Churches as Projections of Power: Bergamo and St. Petersburg

I like to visit European cathedrals, basilicas and such-like for the art and architecture but they are also great studies in social order and in particular, the projection of power. Here are some recent notes:

One, Bergamo, in the foothills of the Italian Alps, near Milan. There's a cathedral here, the Duomo di Bergamo, a presentable if not electrifying pile, with a somewhat forgettable Tiepolo in he apse. But what makes it interesting is that right cheek by jowl is another church--Santa Maria Maggiore, which you could easily mistake for the Cathedral, were it not that the Cathedral is right next door. I really didn't get the story straight. One remembers the old joke about "that's the church whose doorstep I will not cross, so help me God!" But I get the impression that the explanation here may be even simpler than that: some sort of town-down dustup, in permanent truce, never quite resolved. The fun part is that the "other" church, though not a Cathedral, does seem to have some sort of "bishop's door" in the (east?) wall. The catch is that it appears to be 16 feet off the ground, with no stairway. One can only wonder how many bishops they lost before they figured that one out.

[Bergamo, by the way, is the birthplace and last resting place of Gaetano Donizetti. But if the Verdi industry is all over Verdi's natal turf, the Donizetti industry is almost nonexistent. On the other hand, I suppose going home to die crazed with syphilis at the age of 50 is not exactly what the guys down in publicity were hoping for.]

But more about churches: St Petersburg, i.e., Russia, where I note three. There is first of all St. Isaac's Cathedral, right there in tourist central, just down the street from the Hermitage. It's not exactly awful but it is a grey, gloomy lowering 19th-Century hulk that seems capable of sucking the fun out of any party (back in the 70s, I climbed the steps to the observation deck and greeted the 16-stone babushka whose job was to stand up there all day--in any weather, I assume--to warn you not to take pictures of the navy yard across the river).

Second, Kazan Cathedral, not that many blocks down Nevsky Prospect (and why does one city get two cathedrals?). It is even larger than St Isaac's and, if anything, even more grey and menacing--these Russian autocrats didn't want you to think of churches as having anything to do with fun.

But third and most interesting, just a short way from the Kazan Cathedral, is the Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood, and this one is the one that looks most like what a tourist would expect: onion domes and bright colors. You could easily take it for an ancient foundation but no: work was begun in 1883 and completed only in 19o7. Another oddity: it seems to have been built in the middle of the street, or canal or both.

What's going on here? The answer is that it was built on the very spot (so they say) where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. So: it was commissioned almost immediately after the assassination, under an injunction that the architects stick to a traditional Russian design. The dynasty, of course, stayed in power until 1917, and if that isn't church isn't a projection of power, why I don't know.

[It languished, of course, in Soviet times, but later went through a massive overhaul; it was reopenened again in 1997. The walls are covered with mosaics that are, granted, marvels of craftsmanship, although the pictures end up looking a lot like the ones in my Classics Comics when I was a kid.]

Screwups as a National Mythology

I know: stuff happens anywhere. But is any nation more defined than Russia by mistakes, screwups, instances of vain foolishness?

Take for example St. Isaac's Cathedral, the showcase of Orthdoxy just a grenade's throw from the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. There was a competition for the design. There was a competition for the design. Apparently everyone agreed that the winner was not remotely competent to the job. But he pleased Tsar Alexander I and that was the end of it. The Cathedral was 40 years in the building, not least because the architect had to keep hollering for help.

More serious, perhaps, is the doom of the impulse to political liberalism in the failed Dekabrist Revolution of 1825. The rebels--actually a clique of well-connected young army officers--hoped to force the Senate to mandate constitutional republic. The uprising degenerated into a Ruritanian farce, comical except that the leaders were hanged and many others exiled to Siberia (common soldiers, who probably had no idea why they were called to duty, were forced to run the gauntlet).

Perhaps the most grotesquely comic of all is the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The first bomb fizzled; Alexander's protectors attempted to vacate the area but the Tsar insisted to stop to berate the failed assassin; a second bomb blew him to kingdom come.

There is also story about the killing of Rasputin, the evil genius of the tsarist court, in 1916. According to the assassins, Rasputin was an unconscionable time a-dying; first they poisoned him, then they shot him, then they shoved him under the ice. Apparently more careful research has discredited the standard version; I wonder how many ordinary Russians cling to the old view.

Oh, and did I mention that they buried Gogol alive, i.e., by mistake? Or maybe they didn't; either way, there is a mistake in the story and my point holds.

