On the Streets of St Petersburg

This post comes to you courtesy of wi-fi on board the Sapsan [Peregrin Falcon] express train from Moscow to St Petersburg...amongst whose other high-tech amenities number "electronic cigarettes"-- on sale in the buffet car for those who can't make the four hours...I wonder if these may have been introduced as a precautionary measure after desperate passengers, used to the lengthy stops of regular Russian trains, nipped out for a quick smoke at Tver', only to be stranded on the platform as the speedy Sapsan took silent flight....

Умом Россию не понятъ - You can't understand Russia with your mind, as Tiutchev's words come out rather less pithily in English. But sometimes with your body, perhaps: I walk a lot in my usual life, but why does walking the streets of Petersburg make my foot strangely swell up and my limbs ache with a deep fatigue? The air is filled with traffic fumes, cigarette smoke, and, at close quarters on pavements and in shops, the tragic smell of stale vodka. Yesterday afternoon I bought a slim volume about Shostakovich in an antikvariat bookshop from a man who gave off that familiar odour of toxic vodka tears. Last week, I sat on a bus for almost an hour, stuck in one of Petersburg's many probki (traffic jams) crawling along a few hundred meters of Sadovaya Street to join Nevsky Prospect. This was the very place that, on board a tram in 1918, a chance encounter took place between the poets Zinaida Gippius and Aleksandr Blok. Unable to reconcile herself to Blok's recently published long poem, The Twelve, and its depiction of the revolution, Gippius declared that in public, at least, all relations between them must be severed. The tram stops and Blok gets off. It was the last time Gippius was to see him before his death in 1921. Stuck in today’s city's traffic jams, they would have had time to thrash out the matter further; the probki grant no such fleetingness to encounters aboard public transport.

A man breathing sour vodka vapours sits down next to me. "You have beautiful hands," he says, through the slight thickness of drink. "Veins--that's good--they carry life, you know you are alive." (After the exertion of a walk in the heat, the veinon the backs of my hands were prominently standing out.) He compares his own hand to s mine: almost unnaturally smooth skin covered the puffy reddish hand; I recalled the more extreme bloatedness in the hands and faces of the drunken men and woman--the sight of the women was always more shocking--I used to see hanging around on Ligovsky Prospect near the Moscow Railway Station before a smart new shopping centre was built there. "No veins, you see." He took a call on his mobile phone. When it ended, he complained about a nagging woman, and then, with a hint of ruefulness, added "My daughter -- she took away my car because I drink." The traffic lights at the corner with Nevsky changed several times; we moved nowhere.

The St Petersburg traffic is somewhat calmer and less anarchic than it was six years ago--and not just because it spends most of its time ground to a halt in perpetual traffic jams. Many streets in the centre are now one-way (to make room for parking the rapidly growing number of vehicles at the curb), there are light-controlled pedestrian crossings with reassuringly large green-man walk signs, and, I am told, a new law stipulating that vehicles must give way to pedestrians. Crossing Ulitsa Marata each morning, though, is still something of a gauntlet to run: woe betide the pedestrian who thinks it is for him that the speeding car slows, and not to swerve a gnarly patch of potholes and raised tram-tracks...

I can’t help but wonder, though, how the changes in the traffic rules happened—I mean, in a way, it must have been a change that happened overnight--did they just put up sign and the next morning everyone drove the right way? Did people get it right straight away? Were there chaotic encounters as cars erroneously came nose-to-nose in newly designated one-way streets, or confusions and frustrations as drivers were sent looping round the block one more time…? And does this most banal change—the establishment, one day, of a one-way street, work as something of a metaphor for other processes of change in Russian society…? Now the traffic situation is more or less entirely normalized – as are the other changes most visible to me.

For the young Russian friends (5 years my junior) that I live with, the new normality is seamlessly assimilated: they tell me that clothes from [the English high street store] Marks and Spencer are simple, that bread from the French bakery is good, that a smart phone was really the only upgrade to go for. The five years that separates us in age is not a lot, but it does mean that their adult life began in the mid-to-late 2000s, when the “middle class” had grown, wealth was becoming more evenly distributed after the grotesque extremes of the unstable 90s, and the gap between Russia and western Europe, at least on the most readily observable plane of material existence, had shrunk. Their adult lives had largely been formed in the six years that I had not visited Russia, so the imperceptible assimilation of these new ways was somehow even more striking to me.

