Russkaya dushá, Russkaya kul'tura

Thinking back on things, I’m sobered at the thought that so much that means the world to me today came to me quite by chance. I feel sometimes as if I backed into life. So much of my personal history is happenstance, not planned.

I joined the army after college. That was deliberate. But I did that because they told me I’d have a pretty good chance of getting into the Army Language School in Monterey to study Chinese, rather than have to join the infantry and go fight in Cuba or Vietnam. (We were experiencing the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam was just getting started.) I was still naive enough in those days to think if I learned all of the official languages of the United Nations I could get a job there as an interpreter. I had it all planned out. I had already acquired a foundation in French and Spanish and Russian. All that was left was Chinese and presto changeo ipso facto they’d have to take me in!

Naive is one word. Clueless, in retrospect, is a better one.

The army was true to its word. After making me shout, “What’s the spirit of the bayonet? Kill! Kill! Kill!” for a while at basic training in Fort Dix, they sent me to Monterey to study Chinese. Where I immediately found a kink in the system. Chinese classes were started only once every six months and I had just missed the latest intake. I would have to wait six months for the next round, and that would require me to re-up for another year. 

I was already committed to three years (as opposed to two if I had let myself be drafted) and the thought of wearing a uniform and picking up cigarette butts from beaches on weekends for yet another year, like I was doing from day one at Monterey, was just too much. I had been placed in a barracks with Russian students and I quickly got in the Russian mood. I had taken two years of Russian in college and had already caught the bug. Chinese can wait, I decided. There was a new Russian class opening up almost immediately and they would take me.

Once we made it past the “This is a pencil” stage, where I was able to establish myself as way ahead of the pack, it sank in that I had a marvelous advantage. I could rise to the head of the class in a very competitive environment and who wouldn’t want to look like a golden boy without half trying? I sailed through the year and loved the experience. One year down, two to go, and it was not only relatively painless; it was fun. For one thing I was making friends with the guys who - I didn’t realize at the time - would be closer than brothers in the years to come. They would be chosen family and live their lives out (three of them are gone now) at the center of my life. As for Russian, try as they might, the Army could not make us look at the Russians as the enemy. Not that they didn’t try. They forbade “fraternization,” that wonderful word they used during the occupation of Germany and Japan to keep us from getting too cozy with the enemy and forgetting we had an empire to run. But we managed to connect with these people despite the prohibition.

The Russians at Monterey, about 150 on the faculty, plus their families, were a great bunch of folk. There was Serge Sinkevich.  He had left Russia for Yugoslavia early on and become a captain in the Yugoslav army until things got hot and he had to leave for Germany. When things got too hot for him there he made his way to the United States. We used to say, if Sinkevich ever leaves the States, the smart thing would be to follow him. He used to do hand stands on the balcony.  He must have been in his 50s, but had the body and the stamina of a 20-year old. And he played the balalaika. 

Then there was Shaky Jake. He was a Romanoff, and an expert on Tchaikovsky. Don’t know if the shakes were from alcohol or some nervous disorder. He had the saddest face, and would sit and sigh so deeply that you'd think the world was ending. Probably should have been on anti-depressants, but I don’t think people did that in those days. We wondered if he was too close to Tsar Nicholas and family and just never got over the slaughter. Or whether he simply wanted to spend his life in a concert hall listening to Tchaikovsky and not teaching American kids in uniform how to do prisoner-of-war interrogations. 

Then there was General Markov - I believe that was his name - who used to tell us tales of his time in the Soviet army many years ago when he was a new recruit. Like the time they went to someplace in the middle of nowhere in Siberia for maneuvers. They were marching through the woods when they suddenly realized the guys in the jeep at the back of the line were missing. They went back and found them all dead, and the headlights of the jeep smashed out. “Heh, heh, heh,” said Markov. “Such primitives!” They actually thought the jeep was alive and punched its eyes out. “Heh, heh, heh.”

My favorite person was Mrs. Nessin. She was a no-nonsense Bolshevik who had been quite political in her day. She didn’t get along well with the rest of the faculty, especially people like the wife of the local Russian Orthodox priest, whom we called Minnie Mouse, because she had such skinny legs and wore shoes three or four sizes too big for her feet. Minnie Mouse used to go on about the happy days before the Bolsheviks eliminated the tsar. “We were so happy then. We had so many balls and get-togethers with our friends.” Mrs. Nessin, you could see, would cheerfully have thrown her off the porch if she could have gotten away with it.

Then there was Kovalenko, who we learned was Ukrainian and that explained his accent. Another of many gentle souls in this large displaced community of Russians. All highly educated, cultured people, all happy to get a chance to break away from the scheduled curriculum to reveal the secrets of the “russkaya dusha.” (the Russian soul.) “Oh, how we suffered under the yoke of the Tartars!” said Minnie Mouse. “Oh, how spoiled you Americans are who have never been close to starving from hunger,” said Mrs. Nessin. I loved them all.

