mostly museums

Hi, everyone!

I haven't written in a while, and this update is long. Embarrassingly so. I mean really, this is a stupidly long email. I'm sorry! Maybe break it into little bits and read a little at a time? I'll try to be more regular and less self-indulgent in the future. Maybe. Also, this is only most of one part of what I had planned on writing. Hopefully the rest of this part and the other two parts will come out shortly.

I miss you all and love hearing from you, so drop me a line! Hope all is well!

Love,

Annie

Part the first: in which our heroine samples various of the historical, cultural and intellectual delights of her new city…

Kunstkammer
The Kunstkammer was the first museum in our sense of the word in Russia, and was created as Peter I's collection of medical oddities and other scientific what-have-you. Our tour started in a big room that had a bunch of telescopes in it. I gathered from the length of time we spent in this room that these were telescopes of some historical and/or scientific significance, and gathered from what the tour guide was telling us, in Russian, very little else. I was tired. But the view out the window was fantastic – the frozen Neva flanked by the never-ending green walls of the Hermitage.
We were then led up a flight of rather narrow and tightly spiraled stairs into a room with a big globe in it. The globe was handmade as a gift for somebody or other. (I did actually understand all of this, but the tour was a long time ago and I don't remember a lot of it.) Anyway, it was enormous, and hollow inside, and back in the day you and your hoop skirt and powdered wig could be handed up into it by your be-knickered beaux and his powdered wig and the two of you and select of your friends could sit inside the globe as it rotated around you displaying for your frivolous and bought-at-the-price-of-serfdom enjoyment a highly stylized portrayal of the constellations.
We then moved on to the real heart of the museum – the medical oddities bit. This is the part where you see stuffed two-headed cows and deformed fetuses in jars. I didn't much fancy the deformed fetuses in jars. Apparently Peter I's buddies went around and bought all of these fetuses from private collectors who had, in turn, bought them from surrounding peasants or their midwives. I found this whole thing really unsettling. Not only is it really gross to see a 250-year-old baby in a jar, but I couldn't help but be aware of the fact that the jarbaby was actually somebody's child. And that we were all gawking at it. However, I learned as we were leaving the museum that the collection had been created as a way of educating the Russian peasantry. Peter I, in is tireless pursuit of Westernization, was trying through his museum to help the peasants to understand that birth defects were a natural, scientific phenomenon, and not the work of evil spirits or punishment by the gods for some sort of transgression. So as much as I'm not keen on the idea of a "medical oddities" museum in general, Peter I earned some points in my book for having what I consider to be a good motivation.

Peter and Paul Fortress
There were lots of interesting things on our tour of the Fortress that either a) I didn't understand from our tour or b) have forgotten, but all of which I c) should have probably known external to the tour if I think of myself as a Russian enthusiast. Alas.
The one thing I do want to comment about here, though, is that the cathedral in the fortress is where all of the tsars and their families are buried. But they aren't really buried – they are each in a giant stone coffin set on the floor of the cathedral with a sign marking who they were and either the dates of their reign or their relationship to the reigning tsar in question. Seeing this was incredible and I have no confidence whatsoever in my ability to relate to you how moving it was.
But you read in a book, for example, or in a rambling email as the case may be, that Peter I founded this city on the gulf of Finland. But then you go and you actually see where Peter I lies now, and it all of a sudden becomes real and you understand that there was actually somebody alive at one point in whose brain actually occurred the thought, "Hey, this marsh would be a good place to set up shop and force everyone in this big, culturally and historically rich country to change everything about their way of life." And you see Catherine the Great, and you realize that she actually existed, not as some sort of omnipresent force that you can include in a cause-and-effect diagram for history class, but as a person who lived and breathed and probably had acne growing up.
Then there was a special room for the Romanovs. As I understand it, the Soviets wouldn't put the tsar and his family in the room with the rest of the tsars because they technically weren't royalty when they died, as they had been deposed then murdered. But the people weren't going to swallow just forgetting about them, so an adjoining room was built in which each of the members of the family has a large plaque on the wall, and there is a memorial to their deaths. You can't go into this room, but people leave flowers at the entrance.
All of this was really moving, and was the most real that history has ever felt to me. I didn't want to cheapen the experience by being a tourist and taking a bunch of photos of where the remains of real people were lying, but I also didn't want to forget that I had seen these people and that it had been important to me, so I did take a few photos and I'm glad I did.