"Modernization or Death"

I had first come to Russia in 1998, and in forming my relationship to the place and to people here, the “difference” of the place that I came from had to be dealt with one way or another. Perception of the differences stood behind the interest, openness, good humour, and sometimes exasperation, that came along with experiences of everyday life in Russia. People would often ask about where you lived and what your life was like or how certain things worked—and I remember a feeling sometimes of the sheer impossibility of conveying some of these things—not because any one individual aspect of life was so wildly different, but because the whole picture of life that they formed was an altogether different kind of composition. Now, though, that difference has diminished dramatically, and in my relation to Russia and Russians, I no longer feel so much of that suppressed or under-expressed sense of the gap.

***

The other day I was stopped on the street and asked the way to the Dostoevsky house-museum, and the next day, the way to Pushkin’s apartment on the Moika. I was, of course, able to help these seekers of literary addresses –this layer of St Petersburg remains unchanged in the six years since I was last here--but when I speak and they realize I am not Russian, they laugh good-naturedly at the unlikely foreigner who knows where Pushkin lived…

St Isaac's Cathedral on a White Night, from Canal Griboedova

Travelogue ~ Prologue ~ Prelude

My cello has been left upstairs in the attic room at the top of M.’s house that looks one way onto the San Francisco Bay and the other way onto a wooded hillside that is home to new-born, long-legged prancing deer, sweet-songed orioles, a slinky red fox, nine menacing turkeys, and, occasionally, to the delight of M. the improvising cellist, a partner in nighttime duets, the ever-inventive mocking bird. The hard white case in which M.’s own cello has travelled to Russia, Palestine, Israel, Hungary and elsewhere lives up in this room as well -- and the room itself, with its odd-shaped ceilings and many angles is not unlike a giant cello case of its own. I think my cello will be happy there while I am off on this summer of restless travels. Perhaps, now and then, first thing in the morning, instead of picking up his own 300 year-old cello of dark, wise wood, M. will take downstairs my three-year-old anonymous cello, bought from the man in the subway station, and play Bach on it.

***

Returning to England for the first time in eighteen months, I made the hour’s drive from Heathrow to my parents’ house in Hampshire. After the expansiveness and scale of the American landscape, England always seems cosy and rounded, its features—both natural and built—huddling on an island, not stretching across a continent.

In the past few years of living in the Bay Area, I have found myself, now and then, perceiving the landscape in a more primal way--with some awareness the land and climate that exists separately from all that is built, natural contours and dynamics that exist apart from and prior to the modern life that goes on there. With the bay, the headlands of Marin and San Francisco, the Berkeley hills and the certainty of westerliness that comes with the sun descending into the Pacific, one comes to always be sure of one’s orientation in this place. With so many vantage points from which to admire the view of the bay, one is so often struck by how thoroughly humanly settled the area is and, at the same time, how dynamic and boldly defined its landscape is. (Knowledge of the possibility of earthquakes heightens this sense still more.) And as for the weather, one usually has the feeling that although it is so rapidly variable, it moves in large, wide fronts off the ocean or down the coast and across the land. Sometimes, especially when it rains in huge sheets for hours on end, as it did so much this spring, there’s almost some of feeling of processes that are not just local but that belong to the planet, or a relationship between earth and sky that adheres to geological time, not human time.

As I near my parents’ house in the village of Headley, and in the next few days as I drive to nearby towns, I feel that that habit formed in California to perceive both raw landscape and its relation to human settledness now apprehends something anew about this familiar place. What strikes me is how we really do live in woodland. There are woods all around the houses and villages that are joined by narrow, often deep sunk roads. The dense leafiness that is all around creates a sense of protective proximities, and the possibility of ever being able to see as far into the distance as one might from a window or hillside in Berkeley now seems strange and almost audacious. This sense of proximities has an audible manifestation too: issuing from the woodland is a true chorus of birdsong—not the single voice of an oriole or mockingbird, but a constant and variegated song, a tuneful babble of chirps and whistles and low and clear coos, all woven together and close around, through the kitchen window, like sticks and grasses making a nest of song.

***

Now St Petersburg: the first time here for six years. The same familiar smell of the tap water. My body remembers the odd feeling of encountering the one differently spaced flight of stairs on climbing to the fourth floor apartment on Svechnoi pereulok (Candle Lane). And though the trams are all new, the same rattle that’s felt right through the apartment when they pass along the street below. There have been some cellos in Russia, too (heard not played) but more on those another time.

***

I did fulfil the ambition of playing some Bach by the time I had finished the PhD -- the Prelude of Suite No. 1 --and so I made this recording the week after I had submitted the dissertation. It’s certainly quite crude and patchy, and despite a couple of more overtly botched moments (including, annoyingly, the end), it’s just about palpably whole enough. At the very least, a yardstick by which to measure future and hopefully ever- improving efforts…