Manic Bookstore Cafe

"Snow is falling today, almost wet snow..." St. Petersburg in December is dark, very dark. It can be hard to get out of bed in the morning. Setting the alarm for 9, I hit snooze -- once, twice, then drag myself into the kitchen. Tea and breakfast is followed by a trip to the cafe and one cappuccino, two cappuccinos... This afternoon I am wandering around the city, and I picked a very Dostoevsky-like day for it. The above quote, of course, is from his Notes from Underground , and today the mood of the so-called "underground man," his frustrations, self-judgement, oppression, is perfectly understandable. Moika canal, with #12 in the center of the photo After a visit to the new galleries of the Hermitage in the General Headquarters Building -- lofty ceilings, gorgeous views from the fourth floor of Palace Square and the Alexander Column -- I began to walk the embankments. Moika -- home to the last apartment of Alexander Pushkin -- the Griboedov Canal, where ...

My students this term have again been doing some of their own research, doing what I call "filling in the gaps" between the authors and texts we've been reading and exploring together. "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste" Some presentations have been more successful than others, but one last week on Futurism struck me as particularly timely. We've been emphasizing drama this semester, in particular performance and performativity, and so the stage was set for the Futurists and their 1912 manifesto "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste." For the students, the idea that one scholar has called "aesthetic disobedience" (in regards to Pussy Riot performances in recent years) was rather strange: "Why did anyone care how they dressed? Why couldn't they wear wooden spoons in their lapels if they wanted to? Why was a yellow shirt so shocking? What other color shirts were being made and worn, and why were they somehow less shockin...

What a treat yesterday to see a production of David Hare's Skylight , with Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan, right in my own little town. Photo Credit: John Haynes, New York Times The New York Times  called it a "nigh perfect production" in a review of the London stage play last summer. Perhaps the reviewer meant a "Nighy" perfect production -- playing the protagonist Tom, Bill Nighy is brilliant, all restless energy, sometimes twitchy, sometimes explosive. The female character, Kyra, unfolds more slowly. Though considerably younger than her one-time lover, she is more mature -- contemplative, nurturing and parsing any anger she has rather than giving into it, ready to acknowledge that personal happiness does not seem to be her lot, and yet finding slivers of happiness and satisfaction in other ways as she goes through her days. In person at the Wyndham Theatre in the West End this must have been an absolutely physical experience. These two actors, along ...

In 1974, John Le Carré published the first novel in his Karla trilogy, entitled Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy . In the novel, the professions in a traditional British children's rhyme are used as code names for British spies engaged in cold war drama with the Soviet Union. I thought about Le Carré this past weekend. We had come to the end of the international symposium I was hosting, devoted to diplomatic and cultural relations between Russia and Iran in the 1820s. After two days of intense conversations, it was time to sum up. An immensely rich topic, full of intrigue and complicated relationships, "official versions" of tragic events that simply don't ring true, and long-lasting ramifications for varieties of peoples -- from Persians and Russians to Armenians and Georgians, not to mention the English. I had invited twelve scholars from seven countries to come to Ohio State and speak about the period. We had art historians and diplomatic historians, literary scholar...

This time of year just seems to bring on nostalgia. Days getting darker, a chill and maybe something raw in the air, wet leaves, or mounds of dry ones that somehow reappear even after you rake them... Homecoming events proliferate -- at my alma maters, or for my kids, who have to figure out how to negotiate the soccer match and the dance -- even though I steadfastly ignore most games that take place on fields of any kind. And with the holidays approaching, a middle aged woman's thoughts turn to food. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, mostly because we always used to spend it with some of my favorite relatives. Plus the winter was coming, and we would often have frost in the morning of the big day. And we had lots of lovely rituals -- going to the apple orchard with my uncle to get cider for the afternoon (and hiding the maple sugar candy he would buy us from our parents); charades or skits or "three-men-on-a-couch" after Thanksgiving dinner at my grandmother's. ...

Last Friday we had our annual "Hongor Oulanoff Memorial Lecture in Russian Literature," the fifth in a series endowed by his widow Constance. I remember Professor Oulanoff, although he was already retired when I came to Ohio State. This lecturer, like others before her, managed to tie her own work to his by evoking Veniamin Kaverin's Two Captains , the USSR State Prize winning 1944 novel about an orphaned boy who becomes an arctic pilot. (I remember reading excerpts of this novel in college with my beloved Russian teacher, Albina Nikolaevna. Someday I too will be able to link my work to that of Prof. Oulanoff, since Kaverin was Yury Tynianov's brother-in-law twice over [they married each other's sister] and I am writing about Tynianov.) Our lecturer was Andrea Lanoux of Connecticut College. Her work on Soviet and post-Soviet children's literature tries to isolate questions of the role of children's literature in development and ideological indoctrinati...

