Happiness; 26 January 2014

Today our Sundance film festival is officially over; the town will be quieter, the pace will slow. We drive in Park City as little as possible while the festival is on, but when we did go into town this year the traffic was not as intense. I think this is because, unlike many other years, we had no winter snowstorms to slow everything down. And although the nights were quite cold (down around 15 degrees) during the day the sun came out and temperatures climbed to 40 and above. This meant that the sidewalks were clear and there were fewer PIBS (people in black) wandering the streets. I spotted no celebrities—I probably wouldn’t know them if I saw them—but as usual there were rampant reports of celebrity sightings. There were parties all over Park City, the grapevine said, but since I wasn’t invited to any of them I only heard about them through hearsay—and reading the New York Times, which ran a story about the party houses in Deer Valley.

Both of us volunteered at our local library, selling concessions.  With some difficulty I learned to run a credit card through an I-pad, and I did a reasonably good job with the cash register, though I made a number of mistakes. Thank heavens no one checked me when my shifts were over—it was harder than I thought it would be. I even got a few tips, the biggest one $1.50. I can see that this career is not in my future. It made me think of all the “menial” jobs people do in our culture. We take their work for granted and typically don’t pay them well, yet they can be demanding and stressful. After just four hours on my feet, I was tired. 

Again I am meandering, but doing that kind of work brings me to my week’s topic, the Sundance documentary Happiness.  It was the most visually beautiful film I have ever seen, and while the story line was simple, I am still thinking about what I learned from it.

Happiness was filmed by Western filmmakers in Bhutan, where the average national income is $6,100 per capita. In the early 1970s, the country’s Fourth Dragon King (don’t you love that tile??) stated his commitment to modernizing his country. He coined the term “Gross National Happiness,” which he defined as building Bhutan’s economy on the basis of Buddhist spiritual values. Here are the four necessary elements for a happy country:

1.         sustainable development;

2.         preservation and promotion of cultural values;

3.         conserving the natural environment;

4.         establishing good governance.

A GNH index should replace the GDP as a way of measuring countries’ progress, he thought. Bhutan is rated as the happiest country in Asia, the eighth happiest country in the world.

The film poses the question of how entering the twenty-first century might change this allegedly happy land. It opens with the present king of Bhutan declaring that he will allow the Internet and television into his country. People cheer; flags wave; bright colored balloons rise to the sky.  Then we are in a high mountain field, where women and an eight-year-old boy harvest barley. The boy sings a beautiful song about their work and about life.  They seem to accept the fact that they must work hard, as winter is coming and they will need food; this is simple. The mountains around are breathtaking, the highest of them soaring to 24,000 feet. But the boy’s mother, a widow with six children, decides to send him to a nearby monastery, as she cannot afford to send him to school and can barely feed him. He resists this.

However, once at the monastery he makes the best of things. He studies during the day and he makes a friend, an older monk-in-training. Some of the best shots show the two of them in their bright crimson robes running and tumbling against a magnificent, overpowering landscape, emblems of human happiness juxtaposed against an inscrutable, implacable nature.  

These scenes are interspersed with shots of work crews building the electrical system that will bring power to this remote village, a reminder that progress will come here, too.

Even the monks are leaving, though, going south toward Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu. There seems little hope that this way of life can survive.

Although his life at the monastery is not difficult, the boy is homesick. He gets permission to go home to his mother for a few days, and it is at this point that his uncle decides to travel to Thimphu to buy a television; the work crews are close and soon they will have electricity. (Uncle had already bought one, but he broke it when he transported it up the mountain.) Each time he buys one, he has to sell a yak. One yak = one television. The boy accompanies his uncle this time, the first time he has left his village. While in Thimphu, he wants to see his sister, who has an office job there and uses computers—his mother is extremely proud of her daughter.

The film has amazing shots in Thimphu of the boy’s reaction to what he sees: the traffic, the police, the shops, the candy he can buy, the brightly colored lights at night. He finds his sister, but she does not work in an office: she is a dancing girl in a club, and, it is implied, a prostitute. (I know from my two stints working in the Balkans that one of the tried-and-true ways of luring young women into prostitution is to promise them that they will be “administrative assistants” in this city or that if they come with the procurers.)

This time the television reaches the village of Laya safely, and the film ends with the villagers sitting in front of it in the evening. They are watching “World Wide Wrestling Federation,” the program reflected in the pupils of the small children who stare in disbelief at the screen.

“This cannot be real,” one murmurs. “They would murder each other if this were really happening.”

