. They’re the only band I’ve ever known to write a song about moving, which could have been the anthem of the last week in May for me.

Watch this video for some grade-A Canadian accents.

“Now that the furniture's returning to its Goodwill home

With dishes and last week's paper

Rumors and elections,

Crosswords, our unending wars

The black on our fingers smeared the ink on every door pulled shut

Now that the last month's rent is scheming with the damage deposit

Take this moment to decide

If we meant it, if we tried…”

I’d be the first to agree that a right-wing Russian writer and a left-wing Canadian singer don’t have much in common, but all the same I’m struck by the similarities in their approaches to place and displacement. Their melancholy odes to the joys and pains of feeling connected to a certain place in the modern world certainly resonated with me as I moved out of my apartment and flew off to live in a different country for the next two months.

This is my temporary home in Russia.

Stay tuned for more dispatches!

Unexpected Good Luck

When I am bored in Yerevan, I usually go to museums. Yerevan has lots of little museums dedicated to illustrious Armenian writers, composers, and painters. They can be hit-or-miss, but I’m usually pleasantly surprised. Tickets are usually $1.25, and for an extra $5 you can get a guided tour in Armenian. Even if the museum is completely boring, I can at least practice my Armenian with the guide.

"Armenia" by Martiros Saryan.

Today I set out to visit the Martiros Saryan museum. Martiros Saryan was a twentieth-century Armenian painter influenced by Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse. I figured I would treat myself to an hour of colorful Armenian landscapes for an hour before going to Pilates class. To my dismay, the Saryan museum was closed for repairs, and I wasn’t in the mood for the 30-minute trek to another museum that was showing some of his paintings, so I decided to go to the Hovhannes Tumanyan museum down the street.

Hovhannes Tumanyan was a poet and a writer of fairy tales in the late Imperial and very early Soviet periods. As he is considered to be the Armenian national poet, his museum was quite nice, with lots of artifacts from his life, a recreation of his apartment in Tbilisi with the original furniture, and a small, cute theater showing a 3-D cartoon of one of his fairy tales.

Hovhannes Tumanyan
(Image from Wikipedia)

Most museums here don’t have much in the way of explanatory placards, so I decided to pay for a tour to help me connect the dots even though I was running a bit short on time. My guide was a very nice middle-aged lady who made a great effort to ensure that I understood every Armenian word that she said. Maybe it was just because we were in a museum dedicated to a great Armenian writer, but it seemed like the other patrons and staff were particularly thrilled that I could speak Armenian. 

All in all, it would have been just a pleasant way to kill an hour, but things took an unexpected turn toward the end of the tour. My guide showed me a book of Tumanyan’s saying translated into English, which I politely declined to buy as I already have way too many books to bring home with me in my suitcase. She asked me if I had bought any other Armenian books, and I mentioned a few that I had picked up, including one by the late Hrant Matevosyan, a Soviet Armenian writer of novellas about Armenian village life. I’ve been trying to read more of Hrant Matevosyan’s work lately because a friend recommended it to me, and it dovetails well with my long-term interest in rural life in the Soviet Union.

“You are interested in Hrant Matevosyan?” my guide asked, with a significant look. “Would you like to meet Hrant Matevosyan’s wife?”

Hrant Matevosyan
(Image from Wikipedia)

At first I didn’t know what to make of this, but at the end of the tour they took me into an important-looking office that presumably belong to the museum director and introduced me to an older woman sitting behind the desk. Strangely enough, my guide didn’t exactly say that this was Hrant Matevosyan’s wife so I wasn’t quite sure what to do or say at first. My interlocutor started grilling me about where I studied Armenian. Then when she found out that I also speak and read Russian, she wanted to hear all of my favorite authors, especially more contemporary ones (not my strong suit), but she was satisfied to hear that I have read some Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky in addition to Tolstoy and Bulgakov. When I told her that I was leaving tomorrow, she seemed very annoyed that she couldn’t offer me any help at this late date, but told me to look her up the next time I came to Yerevan. Only at the end when we exchanged cards and talked a little bit about the Hrant Matevosyan novellas that I’ve read was I sure that the museum director, Verzhine Movsisyan, was indeed the wife of the late Hrant Matevosyan. She informed me that Hrant Matevosyan’s novellas are difficult to read in Armenian, and that the Soviet-era English translation I had read was not very good as it was translated from Russian. However, she said his dialogue was great, which I can confirm having just started reading a Russian translation of his novella “We and Our Mountains.” In the end she graciously walked me to the door and again urged me to get in contact with her when I come back to Armenia, especially as they’ll be opening up a museum dedicated to Matevosyan soon.

By the time I left, I was sort of stunned at the strange luck of having stumbled into a meeting with a fantastic contact for future research on Hrant Matevosyan. The experience confirmed for me the wisdom of checking out any and all local museums when I'm traveling. Also, it once again proved that a decent knowledge of Russian literature will always pay off. All in all, not a bad reason to miss my last Pilates class in Yerevan!