Venice of the North

Mom and I have walked miles and miles, criss-crossing the canals and ulitsii (streets) of this city that modestly refers to itself as the Venice of the North. This is an enforced vacation in St. Petersburg, not one I would choose, and mostly it feels like we're biding time before we can scoop up Daniil from the baby home next Wednesday and whisk him off to Moscow to get him an American visa and then fly the heck home. But here we are, so why not keep an open mind and make the best of it? In gracious response, each day delivers its own unexpected pleasures and surprises.

When we visited the Hermitage on Tuesday, one surprise was a skinny old Russian woman, dressed plainly with only a few stubs for teeth, whom I kept bumping into in different exhibits. Her English meager, yet miles ahead of my Russian, she somehow found ways to communicate beautiful insights to me. We both stood in front of a simple sculpture of a bull's head made by Picasso, a worn leather bicycle seat for the head and iron handlebars for the horns. "Bull is life," the old woman said, looking straight into my eyes. "All life," she emphasized. "Picasso, Spain, bull, all life for him," she looked at me and nodded, waiting for a return nod of understanding from me. "Yes, da," I replied.
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Today's distinct pleasure was the Anna Akmahtova Museum, only a few short blocks from our hotel. I referenced Anna in an earlier posting (June 24) and now, having visited the Fountain House where she spent 30 years of her life, I am eager to learn and read more of her. Akhmatova is one of the courageous artists and intellectuals who chose to stay in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and then, again, during Stalin's reign of terror during which millions of Russians were imprisoned and/or killed. She remained and bore witness, and suffered great losses, as friend after friend was sent to gulags and never seen again. At one point Akmahtova's son was locked up in Leningrad. Every day for two years, she visited the prison to learn of his condition and petition for his release. As I embark on motherhood with my own son, I can only begin to begin to imagine the heartache and anguish of such powerlessness in the face of suffering by one you hold most dear in all the world.

Here is one of Akhmatova's poems written on a piece of birch bark by a prisoner in a gulag. He'd committed some of her poems to memory and wrote them down as a salve.

And here is Akhmatova's honorary doctorate from Oxford, awarded her in the early 1960s. The story goes that, a few days before her death, she went mushroom picking in her cap and gown.

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I'll end with Ahkmatova's poem "Lot's Wife," translated in the 1970s by Stanley Kunitz:

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And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

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at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

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A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

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Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.