PAIDEIA RUSSIA TOUR 8-23 January 2011

Transcription

1 PAIDEIA RUSSIA TOUR 8-23 January 2011 This is our eighth Paideia East-European tour sponsored by the Reed College alumni office and Russian department, and it is meant to be a broad investigation of Russian culture from its beginnings through the modern era. As the following itinerary describes in detail, we will in that inquiring spirit visit Russia's greatest cities, the present capital, Moscow, and the former one, St. Petersburg, as well as make overnight trips to the smaller towns of Sergiev Posad, Suzdal, Vladimir, and Novgorod the Great, which played important roles in the early development of Russian secular and religious life and contain stunning architectural monuments from the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, including ancient monasteries and cathedrals, centers of the Orthodox Christianity that helped to lay the foundation of Russian culture a millennium ago (the East Slavs were converted by the Byzantines in 988) and that still occupies an active place in it today. Established in 1147 by Yury Dolgoruky, a scion of the Kievan dynasty that ruled the East Slavs from the ninth to the thirteenth century, Moscow is today a vibrant world city that holds fast to its deep history even as it moves ahead to the rhythms of the twenty-first century. We will acquaint ourselves with Moscow's most remarkable sites, including Red Square and the Kremlin with its splendid fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cathedrals and superb Armory historical museum; the lovely New Maiden Convent (founded 1524); Kolomenskoye, the childhood residence on the city's outskirts of Peter I, the Great ( ); the Tretyakov Gallery, the country's largest collection of Russian art, with many great works from the first third of the twelfth century through the early twentieth; and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, with outstanding holdings in European painting and sculpture, including masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, thanks to the gifted pre-revolutionary Moscow collectors Shchukin and Morozov, who were among the first to recognize the significance of the new art and who did much to assure its seminal presence. Besides acquainting ourselves with Moscow's extraordinary museums and historical sites, we will also have, as an evening option, the opportunity to attend performances of the Bolshoi Ballet and Opera Theater, among other distinguished concert venues. After our time in Moscow and an overnight trip to nearby Sergiev Posad, Suzdal, and Vladimir, we will proceed by bullet train to St. Petersburg, the magnificent Baltic capital founded in 1703 by Peter the Great. St. Petersburg is one of Europe's youngest major cities, but it is also among its most beautiful and dramatic, with many impressive eighteenth-century structures of great historical interest. Besides its role as the imperial capital from 1713 to 1918 and its central place in the history of the Soviet period, when it was known as Leningrad ( ), St. Petersburg is a Mecca of art, thanks to the presence in its enormous baroque Winter Palace of what is universally recognized as one of the world's premier art institutions, the Hermitage Museum, with stupendous exhibits representing virtually every stage of European fine and applied art from Greek and Roman antiquity through the Renaissance and the modern era, including masterpieces by Leonardo, the largest assemblage of Rembrandts outside the Netherlands, and, thanks again to Shchukin and Morozov, whose collections were divided between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage, especially fine Cézannes, Picassos, and Matisses, among many other important

2 2011 Paideia Tour 2 modern figures. We will reserve a full day for the Hermitage, although it is truly inexhaustible, and also visit the Russian Museum, the country's second largest collection of Russian art, as well as the gorgeous Yusupov Palace and, in the nearby town of Pushkin, the beautiful Catherine Palace, the most impressive of the tsars' summer residences. In addition to its great museums and important historical sites, St. Petersburg is also the home of the celebrated Mariinsky Ballet and Opera Company, founded in 1783 by Catherine II, the Great ( ), and, as in Moscow with the Bolshoi, one of several evening performance options that will be available to us. While in St. Petersburg we will take a second overnight trip, this time to Russia's oldest city, Novgorod the Great, established in 862 as a Norse trading center along the system of inland water ways connecting Scandinavia to Byzantium and part of the domain of Kievan Rus until the late twelfth century, when it became an independent city-state with ties to the Baltic Hanseatic League. In dramatic contrast to baroque and neoclassical St. Petersburg with its emphatic, even programmatic Western orientation (its brilliant eighteenth-century buildings are largely the work of Italians), Novgorod boasts one of the finest ensembles of East Slavic medieval architecture, including the Novgorod kremlin and its crown, the Cathedral of Holy Sophia, or Holy Wisdom, built in the mid-eleventh century and harking back to the Byzantine Hagia Sophia. But remarkable historical sites, superlative museums, and extraordinary architecture of complex cultural purpose and symbolism are only part of our program, with its inevitable movement between the modern and the medieval, the familiar and the exotic, the urban and the rural, and the secular and the ecclesiastic, as permeable as the boundary between those last two realms has often been over the centuries. The tour is open to any, young or old, student, parent, alumnus, or friend who wishes to learn more about Russia and its fascinating history and remarkable architecture, art, literature, and music and their vital place in the world. No knowledge of the Russian language is necessary, since the tour will at every stage have English-speaking guides chosen for their linguistic skill and expert knowledge of the local history. The tour organizer and leader, Judson Rosengrant, has taught Russian language, literature, and culture at Reed, the University of Southern California, and Indiana University, and, as a two-time Fulbright Senior Scholar, translation theory and practice at St. Petersburg State University. He holds graduate degrees in Slavic languages and literatures from Stanford University and has received post-doctoral fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is an award-winning literary and scholarly editor and translator of Russian literature and historiography, among whose current projects are an English edition of the autobiography of the twentieth-century master Alexander Solzhenitsyn and, in press with Penguin Classics, a new translation of Leo Tolstoy's classic early work, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth.

