The End

"Я устал. Я ухожу." -Boris Yeltsin

Since we arrived back from Moscow, the days have been very clear and cold. I have two days left here and I'm wrapping everything up as best I can: swapping music suggestions with Russian friends, taking tests, buying goat socks from the strange goat lady at the bazaar, beginning to think about maybe starting to pack...These past few days have been a mixed bag of emotions, or a bag of mixed emotions. Sometimes I want to just stay here in Kazan forever, and sometimes I can't wait to go back to my attic in western Massachusetts.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We had a great trip to Moscow. We narrowly missed missing the train on the way there, and sat up late playing "Durak," which seems to be the national card game of Russia. We arrived in Moscow, the city that supposedly never sleeps, when it was still dark. Luckily, we discovered that the Produkti Store on the Corner, at least, never sleeps, and got some stuff for breakfast.

We stayed in the Godzilla Hostel, a clean, comfortable place full of English-speaking travelers from around the world. We walked around the Red Square and inside the Kremlin, saw the Tretyakov Gallery, Arbat Street, GUM, and a smaller wooden Kremlin/souvenier market. Many of these excursions were led by our friend Anna, who spent a year in the states and now lives in Moscow.

On the way home on the train, we feasted on chocolate and debated several of the world's problems and their solutions, and it began to dawn on us that this is the end of the Old Testament of the Kazan Collective.

The next day I woke up in time to see the sun rising over the villages, which turned into dachas, which gradually turned into Kazan. It was stunning. I didn't get a decent picture. And when we arrived, it felt like coming home.

It's hard to say good-bye to people, especially in a language with such different and specific kinds of good-byes. I don't want to say "Proshai," because I hope to come back here someday, but "Do svidanye" doesn't feel right.

It's hard to say good-bye to people, in any language, who have taught me so much. Some of what I've learned here, in retrospect, is pretty basic, but important nonetheless. Whatever I might say about the ludicrous bureaucracy, the corruption, the Soviet gaudiness and bombasticism, I think Russia has most of the important things figured out. Things like drinking tea together and being kind to strangers and telling stories. Things like shauma and spontaneity and hospitality and goat-hair products in general. You know, stuff like that. Russia has taught me a very different kind of happiness, which comes not from "success" or "ambition" in the American sense, political victories, musical accomplishment, or academic success, but from what I just mentioned: spontaneity and adventurousness, the kindness of strangers, good company and friends, and a level of sincerity unbeknownst to me before but knownst to me now.

Shauma and goat-hair are up there, too.

My host family, my professors, my Russian and American friends, thank you. You guys have taught me patience and trust and a sense of humor, you've taught me to be honest and to push for change, you've taught me to break into song in the hallways and understand participles and throw people in sambo and stay cool even in the nuttiest of circumstances. And I'm sure this will be only the beginning of our many adventures, not the least of which will be our horseback voyage across Eurasia.

Sadness isn't the right word for what I'm feeling right now. It's more like a sense of vastness, a realization that my world, the general orbit I call my home, has grown exponentially to encompass not only my Деревня in the Pioneer Valley, but this incredible city on the Volga and all that it holds. And I'll miss this place and these people, but there's nothing lost, only experience and wisdom gained.

And with that I'll conclude with four lines from one of my favorite poems:

"I am a part of all that I have met;

And all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move."

-Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

Old Post

(This post was secretly written last week. Another post about Moscow and the rest of the trip's denouement will be forthcoming.)

My time here is coming to an end; I'm leaving in two weeks and it's way too soon. So the past few weeks have been tinted with that sadness, but other than that they've been good. Highlights include

Two fabulous concerts at the Kazan State Conservatory. The first was Sergei Stadler, a Russian violinist, playing several concertos with the Kazan State Conservatory Symphony, including the Mendelssohn concerto I'm working on now. The second concert was a German organist playing a two-hour solo program on the biggest organ I've ever seen. One of our teachers, Galina, also loves classical music and has been inviting me to these things. It's great having someone to talk to about composers and acoustics and all that nerdy stuff.

Reading "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov. The "most mysterious of novels in the whole history of 20th century Russian literature" (says the blurb on the back), The Master and Margarita is a sort of retelling of the Faust myth in early Soviet Russia. I'm reading it in Russian, so it's pretty slow going even with my dictionary and participle chart. I highly recommend it in Russian or in translation.