Russian Museum
Our professor Kiril, he of the three-piece suit and awkward charm, invited our group to accompany him on a Saturday afternoon trip to the Russian Museum. He is an amateur artist, and has several times shown us photographs of his reproductions of famous Russian paintings. The Russian Museum is pretty much what it sounds like – an art museum that contains the works of Russian artists. The Hermitage is the one for the rest of the world.
The excursion was nice. I was a little out of sorts because I was getting over a bad cold/fever/flu-type thing, on which more later, but enjoyed the few hours spent there. They were having a special exhibit on Russian folk art, which I regret having not gotten to, and a special exhibit on Vrubel. I'm not a big fan of Vrubel. He's pretty well-loved among people with taste in art far less pedestrian than mine, but I feel that Vrubel painted a lot of Jolly Green Giants and put some rhinestones in their hair and called them devils… That was unfair. Excuse me. But Vrubel was the set-designer for a lot of the productions of the Ballets Russes, including for the premier of the Rite of Spring, every bit of which everyone hated in every way at its premier, but every bit of which was total genius, so I respect Vrubel for that and respectfully withdraw my bejeweled string-bean vendor comment from the record. But I still don't much care for him.
The permanent exhibit was really great, because we saw all of the paintings that Peter and Abby and I attempted to teach one another about in Russian Culture last semester. And, of course, they were stunning in real life. My favorite was Repin's painting of Stepan Razin. This is why: in Russian culture we learned a drinking song about Stepan (Stenka) Razin, who was a manly-man and leader of revolutions against various and sundry occupiers of Russia. In the song, as far as I can remember (Kira is probably reading this… I'm sorry I've forgotten everything!) our friend Stenka had captured a hot little peasant girl and was bringing her along on the boat with him and his warrior pals. Said same warrior pals were giving Stenka a hard time for going soft over his, erm, acquisition, so he retorted by essentially saying, "Oh, yeah? Well how's this for going soft!" and threw the poor gal overboard and she drowned. Please don't ask me why I like that song so much. I just think it's so funny!

Hermitage
The day after the Russian Museum we went to the museum to end all museums, the Hermitage. I said earlier that the Hermitage is where the rest of the world's art can be seen in Petersburg, and that's not an exaggeration. It's unspeakably enormous. We were on a two-ish hour tour and didn't even scratch the surface. Also, the original building of the collection is a palace, and so it was cool to stroll through the rooms and imagine what the tsar and his family and servants and guests and household staff and squatters (the place was huge and didn't have security cameras. There must have been squatters, no?) used the rooms for.
Our tour was mostly of classical art of various schools, and after the tour some friends and I trekked off in search of the modern art collection. What I managed to see this time around was mostly Matisse and some Picasso. The Matisse collection at the Hermitage is fantastic, and I promptly fell madly in love. Again, I don't know anything about art whatsoever, and so won't pretend to speak knowledgeably about it, but seeing room after room of Matisse just made me feel really warm and happy and alive. I think Van Gogh has been supplanted in the highly-coveted position of Annie's Favorite Artist.
I know that didn't do the Hermitage justice, but nothing can. It's just huge. Just really really big. And full of lots and lots of stuff. I mean lots of it. And it's free to Russian students (which includes me if I show my student ID and keep my mouth shut) so I'm sure I'll be making my way there again several times.

