Inostranka

notes from the underworld

Part One

to understand the Russian Soul or Dusha, you need to live inside of it.

It was helpful that it was soul in a foreign language. Made it somehow more elusive and accessible at the same time. It was my first encounter. Soul, on foreign soil amidst a revolution from communism to democracy. She goes by many names: dusha, soul, anima/animus, psyche, atman, seele, seula, alma. She is a heart beat I have followed since.

Moscow, 1992 - 1993. Combat Boots. Cobblestone. Red Square. A matryoshka doll waiting to be cracked.

I was a girl in transition -becoming a woman- standing smack dab in the middle of massive societal transition. I went to Russia during my junior year abroad in college and my multi-linguistic Russian Studies professor, a brilliant soul of a human being at a small liberal arts college in Minnesota simply said:

to understand the soul you need to live inside it.

Before Russia I was Stacey. A small town girl from upper Michigan (born in Hollywood). Boy crazy. Wild. and a bit of a mess.

After Russia I became Stasha. Digested by the belly of transition and transformation. Given a new name -made a new shape -still a mess, but at least, one covered in the sheath of a cocoon, shimmering and calling opportunities to delve more deeply in. To soul.

I learned way back, when I didn’t have a language for soul or dusha, that the way in was living encounter, and the only context I had for that was the absolute foreignness of everything. Everybody speaking a language I was barely learning. The rules of an entire society coming undone. And because revolution grows in all directions, the rules of my own inner order had to come undone too.

I knew it was dangerous territory. J.R.R. Tolkien says it is dangerous business going out your front door. I didn’t fully know what he meant. The word dusha felt forbidden. The way it curled out of my professor’s mouth like velvet smoke circling an enigma with a liquid gold center. Dusha. Dusha. Dusha. The poets and writers knew about it. Some of them had written about it in their own blood.

I was an inostranka — a foreigner in my own being.

The rules were reversed or non existent. Soul was full of tricksters and thieves. Gold toothed sellers at the market offering their hand in marriage. Soul was slippery on a train to St. Pete. Soul shone iridescent and gilded in Rublev’s icons at the Treytyakov Gallery.

It was dangerous and devouring. It picked and pecked its way in. Dangerous because once you encounter it, there is no going back. It will turn you upside down. Shake your pockets and your brain loose. It will carve you a new name. It will strip you of outworn identities.

The spark to answer my very first call to adventure seeded something in me — a question, a quest, a desire to know: what even is soul? Russian or otherwise? Why do I need it? How does it shape me? What does it make of me? What does it know that I don’t?

What happens after I encounter it? What is it going to churn me into after it ordeals me? Bones or butter?

Baba Yaga knew more than I did. I didn’t even know her name back then.

Artist: Tin Can

I returned from a larger than life adventure from the belly of the wolf. Was devoured by the Russian volk of change. I was changed. Was changing. Inside the underground fumbling and tumbling.

Moscow was a gritty, salty city teeming with dinosaur-sized black birds and the terrible stench of exhaust from ubiquitous Lada cars and the rank smell of papirosy … those cardboard cigarettes. I saw a society chopped to its knees as elders stood on street corners till midnight selling sausages for financial sustenance. Neo-Nazis and Hell’s Angels — the Night Wolves — rose. Mafia was becoming king. I saw communism die and capitalism spawn slick devils at crossroads that smelled like urine. I puked the underbelly of Moscow on the side of the street after eating poisonous buterbrod sandwiches made with wild foraged mushrooms just so someone could pay for their own food.

Moscow was wild, untethered, desperate, ignoring all the rules. Moscow was also holding on tight and putting on its Stalinist uniforms and marching down Tverskaya to Red Square in honor of the old. And, Moscow was taking off her clothes and stripping in techno clubs blooming from old order ashes.

Soul was a young woman discovering her power after years of iron curtains and ice.

Artist: Uldus Bakhtiozina

Soul was sitting stoic on the metro with Dostoevsky in its lap. Soul was a family of tsiganki -gypsies - playing guitar in the perekhod, occasionally clawing their way into my empty pockets finding nothing but a scolding. Soul was a babushka with an evil eye elbowing me like a football linebacker. Soul was ugly. Iron lipped. Tight fisted. And also peeling, cracking, revealing hidden meaning and teaching me how to hold suffering and exquisite beauty in the same breath.

