Manic Bookstore Cafe

Last week I took what one of my friends called a "Hanseatic tour"--to Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia. The excuse was to take part in an amazing conference on post-socialist memory--and I was indulging in my own post-socialist memories, since the last time I went to Estonia it was Soviet, in the year 1989. I wanted to see what post-Soviet Tallinn was like and to hear in person what Russian-speakers, Ukrainian refugees, and local Estonian-speakers feel about the place in these difficult times.  That part of the world feels like home to me--the quality of light, the air, the occasional mist or even sudden downpour. Being so close and yet so far from the cities of St. Petersburg and Vyborg, where I spent happy days and have so many friends and dear colleagues, was a sentimental journey for sure.  Back in that same 1989 my father came to the Soviet Union, traveling on his first-ever passport, to visit me during my year studying in Moscow at the Pushkin Institute for Langua...

"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 ...

One of my former students is now living in one of the (post) Soviet peripheral high rise neighborhoods of Tbilisi, Georgia. Her experience highlights that important aspect of post-Soviet life: the centers of many East (and Central) European cities are charming (if sometimes decrepit), and the peripheries, where the buildings all went up in aesthetically-challenged times, are generally not.  Back in 1987, several people I knew lived in what seemed to me to be wonderful old buildings in downtown Leningrad, and they explained to me that they were resisting " kapremont " -- capital renovation. The city wanted to move them out of these apartments temporarily to make capital improvements, but they were afraid that once they'd been moved to the edges of the city, they might never see their downtown apartments again. So despite the leaky plumbing, the cracking walls, and the rats, they continued to fight Soviet officialdom. This seemed to me utterly reasonable at the time -...