A Night at the Marinsky

Yesterday marked a week since my arrival in St. Petersburg, and I am already adjusting to something of a routine. Jet lag is a thing of the past, I am growing comfortable with the city’s bus and metro systems, and at Smolny we have just finished the first half of our two-week Russian language intensive. This routine will change somewhat in a few weeks, of course, as the academic semester begins and we enroll in other courses, many of them taught in Russian, alongside Russian students. That, I imagine, will be much more “intensive” than what we are doing now!

Still, it feels good to settle into a routine, even a temporary one. Part of the satisfaction of studying abroad, I think, lies in the realization that it is possible to create a new routine, and adjust to a new way of life in a foreign country. At the same time, though, an authentic abroad experience should never become too comfortable. No one travels halfway across the world to experience the familiar, and from my experience, the most meaningful moments when traveling are the unexpected ones—the unique experiences we stumble into just when we are getting comfortable.

I was fortunate enough to have just such a moment on Tuesday. On our first day of language classes, when I came back to my home stay expecting to spend the rest of the day doing homework and resting, I instead found myself attending a 3-hour Beethoven concert at the Marinsky Theatre Concert Hall—and for free, no less.

As it happens, I was placed with a very musical host family. Both of my host parents, Sergey and Zhanna, regularly sing in local choirs during their free time, and on Tuesday morning Sergey invited me to his concert that night. When I came home later in the afternoon, though, his daughter Masha suggested that there might not be tickets, so I didn’t get my hopes up. But sure enough, he managed to get hold of two tickets to the sold-out show.

So just before 8, I walked down with Masha to see the concert. The concert hall, an impressive and imposing modern building opened in 2006, turned out to be practically next door to our apartment. Masha was a helpful guide as we navigated the masses of Russian concertgoers checking their coats and shuffling to their seats. Since the show was sold out, our tickets let us sit on standalone wooden chairs on the right balcony. Good enough for me.

I do not pretend to know much about classical music, but the first half of the concert was dominated by Yefim Bronfman, a world-renowned pianist who played Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4. Aside from his incredible musical abilities, it was a spectacle to simply watch Bronfman—a big, hulking presence of a man—go at the piano. As Wikipedia helpfully informs me, Philip Roth devoted a passage in his novel The Human Stain to describing Bronfman’s technique. I’ll let Roth take over for a minute:

 “Then Bronfman appears. Bronfman the brontosaur! Mr. Fortissimo. Enter Bronfman to play Prokofiev at such a pace and with such bravado as to knock my morbidity clear out of the ring. He is conspicuously massive through the upper torso, a force of nature camouflaged in a sweatshirt, somebody who has strolled into the Music Shed out of a circus where is the strongman and who takes on the piano as a ridiculous challenge to the gargantuan strength he revels in. Yefim Bronfman looks less like the person who is going to play the piano than like the guy who should be moving it. I had never before seen anybody go at a piano like this sturdy little barrel of an unshaven Russian Jew. When he’s finished, I thought, they’ll have to throw the thing out. He crushes it. He doesn’t let that piano conceal a thing. Whatever’s in there is going to come out, and come out with its hands in the air. And when it does, everything there out in the open, the last of the last pulsation, he himself gets up and goes, leaving behind him our redemption.” 

Courtesy of yefimbronfman.com

After Bronfman finished the concerto, the applause was so unceasing that he kept coming out to do encores, looking increasingly weary each time he did so. Finally the man was allowed some rest as the first half of the concert closed and a 20-minute intermission began.

The second half was really what I was there for. Conducted, as was the first half by Valery Gergiev—another pre-eminent classical musician and the current artistic director for the Marinsky—the orchestra led a performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. A large choir, including Sergey in the far back, stood behind the orchestra, patiently waiting the moment when they would chime in.

I was waiting, too. Being a classical music ignoramus, the extent of my knowledge of the 9th Symphony was that it was famous. I kept glancing to the choir and wondering when they would start singing, since there were no vocal parts for most of the symphony.

And then the “Ode to Joy” began. This I knew, of course. The familiar tune (known to me as the hymn “Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee”) began softly, played only on a double bass. But step by step, the entire orchestra joined in, and then, finally, the choir. It was an exhilarating thing to witness, a spectacular payoff to all of my impatience. I lack the technical ability to describe such music, but no matter. It was one of those moments when you feel lucky to be in the presence of an artistic genius above your understanding.

After the concert, there was a mad rush to grab our coats and hats and make our way out of the building. I have rarely seen such a mad, crowded place as the theater lobby after the show—everything you might have heard about Russians lacking a sense of personal space seemed true in that moment. Then it was back to the apartment to eat dinner—at 11 pm!–and yes, do the homework that I had not yet started.

Needless to say, I had no regrets—and I probably would have procrastinated anyway. Attending a free concert at the Marinsky Theatre Concert Hall isn’t a bad way to do it.