So the film leaves many unanswered questions: how will exposure to the media, to other ways of life, change these people? will these villages endure? will Bhutan’s happiness index diminish as the country is modernized?

Not necessarily. Things will change for these people, some things for the better: they may be better fed, they made work less, their daily lives may be easier.

I know little about Buddhism, but I wonder whether its value of acceptance of life as it is can endure in a postmodern era, where the media encourages us to desire things that we don’t or can’t have. The little boy’s mother counsels him to accept what he must do, and even when she sends him away despite his wishes, when he comes home he finds happiness in lying in her lap in front of the fire.

I find that I am happy in my retirement, though I have enough to satisfy my needs with enough left over for travel, recreation, entertainment, hobbies, etc. I have a partner who loves me, loved family members I see often. I can hardly say what happiness is, but I think accepting what I have should suffice. There are no guarantees in life, no innate justice or fairness. The metaphysical English poets’ theme of carpe diem (seize the day) might be, like Buddhism, a path to enlightenment. 

It’s funny what takes us into the past. It happens to me on a regular basis these days; I might be cleaning up the kitchen, working on a painting, reading or writing a poem, listening idly to the radio—and I am gone, back to a place that seems at least as real as where I am now.

Yesterday it was listening to a program on NPR about the sixties. Maybe it was “This American Life” or ‘The Takeaway,” but the host was interviewing men who had been conscientious objectors and draft dodgers during the Vietnam War. One of them had been at Cornell with Daniel Berrigan; he recounted his tale of objecting to the war on ethical, not religious, grounds and going back to Oklahoma to confront the draft board there rather than staying in New York. Oklahoma at that point had given no one, not even Quakers, deferments for any reason, so returning home meant a prison term. He decided that to make the point that the war was immoral he had to be willing to make sacrifices.

Earlier that day I had been reading over my journal from 1966, the winter term of my freshman year at Allegheny College. Bill and I have been rearranging our respective studies, so that I can have his drafting table in my office for my painting, and in the process I have been moving books and papers. You know—we get this impulse to put our lives in order; it makes us very happy for a time, until the inevitable chaos resumes and we spend a good bit of our time looking for things.

Anyway, I decided to put my dozens of journals in order. I have kept them for decades, starting with 1966. There are lots of gaps from then until around the late 1970s, so I was glad to see I have an early record.

What a pivotal year that was for me. Since I was the first person in my immediate family to go to college, I had been overwhelmed the first weeks. But when I started recording my days that second term, I was happy and in love with Allegheny. Everything there was magical and meaningful. I had forgotten how many important friends I made that year—such a varied lot, male and female. Most of my entries are full of my encounters, conversations, and mini-dramas involving casual dates, would be dates (should I ask Bob Metting to the Sadie Hawkins dance or not? etc.), and imaginary lovers—but also the classes I was taking and the ways my mind was being stretched and re-shaped. I was terrified in speech class, worried I would make a fool of myself in front of whatever male I found desirable at the time.  And sure enough, after my first speech I record, “I looked up and saw John Boughton laughing.” I was still determined, though. After that I worked very hard on my next speech. My journal records that trial:

I have rehearsed my speech five times aloud. I spent considerable time researching it (3 ½ hours), considerable time taking notes (2 1/3 hours), considerable time writing it (2 hours), and a fair amount of time practicing it (1 hour). I believe that adds up to approximately 9 hours. That sounds about right. Let’s see.  9 x 60 +540. 540/7 = 77.0, or 77 ½ minutes preparation for every minute I speak. How can I flub it up?

I was self-conscious, but I also had a growing political awareness that I don’t think I would have ever developed in Titusville. I still believed in my religion at that time, and I spend Sunday evenings at meetings hosted by our college chaplain, Dick Devor. We had discussions, did role-playing, and had speakers. We learned about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “pecca fortiter” (sin boldly), and we took ourselves very seriously: we really believed that we could change the world. Remember that this was just after the terrible summer of 1964, when the three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi and after the assassination of John Kennedy. America was changing, and we wanted to be part of this revolution. I read Nat Hentoff’s The New Equality, Eric Fromm’s The Art of Loving, Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, Le Petit Prince, watched Last Year at Marienbad, and did scandalous things—I went alone to David Frost’s apartment to listen to jazz while he smoked dope. . . . And I even learned to swim well that winter. You see, you could not graduate from Allegheny without passing a swimming test, using four strokes. I hated coming from the basement gym on cold winter days with wet hair, but I loved my teacher, Pam Westerman, who had long blonde hair and the brightest blue eyes. I thought she was one of the coolest women I had ever met. And despite my initial trepidation, I grew to enjoy my swim sessions with her.

