Progressive Nostalgia

I may do a botch up job of this, but here goes anyway. progressive nostalgia, which I mentioned a few days ago, has to do with the neo-marxist perception that the real Marxism of Russia, of the Leninist type, was the good kind of marxism, and that Lenin's early death and the subsequent Stalin years were a hideous interruption of the possibility of the political and cultural utopia imagined by Lenin.

or something like that.

there is a group of independent intellectuals here who call themselves neo marxists and whose project it is to promote neo marxism, a return to the ideas of Lenin and promote them as a viable alternative to Putin's brand of capitalism, which, they fear, is taking Russia in the wrong direction.

In the first session here I attended a series of six seminars given by one of those neo marxists, Alexandr Skidan, who, along with a group of women activists who write and produce plays (among other activities), provided us with a glimpse into their view of a neo Marxist Russia, which reminds me of the days when as a Carleton University student I was recruited into a group of Marxist Leninists to run for student council. I came eerily close to winning, but did not, a "theme" that has continued throughout my life. You know, coming second. I think someone has written an essay about "coming second". We all hear about the person who came first; who comes second? Are they that much worse than the one who came first?

Well, anyway, that is a digression. From neo marxism, and superficially at least neo Marxism sounds similar to the Marxism in Canada in the early 70s, but with an edge of urgency, because certainly in the streets here it feels urgent, crazy, unfettered, out of control. But this out of controlness may be no more urgent than the out of control ness that I see in my own country, just less familiar in its details: the youth here are wearing designer jeans that are not only faded, but also heavily although symmetrically wrinkled. I've seen many many young men and women with punctured skin, "cutters", whose cuts are not merely sliced randomly into their bodies but have become an art form in themselves, an art that is reinscribed in their faded, wrinkled jeans, which are also symmetrically slashed.

My neo Marxist showed us two movies: Tarkovsky's "Mirror" and Sokoluv's "Russian Ark". I had tried to watch "Mirror" before I came here, but was not able to get it; I had seen "Russian Ark" twice before, and although I have not yet made it to the Hermitage (I'm avoiding it, I think, I feel overwhelmed by the thought of its huge size and the knowledge that if I spend 1 1/2 minutes at each picture, it would take me 8 years to see everything assuming nothing changes during those 8 years, I'm avoiding this immensity because I know when I get there I will have to make choices, and what choices would I make, although I read that Dennis Hopper has an exhibit of B&W photographs dating back as far as the 60s and so that might be a place to start), and although I have not yet made it to the Hermitage, watching Russian Ark after two weeks in the city where it was made was a powerful experience and helped me to understand another layer to my reluctance to visit the Hermitage, which is that it is a homage not just to art, to civilization, but also to privilege, and that is where I stumble. yes, I can stand in front of "great" art and then I start to spin off into a consideration of how that "great" art is made possible, how it is conserved, stolen, bought and sold and then I get all fucked up about that. So you can see, maybe, why I'm deferring my visit to the Hermitage; however, I WILL go, because I couldn't bear to go back home and have to respond "no" to the question: did you visit the Hermitage?

Give me a Malevich, for whom art had an earthly, immediate purpose. For whom art was not "beauty" or "not beauty", but for whom art was "true" or "false", and because I know that is what I look for in art, I find beauty for beauty's sake to be, on the surface, beautiful, and then, upon consideration, to be repulsive to me in an essential way that I haven't yet been able to define, or even completely identify or describe.

I visited a soviet style cafe last week with Dmitri, on a Dmitri walk, one of the other things I "promised" to tell you about. Besides the short stocky waitress who was wearing a shiny tight blue dress trimmed with white tubing and a small same-blue-and-tubing cap on her head, there were several pieces of "art" on the wall: clumsy oil paintings: of ships tossing on the sea, bowls of fruit, men at work; all "bad" art, all representative of nothing except their awareness of themselves as "paintings".

And so I'm also thinking: what is it like to live in a place that others visit not for what it is now, but for what it used to be? Petersburg is and was a dream city, an iconoclast's fabrication that came to being because the iconoclast had both "vision" and power. But I can see that all this European grandeur is in juxtaposition to "Russianness". In most of the rest of Russia, the homes and public buldings are made of wood; I noticed this somewhat when I went to Novgorod last Saturday, and this session's first lecture on untranslatable Russia confirmed that perception for me. So when you go out of Petersburg you see, not street after street of European style building, but many small wooden homes (with a backdrop, I must admit, of rows and rows of concrete soviet style apartment blocks).

But maybe my question was not fair: we visit Petersburg for what it used to be, expecting that what it is now will somehow be a continuation of what it used to be. And so I see other tourists standing in front of Peterhof, or in front of Church of the Spilled Blood, wanting to have their pictures taken with Citizens dressed up in 19th century costumes. I don't see people standing up to have their pictures taken with the legless, handless, beggars lining the sidewalk outside the Vladmir mother of God Icon church; the last time I was there, there were at least 8 of them. Hey, not that i think that would be a good idea, but I see that one is the shadow of the other, and haven't quite decided which is the shadow and which is casting the shadow. The rich did nothing right, the poor did nothing wrong.

