Roulettian Intermezzo -- Photo of the Week

Summertime and the living is easy...

It's also pretty hot and with temperatures up in the eighties, Petersburgers head to the grassy banks near the Peter and Paul fortress to catch some rays and to take a quick splash in the Neva.  

Royal Roulette and Graveyard Vodka

Gatchina is one of a handful of provincial palace towns scattered oustide of St. Petersburg, and in its somber (by Russian imperial standards) palace lived a host of tsars, including Alexander III, who hunkered down here after his father, Alexander II, was blown to bits in the city by terrorists. It's also where his son, the last Tsar, Nicholas II, spent a great deal of his childhood. 

One of Gatchina's most roulettian part-time residents was Natalia Brasova. While entangled in a cumbersome second marriage, she and Grand Duke Michael (Nicholas II's younger brother and second in line to the Russian throne) fell in love.  They would gladly have married but Michael, as a member of the royal family, was strictly forbidden from espousing a divorced woman of non-royal status.  They solved this dilemma with an undercover marriage in an orthodox church in Vienna in 1912, some five years after their first meeting. Upon learning the news, Nicholas promptly removed Michael from the line of royal succession and banished him in disgrace. Thus, the newlyweds spent the pre-war years gallivanting around the various watering holes of Europe and had they only been content to stay there, the story would have ended more happily. But in the patriotic fervor that erupted with the outbreak of World War I, Michael received permission to return with Natalia, and so the story finishes abysmally, as did so many stories of Russian nobles who did not manage to escape the red terror of revolution.  First held under palace arrest in Gatchina, 

Michael was subsequently deported a thousand miles east to the remote city of Perm, where he had the honor of being the first Romanov to be unceremoniously shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918. His body has never been found .  

Natalia managed to avoid the revolutionary bloodbath by feigning tuberculosis in prison where she had been held for ten weeks: the authorities transferred her to the prison infirmary, from which she made a successful jail break. Then with the help of a false passport, disguised as a nun, she embarked on an odyssey fraught with danger and uncertainty, from Petersburg to Kiev, and thereafter via Odessa, Constantinople, Marseilles, to a safe haven in England. As funds dwindled, she moved to Paris, where the cost of living was less extravagant.  There, in the city of light, this woman, who had waltzed with royalty, died destitute in 1952 in a charity hospital. 

Meanwhile, it's the Saturday preceding Trinity Sunday, the day on which the mystery of the Holy Trinity is celebrated in Russia.  It is also a customary time to trek to the cemetery to visit the beloved dead.

And as Tour Guide Natasha's family is originally from Gatchina and a passel of her relatives lie buried in this town, we head there by bus and then wander down the quiet shady streets to the municpial cemetery. The weather is bucolic, purveyors of fake flowers are out in full force, and the cemetery is bursting in green, as we wend our way along narrow paths to Natasha’s family gravesite. Her great aunt, grandfather, father, and brother are all buried here. What? Brother? I gasp inwardly. There it stands, written in stone, "born 1980, died 2003 -- you took all joy and happiness with you." What could possibly have happened? 

Natasha sets to work laying the small table that, along with a humble bench, is a permanent fixture at many Russian grave sites: she's brought a simple white table cloth, pickled cucumbers, bread, cheese, cherries, tomatoes, sliced green peppers, handiwipes, and, naturally, vodka. 

"Ach, they all liked vodka," she sighs, as she pours the clear liquid into plastic glasses that she sets at the edge of each grave. She also pours us both a glass, and we stand, meditatively looking at the gravestones, then dip our fingers into the vodka and symbolically splash the graves. 

Natasha starts reminiscing and I ask about her brother, whose face, etched in stone, smiles back at me. "He was murdered," she replies. 

I gulp again. Good heavens! It seems the poor man was shot by his half-brother in some sort of youthful vendetta. Natasha waves her hand, and says something about "banditsky" dealings. 

Then referring to the Russian proverb which states that "between the first and the second glass, the gap is short," she pours another round of vodka, and points to her great aunt's grave, saying, "She was like a mother to my mother, she was my true grandmother.  