So, for a while yesterday I was there, fully immersed in those transcendent moments. I saw the person that I was and I liked her. Although she was naïve, she cared about her family, the people around her, and the entire world. And she made me laugh. By January 1966 the Vietnam protests had begun in earnest, and Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, was not to be left behind. We also  protested other things: hunger among the Ibo in Biafra, racism, poverty. I joined in these protests, but I kept my head and did not let them submerge my own sensibilities. I will end with my entry for 6 February 1966. Now my lists makes me laugh, but when I compiled them I was deadly serious. That was my job: to learn how I fit in the world.

Why I am skipping dinner to take part in the Vietnam protest fast:

1          I believe that

            a.         the war should not be escalated;

            b.         the Viet Cong Liberation Front should be considered a bargaining

                        unit;

            c,          the government should thoroughly and conscientiously re-examine its

                        policy on the war in Vietnam.

2.         I believe that individuals have the right, and duty, to say “no” to the

government if:

a.         they are acting in accordance with their principles;

b.         they have thought carefully about what they are doing.

3.         I believe that I should take a stand on the fact that no one is “asinine”

            for acting on what they sincerely believe in.

4.         No human being has the right to judge the acts of another human.

[And here is the kicker! Evidently the local committee has decreed that we skip meals for a day and a half, but I couldn’t go that far, even though I knew it was the right thing to do.]

           

Why I am not fasting for 36 hours:

1.         As far as I cam concerned, it would accomplish nothing.

2.         I want to protest as an individual.

3.         It would interfere with my learning.

4.         I can’t swim twice in one day on an empty stomach. . . . . 

I See Russia from My Rear View Mirror; 12 January 2014



The above line is adapted from the title of a poem by Agha Shahid Ali, “I See Chile from My Rear View Mirror.” I heard him read the poem years ago at a Westminster Poetry Series reading; while he was hopelessly drunk by the time he got to this poem, he read it with feeling. The poem involves, among other things, the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the subsequent nearly twenty-year rule of the military dictator Pinochet: the imprisonments, the torture, the unjustified arrests.

                                        The siren

empties Santiago; he watches

--from a hush of windows--blindfolded men

blurred in gleaming vans.

The poem ends with the line,

The waters darken. The continent vanishes.

So what does this have to do with Russia? Everything. Last week I thought I had it figured out: relations between Russia and the West had thawed, life is better there now, things are easier.

Not.

In an odd way, the fear I had of Russia as a child has re-emerged: the country in many ways is as repressive as it was during the Stalinist era, even during the feudal ages. Most Russians struggle to make any kind of living, to have the basic necessities of life, while the Gazprom executives  (the oil magnate billionaires) and the ruling politicians live in unimaginable luxury. Sort of like the 1% here and the rest of us, only much worse—“the rest of us” in Russia have very little.

This past Friday night we were invited to a dinner hosted by three Russians, our friend Tamara of last week’s blog; her student O., a mathematical climate genius; and O.’s wife I., who was a doctoral candidate in climate research in St. Petersburg. Tamara wanted to thank us for the Moab tour, but, more importantly, she wanted us to meet O. and I. They prepared a meal of traditional Russian foods: a thin soup of potatoes and vegetables, a very spicy carrot salad, a tomato and red paper salad, potatoes with head cheese, caviar on black bread, and blini (thin pancakes rolled up around sour cream and jam—very delicious). We ate and talked; O. had good English, I. some English, and Tamara very limited English. Again, I only have 20 words of Russian.  Toward the end of the evening, the conversation turned to a discussion of life in Russia today.

Ivan explained that after the end of the Cold War, most Russians believed that daily life would improve in their country: they would begin to acquire the material things that most middle-class Westerners take for granted. But when after a generation this did not happen, Russians became cynical and disillusioned. Today a mafia that came primarily from the KGB controls most of the country while the average Russian struggles to scrape by. His own mother is a doctor and works endless hours for very little pay. The educational system is, according to our 3 hosts, a disaster.

“Russian professors and researches cheat,” O. announced, his thick black glasses slightly lowered below his brows.

