Monday, June 27, 2011

On the Streets of St Petersburg

This post comes to you courtesy of Align Leftwi-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


No comments: