"Of Russia: A Year Inside" follows the author as a first-time English teacher in a remote city in a country he has long felt a passionate and close connection with.
Brant Antonson has seen a Russia few foreigners have. Indeed, few Russians. This young Canadian ventured to Voronezh, eleven hours south of Moscow by train, to spend a year inside a country torn by strife, fresh into a new century, and struggling with the clash between history and future. Tasked with teaching English to students at one university, and then a second, his story is riddled with romance and deception, and punctuated with near disaster and disappointment. Antonson's candour and insights set Russia on the edge of failure and achievement – much like the students he educated, filled with a dash of hope and a lump of fear. His wit did as much to get him in trouble as it did to keep him out of it.
Excerpt
...twenty minutes later we entered the train station - the shrine of distance. We ran for the terminus, dodging the ever-present babushkas. It was a peculiar cold inside the cavernous Vauxhall; it was more musty body heat condensing than anything coming from the mounted radiators. Arm in arm we climbed the stairs to the platform. I was standing in a movie. Anya’s train was steaming and venting to the left. Guards in their long Russian greatcoats smoked ahead of us, nodding in conversation. An incoming commuter slid off to the left tracks with its train horn and squealing brakes echoing off the station walls. Old women hobbled up and over the tracks with their plastic bags. I glanced at Anya. She was beautiful and young. But after years of climbing across the rails, in these temperatures, she too will be crevassed and split; toothless and hunched. There were drunkards in their caps heading for the front of the train where the drunks and smokers have to sit. There were sulfur lights flickering down the rail beds and there was that camouflage Soviet-green covering the carriages. Everyone was breathing vapor trails into the wind. Nothing was out of character. Our words were scripted; we were just delivering them. The train blasted its horn, a nasty attendant hollered departure and Anya climbed into the cold shell of the second wagon. I watched it stammer ahead, locking the couplers and pull into the rails out. Running up the concrete steps of the catwalk, I saw the single light in the rear wagon slide away. The lights of Voronezh sat buoyant off to my right.
Russia has a perplexing charm. That particular ten minutes standing on the platform was all acted out in perfect time. I saw something Anya could not. The people in Voronezh understandably have a hard time understanding certain moments here are captivating and magical to a foreigner. These are the same trains they rode in the 1960s, the same buildings, only in worse repair, they waited in with their parents. And maybe I do know why they can't accept it. I had ten minutes of something that certifies me as being in Russia and Anya, a true Russian, was soon to be braving a cold and dark night crossing miles of fields to get to her home. Maybe my Russia isn't really Russian.
