Flyover Country

Years ago a friend of ours referred to Denver as "flyover country." It's a common epithet I think. The idea is that no one goes there, they just pass over it in airplanes going from one coast of the US to another.

Since I live in Ohio, I can relate. Another of our friends asserts that when she used to drive from DC to the Twin Cities she always strove to drive through Ohio in the dark. I guess that at night she didn't have to experience the blandness. Of course, once we were here to visit, she often brought her family to spend the new year's holiday with us ;)

We have been in Denver for the past few days, and it has felt like quite a significant place. First, the city itself has a lot to recommend it, and the hour we spent this morning at the Denver Museum of Art featured the best set of Native American collections I have seen anywhere. 19th and even 18th century artifacts--particularly handicrafts, like the most amazing moose hair embroidered tablecloth that apparently was all the rage among the French in Canada, woven cradle covers, beaded children's dresses--and also pottery, but 21st century works as well, including some works by Wendy Red Star, Truman T. Lowe, Nicholas Galanin and Kent Monkman that really blew me away.

Art museums and coffee shops are on the "to be expected" list of any city I visit. In Denver we walked through some urban neighborhoods, ate quite a lot of Mexican food, and even visited with friends before and during a book event for my husband's new book -- signed copies now available at BOOKIES, don't believe the website when they say stock is low ;).

Steve joked that this could be in
a Bob Dylan song: "Bail Bondsman Row"

But I also had an utterly unique experience that took me back to a country I won't be flying over any time soon. I had the opportunity to spend an evening with Sofia Bogatyreva and her husband at their suburban Denver home. Like being in Moscow, but with people who left thirty years ago. (Sofia does not have a wikipedia page. Perhaps someone should write one!)

In fact I wish I had known Sofia when I lived in Moscow in 1988-89--she tells me that in those years she hosted quite the salon in their Moscow apartment, and I might have been a frequent guest. After last night I'm thinking of moving to Denver to become a frequent guest here! It meant a lot to me to spend time in conversation with these truly lovely people, both born in the former Soviet Union in 1932. Over the past year I've gotten to know Sofia's life from her writing, because I'm working on translating her book, The Silver Age in Our Home--a book in which she engages with her own memories of childhood and her father's archive to revisit the people, books, and manuscripts that graced her Moscow home through about the time when I might have visited in 1989. But this weekend I met her in person.

When I arrived, Sofia--elegant in an ivory dolman sleeve sweater, black pants and pumps--greeted me and uttered the welcoming words: "come into my den." She said it in Russian, and only later did I realize that the word berloga in her vocabulary probably has a double meaning. Her study is down a few steps, a cozy book-lined room featuring framed photographs of important people in her life (including one of Anna Akhmatova as well as her grandchildren and many others), an animal-skin throw over her love seat, a row of painted Russian boxes and bowls on display. It felt like a bear's cave, which is my primary association with the word berloga, but of course that is also a direct translation from the usual American alternative to "family room." I too spent many childhood hours in my family's "den." 

By evening's end, Sofia and her husband Iurii had been very sweet about my Russian (declaring it to be far better than it actually is). We had a glass of wine and a delicious dinner. We exchanged books--I inscribed the Russian translation of my first book, Writing a Usable Past, to Sofia and signed a copy of the 2003 journal publication of my translation of some Vladislav Khodasevich lectures about Pushkin. Iurii gave me the English translation of his memoirs (he's a very well-published molecular biologist, born in Siberia and with an entire career in Moscow before he moved to the U.S.) and a book that he wrote in Russian about roses, his hobby. We shared a pot of tea and some chocolates.

But then Sofia took me back down to her berloga and let me see, touch, and hold manuscripts from the Khodasevich archive that lived in her Moscow apartment since the early 1920s and that now lives in suburban Denver. She had published the documents in various places over the years, wrote about them in The Silver Age, gave me some to translate in 2003. These are manuscripts that have flown over the ocean and over much of both Russia and the U.S. Manuscripts written in the hand of the poet I have studied and written about, just over a century ago.

I thought about Sofia's father, who kept the manuscripts safe when Khodasevich left Soviet Russia with Nina Berberova in 1922, and about Sofia, who after her father's death made the journey with those manuscripts and more, out of post-Soviet Russia. I thought about my own father, with whom I spend many evenings in our den growing up, and in his home in recent years watching NFL games and telling stories from his childhood and mine. My father, who couldn't understand why I wanted to study Russian, travel to the Soviet Union, write about poets, and whose death I am mourning this autumn. Sofia, only a year younger than my father, is a fascinating interlocutor, a wonderful storyteller, an elegant writer. 

I will return to this flyover spot when I can, to spend time in Sofia's berloga, to talk with her about the old days in Moscow and about her writing, to share a cup of tea, perhaps even in her treasured porcelain tea cup that hand-painted for her grandmother 130 years ago, another Russian artifact she carried across the ocean to her new, and now three decades old, home.