Snapshots and small victories

It’s 11:30 here and I am eager to head to bed before our two-week Russian language intensive begins tomorrow morning, so I’ll try to make this a quick post. Here’s a rundown of the past two (very busy) days:

Sunday

– After eating breakfast and getting ready at home, I headed out at noon for our first group cultural excursion, to the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. The trip, by foot and metro, took about an hour, with a few (OK, several) wrong turns along the way.
– After meeting up with my group at the Nevsky Prospekt station, we headed to the Church. Seeing its onion domes jut into the sky as we approached it, I was immediately struck by how beautifully ornate the Church was, in a uniquely Russian style distinct from classic European architecture. The interior was no less beautiful, and possibly more so. Our tour guide spoke in Russian, rather quickly, so I didn’t catch every nuance of what she was saying, but I can tell you that the church was built largely as a monument to Tsar Alexander II, who was assassinated there (hence the Spilled Blood of its name). My words are insufficient to describe the place, so check out a few pictures below.
– I was so enraptured with photographing the inside of the church that I lost track of the others in my group, who had already left. So I exited and began strolling by myself through the adjacent Mikhailovsky Gardens, then back towards Nevsky Prospekt (the city’s bustling main street) and by the Kazan Cathedral, before stopping in for a quick, cheap lunch of borsht and a pirozhok. 
– While checking out the massive bookstore Dom Knigi, I ran into a bunch of others from my group, and together we strolled down Nevsky to Palace Square: the site of the Winter Palace and the Hermitage. On the edge of the square, we were greeted by an unusual sight: a line of old Soviet tanks and artillery, which tourists and Russians alike were eagerly snapping pictures of. One little Russian boy even climbed on top of a tank to take a selfie with an iPad. I later realized that this stuff was brought out in remembrance of the siege of Leningrad. Today was the 70th anniversary of the siege’s lifting, and the city commemorated the anniversary with a parade, fireworks and several outdoor exhibitions like the one we saw at Palace Square.
– After seeing Palace Square, we headed back towards our respective homestays, but not before making a stop to check out the Bronze Horseman statue of Peter the Great, commissioned by another “Great,” Catherine, and made famous by the Pushkin poem.
– I then headed home to another delicious Russian meal and good conversation with my host family. I am steadily gaining in confidence in my speaking ability, but a lot of it still goes over my head.

Monday

– I woke up a little before 9 to eat breakfast and walk over to Smolny for our language testing. We were given an oral examination as well as a written grammar test, to determine our preliminary language skills ahead of our intensive 2-week program. The testing was easier than I expected, though I did trip up here and there—and I doubt I’ll ever fully understand Russian verbs of motion.
– We then had some more orientation-like sessions about course offerings and our academic schedules, before heading to a cafe for lunch with our soon-to-be Russian language professors.
– After lunch, it was free time—which for most of us, meant doing a few practical errands: first, the bank; then, a phone store, and finally, a huge shopping mall at Sennaya Ploshchad. Wandering through the mall with a couple others on my program, I was again struck by how Westernized the whole place was. There was even the Russian equivalent of Forever 21, which you can see below. Anyway, I stopped at a supermarket to buy a 5-liter case of drinking water, since the tap water here is not to be trusted.
– And then I was back to my home stay, eating some pig and kasha for dinner and carrying on my most sustained Russian conversation yet, with my host parents’ daughter.

Over the course of the past few days we’ve been told by our program’s leaders to always celebrate the “small victories” when first adjusting to life in a foreign city—the little benchmarks that define our growing comfort in our new temporary home. For me, these past few days have been full of them: finding my way around the city on foot, navigating the metro (with its never-ending escalators and confusing naming system), using the bus, overcoming my fear of negotiating basic transactions at a store or ticket booth, opening up to my host family, and in general starting to get acquainted with the city and culture I’ll be surrounded by till June. Small stuff, really, but hopefully these are the first steps to something much bigger.

The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, exterior (above) and interior (below).

Palace Square, with the Winter Palace and the Alexander Column.

And there’s one of those tanks I was talking about.

The Bronze Horseman statue of Peter.

I got a laugh out of this. Apparently the age of desirability in marketing is determined by the drinking age of whatever country you happen to be in.

And to close this post out, a nighttime shot of St. Isaac’s Cathedral that I took on my walk home tonight.

Orientation-ing

Since my last post, I have relocated from one snow-covered metropolis to another, halfway across the world. Wednesday was airport day, as I took a group flight with 11 other students in the program to St. Petersburg via Helsinki. As we arrived at Pulkovo Airport at around 1:30 local time (or 4:30 AM for my biological clock), we passed through a surprisingly easy customs process—I had unfounded fears of a Soviet-style bureaucratic nightmare—and met up with our on-site program coordinators. Then a 40-minute bus ride took us into the city and to the hotel where we’d be staying for the next two nights. 

So—first impressions of St. Petersburg? Well, as we first got on the highway toward the city, I was struck by how Westernized the city’s outskirts were. Of course, in this day and age no one should be surprised by the reach of globalization, especially in a city like Petersburg that has always been so Western-oriented. Still, there was something jarring to me about seeing so many familiar corporations and franchises—Shell, Mercedes, KFC, Pizza Hut, Quiznos, and many more—represented in a country that once stood as the world’s main opposition to capitalism. But in any case, I had fun reading the signs and advertisements written in Cyrilic and noting the little Russian details that surrounded them, as babushkas strolled in parks wearing the distinctive shapkas and fur coats familiar to anyone’s vision of a Russian. 

