The Snug: A Blog

From Ohiowa Impromptu:

Truth to tell, Marina was proud of her yagoditsy and proud of being Russian, too. But she knew her country was doomed, so she busied herself with the task of building an outpost of Russian civilization here, in far America (also doomed, but not yet). She hung out a sign hand-lettered "Villa Yakht" in English and Russian, and promptly set about furnishing the place with all the nouveau-riche yearning of a former Rostov-on-Don penthouse dweller (Ulyanovskaya, near the Nativity Cathedral: nice view, but still Rostov). First came the Leon Bakst prints of firebirds and ballerinas, and mournful Repin watercolors of snow-covered steppes, all white, except the sky, with its hopeful tints of gray. Then, upon the mantel, she arranged in chronological order the complete works, in Russian and English, of her favorite author, Vladimir Vladimirovich Sirin, all 26 volumes, from Arlecchino to Zembla, including the three leatherbound first editions she'd come upon in Moscow in a small coffee-scented bookshop off the Arbat, one windy March afternoon in 1994, in between sudden squalls of sunlit rain...God Christ, how much she owed to Sirin! How much life–how many lives–had she lived in his pages! How many vistas had she seen, how many places near and far! Sometimes she thought half her memories had been invented by him.

      (Russians, you see, made up for a lot by reading good books and, even better, by writing them.)[1] 

      Then she unpacked another memory of her Russian past: the three church icons of SS. Cyril, Constantine, and Igor that her mother had preserved in the attic of her dacha through all the horrid Soviet years. Marina was no believer, new or Old; indeed, her opinion of religion was that it was "bunch of fucking stupid fairy tales for ignorant idiot babushka with brains like old borscht," or words to that effect. Or bullshit for hypocrites who, during the Soviet era, wanted to assert Great Russian nationalism. As they said, Goditsya–molitsya, a ne goditsya–gorshki pokryvat: "If it fits, pray to it; if it doesn't, hide it under a pot." But she loved the age and beauty of the things, so she hung them in the entrance hall. There, a faint whiff of the Russian past floated in the air, and the semi-darkness was yellowishly illuminated by the diamond-shaped windowpane in the front door, evoking the mystical gloom of the long-defunct churches where the icons were born: Ryazan, Tver, Nizhny-Novgorod, Tsaritsyn on the broad blue Volga....

      Melancholy oil portraits were also indispensable in any self-respecting Russian ménage. These, and such accessories as vases, crinoline dresses, and flower baskets, were plentiful, Marina discovered, at The Hip Flask, a small organic gay-run (Paul and Pol, married in La Mancha) food-slash-antique furniture emporium on the corner of Fowler Boulevard and Waistline Lane. She emerged with, in one hand, a HoleMart brown shopping bag containing a bottle of her favorite Georgian eau-de-camomile shampoo, and in the other hand a matched set of three small oil paintings bound together with twine. The oils depicted a nameless local American family of the nineteenth century; no one else was interested, so she got them for five dollars. ("Five box?" she said, incredulously. They'd sell for at least ten times that back in Rostov.) She christened them the Stranglers, not after the West Coast metallic-fusion rock-salsa-grunge band, of which she had not heard, but rather the family of that name in Georgina Fawcett-Henn's mid-Victorian masterpiece The Stranglers, of which you have not heard[2] but she had, and which is, or was, much read in Russian high schools: the Rev. Matthew Strangler and his wife Felicity and daughter Prudence. The Stranglers were a local Victorian family, the Rev. a former blacksmith (hence the book's popularity in working-class Soviet times), quietly depraved behind his Sunday pulpit, given to gin and thoughts of the naked thighs of younger people, probably girls, possibly boys; she, Felicity, demure and docile, with no suppressed fires of rebellion–true; some people, mused Marina, were quite happy to be repressed. However, the Stranglers' daughter, Prudence, later a famous suffragist, was not one of them: she led strikes, and once (1901) joined Lady Lennie Birtwhistle on a march in London.

      Side by side then, together again, they hung in the parlor, the minister in the middle, his womenfolk on either side, catching the rays of the dawn and half-hiding in the shadowy gloaming. They were unthreatening and time-cured, like Caucasus ham. Back in Rostov she'd had similar oils upon the walls, but they were of relatives, with life stories already fixed and static. These strangers were preferable, unless she happened upon their true biographies.

