In any case, I felt much more rested when I finally got up at around eight, and stumbled into the tiny bathroom for my shower. After getting myself all cleaned up, I enjoyed the breakfast Tamara had prepared for me. This time is was a plate of some sort of steamed dumplings, and she demonstrated to me that I was supposed to smear them with sour cream. Yummy!
After breakfast, I had about an hour before Tanya and Sveta were going to pick me up, so I thought I’d try to connect to the Net and check my e-mail. I mimed to Tamara what I was planning to do, and though she clearly had no idea what I was up to other than disconnecting her phone and hooking up a rat’s nest of wires to her plugs, she hesitantly motioned me to go ahead.
St. Petersburg has two dialup numbers for Compu-Serve, but both are on alternate networks, SprintNet, and Equant. The SprintNet number only goes up to 2400 baud, so I gave the Equant 28800 number a try first. Everything seemed to be going well; I got the phone on the other end to answer, but when I began typing in the sequence of codes which was supposed to route me over to the CompuServe network, nothing happened. Even when I lowered the baud rate, the damn thing just wouldn’t respond.
So I lowered the baud rate down to 2400 baud and tried the SprintNet number. This time I was successful in making a good connection, but I had loaded up my full address list in the “To:” field, and the e-mail software just choked. I guess the problem with too many addresses is a real one, and not just some temporary aberration. By the time I got this non-response, though, time was short and I had to get ready to go. I resolved to try again later in the evening.
At ten fifteen sharp, Tanya and Sveta showed up and drove me over to the Hermitage. Tanya pulled up to the museum and as Sveta and I stepped out, she reminded me to be ready to be picked up again at 11 o’clock tonight for the drive to the train station.
The Hermitage
Sveta and I entered the museum and began ascending the stairs up to the second floor, where the heart (as well as spleen, liver and kidneys) of the exhibits are. She led me from room to room, explaining the history, furnishings, decorations, and the paintings that were hanging from the walls and partitions. Some rooms were more remarkable for the sumptuousness of the decor, which began at excessive and went up from there. These rooms were mostly in the section of the museum housed in the Winter Palace. Others, while plain, comparatively speaking, contained priceless works of art by many of big guys I should have been able to remember from art history class. I saw paintings by Rembrandt, Breughel, and many other of their Flemish sidekicks; Titian, Botticelli, Da Vinci, and too many other renaissance and seventeenth and eighteenth century artists to mention. And this was only on one floor of the museum.
Upstairs was a collection of Van Gogh, Cezanne, Rousseau, Sisley, Coirot, Kandinsky and other Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists, including a wealth of Rodin sculptures, and a huge number of works by Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse. In fact, Sveta informed me that the Hermitage houses the largest collection of Matisse paintings in the world, and only a fraction are on display at any one time.
Also on the third floor was the exhibit of art stolen (or taken as reparation, as the Russians prefer) from the Germans at the end of the Great Patriotic War—or World War Two, as we prefer. These paintings had been hidden in the basement of the Hermitage, and were a carefully guarded secret until they were first put on display seven years ago. The Germans are trying to get them all back, but I don’t think the Russians are likely to budge on this issue. Even Sveta, who seems a thoroughly westernized and liberal person, said she saw no reason to send them back. “The Germans tried to wipe out this country, and destroyed a great many works of Russian art. They don’t deserve them back!”
But the exhibit taken as a whole was an overwhelming amount of stuff for just one day, so after Sveta left me at one o’clock, I returned to the sections I really wanted to give some time to; mostly the third floor exhibits, and spent the rest of the afternoon just marveling at the excellence and quantity of the works on display. I could have spent three days in there, and still not done it all justice. I didn’t even bother going to see the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian stuff on the first floor, and just barely skimmed the surface of the Scythian and Mongol exhibits—tossing them in like a Ginsu paring knife just because I am planning to travel to those areas in the coming weeks.
The only other museum I’ve been to that rivals this collection is in the Louvre, and I’d be hard pressed to say that one is better than the other. On second thought, the Hermitage is like the Louvre if it were housed at Versailles, so I think I’d have to give the nod to the Hermitage. I was fairly blown away.
But by four o’clock my art circuits were overloaded, so I left the museum and wandered over the bridge across the Neva to take some pictures looking back at the Winter Palace, and then began my long stroll up the Nevsky Prospekt towards my apartment.
General Staff Building on Palace Square
Nevsky Prospekt is sort of like the Fifth Avenue of St. Petersburg, a bustling, crowded, commercial thoroughfare that is lined with swank hotels and upscale shops. In the ten years since Gorbachev began perestroika, this wide avenue has become Capitalism Central. Huge advertising billboards for Marlboro, Camel and Sony rise from the tops of the old, ornate buildings, and it seems that every square inch of vertical space has some sort of advertisement for anything from soap to sex on it. Or sexy soap (soapy sex?), I wasn’t sure.
There are some really great ads here for a pre-mixed drink that comes in a can, called “Booze.” (And they think we Americans are the unimaginative barbarians!) It’s an entrepreneurial free-for-all. If someone were to try to turn back the clock and crank up the worker’s paradise again, they’d spent ten years just removing all the Madison Avenue kitsch from this street alone.
But turning back the clock seems unlikely. The only evidence I’ve seen that this once was a communist state are the large number of militsia loitering about, and the aging pensioners peddling their possessions on street corners. Though almost everyone I’ve seen here appears to be faring pretty well under the new regime, these pensioners seem to be the “collateral damage” of the rush toward the market economy.
At one point while we were wandering through the exhibits this morning, I asked Sveta if she held high hopes for the future. She drew in her breath and looked at the ceiling as if wrestling for the right words. Finally she said, “I have to, I have a daughter.” But she added, “It makes me sad that the old people are the ones who are suffering so right now. They grew up knowing that the state would always provide for them, and now they are alone and don’t know what to do. And the Mafia and "the 'new Russians' control everything, and they are not good people.”
I didn’t know what to say. All that American blather about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps would be just a cruel insult to those old, helpless people who sold their boots long ago