Gina dreams of Moscow (and St Petersburg)

Chekhov's birth house

"Oh, devushka,” my Russian language instructor lamented as she pinched the latest exam paper between her forefinger and thumb as if that paper were poison. It was just two days before the summer break and she’d just finished correcting the last batch of our exams.

“In Russia when a student does this poorly the professor posts the test to the wall so everyone can see it. But I won’t do that to you. Instead, I will just tell you that I have never seen anyone work this hard for such a low grade. You must be enormously stupid or very determined. Why are taking this class, anyway? You don’t really need it.”

Anton Chekhov

She was right. I was a graduate student in the creative writing department at Iowa State. I didn’t need Russian language classes. They were electives and now I was failing. “I love Chekhov,” I said. “I love the Russian language. It would be nice to read his stories in Russian,” I said, helplessly.

“Well, good luck with that.” She said, allowing my test to fall from her fingers to her desk.
A few days later, I received a phone call from my father. He had amassed an amazing amount of travel miles and needed to use them up quick. Did I want to travel with him somewhere in Europe? Such a question! And then the next: which country?

– Russia, I said. And that was that.

We had friends who had friends who lived in St. Petersburg and Moscow. And so after a few phone calls, letters of invitations written and received, and all the documents were in order, we were off. But I’ll admit as we flew over Finland, and the dark forests opened below us, I felt a strange mixture of exhilaration and nervousness.

Cascade mountain range

I had grown up in the Willamette valley, a stretch of green between the coastal and Cascade mountain ranges of Western Oregon. It is fertile ground with good soil worked in large part by Russian émigrés, many of them Old Believers, some of them Molokans, all of them who for religious, political or economic reasons were willing to leave Russia for good. But they brought Russia with them in their speech, manners, and customs. There was something of that other land in their weariness toward question-asking, toward the too-open or prolonged gaze of the outsider.

Molokan settlers in Azerbaijan

Even when they were mixing among the rest of us at the country fairs or indoor soccer games, there was a separateness to them, an indefinable otherness that made them seem to me exotic. And then of course they had history. Even the children wore it in their eyes. Stories of persecution. Stories of hardship. Stories of long passages through China and voyages by boat to the West Coast. We had heard some of the reasons why people left Russia, but now I wanted to see for myself what was left of that other, older Russia that they had left behind.

St Petersburg

The plane touched down at Pulkova airport. The lettering above the main terminal still read: Leningrad. This was 1993. The name St. Petersburg had been returned to the city two years previous, but for many the city was and will always be, we learned, the hero city, Leningrad. When we disembarked, a young soldier in military olive drabs met us on the tarmac, a machine gun in his hands. It was a solemn reminder that whatever change the recent revolution had brought-- and no doubt the new freedoms were significant-- they came with a price.