До Свидания

I've rewritten this post at least 10 times now and it keeps coming out all wrong, so I've decided it's best to bow out with few words. The title is "good-bye" in Russian. If you translate literally, it means "until we meet again," which I prefer to think we will. I am grateful to all of you who were with me during this year of challenges and delights, but it is time to return to the US and to being a blog reader rather than a blog writer. After all, next academic year I'm supposed to write nothing but that dissertation. (Drop me an email every so often and remind me of that.) I'll leave the blog up for awhile so you can steal pictures at will. Speaking of pictures, here's one final image for you:

Piter, Round Two

I should admit up front that I don't have any pictures of famous places this time around. Sorry, but I didn't too much in the way of touristy things.

After the success of the photocopy acquisition I spend the remainder of Wednesday in the Russian Museum. It is enormous (OK, not like the Hermitage, but still big). I basically blew through the 18th century and made a 20 minute stop for lunch in the cafe and I was still there for 6 hours. I have to confess that that is a little much, even for me. I know I'm a professional art historian to be, but after a couple hours in a museum my brain starts to fuzz out and I can no longer really concentrate on what I'm seeing.

This was the only thing in the 18th-century section that made me stop and think, "Whoa!"

It is a mosaic portrait of Catherine the Great made in Lomonosov's mosaic factory. Here's a detail:

I've seen amazing mosaics in churches, but never any "secular" portraits. Of course, I spent a lot of time in the Vrubel room, especially looking at this:

This is his painting Thirty Three Bogatyrs, which I had never seen live. It is a moment from the Tale of Tsar Tsaltan, which figures in my dissertation. The painting is unfinished, so I can only make hesitant conclusions about it, but it is quite interesting in form and color. (OK, I know you are out there, Margo, rolling your eyes and thinking, "Art historians!")

The rest of the evening I basically wandered around Nevsky Prospekt, poking my nose in and out of book stores and the like. It was terribly hot and humid (of course, with all that water around!), so I wandered very slowly, stopping a couple of times at air conditioned cafes for a drink and a bite. You think this one is subtly referencing Starbucks?

No, I didn't go in that cafe (The Republic of Coffee).

A minor irritation was that on my last trip I had purchased a DVD of the Russian filmed version of Hamlet (1964, directed by Kozintsev, starring Smoktunovskii). This Hamlet is considered by many Shakespeare experts to be the film version to watch. I purchased it because I wanted it and I also wanted Margo, Shakespeare fan and budding theater director supreme, to see it. We sat down to watch it and it choked halfway through, which is when I discovered it had a divot in the middle. Grrr! Thankfully I still had the receipt, so I hauled it back to Piter with me to exchange it. Of course, the store I purchased it in, which is a fairly good-sized chain in the city, is closed. All of them. There was a sign on one of the stores that said they were closed "due to technical difficulties" until July 20. So, I've got a 300 ruble coaster. Bah!

I returned to my "mini-hotel" at 10:30 and decided you might like some pictures. The hallway in the early-19th-century building is very Dostoevskian:

It even smelled like Dostoevsky describes. This is a part of Russia I will not miss. It is the same way in my building--the hallway is disgusting and the entrance reeks of, well, it reeks of a combination of icky things. My apartment is perfectly fine though. This is a particularity of Russian life--for the most part people are pretty concerned with keeping their personal spaces in good order, but forget about public spaces! I cannot tell you how often I see people just toss stuff on the ground, even when there's a trash bin 5 feet away.

Anyway, my hotel is owned by a Swiss man named Andre, who met me at the door and gave me a tour of the some what spartan, but quite comfortable accommodations. Here is my room:

The hotel is new (he owns another one in a different neighborhood), so perhaps there will be a little more color--literally and figuratively--later on. I had my own bathroom the first night, but had to change to a room with a Euro-style shared bathroom the second night. I didn't mind so much, especially since Andre gave me a steep discount "for the inconvenience." As it turned out, I was the only person at breakfast (included) the next morning who didn't speak German. So, I pretended to gaze out the window while I fortified myself, which actually suits my morning self quite well.

