Calm

Can you see the sky opening up
Pouring glass down to our streets and
The homes

And showing us the heavens?
Singing of droplets on wet grass,
And concrete

Can you see the angry lightening
Crashing into the unsubstantial parts
Of our minds

As the chaos of the gods fight for our hearts?
Near our beliefs, and it is
Shattering

Not yet, there is only calm before a storm.
Flowing to the heavens.
Forever.

(Note: I wrote this when I was 16, and I still feel as though I could never write something better.)

Persistence of the Russian Church

Throughout Russia’s turbulent history, rampant with revolution and turmoil, the major cities retained their identities as cultural powerhouses under the shadow of religious persecution. The current capital, Moscow, still to this day remains a popular destination and icon of Russian history. According to Sidney Monas in St. Petersburg and Moscow as Cultural Symbols, “Moscow as a cultural symbol is the ideological home of the Slavophiles. It is linked to the past.” The city always maintained a smaller population than St. Petersburg, only surpassing it in recent years. The cost of living in a city such as Moscow was not as great as in St. Petersburg which contained a large population of soldiers and civil servants. “For the golden age of the Russian novel, Moscow, in this properly literary sense, is not a city at all. St. Petersburg is the only real city…Moscow, on the other hand, remains, like the countryside, a family locale.”

The city which would later be known as Leningrad acquired a foreign identity and took on a European aspect onto its reputation. The infrastructures and air of St. Petersburg appealed the most to Westerners although the climate propagates and exacerbates illnesses that would come to be romanticized through literature and film. Tuberculosis and cancer would make their way into fiction while Moscow’s bout of cholera would be forgotten in time. In fact, the image of St. Petersburg is famously portrayed at the hand of many renowned and respected writers. Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet, wrote extensively about the landscape in “The Bronze Horseman: A Petersburg Tale.” Nikolai Gogol’s magical realist views also gave us a harrowing and outrageous look into St. Petersburg’s cultural flavor. This identity would permeate into the Communist regime under the writers who lived in the difficult time of censorship and fear.