I had been living my whole life in pursuit of something that would blow my mind. And I had burned through some prefatory material—skateboarding, drugs, Bukowksi, grad school—when I stumbled across the short story “The Nose” by Nikolai Gogol.
In the story, a bureaucrat named Kovalyov wakes up one morning without his nose, just a smooth, flat patch of skin where the nose should be. He pursues it around St. Petersburg, but the nose has grown considerably and attained a higher rank than Kovalyov himself—giving it (though “it” seems to be a “him” by that point) the right to flat-out refuse a return to the face of the lowly clerk. Across town, a barber finds a nose that he recognizes as Kovalyov’s in a loaf of bread and tries to covertly dispose of it in the Moika canal, but he’s apprehended by a policeman … That’s just the beginning.
Looking back, I realize that I was primed in a certain sense by that story. That I would one day travel to Russia and become enthralled by the country was foretold from the moment I read it. I had never read anything like it. Not much is explained in “The Nose”—neither how the nose disappeared from Kovalyov’s face, nor how the nose grew to such proportions and reached its elevated rank, nor how it appeared in the barber’s loaf of bread—and even now I’m as taken and flummoxed by it as I ever was. And I’m as taken and flummoxed by Russia as I ever was. My reaction to the story and my reaction to the Russia that it led me to were one and the same.
I used my last student loan to pay for the trip. As far as I recall, my reasons were threefold—two literary and one personal. I wanted to see the place where “The Nose” was set, and I wanted to meet the Russian writer Victor Pelevin, who was going to be a guest at the writers’ festival. I would also travel to Siberia to meet my then-girlfriend Yulia’s parents and see the city she was from.
I had grown up in north Florida (an area of the United States sometimes referred to as the Redneck Riviera) on a dirt road once known as Old Pig Trail. No one around me was particularly tuned in politically. It was the Reagan era, the waning days of the Cold War, and I didn’t pay much attention to anything. Occasionally we had drills in elementary school that did double duty as both hurricane and nuclear attack preparation. After seeing the movie The Day After, which solidified in me the understanding that Russians were my enemy, I asked my mom if we could put in a below-ground fallout shelter, and I remember experiencing no small amount of anxiety when she explained to me that in Florida the aquifer was too high for any below-ground fallout shelter. The Berlin Wall fell during my junior year of high school, but I don’t even remember it. I started working in restaurants as soon as I turned sixteen, and went to college in Gainesville, where I majored in journalism and served time as an inept cub reporter before lucking into a creative writing program that offered to pay me a very small amount of money to write for three years. Upstate New York might as well have been New York City when I left Gainesville for Syracuse in my ‘84 Volkswagen Vanagon. There I read Gogol and first got an inkling about Russia. Just a few years later, I used that last student loan cheque to pay my way to St. Petersburg.
And under the category of mind-blowing, Russia was the best thing going. The first time I turned from Kazanskaya onto the Nevsky Prospekt sidewalk at midday, I could not find a way to move through the chaotically shifting wall of people. Russians observed neither the right-left directional rules nor any other peripatetic conventions, and I was shoulder-, elbow-, hip-, and knee-checked before I’d gone half a block to the Subway restaurant I was aiming for. I liked to think that I knew and understood some things, yet here I didn’t even understand how to walk down the sidewalk.
Being in Russia was like downloading a new operating system for my brain, or like being on acid: everything was recognizable and familiar on one level, but strange and unpredictable on the other. I wandered in a kind of fairy-tale fugue, unable to read or understand anything, relying on nuance and detail. I might as well have been pursuing my own nose around the city.
One thing was clear: I wanted to figure out everything there was to know about it. I wanted to understand the explicit things, such as how to read Cyrillic and speak Russian, and especially how to curse properly in the Russian slang dialect known as mat. And I wanted to learn the more nuanced things. I wanted to learn how to hit that counterintuitive Russian billiards shot in which you carom the cue ball into the pocket off another ball. I wanted to learn the special banya birch-branch beating technique that Igor had learned from his uncle. I wanted to learn how to walk down the sidewalk and how to stand in line, the great twentieth-century Russian tradition.
In this quest of sorts, I read countless books on Russian culture—many of them interesting and enlightening, many of them not. Yet between the interesting and enlightening and my experience of the place, there was a massive cognitive gap: none of those books—even those that seemed to be getting it right—depicted the world I saw in front of my face.
At some point, I stumbled across a travel and photo book by John Steinbeck and Robert Capa chronicling their trip to Russia in 1948, entitled A Russian Journal. “It occurred to us that there were some things that nobody wrote about Russia,” Steinbeck wrote, “and they were the things that interested us most of all … What do people wear there? What do they serve at dinner? Do they have parties? What food is there? How do they make love and how do they die?”
Unfortunately, theirs is not a great Russia book. As they travelled across the former Soviet Union, escorted to one formal dinner after another—most seemingly staged by Stalin’s handlers—Steinbeck wrote more about Capa’s bathroom habits than about what life was like for the country’s citizens. But it seemed to me their intentions were noble. The dominant Western idea of Russia pegs it as the land of the gulags or a place where bears roam the streets. Every Russia story tends to fall into the stereotype of Russians are crazy! or Russians are scary! Once you’d spent time there, you could feel that these stereotypes were inadequate, but it was harder to say what it was about the place that made it so singular, that had fascinated centuries of Westerners, that had defined us in the West by being the opposite of whatever idea we had of ourselves. If you hoped to peel back the opaque layer of foreignness that cloaked the place, the questions that Steinbeck had asked fifty years ago were the types of questions you had to try to answer.
