Word: neva
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...land and water are not in any better shape. The riverbed of the Neva, which meanders beside the magnificent Hermitage in Leningrad, is covered with a thick layer of oil. Ill-advised dam construction and inappropriate irrigation projects have caused the level of the Aral Sea to drop 40 ft. It is possible that this body of water, the world's sixth largest sea, will not exist in 20 years. Siberia, once pristine, is laced with wastes from steel, chemical and coal industries. Worrisome numbers of dead sturgeon are floating atop the polluted Volga River, threatening the Soviets' prestigious caviar...
...directly to a great tradition, and he never forgets it. His native Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg) is the birthplace of Russian writing. It is also the nursery of totalitarianism. Brodsky elaborates the point in "A Guide to a Renamed City" by contrasting two monuments. On one side of the Neva stands the "Bronze Horseman," the equestrian statue of Peter the Great. Across the river is the figure of Lenin on top of an armored car carved of stone...
Both Czar and revolutionary were despots under whom persecuted Russians managed to write and appreciate great poetry and prose. Both gave their names to Brodsky's city. He, in turn, adds a dimension that makes it difficult to return to ordinary reality. The Neva and its canals, he says, make Leningrad narcissistic: "Reflected every second by thousands of square feet of running silver amalgam, it's as if the city were constantly being filmed by its river, / which discharges its footage into the Gulf of Finland...
...Saturday evening, the activity and the animation, disappear. My first night there, I drifted about Leningrad naively, expecting to sit down in a bar or a restaurant to chart with some Russians. But that venture proved to be impossible. The only people who I came those fishing along the Neva river...
...Soviet Union, the children gravitate to one who wears Western clothes. Everywhere, they would study me just as I studied them. A group of young boys, training to be sailors--they were stationed just across from my hotel on the other side of the Neva River--flocked towards me when I asked if any of them spoke English Soon. I found myself surrounded by 40 or 50 of them, but nobody could speak English. We just stared at each other and tried to communicate with gestures. An older officer then furiously called them away from...