Burnt by the Sun

About 8 or 10 years ago my sister was in a used movie and cd store near downtown Dayton, Ohio, where we are from. She was scanning through all of the movies which lined the walls there, mostly stocked at that time with VHS, DVD having not yet rendered them obsolete. She would in that patrol of the shelves reach up with her hand to read the back of a Russian film with a curious title, “Burnt by the Sun,” which had recently won an Oscar for best foreign film in, I believe, 1993. Feeling satisfied with the summary of the film on the back and the exoticism of a Russian film, which at that point was rather unexplored territory in our family, she would proceed to buy this movie and show it to me, her 17 year-old, basketball-playing and rap music-listening brother with only a mild and latent interest in art or literature or really thought of any stripe.

This movie, while admittedly just a very good movie and nothing more, has completely changed the course of my life. After watching it at my sister’s apartment those 8 years ago, it became the brightest image in my mind of Russia and this image stuck with me as something very different and distinct from America, something romantic and complicated. It seemed a whole different world, which, unlike Europe which always seemed so clearly stereotyped (snobbish, pretentious French, drunken, genial Irish, etc) and understandable, and unlike Asia whose people looked and seemed so uniform and culturally flat (admittedly, this was a completely uninformed opinion), Russia was full of interesting, intelligent, emotional people and beautiful nature, and seemed to promise much more that was still unknown.

The world I think had become a bit stale to me already. It is strange for a 17 year-old to be so world weary, but, in short, some unfortunate things happened in my family when I was young and these things instilled in me a hefty amount of skepticism. As the years passed and I went on to study Russian language in university and finally, this year, to live an entire year in Siberia, I never completely understood why the sudden interest in something so foreign and far away. Something that I had no particular ties to. And this was a question that was posed to me possibly more than any other– why are you studying this? And my answers, while generally seeming to satisfy the listener, always felt to me rather incomplete and rote. After already devoting 5 years of my life to this area and changing completely my career path and other things, I finally understand how I ended up here. While there were several more logical reasons, such as my deep appreciation of Russian literature (in particular, the writers Dostoevsky, Gogol, Nabokov, Chekhov, Turgenev, Blok), the main underlying impulse was precisely to explore that unknown world and to leave the one which had become so familiar and unpromising to me. And if I hadn’t watched “Burnt by the Sun” that cool summer night in my sister’s old apartment, I might never have had that bright image of a beautiful, far away world that held some promise for me.

The movie “Burnt by the Sun” is something remarkable, not just relative to the Russian film industry in which it germinated– an industry that is, when compared to American and European film traditions, a bit undeveloped and weak in my opinion–but as something that can stand alone as a beautiful encapsulation of a crucial moment in history. The idea of the film is truly excellent and was very topical in the 1990s, following the fall of the USSR. And who better to make a film of such epic proportions which re-evaluates the nuances of that system and that life than a real Russian muzhik like Nikita Mikhalkov, a man who had a long string of successful films behind him and who was widely respected for his bravado and depth as an actor and director? It all came together perfectly, the idea, the script, the imagery and metaphor of people being ‘burnt by the sun of the revolution’ and the great song of same name, which is played and sung throughout the film. All of the characters are flawed, everyone is guilty except the 6 year old daughter in the film. There is no hero. The general and the NKVD spy both have lied and betrayed out of necessity and at the end all you can do is empathize with everyone and lament that people ever had to live in such a way.

I have at times felt that I too had been burnt by the bright sun of Russia. I’ve regretted at times that I’ve given up a career as a programmer to pursue this academic field. I’ve regretted at certain moments that it’s pulled me away from a serious relationship, my friends and family, and that I’ve spent one of the primest of my prime years living in a country that is uncomfortable and foreign in many ways. But unlike the characters in Mikhalkov’s masterpiece, I don’t think this world will lead to my ruin or failure. This year in Siberia, while turbulent, has impacted me in a big and positive way. And although I may end up some professor analyzing contemporary Russian films or living in the obscurity of untranslated Russian poetry, these things really do continue to be for me that beautiful, unknown world I dreampt about all those years ago.

A few reflections on Russia and America

As there are almost infinite things I could write about from the past year, I’ll just talk about something off the top of my head. It’s futile to try to summarize at this point. Russia… I love it and I hate it. I scoff at it and I revere it. I want to stay and I want to leave. I’m not going to start talking about how Russia is a goddamn mystery inside a riddle inside an enigma, and how you can’t understand Russia with your mind, you can only feel it with your soul. Maybe these quotes (*cough* cliches) hold some water and maybe they don’t. But really, I’ll just say I feel a lot of ambivalence toward Russia. But I feel that towards America, towards most people, etc., so I wouldn’t say it is a terribly critical thing to say, coming from me.

In all honesty, I don’t want to live here. That is one certainty. Mainly, I have a family in Ohio and I can’t just leave that behind for some language or aesthetic reasons. Or even for career. Maybe I could leave temporarily, but I couldnt do it for too long of a period.  I’m not that type of person.