Looking for the Universal Language Again

I don't speak any Russian but I can decode the alphabet and so I have been able to entertain myself these past few days in Russia (as I did in Poland) looking for cognates. One point that caught my mind: if you look back to the 19th Century, you pick up a lot of words that spread from French into a universal tourist language. Granted, the Tsarist elite spoke French as a first language. But I bet you'll find a lot of these examples in other places as well. That is, every old hotel has a sal de this and that—perhaps serving as meeting rooms on the premier etage. At the theater, you may leave your coat in a garderobe and occupy a box in a parter. And I guess words like salon and concierge aren't even borrowings any more: they are simply English (was it Wallace Stevens who said that all French words are English—some we put in italics, others not—?).

Meanwhile, as I continue my transcontinental quest for for easy cognates, I see that the Flemings and the Walloons are ripping themselves to shreds over just this issue. Indeed it looks to me like the Flemings arre turning just as lingo-cranky as the Parisian French were under DeGaulle (sic, but are not, in my experience, today).

And another related note: Mrs. B reports that per Michael Pollen, any food that has the same name in every country (Cheetos, Big Mac)--is not food.

Gergiev and the Mariinsky

We saw a couple of operas at the Mariinsky theater in St. Petersburg last week. Both had their excellences, but I think the real story is not so much the operas themselves as the director, Valery Gergiev, who seems to be trying to put—and succeeding in putting—this venerable venue back on the map

For my taste, the more successful of the two was Duke Bluebeard's Castle—it would have been better titled Don't Go There—that Béla Bartók presented (if you can believe it) as a wedding present to his bride. I'd never seen it it live before, although I had seen a splendid (I suppose definitional) presentation by Solti with Hungarian singers on DVD.

You know the story: the bride wants Bluebeard to show her what is behind the doors: he tells her she'll regret it; she insists, and sure enough she regrets it. Willard White's Bluebeard was austere and remote, which worked. Elena Zhidkova as his bride was kittenish, which didn't seem to work so well. The the staging was a bit occult; Mrs. B. said she read it as a history of Russia which didn't sound like a bad guess.

But what made it was the orchestra: so far as I could discern there was simply no nuance of the score left unexplored. This has got to mean first-class conducting, which is to say Gergiev himself, who is also General Director and Artistic Director of the whole Mariinsky operation.

The other Mariinsky offering was Strauss' Die Frau ohne Schatten, The Woman without a Shadow, another that I had seen before only on DVD. This one was a bit less satisfactory, It's two parallel stories—one supernatural, one earthbound. And it was almost as if two different directors did the two different segments. The earthbound story was alive and full of energy, with so much emotional nuance you could almost follow the plot without a scorecard. The supernatural was vaporous—and the costumes appeared so heavy that you had to wonder how the singers dragged them around. The overall effect was Wagnerian and I do not mean that in a nice way. With only one prior viewing, I really don't know the opera well enough to venture whether the culprit is the current production or Strauss himself.

But once again, the sound from the pit was just superb. Strauss for me has taken some getting used to; not long ago I found him a chore (and indeed, I suspect he would not be a good place for a beginner to start his operatic inquiries). Still, sound like this makes you understand how wonderful the possibilities are. Gergiev's the man, and while you can see him a lot of places, the Mariinsky is the first place.

Men: A Footnote

I've said before that if a guy reaches my age, he spends more and more time among women who have forgotten what it was they ever saw in men. Here's an instance: coming home from the opera the other night, a woman in our crowd said “let's have one more drink!” We settled in at the hotel bar: without blink the initiator popped for a $245 bottle of champagne which, you will have to agree, is a fine way to make friends.

But I fairly quickly realized that I was alone among three women. And almost as quickly, that I was playing out the script for a lost episode of Sex and the City. Not being able to decide whether I was Carrie or Miranda, I wordlessly slipped away from the table; I went for a lovely walk in the St. Petersburg White Nights, and thence to bed. The party, I am told, went on for another couple of hours. I don't think anyone missed me.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Mikhailovsky

My friend Grethe found herself with a couple of spare tickets to unload the other night for a performance of Eugene Onegin at the Mikhailovsky Theater in St. Petersburg. So she took her place on the hawker's platform to try to cut her losses, A few minutes later, she joined the party inside; she was all wreathed in smiles. She said she'd spotted a young couple to all appearances too poor for this sort of high life. She decided—what the heck, and let the kids buy the tickets for just $5 each. Grethe is a kind-hearted sort and it was clear that she was pleased to have had the chance to brighten a couple of lives.

