Saya Kitasei
Saya Kitasei is a CREEES Masters student and is getting a co-terminal Bachelor’s degree in Earth Systems at Stanford University. She received a FLAS fellowship to study Russian this summer at Moscow State University, where she found out the true meaning of intensive: twenty hours a week alone with Nadezhda Nikolaevna, who has been teaching Russian as a foreign language since the 1950s.
It was my second day of Russian lessons at Moscow State University. I was feeling distinctly off balance. Russia, I was finding, is a seesaw: all extremities. It never rains but it pours, and then when it’s done pouring, the sun emerges so abruptly and aggressively that water evaporates from the streets. This alternation of extremes resurfaces in many guises: in the banya, where some Russians leap directly from the steam room into a snowdrift; through hot and cold wars and the political transitions of 1917 and 1991; in the control economy and “wild capitalism”; in the incomes of rich and poor; and through the hospitality and hostility (occasionally coexisting in a single breath) of the Russians themselves. The Romanov double-headed eagle, currently staging a comeback, summarizes the incongruity of Russia’s post-communist dilemma: it is a bipolar creature in a unipolar world. Or at least that was the conclusion I had drawn after my first five days in Russia.
I had prepared, at my teacher Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s request, a short oral essay about Life in My University. I was nervous, but actually, I love talking about Stanford. I would champion it against any challenger – Harvard, Berkeley, the British university system, you name it. After all, it is thanks to Stanford that I was in Russia that summer at all. I was just beginning to warm to my subject when Nadezhda Nikolaevna interrupted me.
“And students can just take whatever courses interest them?”
“In general, American universities value breadth,” I bragged, “but Stanford gives us even more freedom than is customary in the United States.”
Her lip curled. “Germany also has such a system. Students can try a little bit of this, a little bit of that. When I taught there, I had two engineers and one chemist in my class. But you know, after a few months, they all left, and the only ones who stayed were the philologists. Forgive me, but having observed the system in Germany and the system in Russia, I must say that in Russia our students receive a much deeper, more rigorous education.”
Immediately, I felt defensive. And why not? After all, here I was, a student of whatever it is I study, making what I consider to be a noble effort to learn Russian – noble precisely because it isn’t required by my major. So I tried to explain this to her, finishing with what I expected to be a triumphant closer: “And after all, if I hadn’t had as much freedom of choice as I did, I could never have started studying Russian in the first place.”
“How much time have you spent studying Russian?” she asked.
“Four years.”
“And geology?”
“Also four years.”
“Well,” she said, unimpressed, “it seems to me that Russian has probably distracted you from geology.”
All of a sudden, the wind went out of my sails. “So, what do you think, I should not have studied Russian?” I asked defiantly. How could she answer in the affirmative? I had already paid for 160 hours of Russian, after all, and I’d clearly passed the point of no return.
“No, of course that’s not what I mean,” she said. “I’m sure you will be able to find some job where you can use your Russian and your geology… In fact, you should become a technical translator. They would value your scientific background and your knowledge of the Russian language, and they pay well.”
I was horrified. I always thought of Russian as qualifying me for more jobs, not fewer. My liberal arts education, which she apparently thought was too liberal, has surrounded me with encouraging, supportive voices repeating, “You can be anything you want to be,” “Russian? How interesting!” and “We’re going to need a lot of people like you.” But it was obvious that she had no idea she might be offending me, and was simply offering the most optimistic advice she could. Nadezhda was trying to give me a reality check, one I probably needed. In her world, finding yourself was a luxury.
Around this time, a crack of thunder rattled our tiny window, and a torrential rain commenced outside our unappealing attic classroom. We were both clucking over the strange weather Moscow’s been having when suddenly the rain became hail, each hailstone the size of one of my knuckles. They ricocheted off the classroom floor. “What is this called?” she prompted. I had no idea. I had never needed this word before, the word for a July hailstorm in Moscow that interrupts an uncomfortable realization. I helped Nadezhda Nikolaevna close the window as she told me an anecdote about a snowstorm on her grandfather’s farm in the Penza oblast’.
Eventually we moved on to talk about Prince Vladimir, who brought Orthodoxy to Kievan Rus’ in 988 AD, and I recovered some measure of dignity by reciting a page of his history by heart. At the end of the class, Nadezhda Nikolaevna joked “You are a true Stakhanovite! Do you know what that is?” To her surprise, I did. I must have had a strange expression, because she laughed, but by making this reference, this gift of Soviet humor, she was admitting me, if with irony, into her circle. “Anyone not with us is against us,” as Stalin said, and somehow I felt that by weathering her earlier criticism I had proven, at least, that I was not against what she was for. There, in that stuffy classroom with Nadezhda Nikolaevna, over the course of eight intense weeks, I found the fulcrum of my Russian experience.
Now just give me a lever long enough!