Wise Words

Whether I achieve the secondary purpose of my journey—to escape the deadly melancholy of the Christmas season—remains to be seen.

—Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, 20 December

Get Real

It's been a few weeks since I posted anything to this blog, and for my own sake as much as yours, gentle reader, I should summarize what's been happening since my last entry.

I should mention, by the way, that I haven't been avoiding my blogging responsibilities by choice. Things were going just wonderfully here, and I was all set to write a big blog entry about how I had somehow dodged all the small pitfalls that other anthropologists complain of when they begin their fieldwork.  What luck! 

But then, a little over a week ago, without any warning whatsoever, my brand new laptop died. Remember that laptop that I was sent by a certain company as a replacement for the machine that they lost failed to repair over the course of a month? Yeah. I'm not kidding either. This company's flagship machine--loaded with their state-of-the-art technology--, this beautiful baby computer suffered the microelectronic equivalent of SIDS after just one month.

To be clear, we're not talking about some minor inconvenience like, say, a hard drive failure, or a screen that stops working. This is more like a bad motherboard. I've talked with the company's tech support staff via e-mail and long-distance/Skype/conference-call, and after describing the computer's symptoms they replied that it sounded like a serious hardware failure and asked if I could please send it in for repair... from Russia... at my expense.

Grand.

So there I was, an academic in Moscow without a computer (which for 21st century scholars is kind of like being a drug addict without a fix). But I realized that most anthropologists don't have the luxury of computers and gadgets in their fieldsites, so why was I complaining? Who was I to wimper about a stupid computer when I've got the things that really matter: a roof over my head, a great research project, and my health?

And of course, as soon as I felt thankful for these things, I saw them each crumple before my eyes. The apartment in which I'm living suffered a minor flood when the upstairs neighbors left the water running in their bathroom tub, filling the air with vapour that smells suspiciously like the twelve inches or so of late Soviet-era flooring, insulation, dirt, dust, and mold that you might find between two levels of an apartment building in Moscow.  No big deal, I thought.  I mean, after all, the same sort of thing happened to me in my apartment not long ago in the states.  This stuff happens. And then a couple of days later, I started to feel as though a sheet of fabric softener had somehow been stuffed down my windpipe without my notice. At first I didn't think much about it, but after about 24 hours I was coughing violently and feeling as if my sinuses were attempting to escape their captivity behind my face through my eye sockets. Naturally, my optimism about my research began to take a tumble at this point as well.

That was about a week ago.  Things are a bit better now: I've got a new computer (thanks to ridiculously generous support from two readers of this blog who will go unnamed); I was able to get all my notes off of the old machine's hard drive; I'll be sending my old computer back home with an American I met recently; my health is improving thanks to lots of Russian soup; and as for my research, well, it's at least interesting.

After all, how can you NOT find this interesting?

This is a spot on the Old Arbat, a fairly famous Moscow street and tourist destination.  It's not insignificant as cultural real estate.  The Arbat is a great place to take a stroll.  There are some lovely buildings, there are no cars, you'll find artists and musicians and performers everywhere... And here we have, on the right, a statue dedicated to Bulat Okudzhava, one of the pioneers (if you'll excuse the term) of Russian bardic song.  And on the left, standing only a few feet from the revered Mr. Okudzhava, is a large cow.  Not just any cow, actually: this is the mascot (or the mas-cow?... the Mos-cow?...) for a chain of restaurants called "Mu-Mu".

I can't quite explain how well this image represents my impression of contemporary Moscow.  It's not just that the ridiculous and sublime live side by side -- that could be said about the world in general.  Nor is it just that the artifacts of the Soviet past and the post-Soviet present stand side by side.   It's something more about how the past and present don't seem to be able to take one another seriously, despite genuine efforts to the contrary.  This goes beyond nostalgia or irony.  This is... this is...

This is a statue of a cow standing next to a statue of Bulat Okudzhava.  

I feel like at this point, a real ethnographer would know how to read such an image. I don't.  But I'm hoping that since I'm experiencing some of the problems that real ethnographers encounter, perhaps soon I'll begin to think like one as well.

One Week

One week.  I've been here one week.  Since I've managed to accomplish more or less all I could have hoped to accomplish in my first seven days, I suppose that this bodes well for the next fifty one weeks of real honest-to-goodness ethnographci field research to come.  On the other hand, every day I am reminded that my Russian is nowhere near adequate to the task of capturing a shred of nuance about anything, and that I am playing the socioculturally equivalent role of a character from some bad sci-fi about an interdimensional traveler who has just made the jump from life with only three physical dimensions to live with five dimensions within the same universe.  This is a long and confusing way of saying that this time in Moscow, I'm haunted by the strange feeling that everything is the same and yet everything is different.