It turns out that at the beginning of the World War II, Natasha’s twenty-year-old grandmother was, oddly,   (Natasha hints at a romantic liaison in high places) the vice-mayor of the town.  The first thing the Nazis did when they took Gatchina in 1941 was to shoot the real mayor. But Natasha’s grandmother, her baby daughter (that is, Natasha’s mother) and the great aunt managed to escape on a train of refugees heading for distant Tatarstan. At some point along the way, a handicapped girl wanted to clamber onto the train, but no one would let her, believing her to be a harbinger of  ill luck. Natasha’s grandmother took matters into her own hand and pulled the girl into their car. That night, the Germans bombed the train, every car was hit, except the one with grandma, great aunt, and the handicapped girl. Nonetheless, somewhere further along that arduous journey, grandma died and was buried near the train tracks in a vast desert, with no marker, nameless. 

"My mother never even got to stand by her grave,“ mused Natasha, "and that’s how my great aunt, at the age of sixteen, became my grandmother.  She raised my mother on her own...  Okay, well, God likes trinities, let’s have a third round.“

We sit a while longer looking at the mute grave stones, then pack up the leftovers, and as we slowly make our way to the exit, we pass hundreds of other roulettian histories that are not easily decipherable. 

For example, Serezhenka Koptov, who for some unimaginable reason died at the age of two. 

P.S. What became of Natasha's mother, the daughter of the twenty year old Vice Mayor who died in the middle of the desert?  She's living on (where else?) Long Island. After her husband passed away and was buried in the Gatchina Municipal Cemetery, she took a two-week trip to New York to visit a friend. As they were walking along the beach, an Italian man came up to her and said, "Let's get married."  "But I can't even speak English," she replied. "That's all right, we don't need to talk, we'll just look at each other."  And so, indeed, it came to pass.

Roulettian Intermezzo -- Photo of the Week

Summer has come to Petersburg.  The white snow is gone and the White Nights are at their peak.  Late night fireworks light up the sky behind the iconic statue of Peter the Great as the Bronze Horseman.  Hurrah!

Let's go for a slide!

Dada Art, Dada Life

We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin again after the tabula rasa. At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shocking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order.

Thus wrote Marcel Janco, one of the founding members of the roulettian art movement known as Dada. Dada came into existence as a reaction to the homicidal horrors of World War I: nationalist interests, cultural conformity and traditional bourgeois ideals had clearly gotten the world into this carnivorous mess, and therefore the whole hideous batch must be tossed forthwith into the trashcan along with reason, rationality, and logic. Painting and sculpture (bah! those stodgy academic art forms) lost their privileged status and many Dadaists worked in collage, photomontage, and with a multiplicity of found objects. Art became anti-art. Chance and accident were aimed for. Long live irrationality, intuition and nonsense!

Meanwhile, I head over to the Dada Club where Songwriter Sascha's Band of Quirky Musicians has a gig. The Club is a bit hard to find: it's on the same street where Rasputin once lived, but tucked in a courtyard that would make an ideal backdrop for a movie set during the worst days of World War II. Inside, in the atmospherically dim light, I run into Photographer Olya, whom I last saw back in December when she was in search of a new abode.  

Before Dada was there there was Dada

"Oh," Olya says, "I was lucky. I found a room in a communal flat right near the Moscow Train Station. There are a lot of people living there, but my room is at the end of the hall so it's pretty quiet.  Yeah, there's only a toilet, no shower or tub, but I got a bargain on a six-month membership at the fitness club around the corner, only $100, and it's open 24 hours, so I can shower there whenever I want. It's a lot cheaper than paying for an apartment with a bathroom -- and I can take yoga classes there too!"

Meanwhile Sascha and his quirky musicians start to play. Unusually, Music Manager Mischa has joined them, half-hidden behind a glinting tuba.  I remember Olya sidling up to him back in December. Now she moves surreptitiously in front of the stage in a black sweater that keeps falling off her left shoulder, assiduously videotaping the show. It's a beautiful, heavy, depressing St. Petersburg sound.  

And Sascha himself is caught up in a heavy, depressing St. Petersburg story.  Around two years ago he made the acquaintance of Producer Valera with Impressive Big Black Automobile. Valera explained to Sascha that they were on the road to stardom: Sascha would write a musical, Valera would produce it, and the rubles would start rolling in.  The only hitch was that although Valera had scads of money, none of it was currently available, but within the next few months, massive funds were sure to be released. On the basis of this promise and with the help of some falsified documents, Sascha got a bank loan for ONE MILLION RUBLES, which he then handed over to Valera so the magnificent musical dream could be set into motion. And then Valera disappeared. And with him all the money. But the bank loan did not, has not disappeared. What's going to happen? Songwriter Sascha is actually Unemployed Songwriter Sascha and in Russia, you can be jailed for not paying loans. After telling the sad tale, he shrugged his shoulders helplessly, saying "I really don't know what to do." 

