August 16, 2008 I'm in Kazan, now. It's been an incredibly busy week, as my final days in Ufa involved a lot of work and numerous courtesy calls. Now I'm looking forward to settling down again and getting some more work done in Kazan. As I mentioned earlier, I spent the first part of the week working in the archive of Rizaeddin Fahreddin, someone who was much involved in Muslim activist circles in the late imperial period and later became the second mufti of the Soviet Union. Fahreddin's archive is useful not only for the material relating to Fahreddin himself, but also for its wealth of documents pertaining to the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly. Indeed, Fahreddin spent much of his time as mufti going through documents in the Orenburg Spiritual Assembly's archive. In some instances, he recopied materials into his notebooks, but many of the documents here are originals.
The materials on the Orenburg Assembly are not as vast as those of the Central State Historical Archives in Ufa, but I would think that anyone working on the Orenburg Assembly would definitely want to look at them. I should also say that Ramil Makhmutovich has provided a real service to research into Islam in Russia by cataloguing this large fond of materials. Monday and Tuesday were thus spent working intensely at the archive of the Academy of Sciences, where I took over one thousand photographs of documents. On Wednesday, however, we took an excursion. Ramil Mahmutovich (Bulgakov) had suggested that we visit the grave of Rizaeddin Fahreddin, so on Wednesday the two of us went there, accompanied by the historian Marsil Farkhshatov, as well as Gülnar Iuldibaeva, a folklorist at the Academy of Sciences in Ufa, and Liliia Baibulatova, a kandidat nauk from Kazan who recently published a book on Fahretdinov's Asar. Then we all went to a restaurant looking over the Ufa river and had lunch. After lunch, we headed back to the Academy of Sciences so that I could deliver my otchet, or report on my activities, to the Director of the Academy, Professor Firdaus Khisamitdinova, a former Minister of Education for the Republic of Bashkortostan. It also turned out that Firdaus hanım is an old friend of Flera Safiullina, one of my Tatar teachers from way back in Kazan. Some photographs were taken, after which I was presented with a book. All in all, a nice afternoon. On Thursday, I took the bus from Ufa to Kazan. It's a lot cheaper than flying ($35 versus $170), and shorter than the train (ten hours, they said, versus twenty-two). In all, the trip ended up taking sixteen hours, two of which were spent sitting by the side of the road ten miles outside of Kazan due to construction. It was a pretty lousy trip, but not much worse than expected. In Kazan I was picked up at the bus station by Lolla, the woman from whom I'm renting an apartment here. Lolla is orginally from Abkhazia, and like everyone else I've ever met from the Caucasus is extremely hospitable. Indeed, this morning she was taking her children to the "Blue Lakes" outside Kazan and called to ask if I wanted to go. They're quite interesting--today was my first time there. Due to mineral deposits they are a deep blue-green color, and for some reason are extremely cold--no warmer than the mid-forties, in my estimation. When I jumped in the first time, I felt my heart contract and thought I was going to die for sure. It was so cold I could barely feel my toes after just a few seconds. The most anyone could do was swim from one side of the pond to the other--a distance of about forty feet. It was definitely refreshing, though, and fun. In the afternoon on Friday I worked for a couple of hours at home until heading down to Bauman Street to meet Igor, my old landlord from my Fulbright year. Igor has since sold the apartment I used to live in and is planning to emigrate to South Africa, but for the time being is renting a place on Tatarstan Street. Both he and his girlfriend, Sveta, love going to Ikea, which is located in the enormous Mega shopping center on the edge of town. I drove out there with them, and we sat in Ikea for a few hours, drinking tea in the Ikea cafe and chatting about people we know. Then we were joined by a couple of Igor's friends, who were also hanging out at Mega.
I remember taking a "taxi" like this for the first time, when I lived in Kazan in 2003-2004. I was really anxious about it, and only did so after having spent a couple of months here. Ultimately, climbing into the car of a complete stranger in the middle of the night--or at dawn--became second nature, making small talk in Russian or Tatar as we sped down the road listening to techno on the radio. Anyway, the guy who picked me up was a recent graduate of the Law Institute here, and we started to chat. He asked me my name, told me his was Timur, and by the time we got to my apartment near Sovetskaia Ploshchad' he asked me if he could take my picture. "No one's gonna believe this" he said to himself after snapping a couple of photos. Whatever, I guess all of this sounds a bit self-aggrandizing--and it's not as if people here automatically go nuts upon meeting a foreigner. But all the same, there aren't nearly as many foreigners here as there are in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and people here are less stand-offish about making conversation than they can be in the capitals. Indeed, one of the great things about living in provincial Russia is that it is much easier to make contact with people. The other great thing about living in Kazan is getting the chance to hear two languages constantly throughout the day. Indeed, while bilingual signs (Russian and Bashkir) are more present in Ufa than in Kazan, it seems to me that I hear a lot more Tatar on the street here than I hear Bashkir or Tatar in Ufa. In Kazan, I feel like I can live in both worlds, a feeling I think I've only really had elsewhere when I was a student in Montreal. Two languages, two religions, two great civilizations.
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A busy week in the borderlands...
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