The best part, perhaps, was the view from my window:

This is the Fontanka canal. St. Petersburg was built on a series of islands (once upon a time there were about 100, but most little canals and streams have been filled in). I spent quite a bit of time sitting on the broad windowsill enjoying the view. (Plus it was cooler outside than inside.)

Yes, I took these pictures around 10:45 PM. White nights are coming to an end, but it never got completely dark while I was there. The late evening sunlight on pistachio, yellow and pink buildings is simply lovely. Put the colors of Moscow and Petersburg in the column of things to be missed. These buildings were a couple of blocks from my hotel.

(Nope, no idea what they are.) I'm not wild about the green, but still, it's color! They were right near a shop labeled "French Yarn," which had me very excited until I stepped in. It was pretty much the same old stuff you can get in the US, only for nearly twice the price. Like I have the suitcase space anyway.

If you are a brave teenager, you might be stup--uh, I mean brave--enough to take a dip in the Fontanka on a 35 degree day.

(Look closely under the standing girl in the bright lime tshirt.) And, if you live along the Fontanka, you don't have pigeons roosting on your TV antenna, but seagulls:

In spite of the picture here, most of the gulls I have seen in St. Petersburg are of the black-headded variety.

So, there it is. Sometimes I sort of forget that even if I have "been there, done that" enough times not to want to repeat it, this doesn't mean my readers aren't interested. So, I apologize for the lack of photos of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Summer Garden, the Ethnographic Museum, the Kunstkamera, etc.

I Know, I Know

I promised to post Thursday. But, I'm tired. No matter what travel sucks the life out of me. And it is way too damn hot for this close to the arctic circle. It was ninety-freakin'-eight degrees in Petersburg on Wednesday! And on the last leg home from my journey, literally crossing the street to my apartment, I managed to fall on my face and do some serious damage to my left knee. Helpful hint: if you live in a country where ice cubes are a rarity, that old, expired package of frozen dough you bought with all serious intentions on making cabbage pirozhki and you haven't gotten around to tossing will do OK if you've got a goose egg to treat. (Especially if it is the only thing left in the freezer.) Meanwhile, it appears I got out of St. Petersburg just in time. Apparently they are shutting down the city starting tomorrow because, you know, Bush is arriving.

I'm in Love

with the Russian Museum! I arrived at the archives at 11:00 AM. I walked out with my photocopy at 11:15. I kid you not! And, get this, because I'm using it for my dissertation, they DIDN'T EVEN CHARGE ME FOR IT!! All I had to do was sign a piece of paper that said I won't publish it without contacting them for the image rights! I wanted to kiss Nina Aleksandrovna (the head archivist)!

(OK, so I lied about not posting 'til Thursday, but I'm in an internet cafe checking my email and I just couldn't not share this bit of news.)

The Kidnapping

Warning: Really, really picture heavy post!

On Friday evening my friends, the Kozhurins, took me out to their dacha for the weekend. In general, dacha means country cottage. I won't recite all the details involved, but in the Soviet era Muscovites were gradually granted "six hundredths" of land (six attached 10 x 10 meter plots) outside the city so they could grow vegetables and such. They were allowed to build small houses of a specific size and design on these plots. The land remained government property. After the fall of the USSR, privatization began, which was an extremely messy process that continues to this day. Crudely speaking, once a dacha plot has been privatized, the owner can build whatever he/she darn well pleases on it.

The Kozhurins' dacha is 100 km (62 mi) to the south of Moscow. When they took me there 10 years ago, they had a good sized two story home on the plot that was completed on the exterior, but unfinished inside. There was also a small hut with a kerosene stove, a greenhouse, a little gazebo and an outhouse. Water was brought from a well a few meters away.

How things change! What follows are some pictures that I took Saturday morning.

Here is the road that leads to their dacha. You can see other dachas in the distance.

This is the house that stood 10 years ago.

