Russian soul - a postscript

When I posted that blog entry the other day (the one immediately preceding) of reminiscences of the Army Language School, I got a wonderful response from friend Bill Medigovich, one of my colleagues from the 100th 12-month Russian course at Monterey. The class carried the not very original title of R-12-100. Bill sent a newspaper clipping (left) from a celebration of the ALS’s ability to pull that off a hundred times already.

That’s Bill in the center of the photo. And that’s Serge Sinkevich, whom I mentioned in the last blog entry, the guy who could do handstands in his 50s. On the railing of the porch outside our classrooms, no less, where if he had fallen he could have broken his neck. Serge (if he ever leaves the States, be sure to follow him) Sinkevich was what one has to think of as a winner. Chased out of the Soviet Union for his czarist inclinations – OK, maybe not; see below – he made a go of it with the Yugoslav army. Landed on his feet, in other words. Whether it was his uncle, Igor Sikorsky, who got him to Berlin I can’t be sure, but when Yugoslavia was no longer to his liking, he made his way to Germany. I do know that it was his uncle Igor who helped him find his way to the United States.

If we could go back in time machines, this is one place I’d go back to. I’d like to pump Sinkevich for more tales of his youth, more information about life post-Bolshevik revolution. He was born in 1907, I just discovered, so that means he was only ten when the czar was overthrown, and that means the exciting tale of dashing into exile just ahead of the fire-breathing Bolsheviks was probably urban legend.  Funny how people tell history. When they say he had to leave the Soviet Union in fear of his life, they don’t tell you he was only ten years old. You have to dig around for that information. Obviously it was his family, and not him acting solo, who made their way to Yugoslavia. History is best written slowly, and by cynics, rather than enthusiasts.

With all the attention being paid today to the bad blood between the Russians and the Ukrainians, Americans are learning at long last about a rivalry that goes back to the very beginning of the Eastern Slavic peoples. The Russians, as well as the people of Belarus and the Ukrainians, all see the nation known as Kievan Rus’ as their point of origin, not unlike the way the Serbians look to Kosovo as a major part of the history of their nation. You guys may think you own it, but we know it's ours.

Uncle Igor was born in Kiev, but he apparently identified as Russian, not Ukrainian. We know Sikorsky today as the inventor of the helicopter, as well as a whole bunch of airplanes, including what became those Pan Am planes known as the “flying boats.” He may have emigrated to the States in 1919, but he clearly kept his ties with the homeland. The Ukrainians are proud enough of his accomplishments, evidently, to have named one of Kyiv’s two airports after him, the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv International Airport. So there.

Protopriest Father Gregory Kravchina (center), other
unidentified, non-smiling Russians (front row) and
smiling Americans behind them

So Sinkevich, whom I remember judiciously avoiding any political discussions, had connections. I doubt he had czarist inclinations, given his family history. But who knows. I just ache at the thought we can’t go back in time and find these things out. We were all of twenty-three years of age at the time and found these people a bit too daunting to approach with personal questions. Only when they exposed themselves, like Mrs. Kravchina, wife of the local Russian Orthodox priest did with her “oh, we were so happy before the revolution” cluelessness, did we get any real insight into the turmoil of these people’s lives.  She, and other "ladies" on the faculty could be counted on to bow their heads when passing Shaky Jake, the Romanoff knyaz' (prince).

Bill confirms my memory of the general with the jowls, General Markov, the one who chuckled at the “primitives” punching the lights out on the jeep. He apparently headed the Soviet Forces who were wiped out by the Finns and when he returned to Moscow he knew his number was up. Hightailed it out of there, pulled a gun, according to Bill, on the pilot of his little command plane and said, “Take me to Berlin!”

So many exiles. So many tales of harrowing flight from the need their homeland had to throw off the rule of the Romanoffs and install a new Marxist way of life. So much more to the story of the Nessins and the Kravchinas in the immigrant community, the Bolsheviks against the czarists, and how they managed to exist side by side in exile. How I'd love to spend an afternoon with Mrs. Nessin and get her take on the fact that the St. Seraphim of Serov Russian Orthodox Church founded by the Defense Language Institute* Russian exiles in 1950, Kravchina among them, I believe, is now part of the organization of Russian Orthodox Churches Outside Russia celebrating the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Romanoff Dynasty. Their web page informs you that on the 21st there will be a concert by the (no kidding) men's choir of the Tsar Nicholas the Passion-bearer singers in New York. Revolution? What Bolshevik revolution?

