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.
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