The interior is now finished and there are two bedrooms downstairs and two upstairs. The bedrooms downstairs are heated by a traditional-style Russian stove:

Some peonies in the garden:

Dill, onions and lettuce:

They also grow potatoes, tomatoes and cucumbers. The tomatoes and cucumbers are in the greenhouse:

You can see the new "gazebo" to the left of the greenhouse. There's a second greenhouse to the right of the one here. There are also strawberries and raspberries in the garden. We had the strawberries for breakfast and I was in heaven! They used to grow a lot more vegetables, but Antonina Kuzminichna, aka "babushka," is getting up in years and the garden is her domain (and she guards it fiercely!)

This is the new house:

It has a "loaded" kitchen, a small sitting room, and a bathroom with sauna on the first floor. A billiard room is on the second floor.

Some sweet peas near the gazebo:

The site is surrounded by birch trees.

If you grow up in a place where all the tree trunks are brown, walking into a birch forest really messes with your head.

On Saturday we went with the Kozhurin's neighbors, Oleg and Irina, and Irina Kozhurin's sister, Tanya, down the road about 30 km (18 mi)

to Melikhovo, where Anton Chekhov's estate is. The estate is well preserved and has a gorgeous garden. This is the entrance, where a small theater and a monument to Chekhov awaits the visitor:

The main house is nestled in the garden among the trees and near a pond:

Here is the sitting room, with one of Chekhov's desks:

This is Chekhov's bedroom:

(Yes, a twin bed. Remember, this is back in the days when upper class spouses didn't share bedrooms, but rather "went visiting" as the need arose.) Here's the hallway by the bedrooms:

The main house has a lovely porch off the left side:

A neoclassical style gazebo is in the garden behind the main house:

The kitchen is in a separate building to the right of the main house:

It has a real Russian stove inside, unfortunately I couldn't get a photograph. Imagine the stove above on steroids and you'll get the idea.

Here is the well that supplied the kitchen and main house:

This little garden plot runs in front of the main house and the kitchen.

I love the woven fences! There are vast vegetable gardens near the main house and many fruit trees.

Eventually there were so many guests coming to Melikhovo that Chekhov had a small house built on the property:

He originally intended it as a guest house, but realized it was too small to comfortably house guests and turned it into his office (he was a doctor as well as a writer) and hideaway for putting literary inspiration to paper. The garden next to it

has gorgeous roses

and delphiniums

Very few of the flowers have survived from Chekhov's lifetime, of course, but the estate keepers have been able to reconstruct the gardens fairly accurately because the Chekhovs kept pretty detailed notes about what they planted where.

Of course, no estate would be complete without a couple of barns:

And if you live in the country I suggest acquiring a sleigh

to ease travel in the Russian winters.

After enjoying Melikhovo, we went further down the road to Talezh, an ancient holy spring. The spring has been a pilgrimage site as long as history remembers, but only recently has been turned into a major "production" of sorts. So, here you have the source itself:

A closeup:

We all, of course, drank at the source and splashed our faces as is customary. Here is Irina at the fountain and Tanya (in part) building up courage.

(The water is ice cold.) For the deeply faithful, there are bathing cottages where you can dunk yourself completely. Of course, they are segregated by sex for propriety. Here is the men's house.

Here is the women's house:

The roof of the women's house is done in traditional wood shingles:

Only Oleg and the two Irinas were brave enough to wait in line and take a dunk.

There is a chapel on site

and a bell "tower"

After splashing around in the holy water (!) we went for a picnic in the woods. We had eaten and were enjoying the shade when suddenly we heard a rumbling. The rumbling came from this:

They headed straight for us:

Fortunately, they then turned away,

perhaps after figuring out we didn't have any appropriate food. Actually, there were four or five men with them cracking whips in the air and driving them on. Oleg had grabbed a branch and was waving it around and whooping, much to our amusement. Perhaps he also managed to scare them away. After the "cow alarm" the boys went off to seek treasure. Oleg found a bunch of zemlyanika, modeled here by Tanya

(Zhenya, husband of Irina and father of Pavel, is in the background). Zemlyanika are wild strawberries, sometimes called alpine strawberries. I love them. Nobody else was interested, so I sucked them all down by myself! (Yes, I regressed to childhood and pretended they were pristine and needed no washing.) Yum, yum, yum!

