Flying to Moscow (or Leningrad)

One of the things you learn pretty quickly when you work in foreign language teaching is that direct translation from one language into another is not always possible. One book about teaching in my school's resource library about teaching vocabulary (sadly, I forget which one) even argues that you shouldn't try to teach basic words like table and chair as though they have direct, exact translations into the student's native language. A German who goes to England and brings back a table, it is said, will only decide after much examination that this thing the English call a "table" fits into the German conceptual category of a "Tisch".

Personally, I think this example may be taking things a little too far--though in my own limited study of Russian, I have encountered the same kind of problem dealing with the way Russian conceptualizes furniture. Specifically, there is this thing Russians have in their home called a shkaff. English speakers have cupboards, pantries, wardrobes, and hampers to put their belongings in; Russian speakers seem to have only shkaff. As best I can understand the concept, its meaning really is something like "big thing you put things in."

But there are certainly plenty of other concepts that really, really don't translate between cultures. The suburbs, I'm finding, is one of them. As they are now fed a nearly constant diet of American films and television programs, Russians have some inkling of what American suburbs are like. But when they talk about the suburbs of their own cities, it's clear they think of a very different environment.

For one thing, the sheer wastefulness of culs-de-sac, eight-lane highways, and having to drive even to purchase a carton of milk is just not a lifestyle Russia can embrace. Even in Moscow, where something like 80 percent of the country's wealth is concentrated, there aren't enough people who can afford cars to make this kind of lifestyle feasible. Moreover, anyplace where that kind of suburbia might potentially be built has long since been developed in accordance with the dictates of Soviet architecture and urban planning, which, as near as I can tell, tended to favor monstrously ugly and shoddily constructed "tower in the park" development.

As we are now in the middle of the holiday season, I have gotten to learn that Russians have their own version of It's a Wonderful Life--a film that get played and replayed so often during the holidays that most Russians know it word for word. Not surprisingly, the plot of this film is set in motion by drunkenness. On New Year's Eve, a group of men living in Leningrad (or Moscow--I've had Russians tell me the plot of this story several times, but different people have told me differently about where the story is actually set, for reasons that will become apparent) pay a visit to a banya (a traditional kind of Russian sauna), where one of them proceeds to get rolicking drunk. His friends decide to take advantage of his inebriated state and play a trick on him. They convince him that he is really in Moscow (or Leningrad) and must now fly home to Leningrad (or Moscow). They quickly get him into a taxi and to the airport, where he flies "back" to his home city.

When the man arrives in Moscow (or Leningrad), thinking it is Leningrad (or Moscow), he gets in a taxi and tells the man to take him to his address. And behold, it turns out that in Moscow (or Leningrad), there is a street with the exact same name, with a building bearing the exact same number, and having the exact same appearance as the man's really apartment building back in Leningrad (or Moscow). And even stranger--when the drunkard goes up to his apartment, his key opens this other apartment--which looks exactly the same as his real apartment back in Leningrad (or Moscow). The drunkard goes to lie down in what he believes to be his bedroom and soon falls fast asleep.

Well, it turns out that this copycat apartment belongs to a young lady, who soon returns home to find this strange man in her bad. At first she is outraged, but, as can only happen in the movies, the two eventually fall in love and live happily ever after--or, in this case, until a sequel involving their children from subsequent marriages meeting under similar circumstances, involving this exact same apartment in Moscow (or Leningrad).

The entire story is plausible only because there really was that degree of uniformity in architecture and urban planning in the Soviet period. To a lesser extent, this is true even today. Volodya told me once about how new apartment complexes get built in Moscow. They tend to all end up having a very limited number of designs because there is actually a small number of pre-approved designs accepted by the city building and planning authorities. It's not that no other design can be built; it's just that the approval process is faster and cheaper if you're building one of the pre-approved designs. And so developers tend to save themselves the time and cost of doing anything outside the mold.

I find it's not all that hard to accept that the story of this film actually could happen. Outside of its very center, Moscow does take on an extremely cookie-cutter feel. Russian students sometimes ask me which part of Moscow I like best, and I can only reply, sheepishly, that I like the area around the Kremlin best. This is not a lie, and is probably the canned response they expect. But it says a lot that I really can't name my favorite part of Moscow. No matter where I get sent out to teach in-company, I tend to end up feeling like the hapless film hero who ended up in Moscow (or Leningrad). Almost everywhere outside the city center, the cityscape is as follows: a warren of kiosks selling everything from sausages to sandals, some Krushchevkovas (hideous five-story apartment buildings built during the Krushchev era), then some taller, already-dilapidated monstrosities of the Brezhnev era.

None of the neighborhoods really feel like a neighborhood. Unlike in New York, the apartment buildings usually lack ground-level retail space--which is consigned to kiosks and a very few main streets. In the Soviet era, when there was little available for consumers to buy, this kind of planning made a curious kind of sense; now it just makes the city seem that much more dreary and inhopsitable to people.