Dear readers,
I spent most of my year in Russia condemning its citizens and rejecting its culture, but, with my time there winding down, I started making a bit more of an effort to understand the country. There are plenty of Russians who realise that the government steals from the people and that there is nothing that they can do to stop it. There are plenty of people who realise that life in Europe is much better than in Russia and that to protest conditions back home is to risk being thrown in jail or killed. There are also plenty of people who smiled at me, told jokes, cleaned up after themselves when they had barbeques, and so forth--what I finally accepted about Russia is that the people living there are, shockingly, wildly different, as in any country, and that generalisations about Russians as a whole are too simplistic to accurately describe them.
I have a couple of funny anecdotes about culture shock in Russia. One is that I found Russian men incredibly difficult to talk to. My interactions with them would begin with my asking them, "How's it going?"
"Fine," they would answer.
"What's new?"
"Nothing."
"So what have you been up to of late?"
"Work."
"... Do you even like talking?"
"Yes."
I complained of this difficulty to a female Russian friend, who explained to me that chicks talk and men do stuff. It is considered effeminate for a Russian man to talk too much. This is, of course, not to be extended to all Russian men, but I often found it the case.
My other anecdote is, on second thought, not funny. Dogs in Russia are crazy. They bark at everything that approaches them, often get into fights with one another, and will often stand at attention, like little soldiers, almost motionless, and growl when they see another dog within, say, two hundred metres of them. Their owners, for their part, yell constantly at them, pull them close to their legs when anyone walks or runs past (to prevent attack, presumably), and jerk desperately at their leashes, as though in a tug-of-war, when they see other dogs and try to interact with them. Soon before I left Russia, someone's dog took an interest in me, walking up to met with its tail wagging, and, when I extended my hand a few centimetres for the dog to sniff, it jumped back, snorting, and its owner told me, "Keep your hands off my dog." I would, to their credit, sometimes see dog owners chatting politely with one another, but I generally found them unfriendly, and I wondered if their dogs' aggression might be reflect their owners' attitude toward their fellow human beings.
I would often joke, while in Russia, with the Ph.D student whom I mentioned about how much Russia sucked and how far behind the rest of the world it was. Communication in the foreigners' wing of the dormitory was a combination of words, laughter, and energetic gesticulation. I think that my favourite interactions with Kyoon-Tek, my neighbour, were when he said, when I asked him why he kept buying bottled water instead of a filter, "I don't trust Russian technology," and when, after I showed him, with my hands, where the quality of life in Russia and in first-world countries lay, he raised his hand up to his head and said, "But Russians think they live up here!" Our claims about Russia were largely one-sided and, to some degree, unfair, but, as with most stereotypes, there was at least a grain of truth to them.
I have two more anecdotes to tell, one funny and the other sobering. The funny one is that people would often ask me, when I stretched in the hall of the dormitory after running, if everything was OK; the sobering one is that the police booked a friend of mine for walking down the street near a demonstration during the 2014 protests of Putin's presidency and, over the course of interrogations lasting up to nine hours, knocked out two of his teeth. He had no legal recourse, naturally, as he would have had to deal with the police again in order to press charges against them, and they were within their rights to hold him for up to seventy-two hours on the suspicion of his having committed a crime, during which time they were free to find out, in whatever ways they found fit, of what he might be guilty.