3 2011 Paideia Tour 3 CONTENTS Itinerary 4 Tour Costs 15 Conditions and Caveats 15 Russian Visa 16 Other Information 17 Payment and documentation Schedule 17 Suggested Reading 18 Registration Form 21 Payments and any questions about procedures, schedules, bookings, the tour itinerary, or any other matter of interest to you should be directed to the tour organizer: Judson Rosengrant 6532 SW Firlock Way, No. 8 Portland, OR mobile jrosengrant@earthlink.net October 2010 All rights reserved Please note that even though the air itinerary indicated herein assumes a Portland departure and return on United Airlines and Lufthansa, you may embark from any city or use any carrier you wish, providing your arrival in Moscow matches the group's. Please see pages 15-16, below, for details. Contact information for previous tour participants will gladly be provided on request.

4 2011 Paideia Tour 4 ITINERARY Day 1 Sat., Jan. 8 Portland-Washington LV PDX UA250 07:35 A319 4h58 AR IAD 15:33 LV IAD UA964 16: h0 Day 2 Sun., Jan. 9 Washington-Moscow AR DME 10:50 Transfer by coach to the Holiday Inn Lesnaya in central Moscow, with guide Afternoon: Free time Evening: Free time or Metro excursion to Red Square with tour leader Day 3 Mon., Jan. 10 Moscow Breakfast at the hotel Morning: Bus tour of the city, with guide, including Tverskaya Street and Pushkin Square, Sparrow Hills and Moscow University, and Red Square: St. Basil's, GUM, and Lenin's tomb. Lunch at a restaurant Afternoon: Excursion to the Kremlin, with guide The Kremlin (the English is a corruption of the Russian word for 'citadel') is of course the actual and symbolic seat of the Russian government, but it is also a historical and architectural site of exceptional beauty, dating in its original earth and log form from the founding of Moscow in the twelfth century. We will tour the interior, visiting both the Armory historical museum and the astonishing ensemble of churches at the Kremlin's heart, including the Cathedral of the Assumption ( ), the Cathedral of the Annunciation ( ), and the Cathedral of the Archangel ( ), the burial place of the tsars until the early eighteenth century, when Peter the Great moved the government to his newly built capital of St. Petersburg and was himself interred there in its Peter and Paul Cathedral (see Day 10).

5 2011 Paideia Tour 5 Evening: Free time or optional performance at the New Stage of the Bolshoi Ballet and Opera, near the company's 1825 Main Hall (closed in July 2005 for a multi-year, $800 million overhaul). The program for this evening, as with the other theaters mentioned herein, is currently unavailable but will be published later in the fall, at which time participants will be given a chance to purchase tickets in a variety of seating and price categories or to choose other concert and performance venues. Day 4 Tues., Jan. 11 Moscow Breakfast at the hotel Morning: Excursion to the State Tretyakov Gallery, including the Church of St. Nicholas on Tolmachev Street, with guide Founded in 1856, the Tretyakov Gallery is one of the country's two main collections of Russian art, with over 130,000 paintings, sculptures, and graphic works, ranging from eleventh-century Byzantine and fourteenthcentury Russian icons, including masterpieces by Theophanes the Greek and Andrei Rublyov, through nineteenth-century realist portraiture and narrative painting, with celebrated canvases by Repin, Kramskoy, and Serov, and ending in the early twentieth century, with works by Vrubel and Bakst, among numerous other important figures. Thanks to the quality and diversity of its holdings and their skillful presentation, the Tretyakov Gallery offers excellent insight into the origins of Russian national culture and its development its evolving themes and orientations over the last nine hundred years. The Church of St. Nicholas on Tolmachev Street is a newly restored wing of the museum and, with characteristic Russian syncretism, also an active place of worship. It houses one of the oldest and certainly one of the most revered icons in Russian Christendom, the Vladimir Theotokos or Mother of God, painted in Constantinople in the early twelfth century at once an exquisite work of art, a national palladium (Ivan the Terrible's 1552 victory over the Tatar khanate at Kazan was attributed to its sacred power), and a holy object expressive of the most profound spiritual values. Its geographical history is part of its meaning too. Painted in Byzantium, it was brought to Kiev in 1132, then in 1167 taken to Vladimir when that city replaced Kiev as the capital of the East Slavs, and finally in 1395 moved to Moscow, where it was installed in the Kremlin in an earlier version of the Assumption Cathedral (see Day 3), the icon's mere presence imparting legitimacy to each city as a divinely sanctioned center of East Slavic and then of Russian political and religious life. Lunch at a restaurant

