Off to Russia!

“Who these days really examines maps, studies contours, reckons distances? Nobody, except perhaps vacationers or drivers. Since the invention of the pushbutton, even the military don’t do it anymore. Who writes letters listing the sights he has seen and analyzing the feels he had while doing so? And who reads such letters? After us, nothing will remain that is worthy of the name of correspondence. Even young people, seemingly with plenty of time, make do with postcards. People of my age usually resort to those either in a moment of despair in some alien spot or just to kill time. Yet there are places examination of which on a map makes you feel for a brief moment akin to Providence.”
-Brodsky, 1985

Welcome to my St Petersburg blog! I am actually still at home right now, but will be leaving in a couple of hours for the airport. (Boston, to London, to Petersburg). I ought to be arriving there around 4pm tomorrow. My Russian is pretty shaky (not having studied it much for a month or so), so it will be interesting to see how well I survive when I first get there.

I am on a Brown sponsored program where we have a culture/literature/art history course on Petersburg taught by Brown faculty (who are coming on the trip with us), and we’re also taking language courses at the Nevsky Institute. There are about 14 of us going—most of us from Brown and a couple of people from Harvard, I think. We all stay with separate Russian families, which should be quite an adjustment.

So I should probably explain the blog name… Patrick (my boyfriend, if you don’t know/forgot) suggested it over some more poetic line about the city I had found. But it works, it rhymes, and it’s easy to remember, so hey. In case you don’t know, Gog (lopped in with Magog), according to some interpretations on this rather ambiguous reference, is Russia. There are references in Hesiod, Flavius, and Herodotus and the Bible and stuff. It appears in Ezekiel and is connected with the Apocalypse in Revelation. During the Cold War it was particularly identified with Russia. I find it somewhat fitting, the eschatological aspect that is, after taking a course on Russian Modernism and reading some writers from the turn of the last century—when ideas of the end of the world and the beginning of a new era were pretty prevalent in Russia, and especially Petersburg. The subsequent Revolutions there (1905 and 1917 both) only heightened this sense of apocalypse for some. The Symbolist writers would be well pleased with the title, not just for the reference I’m sure, but also for the sound play!

Anyway, I’m looking forward to white nights (the sun will set there tonight around 11:30pm and rise around 4:30am). St Petersburg is supposed to be an incredible city. I’ll try to post when I get there.