Discovering a sheet music store, where I bought the Debussy violin sonata.

Playing music with my friends Tamara and Nayil. Tamara sings and Nayil plays piano; today we played the jazz standard "Summertime" for another one of the epic concert/contests of which Russia is so fond. It was like "Day of the First Years" - reloaded. Enough karaoke to make your ears bleed. I like playing with them, though; we have some good jam sessions. Almost buying Sam a rocking giraffe for his birthday. We got him gloves instead.

Working on a techno remix of our friend Ilsur saying "Moi dorogiye druzya!" ("My dear friends!") This remix has all the salient aspects of Russian techno: random baroque music, repetition, and applause.

Thanksgiving: Forrest and I decided on a whim to make banana bread. What followed was a culinary undertaking of epic proportions - the brown sugar was really rock candy, the eggs were scrambling, we found the baking powder just in time. Then we went to Will's apartment, where half the city of Kazan was gathered. Forrest brought in a stray cat named Ishbishmak Chakchakovich. Ben and I played some Irish music. We had a Battle of the National Anthems that the Russians won, and I destroyed everyone at a Russian game of Mafia.

The day after, Friday, was Kurban Bairan, a Muslim holiday. So there was no school, and I went to my host grandparents' house for a holiday lunch, immediately after a feast of bliniy. Sometimes I feel like this whole country is conspiring to feed me. Saturday was warm and sunny and we went to the park and played frisbee and watched the sun set, enjoying the weird looks from passerby as we frolicked in the wet grass.

Sunday we visited Sviarsk, a once-island now-penninsula with a lot of old monasteries and churches, some of them from Ivan the Terrible's time. It was cold, but a good excursion. After that we went to an American-owned cafe and met the people there. It really felt somehow more American than being around my fellow American students. The conversation there felt louder, stranger, anachronistic somehow, in ways I can't really articulate.

On Friday we're going to Moscow to see the sights and stay in a hostel. Everywhere I go I hear songs about Moscow: "Moskau" by Geghkis Khan, "Moscow Never Sleeps," etc. Then we're coming back to Kazan for another eight days. Then back to America, my home sweet home. How the hell did that happen? This whole carpe diem thing is starting to rear its ugly head.

What will I do in America, in a world without 40-ruble tvorog bliniy, public transportation, Comedy Club, the scowling oxraniks and friendly coat-checkers, and most of all without the Russian people? I've met too many amazing people here to count, and I've come to love this city where nothing is certain and everything is more interesting.

What will I do in a world more reasonable and yet more shallow? I'll get home and be reunited with the people I've missed and sit on the couch with my gecko and the Sunday Times. I'll be just in time for the holiday season, America at its finest. I'll see so many relatives and show them so many photos. I'll have six million medical appointments and go back to planning and dealing with the minutae of life. I'll play my new viola and visit all my old haunts and finish my old projects and plan my next adventures. Go West, young man. All this will be wonderful, but I know I'll spend plenty of time looking out my window at the empty street and imagining trams lurching through the mud, the clack of high heels on the avtobus, junk sales and buses on the sidewalk, ice fishers on the Kazanka, ravens flying over the ruins, two guys leading a live sheep through the bazaar. God I'm going to miss this place.

Here are some photos for you:

Our new mascot, Chebby, at the Kul Sharif

Last Two Weeks

Last week our Kirovian counterparts came to Kazan for a four-day visit. These are the students, also on our program, who spoke no Russian at all when they came to Kirov, a smaller city 16 hours north of us. We showed them the ever-impressive Kremlin, took them to the Intellect Cafe (an excellent establishment with chessboards and free refills on tea), and went bowling. Then the next day we went to an art museum, a skating rink, and to a Tatar-language play at the Theatre Kamal. Then the next day we went on an excursion to Bulgar, home of the ancient Bulgars who settled Kazan and whose descendants now live in Bulgaria. We walked around the new Bulgar, a sizeable village, and the old Bulgar with its ancient ruins. We also waged some epic snow fights, made animal friends, and had an amazingly quiet few minutes by the banks of the frozen Volga. The next day we went to Boogie-Woogie Pizza, another excellent find, and then we said our goodbyes. The next day, as part of our birthday celebrations for Kelsey, we watched "Kniga Masterov," or "Book of the Masters," the first Russian Disney film. It was an interesting combination of Russian and Disney fairy-tale elements: Baba Yaga, mermaids, princesses, the water of life, and happy endings all around.

