Church on Spilt Blood

The New York Institute came to a close Friday while I was on the train, and we've since resumed movie showings. As I suspected, my initial bitterness towards this one was due to my being tired and in a bad mood. To be fair, though, from 9:30 to 6 or 7 is a long time to be at school. Especially when you have to concentrate to get any of what's going on. Anyway, that's improved--plus, the movies are more interesting for themselves now, instead of just as pieces of cultural significance. Plus, I more or less understand the lectures now.

Tuesday we went to the--let's see if I can get this right--the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ, also known as the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood or just the Church on Spilt Blood. It's not a very old church--begin in the late 1800s and completed just before WWII--and it's done to look like St. Basil's, which it does. The style is Russian Revival, I'm told.

As you may have guessed, the "spilt blood" part of the name is important. The cathedral has never actually functioned as a church, and was built primarily as a memorial for Alexander II--the one who freed the serfs, and the one who was buried in the jade tomb in Peter and Paul Cathedral. Well, Alexander was going somewhere under escort one Sunday morning when someone decided to throw a bomb under his carriage. This didn't kill him, though it did a fair number on his guards, and neither did the second one. The second bomb did mortally wound him, though, and so his son decided to build a cathedral on the spot. And it only took
twenty years and a few million rubles to complete.

So, the church has in it a little canopy of jade and rhodonite over the spot where Alexander was (more or less) killed--and, since this was right next to one of the canals, the church extends a little bit into the canal. It's not particularly a particularly large building, but it does have the distinction of being the most thoroughly decorated structure I've ever seen--or heard of, for that matter. With maybe three exceptions that I can think of, literally every surface on the inside of the church was covered in mosaics. One of the exceptions was the partition before the altar (all Orthodox churches seem to have them) which was made of things like jade and rhodonite and marble and decorated with icons (er, it was--the Soviets did away with those, I'm afraid), and another was the canopy over the spot where Alexander II was killed. The third exception is for the spots on the partition where there were icons before the Soviets took them away. Even the floor is done in mosaics--relatively simple ones, with geometric designs, but they're there all the same (though mostly covered by carpet--the marble's not very thick). The rest of the mosaics are images of Christ, the saints, and filler done in floral patterns. I'll post more pictures so that maybe some of you can see at some point. So that's that.

I think the only other thing of note was that today we had our first genuinely bad lecture, which was fairly amusing for me. The topic was cultural barriers to understanding between English speakers and Russians, and it was being presented by a history professor from S. Illinois living in SPB and a Russian student from SPB studying in Canada. It was not intended to be scholarly. Mostly, it was about stereotypes Russians have of Americans (and vice versa), and what cultural differences actually do apply. It would have been helpful for people completely new to Russia but, well, at this point we're not, so it just looked like an assortment of oversimplifications. And the American professor apparently doesn't speak any Russian, so...

Somewhere in the middle of the lecture, some of the more annoyed members of our group started asking him questions about things like, mmm, what the basis for his argument was, or where it was leading, or just how it was that he had become interested in Russia in the first place. So it was amusing, in the sense that the poor fellow immediately went on the defensive, and that it showed rather clearly. As it turned out, he had first come to Russia on a Fulbright. He told us that he said to them, "I want to spend all my time in art museums, and at the opera, and in the theater, etc.", and he ended up in St. Petersburg. He also said that he really liked New York City, so we were mostly led to the conclusion that he's in St. Petersburg because New York is too expensive. He was willing to admit that SPB was a nice enough city, though--just don't go on the metro.

Er. I'm still having trouble figuring out how someone who thinks it's a bad idea to go on the SPB metro could ever have wanted to live in NYC. I'm afraid this sort of thing completely destroyed our respect for the fellow. I felt pretty bad for him, though--the people who were asking questions were trying not to be rude, but I don't think they were trying very hard. Ah well.

I figured out why the lectures have been so frustrating for me, though: not only have they generally been interesting, and a little too far above my comprehension level for me to get all the information I wanted out of them--I realized that these lectures are actually at or near the level that I wanted my college education to be, and I can't understand them properly.

That's all, I think. Tomorrow, the Russian Museum.