6 2011 Paideia Tour 6 Afternoon: Excursion to Kolomenskoye and the historical museum and compound, with guide Once a tiny village on a bluff overlooking the Moscow River southeast of the city but now situated well within its limits, Kolomenskoye served in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the summer retreat of the tsars. No less importantly, it was the boyhood home of Peter the Great and is today noted for its historical museum and log structures, including Peter's cabin (1702), and for its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stone buildings, especially the magnificent, recently restored Romanesque Church of the Ascension (1529) and the more modest yet still very beautiful Church of the Kazan Theotokos (1644). Evening: Free time or a concert or performance Day 5 Wed., Jan. 12 Moscow Breakfast at the hotel Morning: Excursion to Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, with guide. The Pushkin Museum is, after the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia's second home of non-russian art, with a distinguished collection representing ancient Egypt, Greek and Roman antiquity, Byzantium, and Western Europe from the early Renaissance through the modern period, and including, in its new venue for modern art, important works by Monet, Cézanne, Renoir, Dégas, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Matisse. Optional visit to the nearby Cathedral of Christ the Savior ( ) Built as a resounding national gesture of repudiation of the Soviet era, the cathedral stands on the site of the original nineteenth-century cathedral demolished in a no less resounding gesture by Stalin in 1933 to make way, after much overreaching, indecision, and delay, for an immense municipal swimming pool, completed in However one may regard the cultural and historical significance or aesthetic merit of the new cathedral (and given the complexity and importance of the issues, the views of Russians themselves vary widely), the marble and granite structure, built at a cost of at least 360 million dollars, is very impressive indeed, as are the ornate interiors of its upper and lower sanctuaries and their galleries. Lunch at a restaurant Afternoon: Novodevichy ('New-Maiden') Convent and museum and cemetery

7 2011 Paideia Tour 7 Founded in 1524 as a cloister for noblewomen, Novodevichy Convent consists of a group of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century buildings of extraordinary beauty and charm, including the Cathedral of the Smolensk Theotokos, built in The convent's cemetery is one of the nation's most distinguished and contains the graves of the writers Gogol, Chekhov, Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, and Yury Olesha, the film director Sergey Eisenstein, the composer Shostakovich, the pianist Svyatoslav Richter, the ballerina Galina Ulanova, the disgraced Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin, among many other important nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures. Evening: Free time or a concert or performance Day 6 Thurs., Jan. 13 Moscow-Sergiev Posad-Suzdal Breakfast at the hotel Morning: Transfer by coach to Sergiev Posad and the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery, with local guide Sergiev Posad ('Sergius's Trading Quarter'), a small town about fifty miles northeast of Moscow, is the site of the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery, founded in the fourteenth century by the monk Sergius of Radonezh (c ) and the holiest in Russia. In addition to its great historical significance and cultural prestige as the epicenter of Russian Orthodoxy from the fifteenth century until its closing by a nervous Bolshevik government from 1920 until 1946, the monastery is noted for its striking architecture, including the Trinity Cathedral ( ), containing the relics of St. Sergius and an iconostasis painted by the artel of Andrei Rublyov and Daniil Chyorny; the Church of the Holy Spirit (1476); and the gold-domed Cathedral of the Assumption, commissioned by Ivan IV, the Terrible ( ), to atone for his sins and completed in Late lunch at a local restaurant Afternoon: Transfer by coach to Suzdal and the Pushkarskaya Sloboda Hotel, a distance of about 120 miles. First mentioned in the chronicles in 1024 as an outpost of the kingdom of Kievan Rus (c ) in the fertile confluence of the Oka and Upper Volga rivers, the town of Suzdal grew in importance, becoming after the collapse of Kiev first the capital of the Rostov-Suzdalian principality, and then an independent city-state until its annexation by Muscovy in the late fourteenth century. Because of its ancient heritage and relatively unscathed survival of the 'Tatar Yoke' (the occupation of the region by the khans of the Mongol Golden