We understood the sentence but not its meaning. He went on to explain that there are no external controls on research within Russian institutions. It is not necessary to verify one’s data before releasing the results. For example, a director of a Russian research institute publishes her/his own journal. He selects who will publish in a journal, usually among his colleagues and students. In the international community, when someone wants to publish research, that someone submits the article to what is called a peer-reviewed journal (with no name attached). The anonymous article goes to two or three experts in that particular field, who review it. They either accept it, accept it pending revisions, or reject it. I have been through this process numerous times myself with my articles and books on Henry James, with all three of those possible outcomes happening. I do know that while the process takes months or even longer, the laborious method guarantees that the author’s data and conclusions have a high degree of validity. Authorities, with no personal ties to the author, make sure that the research is legitimate.

This does not happen in Russia. In the vast majority of cases, scientific and other articles are published without any validation. While they may be revised for style and grammar, no one checks the facts. Thus, as O. announced, Russian researchers cheat.

Then the conversation took a turn neither Bill nor I would have ever expected. The following information I am reporting is true in its outlines. Some of the details as to the timing of the events may be off, though, as we both had trouble understanding some of what I. told us. She spoke with emotion and not a little fear. She is tall and slender, with a pretty face and long dark hair tied behind her head in a ponytail.



I. looks at deep layers of sediment in the Arctic oceans, trying to track what climate change might be doing to sea life of all kinds. She conducts her field research from various ships. Recently she accompanied an American expedition to the Chukchi Sea, which lies within the Arctic sea between Russia and Alaska. It must have been an amazing trip: she recounted seeing a mother polar bear with her baby along the way.

When she presented a paper detailing some of her findings at a conference in St. Petersburg afterwards, though, colleagues from her own department accused her of “sharing secrets” with Americans. What possibly could be political about doing research involving climate change? Bill later explained that there can be valuable mineral deposits in the deep sediments, for example manganese nodes, that Russia would want to keep for itself.

Obviously I. is a very talented woman, as in the meantime she had been invited to Maryland to work on her projects in the fall of 2013.

Back in St. Petersburg, though, her fellow professors had another surprise in store for her. She had finished her dissertation and was ready to defend it, but abruptly her committee cancelled her defense. No explanations, no defense.

But worse, accusations came: she was a spy and she could go to prison for an indeterminate length of time. At one point as she talked I heard, “CIA.” She had been accused of collaborating with Americans to steal Russian secrets. She would have no recourse in the current Russian system. If there were a trial, it would be heavily weighted toward the university. We are not even sure if there would even be a trial, let alone a lawyer.

She has not been back to Russia since these accusations surfaced, and she married O. in Las Vegas before Christmas. (They could not marry in Utah because they are not citizens—go figure. Let’s not even get started on who can get married in Utah and who can’t!).  But they are legally married and now can begin their application for a green card, O. applying as he is employed in the country with very good prospects of further work at universities. Evidently he is considered to be brilliant in his field, with fellowships in Cambridge, Germany, etc.  They need ten letters of recommendation for the green card, and we will each write one for them.

So, not only do Russian researchers and professors cheat, they can send one another to prison at will. While my English department had serious feuds over my twenty-five plus years as an academic, no one ever tried to send an enemy to prison. Bill and I both suspect that her Russian colleagues were jealous of I., who also seems to have quite an international reputation for someone so young (27?). She had received international grants and attention, and her work was going well. Since it is probably impossible for some of her colleagues to achieve her success, particularly if they have come through a system where there is little oversight of their work, it would be easier to get rid of her. No, not refuse her tenure or fail her at her dissertation defense, imprison her.

She is afraid to go home.

So, that is what I have earned about Russia this month. I don’t want to go there, either. I hope that things work out for this young couple; they will be assets here, as we try to deal with the burgeoning effects of global warming. What insanity, for a country with as much natural wealth as Russia to lock up the very people who might bring about such positive things for Russia—and the entire planet.

Door to Another World; 5 January 2014



Once upon a time I was afraid of Russia: that was during the Cold War era, when my fourth-grade teacher Miss Doris Newbold told our class that Titusville, Pennsylvania (pop.8,000+) was tenth on the list of cities to be bombed by the Soviet Union. I did not question the logic of her pronouncement. I knew that my town had a steel mill; my mother Esther and my uncle Paul both worked there. She claimed that our production of this product made us vulnerable. Who was I to question her higher authority? So after class I ran the two blocks to my home on Second Street and scrambled down the wooden steps to our basement. The basement had an outer room with windows and a cement floor, but in the very back, near the furnace, was a small narrow oblong space, all of dirt. I ducked in and crouched on the floor. If the bomb hit, I just might be saved.