I also came to love the Russian language. Began to read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I went to the Znanie Bookstore on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco every weekend and bought books by Lermontov and Pushkin and Gorky and Turgenev, thinking I’d surely get to them one day. I believe I sold them all to a used books store some twenty or thirty years later, once I realized that was nothing but another youthful sign of naive ambition. Well, not all of them. I did get into Tolstoy and Dostoevsky a bit. In English. My Russian became good enough to follow a lecture by Shaky Jake on Tchaikovsky, but not good enough for Tolstoy. And yet, somehow, I think good enough to believe I knew what our teachers were talking about when they spoke of the “Russian soul.” A deep, dark, pit within the mind, a well of depression that could swallow you up if you didn’t drink enough vodka and fall asleep before it had a chance to snatch you away from your daily routine.

Fortunately, if you can find a way to build a resistance to the dark side of the “Russkaya dusha,” you find the other pieces as well, the proud, often arrogant, haughty side and the passionate side, where song and dance take hold. My friend Jerry loved how they used to sneer at something and pronounce it “nekulturniy” (literally “uncultured” - their word for tacky, uneducated). Culture was very big in their lives. And to this day I am still profoundly moved by the way the Russians support ballet, the theater and and concert performances. High culture, we call it. The Russians simply call it “culture.” And thanks to YouTube, I spend hours some mornings listening to precocious children who have been pulled aside and trained, the same way Olympic champions are trained, to be concert-level pianists and cellists and singers. Or adults, like the opera singers Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who stabbed me directly in the heart not long ago by dying way way way too young. Or Anna Netrebko.

A wonderful new video just showed up this morning - which got me off on this tangent - of the Igor Moiseyev dance troupe, my idea of what must be the best folk dance ensemble in the world. Have a look here (you’ll probably want to skip ahead of the talky-talk if you don’t speak Russian): 

I’ve mentioned all these folk in previous blog entries, but let me repeat a couple of my favorite videos:

• Pianists Alexander Malofeev and Sandro Nebieridze playing Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra. 
• Dmitri Hvorostovsky singing “Zhuravli” (“Cranes”) 

The world is full of musical cultural richness. I love French chansons. I love German Lieder, Italian bel canto opera, Portuguese fado. I love blue grass and Irish country dance. I perk up to mariachi on occasion.  How would I make it through the day without these gifts of the gods. But I have to tell you that there’s something about Russian folk music that gets to the nervous system ahead of most forms of jazz, folk or classical.

I think this is due in large part to the fact that I got to sing in the Russian choir at Monterey, and learning the songs we were given to work on led to other connections, like the Soviet Army Chorus, for example, and the awareness that Russians were still living (at least in the 1960s when I was experiencing this all for the first time) with vivid memories of the loss of more than 20 million Russians in the war. I got to experience the music not just as catchy tunes that you can't shake, but as soulful personal expressions of the harshness of life, the combination of words and music that becomes more than the sum of its parts, that goes beyond the realm of written poetry.

We used to poke fun, we insensitive American kids still barely out of our teens, at how maudlin the Russians could get when talking of the war. They were too proud to tell us too much. Maybe it's because they simply saw us as too young to understand, maybe it's because they saw it as casting pearls before swine, maybe it's because it's hard to put horror into words and, once experienced, you spend the rest of your life running from it, I don't know. Probably different things for different people. We managed to learn from some that others had endured the siege of Stalingrad, and when they spoke of fear of dying of hunger, they knew what they were talking about. When you hear Hvorostovsky sing and you see the tears in the eyes of the audience, it’s not just the beauty of the music, it’s the words. So many songs are about soldiers who never came home. They were a wounded lot, these Russians I got to know at Monterey. They had all been forced to emigrate and live out their lives in a land they found lacking in soul and in culture. Grateful, they were, for the most part, but profoundly sad.

Not entirely, though. Mrs. Nessin, normally so disciplined and cool-headed, lost it once when one of us snarked about what a messed-up country we lived in. Laid him out flat. "What do you know of "messed-up countries?" she asked him, catching herself before she was able to say, "you spoiled privileged little shit." I've never heard a native-born American ever express such a passionate love of America as came out of the mouth of this displaced erstwhile Bolshevik.

I’ve spoken often of the time, in Argentina, I asked a profoundly politically-oriented student how he could want to seek out the company of Americans and hate the American government with such a passion simultaneously. He looked at me strangely and answered, “I’m Argentine. We learn with our mother’s milk to separate people from the politics of their leaders.” That fit with my understanding of how hard it was to get Americans to show sympathy for how much the Germans suffered during World War II. So much childish, “Well, they started it!” So little understanding of how innocents get caught up in the follies of those who find their way into leadership positions.

These days I cringe at the very sight of Vladimir Putin, former head of the KGB, a man who murders journalists, grabs the Crimea with impunity away from Ukraine, and plays the idiot in the Oval Office like a fiddle.  He’s one face of Russia. Not the Russia I know and love.

The man is nekulturniy. He has no soul, Russian or any other kind.

Sorry for going off on a political tangent like that.

Time to get back to singing and dancing.

Those kids doing the goose-step, maybe.

photo credit:  Photo is from a 2007 New York Times article on Putin's attempt to take control of Russian culture, "Putin's Last Realm to Conquer." The photo shows two Russian policemen and was one of dozens of works pulled from a Russian-sponsored show in Paris. Credit to Marat Guelman Gallery.