Catching Up

Street art!

It has been a while since I've written, so this will likely include a lot. I think the last time I wrote, it was the day before I went in for my first day at my internship, so I guess I'll start from there. I'm working for the Gorki Institute of World Literature in their Folklore Department, and that's been a real joy so far. The Institute itself is a research branch of the Russian Academy of Science, so they really don't do much in the realm of bachelor's degress or anything like that, but they have classes for PhD students, and as I understand it, they have a good number of interns who are doing research to get their Masters degrees as well. Anyway, the people there are really nice and really experienced in their fields. The lady that we work with most closely is Yelena, and she is possibly the kindest human being I've met in Russia so far. She is super accommodating, and it seems like most the time, her objective is to help us to accomplish whatever we are working towards personally, whether that's in research, sightseeing, or anything else. She has been super helpful in getting stuff lined up for my research, and  we've been learning a ton each day about some of her interests, like Russian folk music and ritualistic traditions among various Russian groups. The first day, we got to watch and listen to some old Siberian songs, and that was a real treat. I sang some Georgian folk music last semester with some good friends, and it reminded me of that. Anyway, since then, we've been learning all about the Russian calendar, holidays, funerary traditions, and foods-- just to name a few things-- and it has really opened my mind to understanding a lot of things that were, before, a "dark forest," as the Russians put it. I am really loving the subject material, and I'm excited to get into some translation work over these next few days. We're going to be translating Russian articles into English for publication in Folklorica, a journal of Slavic literature and folklore. In any case, I am stoked.



Last week, I went to a seminary put on by the folklore department, and a scholar named Dmitri Foonk presented his recent research into the heroic epics of a group of people called the Shortsi, who live in southern Siberia. Their ethnic culture is still largely based on an oral tradition, but with each generation, there are fewer and fewer skaziteli, or story tellers, so a lot of ethnographers and folklorists have been scrambling to collect and translate their works. It was kind of fun to hear about all the different stories, but I think the thing that interested me most was the clash of the old culture and the new. It seemed so interesting to me that though the stories were all about little villages and bogatyrs (sort of like Arthurian knights, but, obviously, more Russian), a majority of Shortsi now live in large towns and have little to no exposure to the things related in the tales, and there seems to be a general feeling of apathy toward the old traditions among the younger generation. In any case, it was interesting to hear about all the work that's being done in that area. I don't think I personally would do something like that as a career, but it was nonetheless neat to get to feed off of Dr. Foonk's excitement.

Nicolas Cage would be geeking out here. 

The highlight of last week was an opportunity to join some local musicians for a night of folksongs and dancing. I don't know exactly what I was expecting as I went into it, but it ended up being just amazing. A lot of the songs were kind of hard to understand and harder to imitate, but the people there taught us some simpler songs and insisted that we join in the dancing. I would have felt like a complete fool in any other setting, but the people there were so nice and so accepting that we all just jumped in and had a great time, even though we had no idea what we were doing. There was one lady that loved pantomiming everything in the songs, and that was really fun, because some of the songs are pretty ridiculous to begin with. There's one, for example, where a young girl tells her beau to come scratching on the door one evening and she would let him in, but when he comes along, the girl's grandmother is home, so the girl wants the boy to go away so that the grandmother doesn't find out what's up. The problem is, the grandmother thinks the scratching is a cat and gets upset at the girl when she refuses to let the "cat" in, so eventually, she has to follow all of the grandmother's directions, first letting him in, then giving him milk, then letting him sit on her bed, and later on, after a number of other ironic and funny events, ends up putting the man on the fence, which breaks under his weight. It's just really funny, because of course, we know that the cat is really a man, but the grandmother, eyes dimmed with age, keeps giving ridiculous directions as if he really is a cat. Anyway, that was my favorite, especially since the cute little lady kept insisting on acting it all out. We all shared dessert after the singing, and the leader said to us as we parted ways, "Now you have become ours." That might sound kind of strange in English, but in Russian it has a lot of meaning, and it's very positive. There's this concept of ours (svoy) and not ours (chuzhoy) that plays into pretty much every aspect of Russian culture, and often times, those boundaries are somewhat rigid. It can take years to enter into the circle of trusted and loved svoi, one's own people. I really did feel, coming out of that experience, though, that I had found new brothers and sisters. It was such an amazing experience as a whole.

This coming week, my fellow intern, Danny, and I will be launching into folk and fairy tales, which is the topic of my individual research. I'm super excited, because we'll be meeting with Andrei Toporov, who is one of the leading experts in the world on Afanasiev's collection of Russian fairy tales, and I'm hoping that he'll have some good pointers for me as I get working more on my research. Anyway, so the internship is going well. I am really loving all the stuff that I am learning, and I am growing a lot in my ability to understand and love the Russian people and their culture.