On the way home we stopped by the village "supermarket"

for fortifications.

Sunday was dedicated to relaxing and dips in the tiny pool (behind the greenhouses). While the "adults" played whist in the gazebo, I taught Pavel to play gin rummy and he taught me to play durak (fool). I've been charged with making durak popular in the US and he's been charged with making gin rummy the next big card fad in Russia.

Here are my generous hosts:

L-R: Bakhtiar (the Kozhurin's handyman), Pavel Kozhurin, Irina Kozhurina, Tanya (Irina's sister) and Oleg (neighbor and all-round great guy). Zhenya had to leave Saturday night since he worked on Sunday. (He took Antonina Kuzminichna with him, so I don't have a picture of her to share. Oleg's wife had gone in for a nap, so I didn't get a picture of her either.)

Pavel was kind enough to stop the car a couple of times before we hit the highway so I could take some pictures of the beautiful Russian landscape to share with you:

I have no idea what this birdie is, but there were lots of them around.

The pictures are blurry, of course, because the darn things won't pose nicely!

I'm off to Petersburg Tuesday afternoon, dear readers, so no posting until late Thursday. (Now you know why I made this one giant post rather than breaking it up.)

Abramtsevo

Warning: Picture heavy post!

I'm sorry I haven't been around the past couple of days. On Friday I was kidnapped and taken far into the Russian countryside. More about that later...

Before I was disappeared, I hopped on an elektrichka (electric train)

to Abramtsevo. Elektrichki can be put in the column of things I will miss. They aren't fast, nor are they a luxurious method of transportation, but for a few dollars you can travel out of the city for the day. The system sort of works like an above-ground metro: the trains stop every few kilometers and the announcements are almost exactly the same as in the metro ("Tulskaya Station, next stop Serpukhovskaya Station"). The major minus is that people engage in trade on the elektrichki, so you are perpetually hearing, "Ladies and gentlemen, today I have for you ..."

So, why was I going to Abramtsevo? Well, because it is a major reason for the "Russian Renaissance" in the visual arts of the late-19th century. All of the artists I am researching spent time at Abramtsevo. I'll try not to turn this entry into a dissertation, but I could write forever on the estate itself!

Savva and Elizaveta Mamontov purchased the estate in 1870. Mamontov was a railroad magnate and patron of the arts. He was a reasonably talented sculptor himself and loved theater. His estate eventually became a major arts colony and a general retreat for the art and literary communities. The estate's landscape is one of the most painted in Russia.

Abramtsevo is about 70 km (44 mi) outside Moscow and getting there requires a trip on an elektrichka (about 1 1/2 hours) and a walk through the woods. Of course, this walk through the woods was not marked. My directions were rather vague: "Exit the train and cross the tracks. Follow the path. The walk takes 15-20 minutes." I expected a straight path. I know, I know, I should know better by now. After just a few yards there was a fork in the path. No signs. I stood there for awhile, fuming. Fortunately some people appeared and I asked. They indicated that I needed to go left. So I went left. About 10 minutes later there was another fork... Lather, rinse, repeat. Thirty minutes and one scary bridge


later (put this in the category of things I will not miss), I was at Abramtsevo. (Don't worry, Mom, I only crossed the bridge after I watched two Russians nonchalantly walk across it.) Unfortunately I couldn't get permission to take pictures of building interiors, so you'll have to settle with exterior shots. This is the main house:

It served as the inspiration for the home in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. It is a relatively typical late-18th – early-19th-century country home (for the wealthy, of course). (The house was altered several times over the years, so it is more accurate to say that it reflects mid-19th century tastes.) The interior is now a museum that contains mostly photographs, portraits, artifacts and the like. The estate's prior owner was the Slavophile and writer Sergei Asakov, so there are many of his personal items as well.