8 2011 Paideia Tour 8 Horde, c ) and its avoidance of industrial development during the late Imperial and Soviet periods, Suzdal contains one of the most beautiful and pristine ensembles of early architecture in Russia. Of particular note are the buildings of the Suzdal kremlin (dating from the twelfth century), the Savior- Euphemius Monastery (founded in 1352, with rebuilt structures from the sixteenth century, including the Cathedral of the Transfiguration, 1594), the Pokrovsky Convent ('Convent of the Intercession,' ), and the convent's Cathedral of St. Anne (1551). Evening: Free time Day 7 Fri., Jan. 14 Suzdal and Vladimir Morning: Tour of Suzdal, including the Savior-Euphemius Monastery and the Cathedral of the Transfiguration, the ancient churches of the posad or Trading Quarter, the Suzdal kremlin, and the Historical Museum, with local guide Lunch at a restaurant in Suzdal Afternoon: Transfer by coach to Vladimir, a distance of about twenty-three miles. Tour of Vladimir, including the Cathedrals of the Assumption and St. Demetrius, the History Museum, and the Golden Gate and its museum, with local guide The city of Vladimir, founded in 1108 by Prince Vladimir of Kiev but devastated by the Mongols in 1238, lacks the uncluttered, fairytale quality of Suzdal, but it does boast a few surviving structures of immense beauty and historical importance, including the Cathedral of the Assumption (dating from ) with early fifteenth-century frescoes by the artel of Rublyov and Chyorny, and the adjacent Cathedral of St. Demetrius ( ) with its unique exterior decoration that seems to represent the full range of the East Slavic debt to Byzantine culture. Also of note are the remnants of the twelfthcentury Vladimir kremlin and the Golden Gate (1164), the entrance to the ancient city. Return by coach to Suzdal and the Pushkarskaya Sloboda Hotel Evening: Free time

9 2011 Paideia Tour 9 Day 8 Sat., Jan. 15 Suzdal-Moscow Breakfast at hotel Morning: Transfer by coach to Moscow and the Holiday Inn Lesnaya, a distance of about 135 miles. Lunch at the hotel Afternoon: Free time: Old Arbat The Old Arbat is a pedestrian mall famous for its buskers and sidewalk artists, many restaurants and cafés, and excellent shops offering high-quality Russian handcrafts, textiles, ceramics, and other souvenirs. Dinner: At the traveler's discretion Evening: Free time or concert or performance Day 9 Sun., Jan. 16 Moscow-St. Petersburg Buffet breakfast at the hotel Late morning: Transfer by coach to Leningrad Station Depart Moscow at 13:00 for St. Petersburg, a distance of about 440 miles, on the Sapsan ('Peregrine Falcon') bullet train. Lunch on the train at the traveler's discretion. Arrive in St. Petersburg at 17:15 Transfer by coach from Moscow Station to the Hotel Moskva on Alexander Nevsky Square in central St. Petersburg, with guide Evening: Free time or optional excursion to the Holy Trinity-Alexander Nevsky Monastery, opposite the hotel, with tour leader The Holy Trinity-Alexander Nevsky Monastery (or Lavra), founded in 1713 at the behest of Peter the Great, is one of the highest ranking in the country and, along with the impressive Trinity Cathedral ( ), the site of Russia's second most important cemetery, the resting place of the novelist Dostoevsky and the composers Glinka, Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Tchaikovsky, among other major figures.

10 2011 Paideia Tour 10 Day 10 Mon., Jan. 17 St. Petersburg Breakfast at the hotel Morning: Bus tour of the city, with guide, including Smolny Cathedral, Fountain House, Bronze Horseman, St. Isaac's Square, University, Savior-onthe-Blood, the Kazan Cathedral, and Palace Square Lunch at a restaurant Afternoon: Excursion to the Peter and Paul Fortress, including the Cathedral and the Trubetskoy Bastion, with guide St. Petersburg was founded in 1703 (it is younger than Boston or New York), and the Peter and Fall Fortress, built to secure the marshy Neva delta on which the new city would eventually rise, was the first large structure to be completed. Its original earthen walls soon replaced by the granite-faced brick we see today, the fortress contains sites of great architectural and historical interest. Chief among them is the Peter and Paul Cathedral, finished in 1733 by the Italian architect Domenico Trezzini in a deliberately Western style meant to symbolize Peter the Great's fundamental reorientation of the Russian state. The cathedral contains the tombs of Peter himself and of most of the members of the Romanov dynasty who succeeded him, including Catherine the Great, Alexander I, and, after a long delay, Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra and their children and several family retainers, all of them shot, incinerated, and buried in unmarked graves by the Bolsheviks in 1918 but not interred in the cathedral until 1998 an event of great pomp and national symbolism reasserting the deep continuities of Russian history and culture. We will visit the Cathedral and also the Trubetskoy Bastion, dating from the mid-eighteenth century and employed by the tsars as a holding place for important political prisoners, including the assassin of Alexander II, Vera Figner, the writer Maxim Gorky, and the disgraced Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. Evening: Free time or Mariinsky performance or other concert Day 11 Tues., Jan. 18 St. Petersburg Breakfast at the hotel Morning: Excursion to the State Hermitage Museum, with guide The Hermitage (or Ermitage, if you prefer, since the Russian word is actually a transliteration of the French) is one of the world's greatest museums, with over