      But she had still other rooms to fill: the kitchen, traditional Russian heart of the house; the master bedroom; the study; the bathroom (banya). Just as in Russia, the Internet proved a useful ally, yielding odds and ends of furniture and, on BuyMe.com, a blue ceramic stove for the kitchen ($35), a do-it-yourself sauna for the banya ($20) and—best of all--a portfolio of prints by Ilya Rasputin:"Church Hill on the Don," "Village Idiots By Night," "The Vulgar Boatmen," and other treasured classics of Russian kitsch, all at $10 the lot. Art for the masses, at last! Too, she came across pristine recordings of Mandarin Oblomov conducting the Perm Philharmonic in the complete works of Ivan Kopsakov, a steal at six dollars the set of twelve. Marina bought more: the Slonim violin concerto, performed by P. Bezuhov at the XXth Party Congress, 1956; the opera "Noss," by N. N. Polovsky, courtesy of the Novosibirsk Opera and Chorus; and a large color print of the Seine passing in its leisurely fashion under the Pont des Arts, by an unknown artist named Hippolyte Maubeuge. Marina loved Paris, as have all cultured and/or moneyed Russians since time immemorial, or at least the reign of Peter. She'd been there twice, once with Khlebnatov, who, soon after they arrived ("Bah! Parizh? Bah!" was his only comment), bought a bottle of imported Russian Stariy Idyot vodka for an outrageous sum, drank it in three or four gulps, lay down on a bench in the Tuileries, and burst into tuneless renditions of protest ballads of Vysotsky. He refused to move until bodily portaged to the Russian Embassy by the Services d'Ordre, Secteur Russe.

More encouraging words for us stragglers at the lower end of the cognitive elite, from Charles Simic:

Writers and poets are only noticed in totalitarian regimes. They are either imprisoned and shot, or they become highly-privileged flunkies of the regime. In democracies, they are marginal figures without any influence.

So much for the handicaps; what of the possibilities of service in Baghdad? A country in which man's selfishness and stupidity have ruined almost all natural productivity, where vegetation can survive only among the banks of the great rivers which traverse its deserts, where climate has become unfavorable to human health and vigor.

 A population unhygienic in its habits, sorely weakened and debilitated by disease, inclined to all manner of religious bigotry and fanatacism, condemned by the tenets of the most widespread faith to keep a full half of the population--namely, the feminine half--confined and excluded for the productive efforts of society by a system of indefinite house arrest, deeply affected--and bound to be affected--by the psychological habits of pastoral life, which has ever been at variance with the agricultural and industrial civilization.

This people has now come just enough into contact with Western life so that its upper class has a thirst for many things which can be obtained only in the West. Suspicious and resentful of the British, they would be glad to obtain these things from us. They would be glad to use us as a foil for the British, as an escape from the restraints which the British place upon them.

If we give them these things, we can perhaps enjoy a momentary favor on the part of those interested in receiving them. But to the extent that we give them, we weaken British influence, and we acquire native politicians. If they then begin to do things which are not in our interests, which affect the world situation in a ways unfavorable to our security, and if the British are unable to restrain them, we then have ourselves at least in part to blame and it is up to us to take the appropriate measures.

Are we willing to bear this responsibility? I know--and every realistic American knows--that we are not. Our government is technically incapable of conceiving and promulgating a long-term consistent policy towards areas remote from its territory. Our actions in the field of foreign affairs are the convulsive reactions of politicians to an internal political life dominated by vocal minorities.

Those few Americans who remember something of the pioneer life of their own country will find it hard to view these deserts without a pang of interest and excitement at the possibilities for reclamation and economic development. If trees once grew here, could they not grow again? If rains once fell, could they not again be attracted from the inexhaustible resources of nature? Could not climate be altered, disease eradicated?

If they are seeking an escape from reality, such Americans may even pursue these dreams and enter upon the long and stony road which could lead to their fruition. But if they are willing to recall the sad state of soil conservation in their own country, the vast amount of social improvement to be accomplished at home, and the inevitable limitations on the efficacy of our type of democracy in the field of foreign affairs--then they will restrain their excitement at the silent, expectant possibilities in the Middle Eastern deserts, and will return, like disappointed but dutiful children, to the sad deficiencies and problems of their native land.