Unfortunately, there was enough light coming into the room that once my eyes adjusted, I could see spider webs festooning the low ceiling—lots of them. I didn’t wait long to see what kind of spiders might have made them. I pulled myself up and headed back through the cellar’s main room, with its electric wringer washer and its wooden shelves sagging with hundreds of jars of colorful canned goods. My grandmother Ruby was in the kitchen, as usual, and when she saw me emerging from the basement, eyes tear-stained and school dress grimy, she exclaimed,

“Why Susan, whatever is wrong?”

Usually I came home from school in a happy mood, as I had good grades and liked nearly all of my classmates. But today I was disheveled and in tears.

“Miss Newbold said we are going to be bombed by Russia!”

Ruby quickly grabbed the bottom of her blue calico apron and pulled it up over her face. At the time I thought she was wiping the sweat from her face, as she had been stirring a pot of something on a hot stove, but I realize now that she must have been laughing. She was always very careful about not hurting any of her five granddaughters’ feelings.

“No, dear. I think that is hardly possible. Why don’t you sit down and have a piece of cake and we can talk.”

While I am no longer afraid of Russia, somewhere, subliminally, I still view it as “other”: other to my life, other to my way of thinking. And although I am curious about that country and though I love to travel, I have no desire to go there. That must be the result of an atavistic fear stemming back to my Elm Street School Days.

This holiday, after our two older sons, one daughter-in-law, and three granddaughters left, I had planned a trip to southern Utah with a visiting Fulbright scholar from Russia, Tamara Sukacheva. While I would have preferred to be in Moab with warmer weather (it was 15 degrees there in the morning), I had a chance to learn more about the country and people that I once feared.



Tamara Sukacheva is a mathematical logician, a professor at a university in Novgorod, Russia’s oldest city. Now she is in Salt Lake City, developing a mathematical model for predicting climate change in sea ice. She is fifty-eight years old, has been widowed for ten years, and lives with her daughter’s family, sharing a room with a three-year-old grandson. She does not drive a car, and in the summers she takes the bus to her dacha in the country twice daily to care for her garden.  Her dacha, by the way, is a very small shack with no plumbing, set on a treeless plain with a small plot of land behind it. Her mother lives near her as does her thirty-four year old son Daniela. (I have a thirty-four year old son, Daniel.)

Since I am determined to stay as active as I can during my retirement, I have returned to Utah’s Fulbright Board. We plan activities for Fulbrighters coming here from other countries. In November I had a brunch for people and then we visited the Native Elder Show at the Deer Valley ski area, where our guests could learn about Navajo weaving and crafts. They loved meeting the native elders and some were able to try weaving with these beautiful women. Tamara came and a few weeks later fed me lunch at her apartment: borscht and blini. Both were delicious. When I learned that she had seen nothing of Utah outside of downtown Salt Lake and the University of Utah, I invited her to come with us to Moab after Christmas.

“Great!” she proclaimed.

I picked her up on New Year’s Eve and brought her to our house. We went to a neighborhood party that night. She brought gifts for us and for our neighbors: small baskets made of birch bark filled with candy. Novgorod, it seems, is the birch bark craft center of the world. She showed me many pictures of the beautiful things made there, including shoes. At one time the nobility wore shoes made of animal skins, while the serfs had birch bark shoes—they lasted about one week. I also learned that the New Year is the most important holiday in Russia. It lasts a week and ends on 7 January, with the celebration of Russian Orthodox Christmas. So I was glad that we could take her to a celebration. She had never had guacamole, salsa, nor ricotta and spinach stuffed chicken thighs. She took several pictures of the buffet table.

I did find it something of a struggle to communicate with her. Tamara speaks very little English, and I have about twenty words of Russia—I only know those because I used to teach Slavic literature in translation. We did well, though, using gestures and expressions and repeating things often.

We have had multiple visitors from other countries over the years, most of them professors associated with Fulbright. It remains an embarrassment when our guests see our house. Though it is small by Park City standards (about 2700 square feet), it would be huge almost anywhere else on the planet. I tried to explain to Tamara that this is a small not a large (velike) house, but to no avail. What I said made no sense to her. Even our small guest bedroom (12 by 14 or so) was, to her, a large space.

On New Year’s Day I packed up a box and a cooler of food and we headed to Moab, where we stayed at the Gonzo Inn. The suite had a pull-out bed in the living room and a small kitchenette. I knew that while when I have lived overseas on Fulbright grants I was wealthy, Fulbrighters coming here have sticker shock. They have enough to get by but little left for extras, like restaurants. We had breakfasts in our room and took lunches with us.