11 2011 Paideia Tour 11 three million items in its possession. Many of them are on display in the museum's several interconnected buildings, which include the Baroque Winter Palace, designed and built for the Empress Elizabeth by the Italian architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli in , as well as the so-called Small and Large Hermitages later constructed by order of Catherine the Great (reigned ) to house her private art collection, purchased in 1764, the museum's nominal founding year. Containing works by virtually every major artist in the Western canon, the Hermitage's monumental holdings are far too diverse and comprehensive for a brief summary. Among the numerous highlights, however, are the Greek and Roman sculpture, the Leonardo Madonna Litta and Madonna Benois, the twenty-three Rembrandts (the largest assembly outside the Netherlands), the El Grecos, Bruegels, and Van Dykes, and the numerous works, already mentioned, by Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse. The museum is a feast for the eyes and mind. Lunch at a restaurant Afternoon: Hermitage continuation, free time, or optional individual excursion to the Dostoevsky Museum and the Kuznechny Market The Dostoevsky Museum, located in the apartment that belonged to Dostoevsky and his wife, Anna, from 1878 until his death in 1881 at the age of sixty and in which he wrote The Brothers Karamazov, provides a sense of the writer himself and of the cozy domestic refuge created for him and their family by Anna. The nearby Kuznechny Market, the city's best farmer's market, offers a variety of impressive foodstuffs, both fresh and prepared. Evening: Free time or a performance or concert Day 12 Wed., Jan. 19 St. Petersburg Breakfast at the hotel Morning: State Russian Museum, with guide The Russian Museum in the Mikhailov Palace, built by the Russian architect Karl Rossi in , was founded in 1895 and contains the country's second most important collection of Russian art, including superb icons from Novgorod and Pskov dating from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, the evocative nineteenth-century landscapes of Shishkin and Levitan, the great late nineteenth-century portraits of Repin and Serov, and a charming display of early Russian folk and applied art, among many other objects of exceptional interest. Those looking for serious art books and exhibition catalogues, lacquer boxes, ceramics, and other choice souvenirs will enjoy the museum's

12 2011 Paideia Tour 12 shops and kiosks. Lunch at a restaurant Afternoon: Excursion to the Yusupov Palace on the Moika embankment Built in 1770 by the court architect of Catherine the Great, Jean-Baptise Vallin de la Mothe, and once the opulent residence of one of Imperial Russia's wealthiest families, the Yusupov Palace is perhaps best known as a 1916 crime scene, the place where the ambiguous favorite of Nicholas and Alexandra, the Siberian lay monk Grigory Rasputin, was murdered by the young Prince Felix Yusupov and his cabal. In addition to its colorful not to say lurid history, the building is justly celebrated for its stunning interior decoration, illustrating a variety of eighteenth- to twentieth-century styles. Evening: Free time or Mariinsky performance or other concert Day 13 Thurs., Jan. 20 St. Petersburg-Pushkin-Novgorod the Great Breakfast at the hotel Morning: transfer by coach to Pushkin, a distance of about fifteen miles for a tour of the Catherine Palace, with guide. Pushkin, or Tsarskoye Selo ('Royal Village') as it was known until 1918, lies sixteen miles southeast of St. Petersburg. Of the several summer palaces built for the tsars, those of Tsarskoye Selo are surely the most extravagant buildings of sumptuous elegance surrounded by majestic French and English parks. Of particular interest is the Baroque Catherine Palace, begun in but redesigned in for the Empress Elizabeth by Rastrelli as a kind of Russian Versailles and named for her mother, Catherine I (not to be confused with Catherine II, the Great, who despised the building's vulgar excess, as she regarded it from her Neo-Classical vantage). We will tour the palace interior, including its famous amber room, destroyed by the Germans during the Second World War but now magnificently restored with their recent assistance. Lunch at a restaurant Afternoon: Transfer by coach to Novgorod the Great and the Beresta Palace Hotel, a distance of about 105 miles. Evening: Free time

