So, I’m not sure if this is actually interesting, but I thought some might want to know what it is I’m doing here, and what “work” entails. This is what I’ve done the last couple of days.
Monday morning I headed out to archive #1 in time to get there pretty much right when it opens at 10:30. This is a city-run archive, and one of its interesting features is that there are lots of just regular people around getting the kind of stuff people need to get from city archives; records of where they’ve lived, or of military (or Communist Party!) service or whatever. But that also means it’s a little crazy at times… not the reading room where I work, so much, but the entrance.
Anyway, it’s a bit far away, and it has one big drawback: you can only order 5 “dela” a day. A “delo” is basically the smallest archival unit (in fact, that’s an older term for it). Some of them are huge; at both the archives I’m working in I see people working with bound volumes of handwritten material that are literally a foot thick. Mine are instead anywhere from just a couple of pages to usually no more than 20 (though occasionally more), which means that I end up not spending the day at one archive.
But Monday I read through the five dela I’d received, and then did some work copying out possible future dela to order (this is turning into a huge task; there are literally thousands of dela on my topic, so merely noting them all down is going to turn into part of the research here). There’s a way in which this is very much data entry, though with some thought involved, I swear!
After a few hours at that archive (and I basically spend thouse hours sitting at a desk, poring over papers), I set off for archive #2. It takes about an hour to get from one to the other. The metro ride itself is almost exactly half an hour, though sometimes I take a bus and then the metro, in order to avoid having to make two changes on the ring line. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie Metropolis, but there’s a bit with the shifts changing, and sadly, the Moscow metro, as much a miracle as it is, often feels like that. Or, obvious as it seems, like cattle. Not the metro. The people, including me. Reading helps. I’m working my way through the first book by a quite popular Russian mystery novelist (I’ve actually read an English translation of it before, but I figure I’ll work my way through the series while I’m here, and I’d rather start at the beginning). On Monday, I took the metro through the two changes, largely because at one of them there’s a newsstand that sells The Economist, and I’ve been buying it weekly and reading it slowly over breakfast each day. And the issues are freshest on Monday (or on Sunday, I think, but I’m not making a special trip then).
Then there are the other things that bring the process up to an hour. Putting on my coat, putting everything back in my bag, and then reversing that at the second place (you can’t bring much with you into the archival reading rooms, for the most part). A trip to the toilet (still, something I think about scientifically… I’ll pee in archive #1, but still try to avoid the toilet in archive #2; then there’s the fact that library #1 pretty much always has toilet paper, though there’s only one dispenser outside all the stalls, so you still have to think ahead, while library #2 rarely has toilet paper available… ). Finding something for lunch (if I’m heading to a library, I’ll eat there, but for the two archives, I hit a grocery store, usually, or stop somewhere for something quick). A bit of walking. Getting into and out of the metro. It adds up.
Then I’m at archive #2. On Monday, I was chastised as soon as I got there for having too many dela out and told I couldn’t order more until I turned some of them back in. Granted, I did have a fair number out, largely because they allow 10 a day, and I didn’t go there on Friday, and they take me forever to go through. You see, at this archive I work with documents from the eighteenth century. It’s much the same work as at the other, a combination of poring over the lists of dela, and then going through the individual documents, looking for bits and pieces of relevant information. But that last bit takes much longer at this archive (and sometimes the first bit does, too). Russian, the language, changed a lot over the course of the eighteenth century, as did its orthography. So the stuff I look at often has strange vocabulary (thankfully, knowing a fair bit of French and at least some German helps enormously with deciphering things) and REALLY strange handwriting. There are letters left over from Old Church Slavonic and its various script forms. There are… well, there’s a bunch of stuff, and it’s a challenge. A puzzle, really. I have to work from context sometimes until I get a given hand down (and of course the next page is written by someone different). Sometimes that happens at the other archive, with nineteenth century documents—I actually let out a small “oh” the other day, and startled a passing reading room worker. This could have been bad, as this one in particular is always walking around shushing people. I think she kind of likes me, though, because I just got a look, and that’s it.
On Monday I worked there until about 7:45 (and then was chastised again for not following rules about not giving back documents you’re done with after 7 [this was totally my fault, but there you go]), and headed home. I’ve got a new way home from this archive that involves a fairly interesting walk, through a bit of park, then through an interesting neighborhood (including by the Korean [I assume South… it’s got yin-yang symbols on the gates, and I’d assume North’d have hammers and sickles or something…] embassy) and over a cool pedestrian bridge, and then a bus ride.
And then Tuesday and today were just variations on that. Yesterday I reversed the order of archives and was home by 7, since they both closed at 5:30 (and though I could have gone on to a library for an hour or two, three separate places in a day is just too much). It doesn’t actually take that long to get home, I stopped at the grocery store. Oh, man, and bought really yummy spinach that I just steamed lightly like Julia Child suggests: with only the water used to wash it.
Today, I hit library #2 first, and then archive #2, since archive #1 was closed. At the library I’ve been doing a bit of writing/revising on something, and then also going through some old journals to see if there are relevant bits. Today I found very few relevant bits. Which is actually kind of a story in and of itself. I also took a slightly longer break between the two places and bought a cell phone. This took doing. Mental doing. I still don’t have a cell phone in the US. Oh, wait. In North America. Anyway, dealing with getting one, even though I totally bought the cheapest, least fancy one possible, was oddly intimidating to me (yes, I can fly off to Russia for six months more easily than I can buy a cell phone). Anyway, now I have a cell phone. Oh, and I also bought symphony tickets for tomorrow and Saturday night. Yeehaw.
Oh, and the picture? Has nothing to do with any of this. But I haven’t been carrying my camera everywhere, and I’ve been meaning to post this. This is what I see as I walk away from library #1 to the metro stop. It’s an old monastery (I think) that’s been extensively rehabbed, if my memory serves me correctly. And lurking behind it is one of the Stalin gothic towers. This neighborhood is called “Kitai gorod,” which literally means China town, although it has nothing to do with China, sort of the way Red Square didn’t originally have anything to do with the color red. “Kitai” refers to the kind of walls that were in the area, and “krasnyi” (red) originally just meant beautiful. Which it is.