Tamara found Arches and Canyonlands both “very interesting.” She had learned about our national parks on the Internet, and while Russia has a few of them, her country has nothing like our vast network of public spaces. We were able to see quite a bit in our few days there, but I always forget how far apart things are in this state. Tamara loves to walk, but hiking was limited because some of the trails were icy. We walked to the Windows Arches and partway to Delicate Arch, and we walked to the meteor crater in Canyonlands, because Bll is fascinated by the rock formations there. We took other walks along the park roads; there is little traffic now and the roads were ice free. During our time we saw few other visitors, a plus I think; most of those that we encountered were from Asia.



We visited the Green River overlook and Dead Horse Point, where the state of Utah has built a very nice museum.  I don’t think I had ever seen the parks dusted with snow before; they are magnificent. The snow outlines the myriad rock contours, highlighting their strange shapes, and the shadows are bluer, deeper.

Our inn had a Jacuzzi, which I also called a “hot tub.” Tamara had heard Jacuzzi before but not “hot tub,” which she continually pronounced “hot butt.” When I proposed trying it our first night, she promptly took all her clothes off and wrapped a towel around her body. She grabbed the soap and shampoo from the bathroom.

“I am ready!”

 “Where is your bathing suit?”

Before we left on our excursion I had told her to bring a bathing suit.

“I need bathing suit? We go swimming?”

I finally made her understand that in America, we wear bathing suits to the “hot butt.” And when I realized that she planned to take a shower at the Jacuzzi when we were finished, I also explained (laboriously) that there was no shower there.

“Nyet.”

Not so in Russia, I learned. Novgorod has many “banias,” or public baths, where people bathe naked and then shower after. Aha, I thought, a small light dawning: that is why at my health club in Park City I recently saw a sign reading,

“VISITORS MUST WEAR BATHING SUITS IN THE SAUNA.”

Some poor unsuspecting Russian (Eastern European, etc.) must have walked in wearing only a birthday suit.

She loved soaking in the tub. Afterwards she got out and stamped her feet in the snow.

“This bring good health.”

Conversing together became slightly easier toward the end of our trip. I learned that while Tamara and her family lack some of our material goods, they are rich in love and food. Families remain close there, supporting one another always. When the old wooden fence around her dacha fell down, her son and his friends spent a weekend there putting up a new metal one. Her living arrangements with her daughter seem to work quite well, despite their small space, and her daughter’s family is building a home where Tamara will have her own bedroom. It is different there, though: she showed me pictures of the house in its present state. The family works on it as their money and time allow; they are not taking out a mortgage from the bank so that they can have the house NOW.  Her twelve-year-old grandson’s greatest joy comes from his music. He is in a band where players play traditional Russian instruments. She showed me a picture of this large group: it looked like something from the Fifties here. All the members were wearing folk costumes. They are raising money to go to a band competition in Estonia. Somehow this seems like a better choice than being immersed in social media here as many (though not all) teens are here. I think in general Russians are more innocent than we are.

But it is easy to make these worn comparisons. The truth is much more complex.

Tamara would not say anything negative against Putin when we asked her.

“He is a very clever men, but the people around him are not clever.”

Maybe that’s a holdover from the Soviet period, not criticizing leaders. She did tell us that she can’t understand why so many Russian people are still so poor, as the country is very wealthy in agricultural and mineral resources. I suspect it is because Russia went from feudal to modern times, skipping the Renaissance and Enlightenment ages that did so much to grow the middle class in the West. My attempts to ask her about that, though, were futile, so we went back to talking about our respective grandchildren. That’s universal.

I envy her her geographically close family and her personal strength, surviving as a widow for over a decade. She has been remarkably successful in what is, in Russia as here, a male-dominated profession. She laughs about this. When she went to a conference in Poland, she was the only professor who did not have to share a room with someone else.  That was because she was the only woman there. I know from my semester teaching in Bulgaria that professors in the Eastern bloc have very low salaries and heavy workloads, so this Fulbright grant has provided a wonderful opportunity for her to do nothing but her research. I discovered that her sponsoring American professor has not even met with her yet, but as I had the same experience in Montenegro I was not surprised. With her ever positive spirit, she has seized this chance and works constantly on her project.  While I could not always read her face, I found her to be very warm. She always stood very close to me, smiling.

I was exhausted by the end of our trip, probably because of the effort it took to explain things, but I found learning about her world fascinating. I did not have to come home and hide in the crawl space under our house; Russia is no longer “other.”

A very happy New Year to all.