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Published: December 1st 2008
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From the Komarov Botanical Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia
Somehow the US elections that were impending during much of my stay from Sept 1-Nov. 30 weighed heavily on me and I simply couldn’t get a blog together during the time that I worked in St.Petersburg. Also, the instructions from the Fulbright folks to keep blogs simple and sterile took a bit of the fun out of it. But after my son Ian’s phone call to me early Wednesday morning on Nov.5 with the election results, and then the news that appeared as a banner across the bottom of my Russian TV channel that said that Obama had won both East Virginia and Western Dakota I felt a great sense of relief and a great satisfaction that the American democratic system was not, as was sometimes portrayed on Russian TV, in great danger.
My work in St. Petersburg is possible because of a three month Senior Research Fulbright Scholarship. My project involves the translation of a book entitled “Plant Materials of the Altai Mountain Country”, written by Dr. Rudolf Kamelin , the director of the herbarium collection at the Komarov Institute. Dr Kamelin is a botanist/plant geographer whose work has involved
many expeditions to Central Asia and Middle Asia to collect plants and to study the plant ecology of the mountain systems. He is interested in the evolution of contemporary floras and plant communities. One of his findings is that there are some plant species that occur in the Altai region and in the Rocky Mountain West and nowhere in between. This information is what interested me in translating his book along with the purpose for studying the Russian language. His work will be useful to other plant geographers who are also working on the evolution of plant communities. Not much of Russian botanical work has been available in English, but over the last ten years Russian students have been studying English in school sothe next generation of botanists will certainly publish articles in both English and Russian. Dr. Kamelin does not use a computer and does not have email so it was impossible for me to work on the translation without actually talking with him and without the use of Russian/English or Russian/Latin botanical dictionaries that are available in the Institute library. I arrived in St. Petersburg Sept. 3 to live a very different kind of life from Armenia--the life
of a commuter in a very urban environment.
My hosts at the Institute found me an apartment—one room plus kitchen— and the one hour commute by walking and subway is considered to be very short. Researchers at the Institute (Herbarium) do not have to come to work every day. They make their commute, which for most of them, is a couple hours by electric train and subway, when they need to use the library or the herbarium collections. I made my commute for the first month, mostly by mini-van. But after that I walked 25 minutes to the subway and took the metro to town. I couldn't tolerate the uncertainty of the minivan schedule. On weekends usually I was the only person at the Herbarium unless there were other scientists visiting other countries.
I have actually finished the translation (230 pages) one time through. I had worked on it for many months before I actually came to St. Petersburg. So I took a break to spend a few days in Helsinki visiting another botanical institute and and Talinn, Estonia to see a different ex-Soviet country and I will resume the work of revising and improving the text during
the next few months. I have to be frank and say that I can read Russian much better than I speak it. It requires at least a year of living with this very difficult language to become an adequately fluent speaker. But my reading ability is fairly good and of course botanical language is at first horribly complex, but quite limited (petals, ovaries, stamens, carpels, phyllaries, involucres, infructescences etc) so the project is manageable.
Tom took over my job as Director of the Acopian Environmental Center at the American University of Armenia and finds that he really enjoys the work. As a matter of fact he likes being the DIRECTOR. He did spend a week with me in St. Petersburg and we spent many hours in the Hermitage and the Russian Museum, churches, theater etc. He found, of course, that he has a soft and easy life in Yerevan where he has only to walk across the street to the university to go to work.
The pictures that accompany this blog show the Komarov Botanical Institute and the Herbarium Building and some scenes of the city. The weather here in the fall is rainy and gray mostly. An
umbrella is an essential item and of course with the wind from the Gulf of Finland, the lifespan of an umbrella is quite short. But at the beginning of November the temperatures were still just above freezing during the day. They say that the really cold weather occurs in Jan. and Feb. so women are still wearing their fall coats. The long shubas of wool or fur will show up after the New Year with the very cold weather.
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Sondra
non-member comment
Hello
Jenny, so good to hear from you and about your Russian stay and work. Hope you are doing well and will have a wonderful holiday season. The pictures are great and I suppose it has changed since they were taken. The church looks magnificent. You and Tom are in my thoughts. Love,