The same: my favorite foods and places are still here; my everyday survival Russian is slowly coming back to me and seems to be serving me well enough that I don't get too many weird looks when I ask people for directions or talk to store clerks; and Moscow is still a wonderfully busy, strangely beautiful and intimidating place.

Different: I've arrived at a time when one cannot turn on a radio, open a newspaper, or walk five paces without encountering the word "кризис (crisis)"; the sky is grey grey grey all the time; and for some reason people seem to understand the theme of my research even though I feel more detached from my project than ever.  

There's a lot that could be said about all of this... but I've got work to do.  

More to come...

Maybe things aren't so bad...

Huh.  OK, maybe I don't need to freak out about the transition from Chicago to Moscow just yet...

Back in the Former USSR

Hi there.

So, a few words of introduction and explanation are in order. I’ve decided to start blogging for a couple of reasons: 1) it seems a good way to let people in my life know what I’m up to without sending out annoying mass e-mails; and 2) I might as well start getting into the habit of recording my ethnographic impressions of and reactions to Moscow before I need to keep formal research notes. I plan to begin this blog with some very informal ramblings and sprawling notes to myself. But even though this is only a blog, in the interests of protecting my career, I’ll be changing names and obscuring the details of my research.

The title of this blog, “The Moscow Diaries,” is a tip of my cap to Walter Benjamin. Unfortunately, “The Moscow Diary” was already taken by someone in a position that resembles mine uncannily: a visiting scholar living at Moscow State University (MGU) and logging onto the internet at “CafeMax,” a 24-hour café with banks of computer terminals, a new wi-fi system, and seriously overpriced food.

I arrived in Moscow on Thursday afternoon, and so far the trip has gone very smoothly. In my first three hours in Moscow I accomplished more than I had in the first three weeks of my last visit to Russia in 2005. I bought a new SIM card for my cellphone, set myself up with a wireless internet account at CafeMax, and made contact with a visiting American professor and my former roommate from my first stay in the MGU dormitories.

In the nearly two years since my last trip to Moscow, I’ve only noticed minor changes, most of them for the better. Moscow’s subway system now uses convenient “touch” farecards; CafeMax has installed a wi-fi system and has begun selling cheap and somewhat drinkable “student coffee” (i.e. a cup of hot water with a little packet of powdered Nescafe) for only 15 rubles; and the hackers in the MGU dormitories have refined greatly their informal, grey-market internet service. The system works like this: you call the head hacker and ask to get internet access in your dorm room. The hacker will ask you if there’s an Ethernet cable in your room or not. If there isn’t one, then a pair of hackers will be dispatched to fling a cable out from the window of the nearest hub room and in through your window. Looking up at the dormitory, you can see a loose webbing of Ethernet cables connecting students to the local file sharing networks (for free) and to the internet (for paying subscibers). I’m told that I can buy handy “pay as you go” cards at one of the stores in the university’s main building.

I’m now working up the courage to call the head hacker and arrange for an appointment so I can get online this week. I’m more than a little nervous about my linguistic competence at this point. Actually, the word “competence” seems inappropriate. We’re talking about simple brute force utility for now. In the last two years, I haven’t taken Russian classes at my university in the United States, and I’ve only read and talked in Russian sporadically. I’ve been working with a basic survival vocabulary, and I have disregarded my usual concern about using proper grammar. My sentences are short, simple, and blunt.

Surprisingly, this seems to make me a more effective speaker of Russian. In previous trips, I would try to say, “Excuse me, but if you have bliny with ham and cheese, I would very much like one” only to be met with puzzled looks and angry shouts. Now I say, “Bliny with ham and cheese,” and seconds later I have lunch. Getting my cellphone’s SIM card took an hour when I tried two years ago. This time I said something like, “Hi. I want a MegaFon SIM card. How much?” and five minutes later I was taking calls and sending text messages.

I mentioned this to another American student today over lunch, and she replied that in Russia, brevity is the soul of more than just wit: it’s how people prefer to talk in general. She offered an example: “I was dating a Russian guy for a little while, but before long I realized it wasn’t going to work out. In English I would have had to have spent a while telling him that it wasn’t his fault and that we were different people at different stages in our lives and that we each had to follow our own paths or something stupid like that. In Russian I could just say, ‘I don’t really want to be with you anymore’ and it saved a lot of time.”

Anyway, there is much more to say, but in my attempt to adapt to local customs, perhaps I should just keep this entry short and sweet…