The writing festival hired me to do some work in exchange for free annual trips, and I returned every summer (as well as a few winters) after that. I spent two, three, four months there every year, and somehow, over time, that surreality became my reality. The however-many months I spent back home were like the temporary, irrelevant period of my year. I moved from Syracuse to New York City to Phoenix to LA to Columbus, Ohio, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then to Toronto in 2007. All that moving might seem chaotic, but it didn’t faze me because, I think, my mind was somewhere else. It was set on and in the white nights of St. Petersburg.
After the writers’ festival was cancelled in 2008, I returned for even longer stretches. The one life philosophy that I felt I could stand by was to move toward what interests you. And Russia drew me; it would not let up.
And gradually I began, in a weird way, to feel more at home on the streets of St. Petersburg than I did walking down Central Avenue in St. Petersburg, Florida, or on Old Pig Trail when I visited my parents, or on the Danforth in the east end of Toronto, where I lived.
Then there was Igor. Despite my hunch that I’d never hear from him again after that night at the Panda pool hall, he called and invited me to the Russian banya (bathhouse), and I went.
We didn’t have much in common beyond the fact that we liked to play pool and we both spent chunks of our lives working in restaurants. (I wrote a novel, a glorified soap opera, about restaurant workers in Florida, and after Igor read it, he nodded his head and assured me: “The exact same shit happens in our restaurants, man. Exactly the same.”) Growing up, neither of us had known our biological fathers. And though I’m a few years older than him, when we were kids, we were both terrified—he of Americans, me of Russians. I pictured Russians as the evil, vodka-swilling brutes we see in the movies. He pictured Americans as privileged, overweight fakes exploiting the world to their advantage in the name of freedom and justice for all.
But that first trip to the banya together put us on the level.
From then on, when I tired of hanging around with artists, intellectuals, and writers at the literary festival, I hung out with Igor at the nearby café where he worked as a barman, and he made for a fine antidote to hanging out with artists, intellectuals, and writers. Igor and I went fishing and played paintball and camped and drank at the Russian banya, talking for hours and sweating our asses off.
In the summer of 2008, I came to Russia intending to write a book about the country’s resurgence as a major global superpower under president and then prime minister (and now president again) Vladimir Putin, about the emergence, for maybe the first time in history, of a Russian middle class, and about the sacrifices that had been made. But before that summer ended, Russia was locked in armed conflict with Georgia—its first proxy brouhaha with the West, which backed Georgia, since the fall of the Soviet Union—and soon afterward, the entire world plummeted into the global economic crisis started in the United States.
By the time I returned in the summer of 2009, the storyline of Russian resurgence had fuzzed out. And the crisis, which looked bad enough in the West, looked even worse in Russia, where stability was more recent, more fragile. Would this crisis end like the crisis of 1998? With a major currency devaluation that wiped out the nation’s collective life savings overnight? With the stores emptied of food? Or would the price of oil stabilize and the treasury’s foreign currency reserves hold, allowing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to save the day and paving the way for his return to the presidency in 2012?
The more I sought answers, the more the questions kept coming:
What was Russia? How did it work? How did people live? How could they eat kholodets (meat gelatin)? Did love mean something different to them than it meant to us? Why did so many women leave the country to marry strangers? What good did it do them to know Pushkin by heart? Where did their collective stoicism come from? Why did the police keep robbing me? Were their soldiers’ sacrifices honoured when they returned from Chechnya? How did they live and die? Was it true, as a friend from Moscow had told me, that Russians flourish in times of crisis?
While we take stability for granted in the West, this crisis was different. Major global financial corporations were failing. In the United States, whole cities were going bankrupt. And people across the States and Canada and Europe were shaken.
For Igor, the past twenty years—most of his life—had been a steady series of crises. “In Russia,” Igor told me, “everyone knows that tomorrow all the rules may change.” I had been wondering about the story of Russia today and asking all these questions, and before I even realized it, Igor began answering them for me.
In 2008, Igor was twenty-nine years old, which was, at the time, exactly middle-aged for Russian men, for whom the average life expectancy was fifty-eight. (It has since gone up to sixty-two.)
He spent his early years in the Soviet Union as a Young Pioneer (think Leninist Cub Scouts) and came of age in a country called the Russian Federation, a supposed capitalist democracy, during the Wild West nineties. He grew up at the centre of maybe the most wrenching socio-political transformation of the twentieth century. Throughout his life, the rules kept being changed on him. He kept having the socio-economic rug pulled out from under his feet. He tried out all the possibilities perestroika had to offer him, and as he approached thirty he was working as a manager who doubled as barman in a downtown St. Petersburg café.
But the crisis took care of that. By the time I arrived in St. Petersburg in the summer of 2009, Igor was among the 10 percent of the country unemployed, with little to no prospects.
Complicating matters, my wife had just asked for a separation and my own life had been thrown into limbo. As Igor’s world—his job, his relationship, his belief and pride in himself and his country—fell apart, I became, in a weird way, caught up in the collapse. Beyond the fact that Russia continued to compel and flummox me—to be a place where I felt more alive than anywhere else—I didn’t know what I was doing there.
On a lark, Igor and I lit off together, first to the Russian resort town Gelendzhik in the south and then to Lake Baikal in Siberia, on a tear of downshifting across a country in crisis.
It’s said that a story always involves either a stranger who comes to town or a person who goes on a journey—which, if you think about it, is the same story from different perspectives. All right. So it starts like this: Once upon a time, two strangers came to town and went on a journey …