April 18, 2003

Russian-American Relations Below the Radar Screen
By CARLIN ROMANO

In an ornate hall of the venerable Russian Academy of Sciences, a handsome building studded with portraits of bearded academicians from the storied past, Natalia Alexandrova of the academy's foreign-language department and Karen Fox, a marketing professor at Santa Clara University, might as well be poster children -- or adults -- for Russian-American cooperation.

Their clever joint presentation, "Economic Wisdom in Russian and American Proverbs," brings hoots of laughter and good-natured gibes from the mix of Russian and American teachers and researchers present on a sunny spring afternoon, a day made lighter by the beautiful sight outside of the Neva River, returning to running water after a season of ice.

The two scholars, old acquaintances, have entertainingly juxtaposed Russian and American proverbs giving economic advice, in the playful hope of finding revelatory truths about the two cultures. As their overhead projector casts each new pairing onto a screen in front of an unusually long, rectangular wooden seminar table -- the length itself seeming a symbol of the long road the two cultures have traveled together -- the room and concept come alive. Just not in exactly the way they expect.

Under the heading, "Practicing Patience," the screen offers the American maxim, "Everything comes to him who waits," followed by the Russian aphorism, "Patience and work will accomplish everything!"

"Amazing that an American proverb is more passive," Alexandrova remarks with a thin smile.

Next comes "Collective Versus Individual Responsibility." The American sayings predictably emphasize individualism and self-reliance: "Too many cooks spoil the broth," and "If you want something done right, do it yourself." But then comes the Russian complement: "If there are seven nannies, the child won't be watched."

"You would think Russians would be more cooperative," comments Alexandrova, clearly warming to the play-by-play. "Russians cannot work on a team. ... "

Maybe not, but audience participation quickly rises to Springer-like levels. Yuri Tulupenko, a historian of economic ideas from Herzen State Pedagogical University, repeatedly stands or raises his hand to underline whatever theoretical point is at issue. "When you invest more and more," he drily observes, "production rises less quickly than the resources invested." Other listeners call out their views. One Russian woman toward the front elegantly distinguishes between a final American proverb proffered to the group -- "Two heads are better than one," which challenges the individualist interpretation -- and the "Too many cooks" line.

"I think the last one is about brainstorming," she declares in lightly accented English. "But the first one is about decision making!"

So it went for two days of the academy's conference on "Russian-American Links: 300 Years of Cooperation." Not a mention of global-positioning jammers that might have slipped into the wrong hands, or enterprising ex-Soviet generals who might be sharing their own freelance "war gaming" with -- let's say in a spirit of conciliation -- warriors of the former Mesopotamia. Organized by the academy with help from the Soros-supported European University at St. Petersburg, the U.S. Consulate General and the city's English-Speaking Union, it was the first in a series of annual "links" conferences here to explore Russia's bonds with a certain nettlesome superpower, following several that focused on connections to Britain.

The initial spirit of sweetness and light soon transmuted into shock and jaw as both countries' participants faced sometimes-abstruse yet wonderfully detailed evidence of a seldom-explored truth in popular media: that Russian-American relations and mutual fascination long preceded the unhappy years of the Soviet period. A documentary film for local television produced by Nika Strizhak, Unknown St. Petersburg: John Quincy Adams, about the first U.S. ambassador to the court of the czars, drove that home.

Elsewhere, Tulupenko's own paper recounted the odd, fascinating career of the critic and journalist Nikolai Polevoi (1796-1846), whose Moscow Telegraph literary magazine regularly published Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper in the 1820s and '30s. A Romantic who shared many ideas with the Transcendentalists, Polevoi's philo-Americanism stretched so far that he and his friends began using nicknames with Americanized endings like "Shalikowood" -- a little like Susan Sontag joking that she's "Susan Sontagskaya."

Irina Tsimbal, of the St. Petersburg State Theatre Arts Academy, traced the impact of three leading Russian actors who came to the United States in the first years of the 20th century: Pavel Orlenev, Alla Nazimova, and Vera Komissarzhevskaya. (A nasty American critic did trouble relations by commenting on the last -- the Duse of Russia in her era -- "Komissarzhevskaya is not so big as her name.") Elena Mukhina of St. Petersburg State examined the intricate debates over Sapphic love that involved the Russian writers Marina Tsvetaeva and Marie Bashkirtseff in the Paris circle around American expatriate and saloniste Natalie Barney.

Throughout the two days, the exertion and anxiety of cultural influence in both directions became clear. Invited papers probed both the development of American studies in Russia and the origins of Russian research centers in America. They tracked "American Blacks at the Russian Imperial Court," American and Russian perspectives on the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, the experience of Siberians in the United States, the evolution of constitutionalism and human rights in both countries, the mysteries of Vladimir Nabokov's dual consciousness, even sequences from The Godfather and On the Waterfront as examples of Americans' pinching from Soviet montage.

For every reference to a widely known transmission of cultural memes, such as Stanislavsky's titanic effect on acting theory in the United States, one encountered a paper like Elivira Osipova's, in which the St. Petersburg State literature scholar precisely explained the less-known influence of Thoreau on Tolstoy. "I read Thoreau and rose spiritually," Tolstoy wrote in his diary for 1903. Osipova outlined further and still more exotic influences on the Russian master, such as the teachings of American Shakers, who practiced chastity. Then, as if exemplifying the ebb and flow of Russian-American links, she closed by exactly describing the later sway of Tolstoy on the American novelist John Gardner's campaign for "moral" fiction.

"We're not just Country A and Country B," remarked Alexandrova, a co-organizer of the conference along with the foreign-languages-department chairman Yuri Tretyakov, summing up the conference with considerable understatement at the close of the final session. "These are our countries." And the two countries, she stressed, needed to remain friends. For two days, she continued, "We tried hard, and we did a good job." That they surely did. Exiting into the crisp Petersburg air, it had become a little harder to separate the "yours" and "mine" from the "ours."

Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, is currently a Fulbright professor of philosophy at St. Petersburg State University, in Russia.