Могилы и конторы

Okay, this is going to be a long post, because I have a lot of ground to cover. Here goes!

To begin with, another joke-- this one from the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda:

A team of scientists from Harvard University working with lab mice have published a new study, in which they have demonstrated that lab mice live longer without the interference of teams of scientists from Harvard University.

And this is for those of you who know a little Russian:

A man walks into a travel agency.
"Two tickets to Dublin."
"Kuda blin?"
"Tuda blin!"

Also, before I begin this week's account, I would like to inaugurate a new feature of my narrative. I will preface this new addition by saying that Moscow is a diverse city, as diverse as it gets in Russia: there are plenty of East Asians, Central Asians, Caucasians (i.e. from the Caucasus region, not white people, dummy), even a few black people here and there. But there is a conspicuous paucity of one ethnic group: the Indians. You can thus imagine my secret delight whenever I see one of my own, traveling in a little Desi pack on the street, or smelling up the metro-- such that I have begun to keep a mental tally of how many times this rare treat of a thing happens.

The Brown Count thus far: 13.

Now on to events. As of the last posting, I was in the midst of the internship search and classes. Classes remain interesting; the internship has already started. More on both of these themes in a second.

Here in Moscow, we have just emerged from a week of hellish, record-breaking heat. Now when I say hellish and record-breaking, I mean low 90s and dry, which for the average Californian is quite literally no sweat-- or at least, not very much sweat, provided physical activity is confined to mornings and evenings. But in Moscow, people don't know how to cope. Alcoholics are weeping openly, bears are walking the streets in search of food, the Red October chocolate factory has literally melted, and the police have started returning people's bribes to them.

Okay, well it's not that bad/ awesome, but it's still pretty bad. Essentially no building in Moscow has air-conditioning, including our apartment. As a result, in low-ceilinged, poorly-ventilated rooms, it turns into an absolute furnace. You could fry an egg on the Khrushchev-era parquet floors. By evening, it's hotter inside than out, and I have often taken to taking a book to read on the lawns of Ukrainsky Bulvar to escape the heat indoors. Add to all this the fact that nobody owns shorts, and the fact that everybody thinks cold drinks will give you angina, and you will understand why O. keeps saying, "we're in Death Valley! We're in Death Valley!"

Despite the oppressive heat, I've done a lot of cool things lately. Last week, I saw Chekhov's The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theatre, which, if you took Study of Theatre at Harker, you may remember as the place where the great Stanislavsky basically founded modern acting a century ago. It's a lovely place, and the play was, as far as I know, excellent, but since my comprehension of the 19th-century Russian script was maybe 15%, they could have been doing Artaud for all I know (Artaud is a very, very different playwright, for you uncultured swine out there). I could, however, tell that this production was better than the one I saw at the ART in Cambridge in early 2009, because here, people were laughing from time to time, while in Cambridge, the only emotion that most people felt was the desire to vomit.

On Friday, I did some nice, healthy nothing. I tried, but failed, to withdraw dollars to pay rent for my family, now technically 2 weeks overdue. In the evening, we simply watched the World Cup. On Saturday, however, we had a morning tour of the Tretyakovsky Gallery, the premier museum of Russian art in the world, which was rather interesting, although I have frankly had my life's fill of Kievan-Rus-era iconography (that's not a code, Mummy). After a surprisingly delicious and cheap meal at the Tretyakovsky Cafe, several of us, including the omnipresent teacher Sasha, decided to undertake an adventure to Novodevichy Convent.

The convent itself is cool; it was built in the 15th-16th century, and it frequently served as the destination of exile for the uppity wives/ daughters/ sisters of insecure tsars; we spent a good 2 hours walking around the grounds and exploring the various buildings and artifacts to be found there. But far more interesting still is Novodevichy Cemetery, where basically every famous Russian EVER is buried. Among the illustrious to whose gravesights we payed homage were Boris Yeltsin, Nikita Khrushchev, author Mikhail Bulgakov, writer Anton Chekhov, director Konstantin Stanislavsky, poet Zabolotsky, poet Mayakovsky, film director Sergei Eisenstein, cosmonaut Gherman Titov, composer Skriabin, composer Shostakovich, composer Prokofiev, plane-guy Tupolev, communist Anastas Mikoyan, communist Lazar Kaganovich, communist Vladimir Molotov (of Molotov-Ribbentrop and Molotov cocktail fame), wife of dictator Nadezhda Alliluyeva-Stalina, and Soviet-anthem-lyricist Sergei Mikhalkov (also, inexplicably but perhaps uncoincidentally, a popular children's poet).