Well, the concert has ended, the Quirky Folk pack up their instruments. Music Manager Mischa, saddled with his tuba, seems to be back together with a dippy blonde whom I trust cannot really be as dippy as she at first (at second) appears. Olya is alone. And thus we disperse into the snowy whitish dark.

P.S. Cabaret Voltaire, where Dadaism was born in a frenzy of noise and nihilism, was located in Zurich, just a stone's throw from the apartment where the exiled Vladimir Lenin had developed his own solution to the World War I disaster, furiously penning his Russian Revolutionary Tracts.  Long live chance. Long live coincidence. Viva roulette. 

Roulettian Intermezzo -- Photo of the Week

Peter the Great and his Tsarina promenade on Palace Square

Fatherland Defenders and English Across Town

Hurray, it's another holiday in Russia:  23 February, Fatherland Defenders Day!  The origins of this holiday date back to the earliest of Soviet times and are associated with the founding of the Red Army and its initial successes in raging battles against German troops in February 1918.  The holiday was first celebrated one year later and soon became officialized as Red Army Day with the expected parades, fanfare, and rousing patriotic slogans. Yet as is its wont, time rolled on, communism fell some 70 years later, but who wants to give up a holiday? So the day was transformed into the similarly intentioned Fatherland Defenders Day and is dedicated to those people, who protected, protect and will protect the native ground in the form of service in the armed forces. Among the general populace, it is seen as a day celebrating "real men," with all of the bravado and beer (vodka) that this naturally entails.

Meanwhile, Red Kirill scoffs derisively at the official hogwash.  "Such a fatherland! To defend these criminals who have stolen power, who have hijacked the country? Not me!  Give me instead a Traitors to the Fatherland Day!" 

Be that as it may, I must spend this notable day giving English lessons as my students are a dedicated lot. First I head across the Neva to Dearlies -- we spoke about this charming, multi-national child back in April of last year. It turns out that Dearlies is the only one at home today and, probably to escape dwelling on the differences between the "will-future" and the "going-to-future," she insists on giving me the grand apartment tour. From those parts I have already seen, I suspected it was vast, and indeed, it takes up the whole floor, decorated in impressive nouveau riche. "Oh," I say, as I regard the pedigreed Abyssinian cats lounging sleepingly on the tiles, "Your bathroom has a heated floor!" 

Dearlies nods and adds coquetishly  in sweetly accented English, "It is a tiny flat. A very tiny flat! Oh, and look what my father gave me for the holiday!"

She pulls out a bag in that unmistakable Tiffany aqua, and proceeds to display a lovely charm bracelet. "It's silver," she says, "real silver. And he got Mama a purse, a Chanel purse!"  It seems like she is learning all of the important words.

From there it's on to Chokoladnitsa, an upscale chain cafe on Nevski Prospect, where Kate (Katya really, but her mother tries to set the English tone) is waiting for me at a table in the corner, with mother sitting guard. Kate is another charming ten-year-old, slender, pale, wearing a starched white blouse and a plaid skirt, her flaxen hair tied back in a braid. She concentrates, a little furrow appearing on her brow, as we go over comparatives and superlatives, covertly acting out big-bigger-biggest, happy-happier-happiest. Kate pretends to be sobbing (sad-sadder-saddest), while her mother tips away on her i-Phone, every now and again giving Kate grammatical advice and taking a sip of tea. She studiously manages to avoid offering me a beverage, and I could so use some of that $6.00 per tiny-tinier-tiniest cup of coffee right now. Well, it's time to arrange the next lesson and I realize that poor Kate has a schedule busier than mine, as she navigates between school, English lessons, art lessons, horse-riding lessons and the like.  She is clearly being groomed for great things.

"By the way," says her mother, "next time I won't be here, so Grandma will come with Kate instead. I'm going to Dubai for three days.  I haven't seen the sun for so long."  

I trudge out into the sunless, snow-filled Petersburg winter and head back to my apartment to meet up with Golden Guy Pavel. He has good news: he has been accepted into the Computer Engineering Masters Program at a Parisian university and will start there in the fall.  Plus, it's his birthday in a few days, and he's rented a house in Finland for the weekend so he and his friends can celebrate appropriately.  

"So the next time I see you, you'll be a year older,"  I say.

"Yes," he grins, "I'll be twenty-two."

We go over the intricacies of the conditional tense and I ask him, "Pavel, knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently in your life?"

He grins again and says, "I'd do everything just the same."

May it last!

Happy Fatherland Defenders Day!