13 2011 Paideia Tour 13 Day 14 Fri., Jan. 21 Novgorod the Great Breakfast the hotel Morning: city tour, the Novgorod kremlin (dating in its initial log form from 1044), including the Cathedral of St. Sophia ( ), the Millennium Monument (1862), and the museum of old Russian icons, with local guide Novgorod (New Town), Russia's oldest city, was founded on the Volkhov River by the Varangians (a Viking tribe) in 862 as a trading center along the network of inland waterways connecting Byzantium with the fur- and honey-trading Finns and Slavs and, via the Neva and the Baltic, with Scandinavia and ultimately Iceland, Greenland, and North America. After the disintegration of Kievan Rus in the late twelfth century, Novgorod, protected by dense forests and impassable marshes (at least for cavalry), escaped Mongol Tatar dominion to emerge, with its sister city Pskov, as an independent republic linked to the Hanseatic League of Baltic trading partners until its annexation by Muscovy in the fifteenth century. Because of its great age, early wealth, and fortunate freedom from Tatar attack, Novgorod has retained a remarkable ensemble of ancient buildings, including the oldest stone structure in Russia, the beautiful Cathedral of Holy Sophia, begun by Byzantine and Russian craftsmen just fifty-seven years after the conversion of the Kievan princes to Christianity in 988 and still an active church today. Lunch at a restaurant Afternoon: Continuation with local guide of our tour of Novgorod, including the ensemble known as 'Yaroslav's Courtyard' dating from the early twelfth century, the exquisite Church of the Transfiguration of the Savior on Ilina Street (1374), the Peryn Cloister and the Church of the Nativity of the Peryn Theotokos (early thirteenth century), the Yuriev Monastery by Lake Ilmen and its Church of St. George (1119), and the nearby museum of wooden architecture, with its array of archaic domestic buildings open for interior inspection. Evening: Free time Day 15 Sat., Jan. 22 Novgorod the Great-St. Petersburg Breakfast at the hotel Morning: Transfer by coach to St. Petersburg and the Hotel Moskva Lunch at the hotel

14 2011 Paideia Tour 14 Afternoon: Free time Evening: Free time Day 16 Sun., Jan. 23 St. Petersburg-Frankfurt-Seattle-Portland Box breakfast Transfer by coach to the airport, with guide LV LED LH :10 A321 3h5 AR FRA 07:15 LV FRA LH490 10:10 A h35 AR SEA 11:45 LV SEA LH :10 EMB-120 0h50 AR PDX 16:00

15 2011 Paideia Tour 15 TOUR COSTS In-country travel $3, Russian tourist visa $ Round-trip airfare from Portland, including taxes $1, Total $5, CONDITIONS AND CAVEATS The price for the land portion is a group rate based a minimum of nineteen passengers and may be subject to change in case of a smaller enrollment. The price includes all lodging, all scheduled meals (but not any additional beverages you may order), both group airport transfers, all within- and between-city bus and train travel, all entrance fees to museums and sites included in the itinerary (except evening performances and any other activities identified as optional), and licensed English-speaking Russian guides thoroughly versed in the local history and culture. Accommodations are double occupancy in four-star hotels. If you wish, you may obtain a single room for the duration of the tour by paying a $ supplement. A deposit of $1, accompanied by the registration form (page 21, below) will secure your place on the tour, with the balance of your land payment, plus your visa fee, due November 5 (see page 17, below). The deposit may be made to the tour by personal check; the balance, however, must paid by cashier's check or money order to ensure immediate availability of the funds. Unlike the airfare, which by carrier rule will be refundable with a penalty, the land cost will, once you have committed with your second payment, be nonrefundable, except as provided by any travel insurance policy you may purchase. Your deposit, however, will be refundable, if for any reason you are forced to withdraw before the second-payment dead-line of November 5; after that dead-line, your deposit too will be nonrefundable. The fare from Portland, as well as from any other embarkation city booked by the tour on your behalf, is a special Lufthansa fare with North American service provided by United Airlines and its partners. Once your tickets have been purchased, there will be a fee of $ for any date changes, plus the difference in fares, if applicable. Route changes will not be allowed under any circumstances. In the event of cancellation, your fare will be refundable up to 48 hours before departure, less a $ cancellation fee; if the cancellation occurs less than 48 hours before departure, there will be no refund at all, except as provided by any travel insurance you may have. If you wish to schedule a stopover while in transit, the fee will be $ in either direction. Full payment of your airfare will normally be due within 72 hours of confirmation, at the airline's discretion. Payment for the airfare may be made by cashier's check to the tour or by credit card to the airline. Please note that the figure quoted above is the currently available special fare from Portland only, and that it could change before your own flights are booked. The price quoted is for a Portland January 8 departure and January 23 return, but you may remain in St. Petersburg after the group has left for any period within the 30-day term of