I mean for this post to be something of a conclusion to the year that I spent in Russia. I kept telling people, for all of June, that I did not want to leave, and it was not only the disruption of my routines that bothered me, but the sense that I was leaving just as everything was starting to get interesting. My translation teacher had had me over for tea a couple of times. I had started hanging out with the other translation students. I had also made connections with a film producer and a museum curator, for both of whom I was doing translations, and I was dismayed by the thought of how many interesting meetings and interactions I would miss out on by taking off so soon. A former study abroad student (on the other end, in the United States) told me that I would feel the same if I were to leave in two months' or two years' time, rather than at the end of June, as one can never attend all of the interesting gatherings and events that one would like, and I thought of the advice of a friend of mine from Vancouver to always leave a party while the going is good, as, if you stay later and later in an attempt to squeeze as much fun as possible out of it, you will merely tire yourself out and be left with memories of an unsatisfied longing (these are not his exact words). It was time for me to go in late June, just as it was time for many of my friends, now graduating students of the program, to leave the lives that they had known in search of something new. I would never again need to have an individual tutor in Russian linguistics or literature, as I had mastered what I needed of those subjects; my friends were tiring of life in the dormitory and were ready for more adult lives and apartments. I would never, if I returned, say, for another year, recreate the atmosphere of intimacy and discovery that people had helped me to create in that first year, as none of what I now experienced would be new, and my new friends would not be the same as the old, just as a city is not the same when one visits it for a second time and one's second baseball game is not the same as one's first. All of this made good sense to me, and my regret at leaving diminished slightly.
I am left with the thought of all of the museums that I did not visit and the public lectures that I did not attend. Perhaps my most important realisation, over the year, about Russian culture is that it is not the Russians' fault that I did not like it there and not their job to make me happy. I am reminded, funnily, of my first-ever trip to Europe, during which friends of my parents did my wash for me. I do not know if I thanked them--I would like to imagine that I was sufficiently well-bred to do so; but I know for sure, as I remember it distinctly, that I felt entitled to having had my clothes' washed, as though it were only natural--it was their job, after all--for my hosts to have done so for me. Perhaps a positive effect of one's visiting an entirely foreign culture is to be stripped of this sense of entitlement and reminded that nobody owes one anything. I can blame Russians until I am blue in the face for not agreeing with my views of the world, or I can accept that I am just as liable to be wrong as they are and that my cultural values are not absolutely right. It is discomfiting to be in a culture that one finds repulsive, but, if one dislikes it enough, one can always leave it, as I have done, without blaming the culture itself for one's not having liked it. Perhaps an apt summary of this whole paragraph is that it behooves each of us to adapt to the cultures in which we find ourselves (and, more broadly speaking, to adapt to our life circumstances) rather than demanding--futilely--that they adapt to us.
I keep returning, in my mind, to the scene of my departure from the dormitory, shortly after midnight, in a taxi, when my two Korean neighbours shook my hand and wished me success in life. I am reminded of the last scene of Anton Chekhov's The Steppe, in which the main character, a little boy, who has been sent to a different town for boarding school and finally arrived there, days later, by caravan, is seen off. The men who travelled with him--a priest, a merchant, a couple of labourers, and so on--all shake his hands and yell, "Hurrah!" as they depart, leaving him standing in front of his new school and wondering, as he tries to picture it, what his new life will be like and what changes await him in the coming years. I am, perhaps, in much the same shoes as Yegorushka, the hero of that tale, having come to the end of one stage of life and entered another, less certain one. I have talked a great deal with friends and family about the different directions that my post-student life could now take. I have been convinced by my teachers at the institute that I will cherish my memories of my time there for many years and that the most important people in my life, of all of those whom I met in Russia, will stay with me. I am reminded of the past, when, in elementary school, I would sometimes wonder what kind of person I would be in five years' time. I think that even then I had an inkling that my wildest guesses would be far from the truth and that we can never accurately predict the types of twists that our life will take.
I leave you with this thought, having failed to end this piece as gracefully as Chekhov did his (for which, I hope, I will not be ill judged). I survived a storm, much like Yegorushka, and a lot of other hardships (many self-generated) while in Russia, and I am now moving toward something different and unrepeatable. My main thoughts are on getting to bed. I have a set of clothes to wash and need to get some sleep before I head for Prague. I suppose that one needs to take an ever-renewing interest in life so that it not fall into a rote routine. I hope to learn to do this irrespective of my chances to travel in the future and to keep this ability with me forevermore.
Sincerely,
Max
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| One last loaf of challah before I left. |
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