Of more immediate interest to me is, of course, the ceramics studio:

The Mamontovs and all the artists who worked at Abramtsevo were very concerned with preserving and developing traditional Russian art forms. The studio was specifically designed to reflect the architectural styles of Russian village homes, which are always decorated with carvings. It was built in 1873 as a general studio and turned into a ceramics studio in 1890. The studio now contains an exhibition of works by Mikhail Vrubel, one of my favorite artists and the subject of one of my dissertation chapters. The bench he designed and constructed here is near a scenic overlook on the estate. Unfortunately the sun was in the wrong place and created a terrible glare on the protective glass housing, so the images below aren't that great. Two siriny face each other on the back:

The front is done mostly in floral motifs.

In 1877 the Teremok was added as a guest house. It's impossible to photograph it in one shot due to the trees, so here are two pictures--sew them together in your mind. (I would have Photoshopped them together, but the sun was also impossible on Friday so the seam would have been very evident.)

It was originally supposed to be a banya, but it was then altered to house the many guests who visited Abramtsevo. The design reflects the Abramtsevo ideal of the "Russian style."

The next major project to engage the artists at Abramtsevo was the Church of the Savior Not Made by Human Hands (1882).

The Savior NMBHH is an icon of Christ that appeared miraculously when Jesus pressed his face against a cloth, thus creating the first icon. A 12th-century Savior NMBHH housed in Novgorod served as the example for this church. A copy of the icon is above the entrance:

and another is on the iconostasis. Viktor Vasnetsov (another dissertation artist) designed the building based on medieval Russian churches and painted some of the icons in the iconostasis. Ilya Repin and Vasily Polenov painted other icons. Elena Polenova (yet another dissertation artist) and Elizaveta Mamontov designed and embroidered ritual cloths and vestments for use during services. The first major events to take place at the church was the wedding of the artist Vasily Polenov to Natalya Yakunchikova (sister of Maria, another dissertation artist, and cousin of the Mamontovs). Mamontov had a small cottage built for them on the estate, which Polenov used as a studio. It was later also used for theatrical productions.

The church has many stylistic innovations, such as the ceramic tiles outlining various architectural features:

In 1883 Vasnetsov designed a play house for the children on the estate.

The house is known as "The Hut on Chicken Legs" because it was designed with the fairy tales inhabited by the witch Baba Yaga in mind. The top is decorated with the image of a bat and a horse:

A horse head at the roof apex is a typical feature of peasant homes in certain regions of Russia. A c. 10th-century pagan idol stands nearby.

It was discovered during one of Mamontov's railroad construction projects in the south of Russia and he had it brought to Abramtsevo.

It is easy to see from landscape of the estate itself, which stands on a hill above the Vorya River, why so many Russian artists found inspiration here:

Put birch trees in the list of things to be sorely missed.

On the way back to the elektrichka station I snapped a couple of interesting wildflowers. These are called Ivan and Marya (Melampyrum nemorosum):

And these are Ivan Tea (English name = Fireweed):

(My Russian friends have no idea whether they were ever used for tea.) There were great fields of them on the way to the place where my kidnappers held me hostage, which I'll tell you about in tomorrow's entry. Meanwhile, it's been a long time since I've presented you with a picture of sleeping puppies, so here are the Wild Dogs of Abramtsevo(tm):

Pros and Cons

I've decided to dedicate some of the next few entries to things I will miss about Moscow and things I will not. This one is about what is probably one of my favorite topics: food.

What I will not miss:

The Meat Trucks

In case you don't believe me, here's a closeup:

Yes, boys and girls, you can buy your sausages right out of a truck parked on the street. Theoretically these trucks are refrigerated, and the hum of generators attests to this, but the warmer the weather the more, um, fragrant they are. This is not appealing to your blogging vegetarian. Unfortunately, these suckers are parked a block from my apartment building, so I often have to pass them.

What I will miss:

The Cafes on Kamergersky

Sorry, it was getting dark, so the street is not at it's best here. Anyway, there are lots of different cafes here and most of them are reasonably priced for being four blocks from the Kremlin. It's a great place to enjoy a snack and some people watching.