16 2011 Paideia Tour 16 your tourist visa. If you choose that option, your airfare will be the same, providing seats in the same discounted fare class are available for your new departure date. If you do wish to stay on, the tour organizer will obtain either hotel or bed and breakfast accommodations for you, or a private apartment or a low-cost home stay at the daily rate, plus a $50.00 local finder's fee for an apartment or home stay. If you prefer not to embark from Portland, or would like to follow a different domestic or European route with a layover, or use frequent-flyer miles on another carrier, you may do so, providing that your arrival in Moscow matches the group's and that such arrangements are made in consultation with the tour organizer to ensure the best price and proper logistical coordination (airport transfers, etc.). In such cases, your airfare will depend on your departure city and individual needs and may be more or less than the current Portland quotation. Please observe that the tour organizer and his operatives act only as agents in regard to the transportation, hotel, and other arrangements of the tour, and that they will naturally take every professional care. However, they can accept no liability for injury, damage, loss, accident, delay, or irregularity in connection with the service of any vehicle or conveyance used to carry out the tour program, or for the acts or defaults of any company or person, including the airlines and their employees and representatives, engaged in transporting the participants or in implementing the tour program itself. RUSSIAN VISA The Russian visa fee is $200 and nonrefundable under any circumstances. All required documents, including your application, one passport photo, and your passport must be submitted to the tour by November 5 with your final payment. Once your application has been processed by the Russian consulate, your passport with the visa affixed will be returned by express courier about three weeks after the submission of your application. If that schedule is inconvenient for you, the processing can be expedited for an additional consular fee. If you do anticipate complications, please inform the tour organizer as soon as possible. There are few problems that cannot be solved, providing there is adequate time to address them. Those committing with a deposit will receive from the tour the application form required by the Russian consulate, along with detailed instructions for its completion. Please be aware, once again, that the consulate requires your passport itself to issue a visa. If you do not have a valid passport, you must obtain one by November 5. Keep in mind that the unex-pedited processing time for new US passports is about four weeks. Please be aware too that by Russian consulate rule your passport must be valid for at least six months after your departure from Russia. If your passport will expire within that period, then you must obtain a new one or the consulate will not consider your application. Likewise, your passport must have at least one blank page to which the visa can be affixed. If it does not, the consulate will reject your application. If you do need to renew your passport, expect the processing time to be about four weeks, unless you pay to expedite it.

17 2011 Paideia Tour 17 OTHER INFORMATION Please note that although the program is full, there is a good deal of rest time built in so that the pace will not be strenuous. All the evenings are open, for example, leaving it to you to select, with the tour's assistance either before departure or on-site, any after-dinner activities that may appeal to you. Please note too that we have scheduled three meals a day (breakfast and dinner at the hotel, with lunch at a restaurant conveniently located for the day's program) for the duration of the tour, with two exceptions: dinner during the free time reserved for independent sight-seeing and shopping on our last afternoon and evening in Moscow on January 15, and lunch on the train to St. Petersburg on January 16. In addition to the program described in the above itinerary, there will be two lectures on the general topics of Russian history and Russian literature presented by the tour leader. The dates of those lectures have not been specified in the itinerary to give us a degree of flexibility in the matter of evening performances in Moscow and St. Petersburg; that is, the lectures will fall on evenings when there is no conflict with other events of interest to the group, yet will still be offered in a timely way, since their purpose will be to help set the cultural and historical background for the day-to-day activities of the tour and to complement the continuing, multilateral seminar-like conversation about Russia that we will be engaged in collectively and individually during the two weeks of the program. Those committing to the tour will receive after their final payment detailed information from the tour on a variety of matters pertaining to travel in Russia and the tour in particular, including departure and travel instructions (we tend to converge from a variety of embarkation points), packing suggestions, weather predictions and clothing recommendations, advice on currency and on-site banking, health precautions and resources, safety and security measures, a list of in-country phone numbers and other emergency contacts, and, for the linguistically curious, assistance with the Cyrillic alphabet (although, once again, no knowledge of the Russian language will be necessary). Without delay: PAYMENT AND DOCUMENTATION SCHEDULE Registration form (page 21, below) and a deposit of $1,000, per passenger, payable by personal check to Paideia Tours. By November 5: Balance of your land payment, plus your visa fee, by cashier's check or money order to Paideia Tours: $2, (or $3, for a single room), accompanied by a completed and signed visa application with your passport and one standard passport photo. Your passport, visa application, and photo and combined land payment and visa fee in the required form should be sent to the tour organizer at the address indicated on page 3, above, using USPS Express Mail, UPS, or Fed Express to ensure quick and safe delivery.