Progressive nostalgia is the term used to describe the project of those neo Marxists I described earlier. PG is working against the democratizing machine in Russia, a machine that will inevitably lead to there being many more people with broken fingers begging outside the cathdrals (at least, you will say, at least the cathedrals are open, are no longer storing vegetables, or being used as icerinks...but there is a tradition of using cathedrals as storage for vegetables in Russia, established long before the soviet times, a kind of beautiful metaphor, don't you think, of having a town's nutritional sustenance stored where they also go for spiritual sustenance?). Despite this project, this insistence on the evils of capitalism, there are very few "progressive nostalgics", and most people are just too excited about versace, or macdonalds, or ... well, words fail me here, because I realize that I don't know the names of those expensive labels that are all over the place here, but let me say this: everywhere on every street in my neighbourhood there are stores with heavy security at the doors, men in suits wearing headsets, whose job it is to intimidate you into not stealing the goods, into not even entering to look unless you know you are also going to buy, and in those stores are brand name sunglasses, purses, shoes, suits, hair products, chocolates...all packaged like fetishes.

This week I also started the poetry workshop. The instructor, Jorie Graham, was in a car accident in France last week, suffered a concussion, and was not able to come, so we have a "substitute", although I hesitate at using that word. The class is great, and I realize, because I've received emails of complaint from you, that I haven't spent much time describing the workshops and the people, and the thing is, well, I've spent two weeks just trying to get a handle on the city itself which dwarfs everything else around it, a city of stops and starts, and everytime you set out to go anywehre, you bump into a canal or a river and have to go in a different direction for a while until you can cross a bridge and re-set your course and of course the street signs are in cyrillic...but the poetry workshop, well, I really do love poetry, I love writing it, I love reading it, I love talking about it, and I love talking to the people who are writing it. Poems are really like eggs, I think: small, condensed, nutritious, tasty. And when I sit in front of uncracked poem ...

My roommate is Allison, from the US originally, and then in Hong Kong for 2 years, and now in London for the past 5, and is quirky eccentric, a HISTORIAN (yikes!), a fiction writer, young enough to be my daughter (it's okay, Lorraine, you are still my best daughter). We get along well, and seem to share the need for many hours of sleep each night and each have the ability not to annoy the other. Well, we are so seldom in the room at the same time, there is so much going on that we have no need to be there except to sleep. But it works well, and every morning one or the other of us does reconnaissance on the shower: "halleluia" is code for "hot water", and absence of code means "you may as well stay in bed until the last minute".

Food: I've had questions about food. Breakfast is included in the price of the accommodation; however, frequently they "run out" of food which turns out not to be such a bad thing as breakfast is: a glass of orange juice, 1/2 cup of coffee, a plastic container of yogurt, and a cake wrapped in cellophane. Okay, it's not as bad as the soldiers' WWI rations, but I've been to the markets around here, and I know they could do better. On a good day, instead of cake we get blini's, or crepes, which are usually good, but really sweet, and there is never enough cofffee to wash it all down.

So, I've given up on breakfast, and since they've brought a tiny refrigerator into the dorm where I'm staying, I can buy my own yogurt and my own blueberry juice (I HATE orange juice) and Allison bought some bread, and I bought some more Linden honey (oh, my god, that's good honey) and so breakfast is now okay, although there are many crumbs in my bed. Lunch is usually an option, and dinner is usually borsch, which is great just about everywhere I've tried it. One place, the Lenin Cafe, serves a hot borscht covered with a slab of baked bread. I'm not describing that very well, but I think that the bread is baked right on the top of the ceramic soup bowl, and that the whole thing is done in the oven. very good.

other than that, just about everything comes with mayonnaise, and while the younger women scrape it all off, I generally welcome the chance to eat the fat with impunity. There is a Georgian restaurant I've been to a few times that offers a "businessman's lunch" with a set menu: soup, salad, and some sort of meat with a starch, and that's about 130 rubles. Don't ask me how much that is in dollars, I have no idea. i just keep spending my money.

At dinner time, the Georgian restaurant makes this amazing dish called (and Steve, you take note, because I want you to make this for me some time) Drunken Chicken. It is an amazing boneless chicken stuffed with walnut paste and dried apricots and soaked in some sort of alcohol (maybe vodka?) and is so good. Well, I'd have to say that Georgian food in general seems to have a bit of a leg on over Russian food, so maybe a Georgian cookbook?

I've also been to an Italian restaurant, and although the lasagna i had was good, the valpolicella i shared with Ann was even better. I've also been to an Armenian restaurant, which I remember nothing of, so can only assume it was mediocre (oh, yes, I remember! Wow! how wrong I am. I had this amazing bread dish which was boat-shaped dough, baked with an egg in the middle, and cheese. Disgusting in terms of nutritional value, but I could see coming home after a hard day in the Armenian fields and chowing down to 2 or 3 of these. I also went to a cafe called the Idiot, but do not remember. on those days when I don't want to be around others, I just go to the blini place and get a couple of blinis, usually the one with jam, which means that i get this lovely crepe smoothered in blueberries, yum.

So, I'm not suffering for food. It's just all different, and I'm craving a carrot, hoping for carrot juice, and while I did find a "juice bar", it's more expensive than water, which is more expensive than pop, which is more expensive than coffee, which is more expensive than beer, which is more expensive than vodka.

I hope I've answered all your email questions. The protest seems to have passed by, but then I just realized that the guy in the booth next to me has left, and i suspect that what I was hearing wasn'tr eally a protest, but the yells of disgruntled video game characters. My hands are feeling grubby from this keyboard as I have been here for a couple of hours, minus 11 minutes.

Love you, and love you,

Anne