We have a bunch of really cool people that live on our floor in the university dormitory. We're on the ninth floor, and we share it with a number of Armenians, Kazakstanians, and Frenchies (I use that word not out of preference but rather because English seems to lack a word encompassing both French men and women), and they are all really amazing, and I love hanging out with them in the common area. The Armenians are really funny, which is not surprising, in that all the Armenian friends that I've ever had have likewise been hilarious. I threw every bit of Armenian at them that I could muster, which amounted to "Hi, how are you? Apple. Ladybug. 1, 2, 3,..., 10. You smell like cheese." They were, needless to say, very impressed. They both speak English pretty well, though, and both are fluent in Russian, so we don't have any trouble communicating. The Kazakstanians are pretty much the nicest people ever. They love talking, and they always make delicious food that wafts down the hallway and makes me feel like somehow, buckwheat with eggs and sauce is not a proper meal. The Frenchies are really cool, too. They all speak Enlish well, and we talk a lot about all sorts of subjects. There was one night where we were up til like 3 am talking about the Church and about the distinctions between agnosticism versus deism-- I know, not what you'd expect to talk about with a bunch of people from halfway around the world. I really like them, though. They are still learning Russian (as in they just started, for most of them), and it's kind of funny to see them where we were all at before we came to Russia/Ukraine. They'll get it eventually, though.

Our final couple arrived last week and has at last recuperated from the flight over, so we are at last a full team of crazy Americans. Everyone at last has his/her internship more or less figured out, and most have already begun working already. One of the girls is teaching English while here in Moscow, and I'm thinking that is the way to go in terms of career. We figured out that she is making more than eighty dollars an hour, meaning that some days, she comes home having made 400+ dollars. I'm thinking that if I'm not married or involved in something really cool by the time I finish school, it might be worth it to come over here and work for 6 months or so just so that I wouldn't have to worry about money for a while. I like it a lot here in Moscow, so it would be like a vacation plus a higher-paying job than I could get perhaps anywhere in the U.S. I'll have to see how things work out in the end, though.

Rozh'. One of my favorites for one reason or another.

We've been up to a good deal of sightseeing over the past week and a half or so, including a trip to the famous Tretikovskaya Gallery, which houses a majority of the great works of Russian art, pretty much from the beginning of the Rus' (Russian people) up until now. There were a lot of portraits, and those honestly weren't my favorite thing ever, but it was neat to see all the original works of the painting that we always in textbooks. The famous portrait of Pushkin had the honor of being the only individually-lit piece in the whole gallery, so apparently it is a pretty important piece, for one reason or another. I about died and went to heaven in the Peredvizhnik galleries, where they had some of my favorite pieces. I've always loved the work of the Peredvizhniki (who put on traveling art exhibits to acquaint the Russian general population with art) more than just about any other group or individual painter, and they had gallery after gallery of works that I had always wanted to see. Even though a lot of them are really simple in terms of content, I really connect to them. One of my favorites is a simple field of rye, and there's not much else, but it really reminds me of Ukraine, so I hold to whatever memories I can. I also got to see a number of pictures in full-size, which doesn't mean a lot until you realize that for one of them in particular, they had to tear the walls out and rebuild them in order to be able to house the massive painting. It took up the entire wall of one gallery, stretching probably around 25 feet in height and about 50 in length, and various preliminary sketches and early figures of the painting (Appearance of Christ to the People) took up another two or three galleries. It really was breathtaking.

There's another painting that I never really appreciated much when I studied it, but seeing it in full size really made me think a lot. The painting is called Christ in the Wilderness, and it will likely not surprise you to find that it is a depiction of Christ in the wilderness during or shortly following His forty-day fast. I think most of the pictures of Christ that I see have Him looking either very serious or in great agony, but in this one, He just looked sad. I think that time in the wilderness must have been a time of great realization as He came to understand the state of the world and His own role in remedying that situation. I've thought a lot about when it was that He realized-- truly realized-- the full impact and importance of the work that He was to do. I imagine that that time was pretty hard for Him, despite the fact His constant willingness to follow after the will of the Father. The reality is that Christ was a person like you or me, capable of experiencing joy and grief. Though sometimes we try to interpret Christ's instances of sadness (for example, when "Jesus wept" at the death of Lazarus) as acts of empathy and compassion toward those who were suffering, the other astounding possibility (and I say that with some facetiousnous) is that He was truly and legitimately sad. His dear friend had, after all, recently died, and it seems to me that that was the first chance that He had really had to come to terms with the death of His friend. The thing is,  I don't think that there's anything wrong with grief, and to acknowledge the fact that Christ, like any one of us, had people whom He loved and cared for on more than a level of duty to mankind, is, in my mind, to make Him a lot more real and a lot more able to comprehend the grief that we experience when we encounter loss. My friends and I talked about this and many other things as we sat gazing up at the painting, and for a moment, I felt as though we were in the temple. There was a great peace that came over my mind in knowing that Christ lived and endured trials and temptations and died that He might better understand how to help me in my times of need.

There's a lot of other stuff that I could talk about, but frankly, I've been blabbing for too long, so for record-keeping's sake, I'll say that we visited the Bolshoi theater (just visited, haven't seen a show yet), the WWII Memorial Museum, the Pushkin House Museum, and a gigantic rinok (market) called Moskva (which we spent almost all day looking for). Additionally, for work, I went to a showing of a documentary film about tribal ritual surrounding circumcision (not the number one thing on my list of things to learn more about, but thankfully, not a huge time commitment either). The only way we were able to find the theater was by asking around, and a guy told us, "I know of a couple of theaters, but the only one anywhere nearby is a tiny one that shows really strange movies." At that point, I was pretty sure that was the place, but we walked off slowly so as not to appear as the sort of creepers that would spend a Thursday night watching "strange movies" about cirumcision. Anyway, that's my life for now. Tomorrow's another adventure, another joy.