I love you, Peter’s own creation,
I love your stern, your stately air,
Neva’s majestical pulsation,
The granite that her quaysides wear,
Your railings with their iron shimmer,
Your pensive nights in the half-gloom,
Translucent twilight, moonless glimmer,
When, sitting lampless in my room
I write and read; when faintly shining,
The streets in their immense outlining
Are empty, given up to dreams…
-Pushkin



It is wonderful to be living in a place so full of history and literature. It hits you in random places, when you realize how alive Russia’s cultural past still is, and how natural and everyday it is for the people who live here. St Petersburg is a young city as far as Russian cities go (1703), but it has soaked up hundreds and hundreds of years of Russia’s tortured past by mere virtue of its controversial purpose and placement within Russia. You stumble upon history everywhere you walk. Maybe it is America’s youth or perhaps more likely it is the way Americans express their national pride and identity, but history as related to place is treated differently in America. There are museums for seemingly insignificant places and things at times. Maybe there is too much here in Russia to keep track of—but the past has a different life here, not like in America when it seems that as soon as something happens it must be jarred, sealed, anesthetized, evaluated, observed, placed, ordered, and then visited with a small fee. I feel as though that even with the small amount of time I’ve spent here, the past is close, and throbs in the blood of these people who scowl at you on the subway, in the homeless babushkas on the street trying to sell you kittens for 50 roubles, in the swollen body of a young pregnant woman who walked me to my street, in the weeping of the woman I heard the other night and the placating words of a man at her side. Which reminds me of a quote I once read: memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it. Perhaps this is what past is about here.

For example, when I was reading more about where I live (the Smolniy district), I realized that the street on which I live (Tverskaya) was where Bashnya was (“The Tower”). This slightly crumbling building was where Ivanov, Alexander Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Roerich, among others hung out and had intellectual discussions about poetry and art and no doubt about everything else as well. After reading such poets and writers it is mind blowing to be living on the same street where perhaps Akhmatova or Mandelstam composed one of their best poems, or Roerich thought of an idea for his next masterpiece. The seemingly quotidian here is so full of surprises. At first it is confusing and almost offensive that there isn’t a museum there or something, not even a plaque from what I can tell, but the more I think about it, I think it’s better this way—it has not been amputated from the city with guards or gates. The city these friends like prophets watched almost implode from their watchtower above the Tauride garden. For them, Russia’s past and culture almost ended here, whispering eulogies and elegies to a city they saw dying. Perhaps they’d be pleased to know that life, boring and ordinary life, still continues behind those tower windows.

In any case, I walk past this building everyday and I walked through the garden today to escape the rain (which also seems polluted). I ended up getting myself filthy again from all the dust (the flip flops were not a good idea today as far as grime, although it did save my feet a few more blisters). My walk is long from the metro, but I’d rather walk around than ride a bus crushed between hairy, smelly, Russian men with their shirts completely unbuttoned. There were a lot of children in the park and it was rather beautiful, despite the stagnant “pond” and “streams” filled with the poplar fluff and god knows what else. Believe it or not there were some little boys swimming in it (no wonder the average life span for men in Russia is in the 50’s or so). The Tauride palace, toward one part of the park was built by Catherine the Great for her lover. Stasov designed the building with its neoclassical style (typical of St P’s—a lot of neoclassical, baroque, some rococo, without much built in the “national style” except for the Church of Spilled Blood, which sticks out like a multi-colored bruised thumb against the skyline).

I have yet to explore the Smolniy institute and convent. It is a blue and white complex, and the institute part was once where the Bolshevik’s principal base was during the Revolution and later became Leningrad Party headquarters. I will have to get there at some point.

So tonight is the Solstice, which means the sun never really sets. It is too bad that it is a Wednesday and that I am so exhausted. Time is so disorienting here, along with the city itself (despite its “orderly” layout). Sometimes I’ll think it’s 2pm, and then look at my watch and realize it’s already 8:30. Confusing. This evening there was a thunderstorm with heavy rain—a relief on this parched city. The winds were strong and I could see things flying off the roof across the way (I live on the 5th floor) and hear glass breaking. I hope we will have more rain soon, although that means more mosquitoes, more mud, and less pleasant walks home.

Besides the solstice, my day was uneventful. I still don’t really know how to get around (transferring metro stops, taking minibuses, and trolleybuses, and then finding what stops to go to). Classes were decent (lots of grammar). And then a bunch of us, along with Prof Golstein, went to get lunch at a café near the Institute. If I’ve learned anything today, it’s that everything takes forever in Russia. We waited for our food for at least an hour and a half, and it turned out to be pretty bad. So far the food I’ve had at cafes has been really really disappointing, while the food at home has been surprisingly edible. It was nice to get to know people better, especially the two Bulgarian girls who basically saved us until Prof Golstein got there to explain the menu. Afterwards some of us decided to go to Sadovaya to buy concert tickets and try to find adapters for the outlets here. David decided to go home early because he wasn’t feeling well (he had three shots of vodka at lunch despite Prof Golstein’s warning that one shouldn’t drink vodka in hot weather). Buying tickets took forever, as did wandering around in the computer store. I got to embarrass myself today by trying to explain to 5 different people from three different stores what an adapter was and what I needed it for. Eventually I found the right thing for my computer, since the one I had was getting really hot and smelling like it was about to catch fire. Not good. So hopefully my computer won’t blow up as I’m writing this.

I think on Friday some of us want to go to The Idiot (Dostoevsky anyone?), supposedly a good café, although my host parents said the only thing interested about it was the décor. So we’ll see. Tonight was dinner with the family, homework, some relaxing, and the storm.

It is midnight right now on the longest day of year. White nights are amazing, although backpacking during the summer in Alaska has prepared me somewhat. The whole city stays alive. You can see couples walking along the street half drunk on the feelings that these nights inspire and perhaps half drunk on all the vodka they’ve no doubt been drinking since afternoon. What a night, how strange to live in a city that can never turn out its own lights.