Notes from Archangel

Two days in a northern city.

A gray, ugly city, ruined (like many once-beautiful places) by the twentieth century. One hundred years ago this northern port was full of wooden merchant’s houses with carved windowsills, red brick merchant’s mansions, colorful flower gardens, and wooden fishing boats plying their way up and down the River Dvina. Some of the wooden houses remain, but they are dwarfed by the long shadows of washed out grey apartment buildings that are nearly indistinguishable from an oversized cinder block.

The brutalist silhouette of the city is subsumed by the mysterious beauty of the northern landscape and the polar light. On a clear day in October, golden hour lasts nearly the whole afternoon. The sun hangs low, nearly motionless in the large sky, and the air is suffused with gold until sunset brings it to a close.

The Dvina river, hurrying to empty into the White Sea, is large and powerful and never still, cradling the city in a sinuous grasp. The weather shifts constantly, from sun to mist to rain and back again.

Archangel at the end of the nineteenth century.

On the day after Pokrov (the feast of the Protection of the Mother of God, traditionally the first day of winter and the beginning of the peasant wedding season) it started to snow. First it was a light, unpleasant, frozen sleet, driven forward by a wind off the sea. By evening it was heavy, fluffy, thick, snow, the kind that declares the onset of winter.

The bus to the airport was late and the number on the front was partly covered by snow. I hurried on board, suitcase in tow. In a few minutes the conductor came up to me — a thin, quiet man with a northern face: large blue eyes and blonde lashes.

“Will I make it to the airport on this bus?”

First his eyebrows raised slightly, though the rest of his face stayed completely impassive. I was trying unsuccessfully to grab the offered ticket with frozen fingers. At the last possible moment he shook his head slightly, then finally nodded.

“If you didn’t know, why did you board it?” he muttered, walking away.

The people I met here were like that — quiet, stern, and contemptuous of banal or obvious questions. It was as if the effort to speak must always be directed at something deep or profound — else keep silent.

The Northern Dvina. 1870-1900.

Archangel stays up late and walks up late. By “late” I mean that my roommate in the apartment where I stayed went to sleep around 4 a.m. and woke up around 12 p.m., and that there was no print shop open before 10 a.m. In Europe this kind of schedule is usually dictated by the vibrant night life, but here in Archangel I thought it must be due more to the effect of the white nights during the long polar summer.

In the local art museum I found paintings done by Dmitry Sveshnikov, who devoted most his life to painting northern landscapes and the Nenets people — reindeer herders, hunters, and fishermen whose herds can still be found today north of the arctic circle. I wondered if he was a relative and bought an album of his paintings just in case.