Interestingly, we arrived at the Cemetery 45 minutes after closing time; a good old 300-ruble bribe from Sasha did the trick. Anyway, the whole day combined kept me away from home from 9:30 AM to 10 PM, so Sunday was a bit quieter. In the morning, we had yet another tour, this time to the Kremlin, and this time in Russian. Unhappily, one of our fellow students, a poor Georgia Tech child of Indian extraction whom I will call Kostya, decided to join the Russian-language tour, while in fact knowing essentially no Russia, and even less, appallingly, of Russian history and culture. In his shoes, I would shut up and listen patiently, but he unceasingly would ask for the definition of words that ended up meaning things like "three." I doff my hat to the extremely patient tour guide, who had the generosity of character not to kill him.

Nonetheless, it was an interesting tour-- although they hardly let you into the government buildings, which is disappointing. Instead, you see the fine 15th-century churches on the grounds-- most of which were built by Italian rennaissance architects (cheaters). Therein, there were more graves (!), although Ivan the Terrible's is behind a partition that is not open to the public. Sadtimes. Afterward, we munched on ice cream on the park in the Kremlin, and made fun of the English-language tour guide from the previous week (the one who fought with the great Victor the driver), who had legitimately asked us if we had ever heard of the Great Patriotic War, the Russians' name for WWII.

We all laughed except Kostya, who evidently had not.

Then on Monday, my internship at the Slavic Center for Law and Justice began. The SCLJ is a law firm that focuses on cases relating to human rights, and particularly religious freedom rights. Scarily, it's affiliated with Pat Robertson, but their work is very legitimate, as far as I can tell. I'm working for a pretty cool young guy, who another Harvard dude worked for a couple years ago; he says he is the real thing, and that the internship involves good work. So far, I've helped him on a project in which he is supposed to offer suggestions to the Bar Association of Moscow (or whatever it is) to improve their lawyer examination process; and in finding summaries of European Court of Human Rights cases/ rulings/ execution reports.

Speaking of which, if you know anybody who practices law in Canada, the UK, Australia, or New Zealand, let me know.

Today, there was a cool round table of various academics, religious officials, and lawyers at the SCLJ, where they all compared notes about how to fight for religious rights in Russian courts. I was particularly struck by one vein of conversation: whether Russian courts are bad because people are incompetent, or because they are not independent. As my boss told me afterward, it's a mixture of both, in his experiences. The fact is, Russian judges are all directly appointed by the President, and their ratification by the State Duma (parliament) is basically a rubber-stamp process. Thus, competent or not (and many clearly are not), they all know where the buck stops, and it's not with them. My boss also added that comparing American and Russian courts is like comparing a human with a chimpanzee.

I assume that he was commenting on the evolutionary relationship between the human and the chimpanzee brains. Maybe, though, he was being really deep, and commenting about the long arms of the Russian law, which nonetheless cannot walk properly upright, due to its stunted and underutilized nature, more suited to clinging to the tree on which it suckled than to treading freely on the bold plains of justice. Then again, maybe not.

This week in class has been ho-hum, but the last couple of days we have been learning some Russian black humor, of the "malen'ky mal'chik..." ("little boy...") variety. Here is a sample (my free translation):

Boy's in the kitchen, his cutlets are frying;
In the next room, legless, father is crying.

Well, that's mostly all for now. Today, I finally got the money for my host family, which was a relief, and ate delicious, delicious syrniki, or cottage-cheesish pancakes with jam. I think V. Jr., who is currently strolling with wife and son, is drunk again. I was going to talk a bit about the Russian soul-- about which I have a lot of deep and poetic thoughts-- but I will leave that for another time. But there is news! Tomorrow, I fly to Slovenia, to join my friend Jan and the Harvard Din and Tonics! Jan has set up a stop for the Dins there, and since I'm the mutual connection, I figure I would be stupid not to show. Excitement!

With that, I must depart, but I will leave you with this final video. I hope I could say that it was in jest, but it's completely serious. I will let Petr Nalich (Cosmo Kramer? Borat Sagdiyev?) speak for himself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOzkN8dHnjk