This morning I heard a remarkable keynote address by Tomislav Longinovic. For a year, my colleagues have been hosting a seminar entitled CrossRoads: Culture, Politics and Belief in the Balkans and South Asia. Much as I would have loved to attend every session, I somehow managed to go to, yes, two: the first keynote on India and one of the last, today. The experience was enhanced by the fact that I've known Toma for about a quarter century: he was hired at the University of Wisconsin about the time that Yugoslavia was becoming engulfed in the wars that tore it to pieces, and I was still in graduate school. But the warm embrace I got at the end of the talk was only half the reason I had a fabulous morning; the other half was the talk itself. "Words that Hide: Balkan Politics of Translation" was his title, and his aim was to try and tweak our understanding of the Balkans and of the unfortunate term "Balkanization," which, as he pointed out, is always negat...

I haven't been to Georgia in forever. But I have several scholars coming from Tbilisi to a symposium I've organized at Ohio State, and one of my favorite former students has been living there for some time, so it's on my mind. The symposium, because of a variety of complicated scheduling factors, is actually set for November 7 and 8. November 7, for those of you living in a truly post-Soviet world, is the anniversary of the October (Bolshevik) Revolution of 1917. We are thinking of another anniversary these days: this autumn marks 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. A quarter of a century since the sphere of Soviet influence began to disintegrate. But in November 1988, 26 years ago, it was not self-evident that the Soviet system was failing. I was studying in Moscow at the Pushkin Institute of Language and Culture, on the south-west side of the city, and the group of Americans at our institute--under the leadership of our American professor--headed to Georgia in ...

Though it was in the 80s again on Saturday, I was in the mood for autumnal baking. It might be because I was reading MFK Fisher's  Alphabet for Gourmets . Despite her reputation as a French and/or California writer, one can find a Russian cast to her alphabet: although she disdainfully rejects the too-easy B is for Borscht, she does end the alphabet with Zakuski,  the ubiquitous Russian appetizers. Zakuski  generally serve as the beginning to a meal, and she does note that irony. MFK Fisher may have known an "extravagant hunger," as her biographer has it, but she surely didn't know the extreme thirst of a true Russian alcoholic. What Fisher may not have known is that sometimes, if the purpose of the gathering is drinking, zakuski may be the only food available... And I'm quite certain her circle of acquaintances did not extend to the truly hard-drinking Russian -- the kind who can drink even  without   zakuski,  merely by sniffing a piece ...

Being affiliated with a major university -- and knowing the right people who point you to cool events -- has its advantages. Yesterday I attended the Ohio State Theatre Research Institute lecture featuring Pamela Howard. This woman -- a "director, scenographer, visual theatre artist and educator" -- was amazingly smart, thoughtful, funny, generous, intelligent, talented. What can I say -- I was honored to be in her presence. Many people were there to find out about her current work-in-progress, a production based on Charlotte Salomon's graphic memoirs Life? or Theatre?  If you haven't heard of her, Charlotte Salomon was a 23-year-old Jewish refugee sheltering with her grandparents in Vichy France in 1940 when she learned of a strange fate that surely awaited her -- she learned that eight members of her family in the matrilineal line had committed suicide, a fact that had been hidden from her when her mother threw herself out a window in 1926 and only came to ligh...

Last weekend I went to a wedding where the couple were getting married a second time, for the benefit of their American friends and relatives. They had first married in Israel in May, and the mother-of-the-bride got up to thank them for "bookending" with joy and love this summer, so filled with tragedy and sadness. Israel, Syria, Afghanistan, Russia and Ukraine, not to mention Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria,  -- this has indeed been a terrible summer. But I take solace in the peaceful international border crossings that continue to go on, and the excitement of the young (and old) who continue to travel and study foreign places. Some of my friends, in their early 70s, did not even consider canceling a train trip they took in August from Beijing to Moscow. A student stopped by looking for volunteering or work opportunities next summer in Russia. My own Russian friends continue to send love and news, despite the rhetoric of our leaders who are accusing each other of lie...