Midway through the first act (as she recounted later), Grethe had second thoughts: she decided she didn't need the $5 bills and she resolved to seek the couple out and to give back their money. At the interval, she went looking for them and—surprise! In the seats were two perfect strangers. Evidently the objects of Grethe's bounty had decided that the utility-maximizing deployment of the benefaction was to sell the tickets up market and to pocket the swag.

Welcome to the sometimes unfamiliar world of Russian opera. The performance was, as I say, Tchaikovski's Eugene Onegin—the work of a Russian composer, based on the poem by the Russian poet, performed in Russian before a mostly Russian audience. I want to say “and you can hardly get any more Russian than that. In fact, I gather that there is room for debate among Russians themselves as exactly how well the composer captures the “true Russian-ness” of his poetic precursor. As it happens, I did read the poem once, but in a translation so enjoyable I suspect it was probably unfaithful to the original, so a question of this sort is best understood as above my pay grade.

But whatever the verdict on ethnic purity, the matter of ethnic purity, still it was an opportunity not to be missed and in the end, well requited. Actually, T has never quite floated my boat but the music is nothing if not listenable and the story flows along with an effortless ease. Mrs B. points out shrewdly that he is at his best at the dance scenes, suggesting that his real metier is not opera but ballet, And as to ethnic flavor: I can swear I could hear some unfamiliar, i.e., non-Western, sounds, not just in the peasant choruses (where you hear them even in non-Russian performances) but in some of the arias themselves.

And I'd say the theatre is a bit of a story itself. In the Soviet days they used to use it as a venue for cheap and second-rate productions of war horses like Swan Lake for consumption by gullible tourists. Nothing about EO deserved the characterization of “second rate,” and in any event, the audience was mostly something other than tourists.

As we left, we got a last look the unknown and unknowing beneficiaries of Grethe's bounty. “I better check the $5 bills,” Grethe said. “They might be counterfeit.”

Back Again.

We're back from out latest traipse. We ended with four days in St. Petersburg, ie the Russian one. I wanted to post some stuff, the hotel charged about $28 a day for internet and there was nothing on my agenda worth that kind of money. I must say I see that you haven't done much to put the world back into place while I'm gone.

Of Course there are Still Jews in Cracow

Sighting: Radisson SAS Hotel lobby gift shop.

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

No Joke: More on Polish Cooking

More evidence that Polish food is not a Polish joke: Raraka. Cut potato thin on your mandolin. Salt it down to leach out the moisture. Skillet-fry it into a pizza-style pancake (maybe add some ground pepper). Top it with lumps of (a) salmon roe (or, hey, beluga); (b) sour cream; and ( c) chopped onion. Wrap little bits of the goodies into slices of pancake. Again, yum.

Inspiration: the Restauracja Szara on the Old Town Square in Cracow. Mushroom soup was good, too, if a bit salty. But then, the mushroom soup is good almost every place here, and they say it isn't even the season.

Cooking fact: they say that the Poles got cabbage from the Italians in the 16th Century (same time they go Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine), and that the cabbage improved the quality of Polish cuisine,. Query, what must Polish cuisine been like before cabbage? Is this a rework of the old joke about the politician who went from Palookaville to Washington and raised the intelligence level of both places?

Plinglish

Polish is not an easy language for an English speaker to guess at, but there sre ways of getting a toehold. You start with the international brand names—Toyota, Tesco, KFC. You move on to the stuff that is part of the universal language of tourism—kebab, pizza, sport. But then you continue to what look like foreign borrowings bust with a Polish twist: antyki, apteka—here's a sign that says “cygara, cawa, alkohole” (I don't know how to categorize “motory skutery”). Not all are English borrowings: we see restaurajca and delikatesy, also bizuteria, kuchina and fryzjerskiy (hairdresser) not to mention “kosmetyci naturalni.”

But there are more general cases where western culture seems to have carried its language with it. Academic life is clearly one (and come to think of it, I recall reading somewhere that “academy” is one word that is the same in all European languages)--consider also “muzeum archaeologiczne,” and “ogrod professorsky” (professor's garden).

And here in this heavily Catholic country, it is perhaps not surprising that some of the heaviest borrowings are in the realm of religion. Cracow is the city where Karol Józef Wojtyła was archbishop, so it doesn't take much to guess your way through “Universytet Papieski Jana Pawla II”--but then you also see “katolicka basilice” and “zakrystia.”

