studying russian at the wrong time

on the train from moscow to kazan with my dad in 1994

the past week or so of russia's agression against ukraine has me pondering my past. i studied russian, mostly literature and quite a lot of russian history. of course i studied the language as well, but i was never a great talent. i could always read it better than i could speak it. but i did ok, and most importantly, i loved it. 

i studied russian at precisely the wrong time to actually get to do anything with it. i began studying in 1989, just as the berlin wall fell. it took a couple more years for the soviet union to dissolve, but dissolve it did. and by the time i finished my bachelor's degree in 1993 and my master's in 1994, academia didn't really know what to do with us russian majors. 

looking back, so many of my professors were former military, harry had been to the defense language institute in monterey and then princeton (possibly not in that order). the head of our department at iowa, ray, was also former military, as was kit, whose last name i don't remember, though polish was his specialty. later, at asu, the head of the russian department was also former military. they were surely all tapping people on the shoulder to join the cia or fbi or nsa. but that tap never came for me. perhaps because of the aforementioned not being a language talent, but i think it had even more to do with timing. i simply studied russian at the wrong time. fellowships dried up. slavic departments shrank and merged with other "minor" languages. i met a nice danish boy and followed him home and love sent me in another direction.

and i believe that today, we're seeing the result of that. putin and his cronies felt humiliated at the dissolution of the soviet union and now he's taking the first steps towards getting it back. and because no one kept studying russian and slavic culture, it seems like the world is rather blindsided by it all. maybe they should have tapped some of us on the shoulder after all, even if we weren't brilliant at russian, but just had a deep and abiding interest in it and the culture. 

as usual, at moments like this, i wish i could still sit across from my dad and ask him what he thinks about it all. 

history is a matter of perspective

the angle taken by a museum is very often through the lens of where it's located. we went to the maritime museum in barcelona yesterday. since i'm currently writing about the long voyage from amsterdam to the cape in 1723, i'm very keen on learning i can about what ships and life on ships were like back then. i didn't exactly learn that at the maritime museum in barcelona.

it was a beautiful building, almost danish in its skillful combination of old and new architecture. the main feature was a 60-meter long replica of a galley, an oared warship, made to fight the ottomans in the mediterannean in the 1500s. those oarsmen were slaves and did not have a good life. the captain, however, did, with fine inlaid wood floors and art up in the quarters on the stern, from which he dictated the battle. it was elaborately decorated with both painting and carved reliefs. there was a medusa's head on the back, to strike terror in all who approached from the back. the figurehead was a beautiful carved neptune, riding a fish and covered in gold leaf, showing undoubted dominion over the sea.

it was a confusing exhibition, and hard to find the way through to see all of the exhibits. we finally did, but not in the right order of things and it did get a bit hazy as they leaped from those mediterranean incursions to trade with the americas. because they were focused on ships built in barcelona and the catalonian sailor in general, they skimmed over that whole thing with the spaniard columbus and his role in accidentally discovering the new world when he tried to find a new passage to india, undoubtedly because the spaniards couldn't keep up with the portugese and dutch on their well-established routes around the cape to the far east. (phew, that was a long sentence.)

there were displays about the trade with the new world and the goods that went back and forth - sugar, cotton, tobacco and yes, they even mentioned the slave trade. i think they handled it well. you stepped into a little room, where the walls were covered with official documents regarding the slave trade, and a whispered voice said that it was an ugly bit of history that no one really wished to talk about, but it needed to be done, and it was a dark time for humanity. those plantations in the american south could do with a bit of inspiration there.

and it all had me thinking, once again, about how history and how the story is told, is a matter of who is telling the story. maybe i need to head to amsterdam to hear their perspective, they must have a maritime museum there.

layers of history

while in istanbul a few weeks ago, i visited the ayasofya. it must be one of the most magnificent human made structures in the world. built by justinian starting in 532, it has stood stoically through regimes and wars and earthquakes and fires, shifting religions and rises and falls of empires. it remains, implacable, its scars visible, but none able to mar its beauty.

the layers of its history are there to be seen - mosaics of kings and saints side by side with enormous quotes from the quran in arabic. tiles on the floor that saw the coronation of emperors and sultans. stone staircases worn smooth by the feet that trod on them for millennia.

we got in at the very end of the day, so there weren't many people. it was quiet and monumental. and in the quiet it felt like if you listened hard enough, you could hear the whispers of the stories that vast, ancient place had seen - the multitude of voices which had passed through, the games played, palace intrigues conducted, prayers said, speeches and sermons proclaimed. all of those stories whispering from the walls. i wanted to hide in some corner and stay after closing, to hear them all...

* * *

i'm so sad - andrei bitov is dead. 

i wrote my master's thesis on pushkin house and

had i finished my Ph.D., i would have written on his work.
but 81 is no bad age. my dad nearly made it there as well.
and today he would have been 85.