Swine flu has overtaken the city, so this past week all the students except us have been "quarantined," meaning they don't have class. On Wednesday, this crazy dance teacher coerced Sam, Ian and I into working lights for a concert for the rector's birthday. I use the word "concert" loosely, charitably. It turned out to be three and a half hours of speeches, set to the ubiquitous disco remix of "Pirates of the Caribbean," interspersed with occasional karaoke numbers. Doing silly things with the spotlights soon lost its charm. We thought it was done, and then the rector got up and made his own speech, which was actually pretty good...the man had something to say about being a teacher.

After all this ridiculousness, we went to see "Czar," a kind of psychological thriller about the life and craziness of Ivan the Terrible. It was gory and incomprehensible.

Friday night I had a gig at The Leprechaun, Kazan's only Irish pub. It was pretty low-key; I just played my limited Irish repertoire for about half an hour.

Today I went and saw an excellent concert of folk music and culture. Really great stuff. It was mostly folk singing in various regional styles. It was all pretty loud and strident, with interesting harmonies and vocal techniques.

So that's been the past two weeks for me. Just over a month remains. I have nothing profound to say right now. I'm having a great time.

Working with our Russian student-tutors, who help us tackle challenging grammar and review the stuff we already know.

The view from the Kremlin at sunset, which happens at 3:30 in the afternoon these days.

Bulgar - home of the ancient Bulgars. These were some fun ruins.

Us on a tank at Victory Park.

"Everybody's Waiting for the Next Surprise"

I think Halloween is something you have to experience to understand. Friday night I was the guest native speaker at an English language "conversation club." The theme was Halloween, and we talked about Halloween traditions and symbols. Everyone spoke really good English, but it was still hard to convey the spirt of Halloween and the idea of scaring people and being scared for fun. People mostly know what Halloween is here, but they don't have the same kind of associations and symbols as we do. For instance, when the little kids saw us carrying pumpkins, they said, "Are those real pumpkins? Are you going to eat them?"

On Saturday we created an American Halloween party of epic proportions at School 165. We carved pumpkins with our Russian friends. (When we smelled burning pumpkin, we remembered to tell them to scoop out the insides.) We cut out bats and pumpkins and witches from wallpaper. Ben and I made an impressive spider web. We dressed up in various costumes, ranging from vampire to "person with a mouse on his shoulder" to President Medvedev.

When our guests arrived, our friend Ilsur made a speech to his "dorogiye druzya." We had a trick-or-treat trail for the little kids and showed the big people the Russian version of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Then the students at the school performed an English play, which involved rhyming couplets and impressive costumes, and we performed our play, a Russian version of Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin that barely held together until the arrival of our friend Diana and her pinata, which was meant to look like a pumpkin but ended up being a kind of ghoul in the Colombian national colors.

After that we took our guests out into the hall for games such as Spooky Musical Chairs (the kids ran around while I played "Danse Macabre" on the violin), Bobbing For Apples, Fortune Telling, Pin the Nose on the Witch, and Mummy-Making (wrapping up little kids in toilet paper.) Then there was the costume contest, and then the party fizzled out. Sam and I recited Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." (Sam was the Raven.) We raised over $4,000 rubles for the orphanage. We smashed the pumpkins on the snow-covered Russian sidewalk. It was the best Halloween I've had in a long time.

Observations

Hello all. This post will consist largely of several unrelated observations, and maybe a few photos as well.

1) Anti-Semitism in Russia.

I hear it all the time in casual speech. At Yalchik, someone called me a "Yevrey" ("Jew") for not sharing my bread, probably not knowing that I really am Jewish, half anyway. (He then retracted this assertion of Jewishness when I gave him some bread.) Yesterday I was playing chess and I moved my pieces to evade a checkmate. "Ah," said my friend Seryozha, "a Jewish move! Sly," he explained when I looked at him funny.

I don't get it. Maybe it's just a way of speaking, the way some Americans say, "That's gay!" to mean "That's bad!" even if they're not particularly homophobic. Or maybe it's deeper than that; maybe the Russians who say these things really do think Jews are stingy and sly. Whenever I confront people about it, they totally evade the question, with non-sequitors such as "Jesus was Jewish!" or "I want to learn Hebrew." They don't even try to explain it or provide a context. It's really irritating.