Aside from the Western Europeanisms, I suspect you could do a lot better with Russian but you'd have to (a) transliterate from the Russian alphabet to the fussy Polish script and (b) know Russian. I do like it that you see “ochrana,” which echoes Russian “okhrana,” the old tsarist secret police: these days in Poland it seems to mean “security guard.”

None of this gets you very far, of course, expect perhaps to put paid to the idea that we are all homogenizing into English. Rather the point is that we are not homogenizing into English at all but developing a linguistic soup in which all languages participate.

Łódź

Łódź, on the road from Cracow to Warsaw, is hardly a tourist destination. But I've wanted to read it since I read I.J. Singers family saga, The Brothers Ashkenazi. And I can testify: a visit to Łódź is a fascinating insight into what Poland must have looked like under the communists and even further back under the tsars.

Apparently at best, Łódź was no more than a big, hard-working industrial city.--”the Manchester of Poland,” I heard someone say. I assume they were talking about 19th-Century Manchester, England, but it also reminded me of Manchester, New Hampshire, where I went to high school 60 years ago. Łódź, is (and apparently then was) bigger, but they are both defined by the old textile mills—massive, gaunt red-brick buildings with lots of windows, side by side with blocks of charmless worker housing. Both in Łódź and in Manchester this stuff evidently stood vacant for a long time, but in both cases it has now been aat least partly revived with restaurants, computer stores and who knows what else. Łódź also has something my high school town does not—ungainly and portentous faux baroque monuments to the industrialist's power.

Łódź today appears to be a functioning city, but by any superficial measure, it looks a lot worse off than either Warsaw or Cracow. Warsaw is charmless but appears to be busy enough and somewhat on the make. Cracow –even after the floods—appears to thrive. But in Łódź, you see bad teeth, crummy haircuts, cheap clothes. I hear tell that some Poles are moving back home from the west. Under the right circumstances I can see how that would make sense. For their sakes, I hope it won't be here.

Update: I am reliably informed that the correct pronunciation is "wudge," as in "there once was a lady from wudge..."

Just a Word About Cracow

Now that I'm here, I can spoil the fun: Cracow is what I suspect maybe Prague was 20 years ago. Lots of well-preserved medieval architecture, pleasant walking spaces, plenty of beer and ice cream (90 cents a scoop) but not nearly as many tourists as the hordes on the Charles Bridge. Quaint at the center; big, public square although it lacks definition--they could use a Bernini. But this is no hole in the wall: the book says 800,000 people and they have traffic jams. There seems to be a bit of music around, but our timing was off.

Why did this jewel survive World War II, while Warsaw was reduced to rubble? I haven't really researched but my impression is that (a) the Nazis wanted to preserve it as a headquarters; and (b) at the end, they decided they needed the army worse elsewhere.

Also, lots of hilly/mountainous woodland in the outer environs. They say that westerners come over here for the hunting, but I have to wonder: if, say, a Dane comes over here and brings down, say, a woolly mammoth, how does he get it back to Copenhagen? Maybe he says it is the heart of his dear brother.

From Rope Gives Carmelites

"From Rope Gives Carmelites." The speaker is a guide at the shrine of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa. My Polish-English dictionary translates: "look at this lovely braided cord, designed to go around the head of the portrait of the Madonna. It was a gift of the Carmelites." And I genuinely admire, not to say envy, the improvisational skill and raw nerve of a man who can just barrel his way through in a strange language, even more when (as this guy did) he actually makes himself understood. He was a priest; I think Pauline, I think he said his name is Carl. He was late because he had to catch the TV showing of the great beatification ceremony in Warsaw. He is a man of strong opinions:

Please (or "Pliz"). Is not black, madonna. Is a lie from Nazis. Look at this picture. Is from eastermediterranean, olive in color, is natural. Nazis call her schwartzemadonna to make her little, but is not black. Is like some people say "you look Russiasn, but no I am not Russisan, I am Pole. Black madonna in Germany, in Croatia, not here. *

Also a bit of a joker:

Why you wear sunglassses? In Poland we worship the sun. I get good weather from you. I call Jerusalem, from here is local call.

Also a man of faith:

You are Mormon? I go to Salt Lake City, they don't let me go to temple, I say why not, you come to my place I let you stand near Madonna, not afraid. The Mormons, they find your ancestors, on Sunday morning they baptize 20 times. But they not believing in Godinthreepersons, 20 times not valid, what a waste.