But also, Russia is, well, a much less comfortable, luxurious country to live in. This is something I wouldn’t say to a Russian in conversation because any comparisons with America automatically cause most Russians to see red. But objectively, in terms of amenities, there a lot of areas where America blows Russia out– food, clean streets, good roads, cultural options, i.e. subcultures, music, films– with the exception of classical art like ballet, opera and symphony which Russia does very well– service in restaurants and cafes, even cost of living seems a bit lower in America relative to people’s pay. And it’s my country, where I understand people more or less inside and out, and I can feel what they’re about, where they’re from, etc.

And of course, even though our economy is pretty awful at the moment, we’re still an economic powerhouse and our standard of living is remarkable. People have it so good, in fact, that they complain about how good they have it. And being here has reminded me about how stupid that is, what a luxury it is for people to whine about all sorts of things that they whine about, and that I am guilty of it as well.  Russia also struggles with developing its democracy, which is all of 15 years old and rather undeveloped compared with the US, where censorship is comparatively non-existent, and people are *so* free (in media, in speech) that they are even prone to constant criticism and dissatisfaction. It’s like democracy on steroids. It’s not a utopia, but I think most of the real flaws are cultural problems, not flaws in the infrastructure and the system itself.  It’s a pretty great system relatively. And I have to mention that I think our country is at a real low point and if Obama is elected will improve significantly in the next few years (economically, foreign policy, etc.).

But Russia has a lot of very good things as well. Hospitality, warmth, generosity, openness, real raw emotions. There were moments here when Russian people did a bunch of really nice things for me without any good reason and I thought about how calculating and logical I and other Americans are in our personal interactions. I’ll do something for you and then I expect you to do something for me. If you don’t, I think you’re self-absorbed or using me or maybe greedy.  Russians, if they like you, will do all sorts of crazy things to help you, will give you all sorts of gifts with money they don’t really have, will even sometimes smother you with offers to the point of being overbearing. In my case, a little of this was probably because I’m an exotic (or helpless) foreigner. But I can more or less separate the foreigner-worship from the genuine gestures of friendship and there was plenty of the latter.

I love that Russians, for instance, really value simpler aspects of life. And a lot of this is probably out of economic necessity. But nonetheless, it is the way it is here and it’s better. People will meet in a park and just sit for hours and talk. People meet and walk around the town for hours, through parks, through streets, just takling. People will go over to each others house with a bottle of beer and sit in the kitchen and talk or joke around. That’s the whole event. No going to a restaurant, no movie theatre, no watching tv, no sports event, nothing. Just plain talking, no distractions (except beer, which really helps things along in my opinion). We really lose sight of how important this is in modern America I think, we’re too caught up with everything.  

So who’s better– Russia or America? Just kidding.

I suppose my interest in Russia is about the same as it was before I came. It’s a separate and very different country, far away from us, and I will continue to think of it as that. But it is also more than a mere intellectual curiousity for me now, it is something that I lived for a year, I know it, more or less, I came over for dinner and heard all the family stories and stayed the night in the spare bedroom. I feel a real fondness and understanding of it. And the better aspects of life here, the openness and generosity, the appreciation for simply interacting and connecting with people, are things I’d like to incorporate into my life back home. Not to mention I’d really like to build a Russian banya in America. They are god damn amazing.

I’m still here, barely

I am rather sure that no one reads this anymore and with good reason. In recent years I’ve had various blogs, all of which I haven’t really kept up well, with the exception of the blog I keep in Russian at livejournal. Of course, to most people who know me this is pretty worthless because they don’t know a word of Russia, or maybe just one or two words– my dad, for instance, has mastered ‘privet’ and ‘do svedaniya,’ but you get the idea. A clever and Internet-savvy user might have tried copy and pasting my Russian journal entries into a damn text translator (there are tons of these websites), so for anyone who really wants to have some sort of account of the past year is advised to give that a try.

It’s too bad I failed to use this blog for its stated purpose–to have an account of my impressions and experiences this year in Russian in English–because there were many many impressions and experiences that I could have written about. As it stands, they exist only in my head and I hope that I don’t forget. The unexpected thing is that I think the most important experiences I’ve had here had very little to do with Russia, but were in thinking about myself, my life and goals, how I feel about things in the past and different people, how I feel about America. It was a year spent largely in reflection. Of course I experienced many visceral things in Russia that were very much Russian and I appreciate that. I just feel that the changes I’ve gone through have been even more important.

The year is essentially over, I leave for home in 5 days. It’s a bittersweet feeling, as changes usually are for me. I’m mostly happy to go home, but there are some other feelings of wanting to stay and knowing I will miss things. There’s a certain helplessness and futility to these sorts of feelings– a sort of feeling sad in anticipation of feeling sad. Hmm. I am sometimes a bit too melancholy as a person, I’ve been told that, and this is a damn good example of that. I wonder if other people have this.

So as the year is over, I might start using this as my all-purpose blog. Or I might not. We’ll see. I don’t have a personal blog (in English) anymore and I miss that. The whole idea of blogging is something I am ambivalent about, but by and large I’m ok with it and find it worthwhile.