Soul drove on the opposite side of the road with me in the backseat, clinging on for dear life. Soul stormed into a video bar with masks, bullet proof vests and machine guns to take hold of the most wily parts inside of me -terrorizing me from the inside out. Soul gave me apocalyptic dreams in black and white and spoke secrets in old Church Slavonic. Soul was a thin beeswax candle in an underground tomb of monks and drank mead in meadows where old folk weddings happened in wagons driven by horses. Soul was a mystery wrapped in brambles, picking wild cherries to make a fresh pie and host a feast despite making only twenty five dollars a month on a Russian pension.

There are many stories in my wild matryoshka belly. About soul and becoming. About transition and the strange rites that initiate us. I’m thick with mythos and memory. Braiding the past with fairytales and biography to make sense of the riddle of becoming.

All this to say: Baba Yaga churned me a new name. My identity went under. My confidence went asunder. My sense of what I thought I was was dissolving, dissolving, dissolving. A caterpillar without a cocoon. Standing naked inside transition without a map, compass, or any sense of the new order. Occasionally she blinked and flashed me a secret while lifting up her skirt.

Descend. Underworld it, girlfriend. Get down on the meat hook and trust the strange and unpredictable dis-order of change.

Becoming a girl inside of woman inside the dissolution of an entire socio-political system in a foreign language is great and terrifying soul food. And, it is terrible mental health food, if there are no bearings to guide your return.

Upon return: anxiety. I didn’t know it had a name. Depression. I didn’t know that was a thing either. And a wild car crash — rolling and rolling and rolling through a cornfield off the highway in South Dakota on my way back to Upper Michigan, because I fell asleep at the wheel, because I was coming apart at the seams and didn’t understand the rules of driving. Ego had taken a backseat. Soul was in charge. And soul actually isn’t very good on a highway.

When you are thrown headfirst into soul with no guides, no maps — it’s brutal territory. The world calls it mental illness. Insecurity. Depression. Fill in the blank. Particularly in 1993, when there was far less language for what I was moving through. From the outside it looked like breakdown. From the inside, I had been hurtled into a cocoon, my mouth covered with gauze for mummification and I didn’t know how to speak or ride the currents of dissolution.

From the outside looking in -something had happened to Stacey. She wasn’t happy go lucky. She didn’t just want to go to the Mall of America and buy stuff. She didn’t want to watch Beverly Hills 90210 and go to frat parties and conquest hot boys. She wasn’t chugging beers on drink-an-entire-12-pack day. She didn’t want to be in a sorority anymore. She didn’t know what to say. She became quiet. She swallowed her voice. She wrote poetry and played the grand piano in between classes. Sometimes she drank vodka from a thermos between classes to calm the what the fuck is this jitters that had been creeping in thick.

My Russian Studies professor was my lifesaver. An angel of mercy. A mysterious helper in the story. He knew I was in the in-between. The liminal.

Denis — Cronk, as we called him, a nickname from his Croatian last name Crnković -said:

Stashenka. It is simply dusha. Best read Dr. Zhivago. It’ll give you more insight than anything I can tell you. Trust the great writers. The poets. The old stories. They know more than we can figure out.

So I did. I read Dr. Zhivago. And Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Poetry by Esenin, Akhmatova, Blok. And listened to songs from my favorite Russian rock band DDT, over and over, gleaning what I could from their lyrics. Their song Poslednaya Osen'or The Last Autumn gave me truth in its story about an epoch burning out like a farewell bonfire. Poets departing. Stones coming to life. Yuri Shevchuk, the lead singer calling out to Pushkin across the centuries — why didn't you tell us how to hold this? How to love through the final autumn? I didn't know yet that I was asking the same question. I was calling out to Pasternak with the same question -how do I hold this thing that tears you from the inside out but remakes you in the same breath?

Pasternak offered me Lara’s sight about what it truly means to stand inside change -when the old order crumbles and the new order isn’t yet standing:

Everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common ground, has crumbled into dust and has been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.

Dusha. Dusha. Dusha. It sounded like an exhalation. A rounding out. A life force of creation.

It changed my name from Stacey to Stasha.

Either way, my name still meant resurrection.