Dostoevsky

well, Dostoevsky, yes, and other things, too.

It's Thursday night for me, and probably Thursday morning for the rest of you, and I'm getting ready to go back to my dorm room and to bed. Lucky for me I have had a couple of days in a row of hot water for a shower, which means that I feel mostly normal during the day.

Wednesday: the regular non-fiction workshop in which we looked at Ann's essay about New York City being the laboratory for Barnard students, and then the cities of Russia being the laboratory for Ann's life. Should I tell you that Ann remembers the night that Stalin died because it was the first night of many she spent with a socialist partner who shall remain nameless? That that first night was a celebration, of sorts, of that death, and of many other deaths and then hope for the future. Her essay, of course, was not about that night, but about the contributions made by Russia to the defeat of the German army in World War Two, and the challenges of urban design in Russia's new cities during the soviet period: Petersburg, Odessa...Ann first came to Petersburg as an intourist in 1970, and her stories, well, her stories are hers to tell. She left this morning on an early plane.

The afternoon involved a viewing of Russian Ark and brief lecture about it by poet, essayist, and "intelligentsia" neo-Marxist Alexandr Skidan. Further discussion on Friday. I'll let you know, but am guessing that the discussion will centre around the director's "blindness" to the soviet period and the function of the European guest who is shown around the Hermitage by the unseen narrator. The European guest, Marquis de Gonstine, who in 1940s published the most vile book ever written about Russia, was played by a Russian actor (Sergei Dryden?) who is the husband of the woman who owns the space (coffee shop, bookstore, art gallery) where we watched the movie.

The Russian reading at the Anna Akhmatova Museum, Sergey Gandlevsky and Leonid Kostyukov. The former a poet whose translations were first read by Matvei Yankelevich and then who himself recited them from memory. Just stood up and recited his poems, short and long, all of them, word for word, no crib notes, and in the tradition of the soviet poets who did that out of necessity, out of the need not to be arrested for their written work. When asked what his favorite alcohol was, Sergey responded that he drinks to become drunk, not for the good taste, so he doesn't care what alcohol he drink. However, given the choice, he would select cognac over cologne, but he does not care what brand of cognac.

And then the Dostoevsky Museum with Allison today, and the Vladimir Mother of God Icon Cathedral, the first and last parish that D worshipped in as a Petersburger.

But of course all this is just stuff. You don't care about that stuff, do you? I mean, what could it possibly mean to you to have me list what I did, where I went? It's all meaningless until it has a personal stamp on it, until there is a story. So, here is the story.

Next to the Dostoevsky Apartment Museum is a market, an indoor market. I said to Allison, let's just go in an look, because I could see from outside that there were some vegetables piled up in pyramids, and so we went in and there were more vegetables piled up in precarious pyramids and more types of vegetables than I have seen anywhere in any restaurant in Petersburg and I practically danced down the aisled, taking photographs of gerkins and cucumbers, tomatoes, green onions, bunches of lettuce. And then the white, white cheeses packaged in brie or camembert like rounds but probably what I think of as russian feta, deep fried cheese sticks, mounds of yellow and red pears, limes, apples, carrots, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, cherries...and the market smelled fresh and fruity and clean not with the rotting vegetation smell of an equatorial market but of the lively and alive vegetation smell of freshly picked and brisk air ripened pure nutrient. I had to pull out my camera, as if I had stumbled upon something I had never seen before, and I took pictures of swollen garlic bulbs, dried apricot, dates, figs, and Allison she just touched my shoulder and laughed.

I bought a small tub of linden honey, why linden honey, I don't know, there must have been 20 different kinds of honey, Steve, each a different golden yellow and thick and sweet in a honey sweet way, and she held out a small stick with honey dripping off and she was laughing at me because I think she could tell how excited I was at seeing all this real food in one place and before I had finished tasting one kind of honey she handed me another stick oozing honey and I kept trying honey after honey and she kept laughing at me and I kept dreading when the honey samples would stop coming and I bought a small amount of honey that I will eat...some time. Russian honey. Steve, I will try to bring some home.

But the real story is the pug, the German pug, the fat german pug who was so fat that his bulbous eyes were almost lost in his facial folds and even un-neutered he spread himself lazy on the concrete floor of the market, maybe hoping that some scrap of vegetable would fall his way, and so I took his photograph and his owner posed him for me, he was so fat that he barely moved, just looked out from inside his body through those ridiculous fat eyes, and his name was Faroud. From Germany and the women selling vegetables and fruit thought I was crazy taking pictures of a fat dog in a market but what could be better than honey, fresh cherries, a fat pug, and talking a kind of hectic Germanic-Russian--English sprinkled with the desperation of French and Spanish prepositions and nouns -- and what did the pug care, really, he just wanted me to pat him, well, no he just wanted to stretch out on the cool concrete floor.

So you can see, maybe, that the staid museum veneration of a great writer was a bit of a letdown after the pug and the honey, and while I was interested in wandering around Fyodor's 6 room apartment and reading about how his gambling addiction was his undoing and his wife's devotion his reconstruction, there was no mention of a dog, and unlike Cathy the Great he spent much of his time writing and thinking. Well, maybe that's unfair to compare him to C the G; she collected Italian Greyhounds, being an Italophile what with all that rococo and Greco Roman statuary.

But Fyodor moved every few months, and this apartment museum was the last apartment he lived in; he died, a very heavy and stubborn smoker, of emphysema, and there is a tobacco tin in his apartment on which his daughter inscribed the date of his death: January 28: Papa died today, it says.