Russian life during a time of change

The American-born daughter of Russian emigres, Ingrid Bengis has been long fascinated by the land of her ancestors and a culture made present not only in her parents’ stories and language, but through the works of great Russian poets and novelists -- Akhmatova and Dostoevsky, in particular. Weaving together strands of memoir and travel writing, “Metro Stop Dostoevsky” tells of her months-long visits between 1991 and 1996 to St. Petersburg (which she refers to as Leningrad, following local tradition), where she resided in the same neighborhood Dostoevsky used to live, at the very time the Soviet Union was disintegrating and Russia was thrust into market-driven capitalism.

The book, she tells us, seeks to answer dual questions: What has socialism created and killed in the Soviet Union? and What has capitalism created and killed in America?

“I need to ask these questions, now,” she writes of her 1991 visit, “before socialism disappears altogether.”

During her lengthy stays, she learns how to get around, how to stand in lines, how to deal with the annoying bureaucracies that are everywhere, how to live like a real Russian. “[S]tanding in lines has started to affect me the way it affects Russians. Lines have a life and a logic of their own. It is inconceivable to abandon a line, even if there is nothing at the end of it. To abandon a line is to abandon hope, and what would life, especially Russian life, be without hope?” In many ways, she romanticizes Russian living and yearns to stay in her Dostoevskian fantasy, even as it becomes painfully real.

After much frustration, she lands a job teaching literature, though she goes months at a time without being paid. She makes friends with other educated professionals and shares an apartment with B, a seamstress whom she met on a previous trip to Russia. B is recently separated from her husband, and the disintegration of her marriage serves as a mirror of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The eventual ruin of the friendship between the author and B is meant to represent frayed relations between Russia and the U.S. “My personal trajectory corresponded to the trajectory of America in the national [Russian] consciousness, from the bearer of a superior civilization to the harbinger of cultural collapse. The Russians thought that the West was offering them freedom, but it turned out to be just another form of slavery.”

Overall, the narrative is episodic with no clear-cut through-line tying together the various stays in Russia and the sundry problems the author must overcome. Readers are not altogether sure why she’s living in Russia in the first place. Her job seems more a hobby than genuine employment, and life in Russia, as she depicts it, is not exactly a picnic, though she is utterly enamored.

Meanwhile, we learn that the author’s mother is ill at home in Maine, and yet she’s living in St. Petersburg for reasons she doesn’t elucidate. “I think that I have died and gone to heaven and am living in Dostoevskyland,” she writes, yet fails to convince readers of this paradise.

When Bengis becomes ill during a stay in 1994, she is appalled and delighted by the medical care she receives, submitting to intestinal surgery without knowing exactly what’s wrong. Whatever the problem is, she tells us, “I feel no inclination to ask anything more specific, nor does the surgeon ... seem to have any inclination to tell me.” Rather, she experiences “an uncharacteristic lack of interest in asking Western analytical questions.” Her shunning of “Western” questions is frustrating for Western readers who want to know what’s going on.

Likewise, Bengis’ relationship with B is utterly maddening. From the outset, B spells trouble. “There was something catlike about her and I have always been afraid of cats,” Bengis describes B. Yet she proceeds to loan her money, and to be abandoned by her regularly. Bengis even enters into a joint business venture selling handmade shawls in the West with B, though admits “I’m sure we’re never going to make anything ... so it doesn’t matter what percentage I get. Fifty-one percent of nothing is still nothing.”

In the long run, B cheats her out of thousands of dollars and a much-coveted apartment (for which, readers surmise, Bengis is still paying the mortgage), yet the author wonders where she went wrong in the relationship. “B always told me that I was a mongrel, who loved the way dogs love, unconditionally, even if their masters are cruel to them.” Her love of Russia seems as blind and unquestioning as her misplaced loyalty to B.

The portrait Bengis draws of Russian life during this key moment in history is both fascinating and well-written, yet far too many questions, many of them personal, are left unanswered. Still, we’re given crisp depiction of the frustrations, upheavals, joys, kindness and cruelty that constitute Bengis’ passionate, if inscrutable, experience of Russian living.

*

Metro Stop Dostoevsky

Travels in Russian Time

Ingrid Bengis

North Point Press: 340 pp., $24