18 2011 Paideia Tour 18 SUGGESTED READING There are many guide books for Russia, some providing national coverage and others devoted to particular cities or regions. Among them, I have found the Rough Guide series, widely available in paperback, to be among the best sources of practical information: The Rough Guide to Moscow, 5th edition (London, 2009) and The Rough Guide to St. Petersburg, 6th edition (London, 2008), both by Dan Richardson. Besides a good deal of sensible, up-to-date advice, the Rough Guides contain helpful historical summaries, maps (including subway plans), and site and neighborhood descriptions, as well as helpful overviews of the contents and arrangement of the principal museums. Russian culture is very rich, with a history reaching back to the first millennium CE. The literature in English dealing with that culture is similarly rich, but the works cited below, all noteworthy for their scholarship and readability, are excellent places to begin. Because of their academic orientation, most have excellent bibliographies (especially Billington and Figes), should you wish to expand your study of any area, and all of them can be used selectively or for reference, thanks to detailed indexes. But if you have time for only one book, then I would recommend Figes's fine cultural history, Natasha's Dance, available in paperback. Social Histories Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). An exhaustive, up-to-date synoptic history based on fresh scholarship Robert Service, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). A careful, up-to-date political and social history Gregory L. Freeze, ed., Russia: A History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). A highly usable collection of thematic essays by various experts on periods and topics from the rise of Kievan Rus in the ninth and tenth centuries through the collapse of the Soviet Union in Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 2nd ed. (New York: Collier Books). A very interesting, if slightly tendentious, analytical account and interpretation by a major historian that is alert to the diverse factors, including climate and geography, that affected the development of Russian 'character' and culture. Cultural Histories Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Picador). An extremely well researched and highly readable account of Russian culture from the profound transformations of Peter the Great in the eighteenth century through the late Soviet 'stagnation' of Leonid Brezhnev in the twentieth.

19 2011 Paideia Tour Nicholas Rzhevsky, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). A handbook featuring short articles on a variety of topics James A. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage Books). Begins with the rise of Kievan Rus in the ninth and tenth centuries and ends with the Soviet Union in the twentieth, giving especially good treatment to medieval Russian culture; less lively and up-to-date than Figes but with a historical range that reveals the links between the ancient and the modern. Topical Histories Art and Architecture William C. Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture, 2nd ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press). The standard account, with lavish illustrations. See also the University of Washington 'Brumfield Russian Architecture Collection' ( for a selection of images and text George Heard Hamilton, The Art and Architecture of Russia, 3rd ed. (New York: Penguin). Although first published in 1954, still the most comprehensive treatment of the subject, with discussions of medieval architecture, icon painting from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries, the art of imperial Russia into the nineteenth century, and early twentieth-century Russian painting and sculpture Theofanis George Stavrou, ed., Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). A valuable collection of essays by specialists on a variety of subjects relating to literature, fine and applied art, music, and general cultural issues Tamara Talbot Rice, A Concise History of Russian Art, 3rd ed. (New York and Washington: Frederick A. Praeger). An excellent and indeed concise survey of Russian art from its beginnings in the first millennium through the modern era by an authority with a thorough knowledge of Russian history and culture and a lucid prose style Camilla Grey, The Great Experiment: Russian Art, (New York: Harry N. Abrams). A very well-informed account of the major figures and movements with excellent illustrations. Literature Victor Terras, A History of Russian Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press). Authoritative synoptic account of the development of Russian literature with short descriptions of authors and works.

20 2011 Paideia Tour Edward J. Brown, Russian Literature since the Revolution, revised and enlarged edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). A broad discussion of the major authors and works of twentieth-century Russian literature in the context of Russian literature as an institution and in relation to the social and political events to which it inevitably responded D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, edited and abridged by Francis J. Whitfield (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). A classic discussion by an inexhaustibly well-informed critic of virtually every major figure and work in Russian literature through the first quarter of the twentieth century. Music Francis Maes, A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans and Erika Pomerans (Berkeley: University of California Press). The most up-to-date broad account of the development of Russian musical from, as the title obliquely informs us, Glinka in the nineteenth century to Shostakovich in the twentieth Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press). A collection of very serious essays for the musically well informed by a leading cultural critic and musicologist on such figures as Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich. Cuisine Joyce Toomre, trans. and ed., Classic Russian Cooking: Elena Molokhovets' "A Gift to Young Housewives" (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). A translation with helpful annotations of a late nineteenth-century culinary classic Darra Goldstein, A Taste of Russia: A Cookbook of Russian Hospitality (Montpelier, Vt.: Russian information Services). A judicious selection of excellent recipes with illuminating cultural commentary.

21 2011 Paideia Tour 21 REGISTRATION FORM (to be returned immediately with your deposit) Full name (as in passport) Home address Home phone Work phone address Passport number and expiration date Date of birth Emergency contact while abroad (name, address, and phone number) Preferred departure city Preferred accommodation (double or single)