As we approached the city’s center, Petersburg’s Russian-ness became all the more clear, as we drove past the massive Lenin statue in Victory Square and countless Orthodox churches. After checking in to our hotel, we were treated to an early dinner of beef stroganoff accompanied by a delicious salad, soup and desert.

Over the past few days we’ve had a lot of meals like this, sampling many staples of Russian cuisine during the orientation period—and on the program’s dime, no less. Orientation is, by its nature, a very regimented process, so as a group we’ve been shepherded from one info session to another detailing every possible aspect of our lives here this semester, including everything that could possibly go wrong. It’s a process that is exciting but sometimes overwhelming, especially when we’re talking about LGBT issues in Russia, or what to do if we are detained by police, or simply the process of navigating Petersburg through public transportation. In between these sessions (and our delicious meals) we have only explored our immediate surroundings in Petersburg, with the exception of a bus tour on Friday that gave me a sense of the city’s geography and its grandeur for the first time. (Check out some blurry, clearly-taken-from-a-bus-window photos below).

Today, though, we took the next step by moving in with our host families. Luckily for me, I was assigned to a family that lives within walking distance of Smolny College, where I’ll be studying. My two host parents are both in their 50s, and they currently live with two of their daughters, their son-in-law, and two little granddaughters: 3 year-old Ksenya and 4 month-old Nastya. From our first conversations, and the delicious dinner I just ate, it seems that I have really lucked out in my host family assignment—everyone has been friendly, engaging, and genuinely interested in what I have to say and where I’m from (the Boston picture book I gave them as a gift has been a big hit so far).

At the same time, I have never heard Russian spoken so fast, and I have never felt more self-conscious in a language! But I know that this language barrier is an inevitable part of the process, and hopefully by the end of the semester I’ll be able to carry on in conversation with much more confidence.

For now, though, I’ll sign off. On tomorrow’s agenda: an excursion to the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, the site of Tsar Alexander II’s execution in 1881. I’m excited to see more of the city on foot and up close, and to  settle into a routine here with my host family.

The famous statue of Peter the Great, sculpted by Etienne Maurice Falconet and immortalized by Pushkin in his poem “The Bronze Horseman.”

One of the St. Petersburg “Rostral Columns,” which surrounded the location of the St. Petersburg Stock Exchange and served as beacons overlooking the Neva.

The Hermitage/Winter Palace seen over the frozen Neva River. 

Smolny Cathedral, not to be confused with Smolny College, where I’ll be studying!

The Russian cruiser “Aurora” which saw action in the Russo-Japanese War and fired the famous “blank shot” that started the October Revolution.

 

 

Rushing off to Russia

Hello friends,

If you are reading this blog, chances are you know who I am. For the rest of you, here goes: my name is Sean Keeley, I am a junior at Boston College majoring in International Studies, and I’ll be spending the next semester studying in the Bard-Smolny program in St. Petersburg, Russia. Over the next 4 ½ months, I’ll be using this site to share my observations, musings, and (hopefully) insights—providing a “window” into the city once called Russia’s “Window to the West.”

I begin my blog from an unusual starting point: snowed in to a Super 8 hotel in Queens, New York along with my dad. This is not, exactly, how I planned to spend my last night in America—the initial plan was to take a flight out of Boston tomorrow morning, in time to join up with the other students in my program for the group flight from New York. But nature had other plans—with a massive blizzard bearing down on the East Coast that threatened to cancel flights tomorrow, my parents decided get me down to New York today, in advance of the group flight tomorrow. Thus ensued an accelerated departure process, full of last-minute packing and errand-running and then a grueling six-hour drive to New York in the middle of a massive snowstorm. A huge thanks goes to my parents for taking time off work to help me get down to New York as quickly and safely as possible.

Tomorrow afternoon the real journey begins, and I suspect I will have much more substantial to say when I arrive in St. Petersburg. For now, though, I will try to address the question I’m most often asked these days, by friends and family and strangers alike: why Russia? Usually this question is asked of me politely and with genuine curiosity, but other people—and not infrequently, Russians themselves—seem seriously bewildered by my choice. Why, of all the countries in the world to study, would I choose somewhere so cold and remote and (as Western stereotypes would have it) so unfriendly?

It’s a fair question, actually, for which I do not have a single, coherent response. Instead, my interest in Russia stems from many sources—from the literature of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which consumed much of my free reading during the latter half of high school; from the passions of Mr. Wilson, my Russophile of a high school teacher who first piqued my interest in Russia’s turbulent history and dysfunctional politics; and, finally, from the language itself. That is how I really got started down this path two-and-a-half years ago, as a first-year college student and language lover who simply wanted to try something new after several years of French.

Over the next few months, of course, I will be experiencing much that is new to me, and perhaps more than I bargained for! But I hope that through this blog, I can arrive at a fuller answer to that question—and I hope you will follow along as I try to figure it out.