2) The Disco.

Last night we went to the disco as part of the Day of the First Years celebrations. It was my first club experience, and in many ways had all the seeming of an American club: DJs, strobe lights, bouncers, everyone dressed to kill. The party went until 3 in the morning, and then a lot of the first years went elsewhere to party some more. Crazy. It was very surreal, very very far from home. Probably the highlight of my evening was when they played a techno remix of the Muppets theme song: "Manamana. Doo doooo doo doo doo!" True story.

Today in class we were talking about American clubs vs. Russian discos, and I explained how we card in America. My teacher was incredulous. "You have to show your documents at the club?!" she exclaimed. I laughed so hard; in Russia you have to show your documents everywhere but the club: at the university, at camp, at the gym, whenever the police ask you for them. And not just passports but superfluous, ridiculous documents. The bureaucracy! The absurdity! I would have gone on a rant if I'd had the right vocabulary. I guess I was really tired. The culture shock hit me like a brick wall this week.

Left: Tatar dance/comedy skit. Right: real live communists on Bauman street!

Last couple of week

It's been a good almost two weeks here in Kazan. The weather's getting chilly and the heat's coming on in my apartment. I can't believe I'm almost halfway through my time here.

A couple weeks ago, a few of us went to our friend Kostya's English lecture. We had nothing prepared, so we fielded questions from the students, who were mostly upper-level English or lexicology students, and skillfully drew muffins, bagels, and a map of the United States. We explained American humor, such as "knock-knock" jokes (which were lost in translation), "that's-what-she-said" jokes (which were altogether not kosher for class), and walking into a wall, which is pretty funny in any language. We also taught the students and teacher some useful American slang, such as "chill," "fo sho," "that party was off the hook," and "thizz face." (Forrest's Bay Area slang was new to me too.) However long these students had studied English, I could tell most of what we were saying was lost on them; they sat quietly, wearing faces of polite confusion. After close to seven weeks trying to do everything in Russian, I recognize that face. I guess it's a long road to true fluency, past the entry level of practical vocabulary and into the thicket of real speech.

On Sunday we went to the orphanage and told the orphans about Halloween. We showed them how to carve a jack-o-lantern, too. We're planning some Halloween festivities for them there at the orphanage, and also an event for our friends and acquaintances at a school, with food, a haunted house, a play, and a raffle, as a benefit for the orphanage. Sam, Ian and I have been put in charge of the haunted house, and I'm teaching myself Saint-Saen's "Danse Macabre" as fast as I can.

This week has been a tiring series of rehearsals and audition/performances for "Day of the First-Years." I will likely be in two acts in the final, surely epic, concert on the 20th, playing Irish music and dancing with American and Russian friends.

Today Hillary Clinton was in Kazan. She spoke at Kazan State University, and we were hoping that since we are, after all, here on state department scholarships, we might be able to get in to see her speak. But no such luck. From what I understood of our conversation with the head of security, only people on a list, or of a certain "quality," (i.e., Kazan State students), were being allowed in. So that was disappointing, but I had a nice walk in the park after, so it was all good.

The other day one of our teachers told us about going to school during the Soviet era. It sounded awful. She told us about being made to write with her right hand even though she was left-handed, being made to drink milk even though she hated milk, even to wear her hair a certain way. We had typical American gut reactions to all this: "That sucks! Stick it to the Man, man!" It's one thing to say that and another thing to really stick it to the whole Soviet system of conformity-as-collectivism. Still, I wanted to tell Stalin, do you think the Bolsheviks accomplished the revolution by sitting down quietly, speaking when spoken to, drinking milk when told to drink milk?

The way our teacher put it was, "At home, I was a person; at school, I was just under this system." Since Gorbachev, the education system has changed, but a lot of that mentality still prevails. There's still often a stark contrast between who you have to be at work, at school, out on the street, and who you become at home, around friends and family. Maybe it explains the way people dress up, don't smile, and blend in on the street, giving Western tourists the impression that Russians are cold and paranoid. Exchange students who live with host families find out otherwise; inside the apartment, everything changes.