Wonderful thing about history, if you can stay alive long enough to appreciate it... it never ceases to surprise you.

*The Army Language School changed its name to the Defense Language Institute of the West Coast while I was there. I'm still more comfortable with ALS than with DLIWC, but since I'm talking about a name-change from 56 years ago, I guess it's probably about time I got with the drill.

Both photos courtesy of Bill Medigovich of R-12-100.  Oh, and by the way, that’s me in the black-rimmed glasses, three defenders of freedom down from Bill, in the top photo. Witness to history, if only I’d had the wit to ask the right questions.

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.

It's beginning to feel a lot like...

Christmas in Sagami Ono, mid November

I'm getting all Christmasy. Friend Bill is coming in next week for the season, as he does now every year. We'll go get a tree and tart her up real pretty and hope nobody stops by that is susceptible to photosensitive convulsions.

The hostes with the mostes are in California this year, not Argentina, and they are putting on their Christmas Eve do, complete with Santa, and suddenly I'm faced with all this evidence that I've got a whole bunch of traditional behaviors to display! And I'm looking forward to it.

My family is less enthusiastic. The husband is excited about Bill's arrival, about Paz's play about Madame Bovary which we have tickets for and about Santa coming down some metaphorical chimney with gag gifts for everybody on the Eve, but he views the notion of Christmas through Japanese eyes. In Japan, Christmas is a time for getting laid for the first time, something high school kids do the way so many do on prom night in America. And it's all about jinguru beruzu, jinguru beruzu, jinguru oru za way... more than it is about the Messiah's arrival being signaled by stars in the Western sky, kings wandering in from a neighboring kingdom not being a Japanese thing.  But he goes along with the rest of us. Miki and Bounce, who make our family complete, have only one request of Santa, that their breakfast and their dinner continue to arrive more or less on schedule.

I've been listening all morning to the King's College Choir at Cambridge. Damn if they don't melt my cold jaded heart. Nothing like boy sopranos to warm you to the idea that not all religious traditions are toxic, that you need to move over and let the Christians have their annual holiday without your anti-religion snarking. Christians feel an uplift toward a transcendental figure who, if you believe in him, takes away your cynicism and disappointment with the human condition. I can get into that. I feel an uplift when I hear those angelic voices and find myself wondering how it is one can create such incredible beauty using nothing more than the human voice - OK, so the gothic church, the choir robes and the organ background also play a role - if one applies the proper discipline and gets the proper training.

The silly people continue to find stuff to object to, of course, the exclusivist political Christians who insist that Christmas belongs to them and not you. And folks on the other end of the spectrum as well, those who find any and all tradition stuffy and fail to understand the power of ritualistic behavior in creating a sense of well-being. Then, of course, there are the really silly-dilly folk like the fundamentalists at FamilyVoice Australia, who have their tits in a knot over the use of a hunky gay couple by Bond's Underwear Company  to sell their wares with a Christmas theme. Seems FamilyVoice doesn't know family when it's staring them in the face, poor fellows.

No matter. The world still turns. We will still say Merry Christmas when speaking to friends who we know, whether for religious reasons or cultural, celebrate that holiday. And we'll demonstrate the Christmas Spirit by saying Happy Holidays in public venues instead of Merry Christmas where it is important to stress that, as citizens of an all-inclusive country, we'd like to make sure Jews and Muslims and Hindus do not feel left out. 

So whether you, like my Lutheran friends do, light the advent candles, or whether you sign up to sing Handel's Messiah, whether you decorate a tree or whether you're planning on sushi for Christmas, I recommend giving in to the notion that "it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas."  

And set aside if you can some time to listen to the Choir at King's College Cambridge, and be thankful for beautiful things. There are many videos. I'd recommend starting here. 

It will be oh so good for the soul.

photo credit: Taku took this photo at Sagami Ono Station on November 18th. No idea how long it had been up by then.