More on Being in St. Petersburg

Bored in St. Petersburg; how blasé can one get?  Yet business travelers understand.  Sightseeing gets old; eating out becomes a chore, the unfamiliarity itself is soon a burden.  There are only so many museums and cathedrals that one cares to see.  Today was the Russian Museum, with several items I recognized from art history and Russian art in particular.  It was pleasing to see them “live” but only for the moment.  I long for my own bed, my own kitchen, the rest of my own clothes.  Troubles at home matter but don’t prevent me from being homesick.  Perhaps if the class were more lively, perhaps if I felt more positive feedback from the students, I’d be more energized about St. Petersburg.  But it isn’t so, and I must persevere.  I count the days, the number of classes remaining (two), the number of showers (ditto), the number of—well, anything that is part of the routine.  I am grateful for the university WiFi that services this hostel.  It failed for a few hours yesterday, reminding me that things could always be worse.  I would gladly have forgone a kitchen to have been put up in a real hotel, with not only Internet access but also cable-TV.  What little Russian television I perused on the set in the living room convinced me that TV was the same all over: news, kiddie shows, police shows and soap operas.  I could even have derived interest from CNN.

In this post-communist Russia, so much has been grafted on of Western consumerism that I wonder what is “West” and what is merely “human.”  Do we all gravitate towards discount prices and brightly colored advertising?  Is all this universal?  There’s also a lot of English word and Roman alphabet mixed in with Cyrillic letters.  How does that mesh in a Russian’s consciousness?  Is it just an exotic touch or is it considered snobbish?

I went to the synagogue yesterday, a long walk through nondescript, almost uniform streets.  The architecture here does not vary and the stores do not have plate glass or bright awnings.  They barely stand out from the facades of the buildings they occupy.  The result is to make the streets look blank and dreary.

The synagogue is large and well maintained.  Two nattily-dressed middle-aged women entered as I left.  The place was empty otherwise; not surprising, because no services mid-morning.  Traditional architecture, with the women’s gallery on top, domed, with small towers flanking the main sanctuary.  Gift shop and kosher café off to the side of the courtyard.  Private security guards at the gate, who gave only a cursory look at my fanny pack.  There’s a massive photo of the Wailing Wall wallpapering one of the sides of the courtyard.  I emptied my wallet of kleingeld into the pishke in the lobby. The Lubavitchers run the place with their usual thoroughness and attention to halakhah.  The Website sports a dating service along with times for services and events for the holidays—all of the holidays.  I was sorry not to have had a Friday free to attend services but I was not motivated enough to attend Saturday services.  My loss, as one might say.

Another CILS Teaching Stint - St. Petersburg

I had to see if I could duplicate the Riga experience, so I put in for another Senior Lawyer "professorship."  I was assigned to St. Petersburg, the Herzen Pedagogical University, Faculty of Law, for April 15-26, 2013.

My quarters are on Kazansky Street, in a student hostel, which is like a residency hotel on the Upper West Side.  In fact, the neighborhood is rather like the Upper West Side, with lots of little restaurants and cafes. Griboyedov Canal is a block away and parallels the main commercial street.   Kazan Cathedral marks the eastern end where Kazansy Street meets Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg’s Fifth Avenue.  Can’t ask for a better location for this city, redolent of history and past glamour.

I have an entire apartment: bedroom, bath, sitting room, dining room, kitchen.  It faces the building courtyard.  Empty benches surround a pile of dirty snow along one half of the open space, a line of trees and hedges behind them.  The other half of the courtyard is bare concrete.  The walls are yellow-dun, lined with windows.  There are dezhurnayas on the floors to provide hot water for tea but the kitchen is equipped with a plug-in teapot.  A small convenience deli is right off the lobby and there are also small grocery stores nearby.  I stocked up on some easy food: cheese, salami, bread.

Jet lag is still a problem; I cannot wake before 10 a.m.  At 4:00 I met my contact, Marianna Muravyeva, for a brief tour of Herzen campus and help with class preparation.  The campus is a little world within the city, a series of courtyards surrounded by dun-yellow and sea-green 19-century buildings.  It was initially an orphanage, then a teacher-training school, now a university.  No special fame, except age (230 years or so).  I tagged after Marianna through halls with parquet floors overlaid with fading red runners, making appreciative noises at paintings of tsars and former rectors (the tsar paintings were hidden during the Soviet era).  I learned where the law department was, learned how to get the room and equipment keys from the dezhurnaya, and where the civil law faculty room was.

Marianna helped set up the equipment in the room and introduced me to the class.  I have 16 students, 12 of whom are women.  They seem friendly and respectful.  The first presentation was just a get-acquainted one, mostly about New Jersey and me.  It lasted all of ½ hour of a class that is scheduled for an hour and a half.  My confidence sunk as I frantically wondered how to fill the time.  I gave them a 15-minute break, and then told them to spend 10 minutes reading the hypothetical cases in class.  I then asked them one by one to describe their aims in the legal field.  That got some conversation going on land use law, civil rights law and mediation.  When I dismissed the class, about 10 minutes early, one student approached to continue the discussion on land use law.  I enjoyed describing planning board politics and prerogative writ cases and was gratified to hear him say it was interesting.

Dinner was at a US-style hamburger place on the Griboyedov embankment, offering a score or more of hamburger variations (including the “Brooklyn”) and decorated with videos of early ‘60s US rock ‘n’ rollers for atmosphere.  The hamburger wasn’t all that bad.  St. Petersburg’s past seems so unreal, the communist world like something from fiction.  Yet as I sit in my apartment, I wonder whether the hall outside once rang with the tramp of KGB footsteps in the ‘30s, whether late-night knocks on the doors and police cars were a feature of life in this shabby building.