And efficient:

This is end of five star tour. Now I have mass, we have joke, priest never late for mass. Priest not there, you can read the lesson but not mass.

But in the end, a man of faith who blesses the souvenirs:

In the name of thefathertheson and holyspiritaman. Canon law, cannot sell, only give away, canon law.

But a man of compassion:

Holy water, don't need very much, we boil the hell out of it. Is a joke.

====

*For an unexpectedly good discussion, go here.

Addendum: I should have offered a thought about the experience as a whole. Suffice to say this was the most Catholic crowd I've seen since Claremont New Hampshire in 1955. Not all Polish either; in a queue I chatted with a lady here on pilgrimage from England. One woman holding on her lap an obviously impaired child almost as big as she was. Humble folks, but not nearly as shabby as Wal-Mart: no exposed butts and nowhere near as much flab. Lots more tobacco, though. Is no joke.

Polish Culinary Advice

You can eat any mushroom in Poland, but some only once in your life.

Polish Piano Music: The Secret

We got to attend a concert of Chopin piano music last night in Warsaw, the Chopin-mad city. It was an almost private affair in a refurbished palace with a baby grand piano, and for a strong bass , and assuming they couldn't afford a full grand, wouldn't they have been better off with an upright?

The walls were decorated with massive paintings in a mode of sedate elegance, one showing some American Indians bearing gifts to a European. But funny thing: the Indians had six toes on each foot.

What's going on here? I don't know but it occurs to me that maybe this explains the dazzling complexity of Chopin piano music. Maybe the great man himself had six fingers; maybe also his expositors. Maybe this means that the painting was done from life, and maybe it explains why only Poles can play it.

Polish Joke

--"This is our Parliament House. Sometimes we have demonstrations. The farmers come and throw potatoes. The miners come and throw coal. So far we do not have the bankers come and throw money."

A Lovely Spring Morning in Warsaw

I went this morning to visit the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument. The Nazis reduced everything around here to rubble so there is not a lot left to monumentalize, but there is a bit of open park space and one modest proletarian-style statue. They say Hitler himself picked out the stone, envisioning a monument of a rather different sort. At the souvenir stand, you can buy Polish cookbooks in six different languages, and biographies of Chopin, along with severe accounts of the ghetto story. The guide, to her credit, did not spare the details: how the Nazis rounded all the Jews up into a ghetto (there was none before), and then undertook systematically to transfer them to Treblkina and their certain extinction--and how s saving remnant rose up and lost their lives in a final act of suicidal defiance. There is small bulletin-board-like display of archival photos, including one of the ghetto's Nazi commandant. "He was hanged," the guide said. A voice muttered, "too bad they could only do it once."

"You are smiling," the guide said to me as I left. "You must be in a good mood." Sure I was in a good mood. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky; the temperature was around 70F and there was just a touch of a breeze. And every day above ground is a good day.

Warsaw Restaurant Note

Smaki Warszawy (does this mean "Warsaw Snacks?")--47/49 Zurawia, just out of sight of the world's ugliest cultural center. Local food: great for sour rye soup and borscht, and at least six different settings for asparagus. Dumplings not as deeply bathed in pig fat a you might expect. Okocim beer on tap. Block-long dessert showcase.

"Someone Put Pineapple Juice in my Pineapple Juice!"

They say that just before Chopin died in Majorca Paris, he asked that his heart be taken back to Warsaw. His sister undertook to carry out his death-bed request, but she feared the hostility of the Polish customs guard. When the guard asked her what was in the package, she airly replied:

Oh, it is the heart of my dear brother.

Believing this to be the silliest story he ever heard, he cheerily waved her through.

I'm sending my liver to Liverpool,
My pancreas off to Peru;
My stomach and kidney
For the summer to Sidney,
But my heart I'm still savin' for you.

Danish Dietary Advice

• Assemble rye bread, herring, raw onion and aquavit.

• Top the bread with a slice of onion and a bit of herring.

• Take a bite, then sip a bit of the firewater.

• Chew.

• Yum.

Product placement note: there's a lot of inedible herring in the world. The stuff we sampled came out of a jar labeled "Skippersild Marinrede Sild," and it was super--mild but tangy, and not fishy. The swill was "Aalborg Taffel Akavit." The onions were fresh picked in the back garden.