Ruslan and Ludmilla
I finally got to the Mariinsky Theater! On Friday two of my friends and I went to see Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmilla. I expected this to be a big event, for which we would need to get really dressed up, get tickets in advance, etc., and then be ushered into an overwhelmingly large and exquisitely decorated opera hall where we would sit in awe for several hours and then go home not an insignificant amount of money poorer. This wasn't how it happened. It was so much better.
The decision to go to the opera went something like this:

Scene: the hallway of our university, 4pm Friday
Dramatis Personae: Me, Ashley (a girl on the program who was also here last semester), Titus (a guy from the program who is a double-degree candidate in Russian and piano performance at Oberlin. Read: a distressingly talented piano player with whom its fun to be geeky about classical music but who puts my knowledge of same to absolute shame.)
Ashley: Hey, guys! So I was looking in the paper, and Swan Lake is being performed at the Hermitage tonight. Anybody want to go?
Me: Oooh! Yeah! Can I look at that? Hey, it looks like the Mariinsky is doing Ruslan and Ludmila tonight. That might be cool, instead.
Titus: Yeah, I'd be game for that.
Ashley: Okay, cool. So let's meet at the Mariinsky at 6:15?
Me and Titus: Sounds like a plan.

Ashley went home, but Titus and I didn't really have time to do that, so we went to get Shwarma (I don't know how to spell this and it isn't Russian and it's probably disease-infested and bad for you, but it's the greatest thing to have ever happened to the planet. Lamb and veggies and yogurt sauce in a hot flatbread that you buy in a roadside stand for like $1.50 and which they make right in front of you and which tastes like heaven.) Armed with Shwarma and still dressed in what we wore to school, Titus and I began the walk to the Mariinsky.
I expected the Mariinsky to be positioned on a hilltop, a glimmering beacon of high culture. (side/explanatory note: The ballet at the Mariinsky theatre is the best in the world. Nobody in his right mind cares to bicker about that. The orchestra's pretty hot, too. I know less about opera, but I imagine the Mariisnky isn't exactly at the bottom of the heap.) However, when we got into the neighborhood we had a little bit of trouble finding it! We saw a biggish building with a rounded top and Titus said, "That looks like it might be an opera house…" and I replied, "Yeah, I think you're right. Wow, it's just sitting there inconspicuously like it doesn't know it's the Mariinsky!" Slight pause… "Wait, like the building doesn't know?" I think I take some getting used to.
Anyway, we went in, waltzed up to the ticket counter, and bought three box seats for 400 rubles each. We bought the box seats because they were all that were left since we were wrong about the time and were there 20 minutes late instead of the hour early we thought we were, and thusly paid the 400 rubles (about $16) instead of the 100 that it usually costs students (see student ticket note for Hermitage).
The inside of the theater is beautiful, but pretty unassuming. It's beautiful in the way that a living room decorated with comfortable, well-loved and well-crafted antique furniture is beautiful, as opposed to the way a room decorated with furniture so expensive you only ever sit in it when entertaining and children are never allowed to touch anything is beautiful. That is, it was ornate and stylish, but also smallish and cozy, like you could really feel possession of it as your local theater if you went there often. The audience seemed to me to feel that way, too. I pictured conversations similar to ours among the audience members: "Hey, Ivan, after work ya wanna go shoot some pool?" "Nah, we did that last night. What about the opera instead?" "Hey, that's a good idea. Ruslan and Ludmilla is one of my favorites. Maybe afterwards we can go get a beer or something." "Yeah, cool." I loved that. Classical music is something that you should really get to experience and possess as your own, not something you should have to look at through a glass case. It felt at the Mariinsky exactly the way going to an opera should, in my opinion, feel.
As for the opera itself, the costumes were fantastic, the story and music were very Russian, which I enjoyed thoroughly, but the production on the whole was, to be honest, a little underwhelming. It just wasn't quite as polished as I was expecting. However, I've been told that it's the off-season and a lot of the company is on tour, and that it gets better towards spring. However, regardless of all of that, it was a fantastic show, I was on the edge of my seat and laughing and/or looking in awe exactly as I imagine a six-year-old girl might upon first glimpse of Cinderella's castle at Disneyland, and I'm totally hooked on opera now and, if I could, I would pitch a tent in the Mariinsky's unassuming foyer and just chill and go to the opera every other night.