I was talking to a Russian guy on the bus who simply could not understand why I came to Kazan. "What are you, a Muslim?" he said. I said no. "What are you doing here? Why did you come here?" he asked me five or six times. "To study Russian and understand Russian culture," I said. He repeated, "Why did you come to Russia? Your own problems aren't enough?" I tried to explain that I don't have any problems here in Russia: I'm having an amazing, paid-for study abroad experience, I have friends, I have food, I have interesting and meaningful stuff to do. He still didn't get it.

I've been in a good mood lately. I think that's because I came here to do exactly what I'm doing: learning through experience what I can only learn here. I don't know whether I'm on that long road to language fluency, but I'm definitely in the catacombs of culture, going back and back like the bazaar, through an endless maze of dog-hair socks and discos.

Random stream-of-consciousness post

Hello all. I've spent over a month here in Kazan. It feels like fall now; the leaves are even turning a little bit, although it's nothing like the spectacular colors of New England. I've been really busy cramming my head full of new words, getting to know my Russian peers, preparing for the epic performance that is Day of the First-Years, and still getting to know my way around a new city and a new culture that seems more evasive and full of contradictions the deeper I go into it.

We Americans have finally received our schedules for our other classes; we were told that we hadn't received the schedules earlier because even the regular university students hadn't received their schedules, which was simply not true. So now that we have our classes, we've been spending the bulk of this week scouring the landscape in search of them. Each week the locations of the classes change, and the new schedule is posted in each building. This schedule, too, lies; more often than not we go to room 479 expecting a literature class, only to find that room 479 is really the office of the German department. Or, better yet, some of my friends were looking for a class in Room 2, and found the rooms in the hall numbered 5, 4, 3, 1. No 2.

There's a level of bureaucracy here, especially in the university, that borders on absurdity. No one seems to know where anything is; today I went on a wild goose chase across the center of town, looking for my rehearsal. The conductor told me it was in the psychology department; asking around, I was told that the psychology department was upstairs, across the street, that there could not be a rehearsal in the psychology department, and that there was no psychology department. When I found the psychology department, the security guard asked where I was from, and when I said "America," he launched into a hearty rant about Tatars vs. Russians, Chechnya, Afghanistan, etc, etc, etc. Then the conductor called me and said he really meant the physics department, so I went back to where I came.

The lectures I've found, though, have been good; I sat in on a History of World Art class in which the professor was talking about art in the Stone Age and how the representations of men and women changed as people's lifestyles changed from hunter-gatherer to agrarian. The visuals helped. Then I went to a Music History class where I understood almost everything the teacher said. It helped that I already knew a little about early baroque music, and a lot of the vocabulary was Italian (pizzicato, oratorio, conservatoria, etc.)

And speaking of which, I went to my first opera on Sunday. It was Puccini's "Madam Butterfly," and it was an excellent production, with an amazing set that used lots of moving furniture and projections of different images. The cast was really talented too, and the orchestra. It was a lot to follow, between the Italian singing and the Russian subtitles, but it was great. One fluid, colorful act, then down to the lobby for caviar, then another act.

I also discovered a Russian thrift store. The sign said "Second hand clothing," so I decided to check it out. I could have walked in there with my eyes closed; remarkably, it smelled exactly the same as the Turners Falls Salvation Army. They didn't have any shirts that fit me, but it was a nice find.

Day of the First-Years (Den' Pervogokurnikov), a big university holiday with a huge concert, is approaching swiftly, and I am in two acts. One: a rendition of "The Rocky Road to Dublin," a popular Irish folk song, with me fiddling, my friend Ben singing, and some of our Russian friends jigging in the background. At the "audition," we were one of two acts to get a perfect score, and the other students clapped along to it like they clapped to everything at Yalchik, creating a weird three-against-two Hemiola effect. It was great though.

The other act is a ridiculous dance, also with Ben and me and our Russian friends. We were woefully unprepared, which brings me to my big accomplishment of the week: my first legit joke in the Russian language.

We all went to one of the dancers' apartment to rehearse our dance. We ended up watching TV and eating lots of food instead. During the meal we were talking about how unprepared we were going to be, and I said something like, "This is only practice, guys; tomorrow we're going to have to do this in front of an audience: eat and watch television!"

Okay, okay, it wasn't great. I'm keeping my day job. But I said it in Russian, and they laughed. It's a start.