Моя Россия - My Russia

Last week, I reconnected with two colleagues from my first stint in Russia. We recalled the old days during an elegant wedding in Washington DC, far from the time and place of our early post-soviet privations. It was great fun, and great to see friends with whom reminiscence of common experiences is but one facet of our relationship.

Sean is among the better read people you could ever hope to meet, and perhaps as a result, he has an excellent facility with the language of emotion. He wrote me an email the other day that eloquently describes the allure of Russia. It floored me for being so evocative and accurate at the same time. I couldn't possibly paraphrase, improve, or otherwise capture his words.

So here they are.

After reading your blog, seeing your photo books, and hearing your stories I have a great yearning to go back, see it all again, take that train. Russia is just such a deep and transformative experience. There is something about the sight of a church, topped with onion domes on the edge of a field, the land stretching away beyond it. This is not just beautiful, but somehow, knowing that that stretch of land goes on and on into Asia and the Pacific, the small church seems all the more profound a statement of beauty, history, and human and divine aspirations.

Even the most beautiful churches and buildings in Western Europe lack that character of immense presence, which even the smallest of those Russian churches has, a presence that can only come from the history of human striving upon such a vast, harsh land and against such a brutal history.

Well, now, whatever else you do, you've made some part of that yours. That is something; more than most people ever do. There are a few lines from an early poem of Rilke's which I know well because they were in a book Tom had in Kalininigrad (Selected Poems of Ranier Maria Rilke translated by Robert Bly), and I copied them into my journal. They are the lines which open the poem:

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

He wrote those after visiting Russia at the turn of the last century -- it was one to the great influences on his life. I think only a foreigner who truly experiences Russia can appreciate those lines and the almost indescribable lure of the place.