Danilovsky Rynok (St. Daniel Market)

This market is two blocks away. While it is quite popular, so you always have to fight crowds, how can you resist shopping somewhere where all the men think you are beautiful? {wry grin} "Hey, beautiful, try my cherries!" "Hey, pretty girl, try my carrots, they're the sweetest here!" "Hey, lovely, my cabbage is the best around!" The women are just as flattering, and try to be helpful, "Eat my apples, dearie, and you'll keep your beautiful teeth!" Even better, you can try before you buy. The market is big enough that if you wanted to, you could probably have an entire meal by circling around the stands. Of course, the best part is this


Clockwise, cherries from Uzbekistan, plums from Tatarstan, more cherries from Uzbekistan and tomatoes from Crimea. I realize that this isn't exactly local produce--I do try to eat local when I can, but when you're living this far north, you gotta take your cherries from where they grow! I'm mad about the golden cherries (called Queen Anne or Rainier in the US) and I'm eating as much as I can here. They aren't cheap, but they are about a quarter the price they go for in the US (which is $7/lb!). The other cherries have me at loss to describe other than "pie cherries." Russian has two words for cherries: vishnya and chereshnya. (The orchard in Chekhov's Cherry Orchard is of the former.) Vishnya are the sourish type that are best used in cooking. Chereshnya are the sweet type you eat right off the tree.

Georgian Food

Yes, I can make my own Georgian food and I do often do so at home, but it's never quite the same as in my favorite Georgian restaurant here: Dukhan Alaverdy. In spite of that, I've decided to chat a bit about the food and provide a recipe.

The plums and cherries above could have been from Georgia if it weren't for the continued squabbling between Russia and Georgia. The plums are an important part of Georgian cuisine. They are used to make tkemali, a spicy sauce Georgians use like Americans use ketchup. This is pretty easy to prepare at home and stores well in the freezer. My favorite uses are for kidney beans (lobio) and various eggplant dishes. (Georgian is a lamb heavy cuisine, so it is used for that too.) Spinach is a major part of the cuisine as well. One of the things that makes my mouth water is pkhali:

2 lbs fresh spinach
1 cup walnuts
1 bunch cilantro or parsley
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1/2 teaspoon cumin
small onion, chopped
4-5 cloves of garlic
1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar
pomegranate seeds

Wash the spinach and steam it with just the water clinging to the leaves after washing. Put the walnuts and the following 6 ingredients in a food processor. Process into a paste. Put into a large bowl. Puree the spinach in the food processor. Stir into the walnut mixture. (If you are really into authenticity, you will mash everything with a mortar and pestle.) Place into a serving bowl and sprinkle pomegranate seeds over the top. You can eat it as a salad, or spread on bread (something like pita or lavosh). A variation of this dish is made with beets instead of spinach. Use about 1 3/4 lbs. Enjoy!

Of course, there is always the artery clogging khachapuri (sooooo yummy!) and lots of stuffed eggplants, red peppers and cabbage leaves. If you really get into this, I highly recommend Darra Goldstein's book The Georgian Feast. OK, I think I know where I'm having lunch tomorrow!

Helpful Hints

How to survive cold water season and still be "fresh and clean":

(1) Before going to bed, fill the tea kettle up. Place it on the stove.
(2) When the alarm goes off, throw it across the room.
(3) Shuffle to the kitchen and turn the burner on under the tea kettle.
(4) Continue shuffling towards the bathroom.
(5) Turn on the water, stick your head under the stream and stifle a scream as the water hits your neck.
(6) Turn off the water. Soap up your skull.
(7) Turn the water back on, rinse your hair. Your skull is numb by now, so it won't be nearly so bad.
(8) Wrap hair in towel.
(9) Plug bathtub and fill it with a couple inches of cold water.
(10) Go to the kitchen where the kettle is now boiling.
(11) Return to the bathroom and empty the kettle into the bathtub.
(12) Disrobe, climb into the bathtub with your washcloth.
(13) Get wet.
(14) Soap up.
(15) Rinse (a plastic cup is very useful here).

Fifteen simple steps and you are ready to go out and sweat like a pig in the metro on your way to the Tretiakov.