A Winter in Russia

A Winter in Russia

As a struggling writer, or better put, a struggling want to-be writer, I’m told to read great writers, especially descriptive ones. Right now, at this very second,  I’m sitting at the Mission Viejo Library, it’s 12:53 on Thursday, March 24, 2011, and I’ve settled back down to my writing desk having just come back from lunch at Berkley Dog restaurant. I had two Louisiana Hot Link Sausages with fried eggs on top, along with Russian mustard, as well as Spicy Maui Onion mustard's, along with a Diet Coke. I ate the two dogs in quick fashion; not quick from hunger, but because I didn’t eat the dogs buns.  By the way, not eating bread makes all meals wonderfully light and amazingly quick. I ate them with a plastic fork and knife, eating dogs with a fork and knife was an amusing curiosity to the Berkley Dog staff, eating with an audience is unnerving, it’s too much concentration, eating with onlookers diminishes flavors.

While eating I was reading Owen Matthews “Stalin’s Children,” a tale of three generations of one family living in Russian from 1920s-2005, the reason I’m reading this book is twofold, first I have a vested family interest in Russia, which is my second county by heart attachment, the second reason is because Owen Matthews is a genius at descriptive writing. The Library has become my writing office and it’s here that I’ve been writing my book “Stories,” and writing always requires breaks from writing, breaks are needed whenever a fog arises in the writers mind, there is no schedule for this fog, it just appears, walking around causes a small breeze to usher out the fog.  So wandering the isles is a breeze creator, reading quick stories from magazines, headlines form newspapers, or looking over the substantial free movie DVDs also helps to increase to lift the fog. A side benefit in these wanderings is discovering more books to read, a couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon Fyodor Dostoevsky, six copies have been checked out for the last two weeks, but today after lunch I’d been informed that Fyodor made his way back, so I checked him out.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic “Crime and Punishment,” is a book I’ll start reading today even though I haven’t finished “Stalin’s Children,” Dostoevsky’s book is THE standard of descriptive writing, in it he describes Russia, especially St. Petersburg where my family lives, supposedly in a stunningly vivid detailed arrangement throughout the novel. I can’t wait.

Since I’ve been to Russia twice and listened countless times to my daughter’s descriptions of Russia in winter, I thought I’d share the section from Owen Matthew’s book I just read at lunch, which describes the Russian winter that his family experienced as well as he himself when he came back to Russian to live as an adult journalist.

“Winter in Moscow comes down like a hammer, crushing out light and color, beating the life out of the city. It closes overhead like a pair of musty wings, enveloping Moscow in a cocoon, cutting it off from the world. The city begins to look like a black and white dreamscape, disorientating and subtly disquieting. On the streets steams of huddled figures hurry through pools of dirty yellow light before disappearing into doorways or the Metro. Everything becomes monochrome, the people in black leather and black fur, the city swathed in black shadows. In the underpasses or in shops, the only places one sees people in bright light, faces are pale and strained and everything pervaded with the wet-dog smell of damp wool. The skies are dirty gray, low and oppressive.

Every winter I spent in Moscow I had a sense that the world was closing in on itself, shrinking into a state of siege behind double-glazed windows, taking shelter in the fug of state-provided steam heating, and that we were powerless in the face of this overwhelming force of nature, fragile, unable to do anything but accept our lot.

Like my father must have done, I found Russia not just another country, but a different reality. The outward trappings of the city were familiar enough-the white faces, the Western-style shop fronts, the neoclassical architecture. But this European crust only sharpened the sense of otherness. Instead of reassuring, the distortion of the familiar was even more disturbing. Moscow felt as surreal as a colonial outpost on which some distant master had tried to transplant grimly imperial architecture and Europeans fashions. Underneath all the affectations the city’s heart was wild and Asiatic.”

Could you write a description of your city through the seasons, try it; the outcome may make you more alive in the place you live. Despite Owen Matthew’s heavy description of Russia in the winter, he loved her even more because he observed her vividness’s.

Observation is a form of centering on the “Otherness’s” of life, “Otherness’s is healthy medicine.