Howlin' Wolf Schooled My Russian Students
It was the 90s and I lived off Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg, Russia. My cramped, 75-year-old flat, furnished with cheap, non-cushioned furniture held six rugged, youngish (it can be hard to tell one’s age there) students eager to get American English hammered into their psyches.
My students came from the local university where I also taught English literature. I’d just finished graduate school and was eager to take a master’s degree in Russian literature to the streets. It took all of two minutes to realize studying Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy in Boulder, Colorado, had little to do with introducing English lit and language to 20th century Russia.
But you know. America and their futures were waiting.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) ushered in Soviet republics’ independence and by 1992, the USSR formally dissolved. You wouldn’t know it to look at the St. Petersburg citizens then. Fallout from oppression, wars, and fascism left many with bent backs, gray skin and tired eyes.
Each student had an English primer from their grade school days – very old, small textbooks with gray pages and nearly illegible print. “May I?” Irena handed me her book.
“Excessive freedom often leads to confusion,” I read aloud from a page that fell away from its spine. I looked around the room and kept going. “The boy is well-mannered and not at all cheeky,” I recited.
I chuckled and looked at the expectant faces and thought: Surely they have other resources.
“Do you have story books or fables or children’s fairy tales translated into English, somewhere? A library, maybe?” Naively, I figured at least those works would be absent the dogma and political undercurrents.
I also instinctively knew this gig was going to kill us all if we couldn’t find something more fun. Oh, how American (born in Iowa) I am.
“Those books from England,” Ivanka explained. “Our leaders rewrite.” What? British English and propaganda? That’s it?
“The people of Russia look to the Tsar for guidance, as children look to a father,” I quickly skimmed.
Did I mention that my first day in St. Petersburg, I tried to read a map and, seeing the Cyrillic alphabet for the first time, I panicked. I’d been working myself into an early death finishing that grad degree that required a German equivalency test. I’d had no time to study Russian. I could not read the map. I literally could not phonetically figure out so much as a syllable.
“We do not speak like this in the U.S,” I said and immediately regretted it. I could tell by their faces they already knew this, though it is unclear how. The only TV station ran intermittent, state-run rhetoric. The new-fangled World Wide Web was only accessible at one college that had two ancient, cobbled-together computers and only one of those had email capacity.
So how they knew their English was wrong and not going to be helpful in emigrating was beyond me.
I panicked again. I wanted to better explain the stilted syntax of this “English Language Primer,” not to mention the oppressive message in the verbiage. But because I did not speak Russian and their English was rough and because their only tool to communicating in English in the West was limited to these crude textbooks, I realized I could not clarify anything with them.
“In the U.S.,” I started, “we’d probably say, ‘He is a nice boy,’ not ‘The boy is well-mannered and not at all cheeky.’”
Big, uncomprehending eyes stared at me amidst polite sips of hot tea. “We don’t say, ‘cheeky.’ That is a British adjective, though many would argue Americans have bastardized the English language beyond comprehension. Ask any Chaucer scholar,” I added because I couldn’t help myself.
Now I’d really lost them. I elected to use nothing but simple vocabulary and declarative sentences. “Is there another way,” I try, “to say, ‘A loyal citizen contributes quietly to the common good?’
“How about, ‘There are unsung heroes among us.’”
I’d made it worse. “We’re never looking at these textbooks again,” I said and tossed mine aside. “Tell me about your evening yesterday. What did you have for dinner and how did you cook it?”
Irena perked up. “I cook borscht. It was good.” Well, okay then.
Maybe I could take them on a vocabulary run where we write down a bunch of nouns or verbs in Russian and translate them. Maybe I could show them the collection of “Alternative American Short Stories,” penned by Japanese Americans, Native Americans, Polish Americans, that I used to teach literature.
My instincts told me otherwise. I’d likely end up deeper in the borscht than I already was.
In my anxiety, I whipped out a tape player and cassettes I’d lugged across Eastern Europe and popped in Howlin’ Wolf’s “Back Door Man.” I watched and waited for what I knew would be additional language confusion.
I was in over my head. I did not have a Lesson Plan B. We were looking at a semester of rudimentary vocabulary and first grade sentence structure. “Her hat is red. I like tea.” It was going to be a long ten weeks.
“Yeah, I’m a back door man,” Wolf crooned.
“I’m a back door man,” The guitar was guttural.
“The men don’t know,” he sang.
“But the little girls understand.”
I stopped the cassette. Ramon smiled. “He is a lover,” he said in perfect English. When his fellow students looked puzzled, he repeated it in Russian. Everyone grinned. Irena reached out and pushed the play button. Every ear turned toward the cassette player. I upped the volume.
When everybody's tryin' to sleep
I'm somewhere making my midnight creep
Every morning, when the rooster crow
Somethin’ tell me I got to go
Lovely Anna translated in rapid Russian. Everyone laughed.
Anna looked at me and said, “мужчины!” (muzhchíny), the universal exclamation exasperated women use when seeking validation from other exasperated women fed up with whatever the men are doing.
“Men!” it turned out, brought us all together, unified as we were, by Howlin’ Wolf’s affair and voice.
I popped in a Bessie Smith tape.
Nobody knows you
When you down and out
In my pocket not one penny
And my friends, I haven't any
“She is not on the good day,” Irena said. Close enough, Irena, close enough.
“Excellent!” I laughed. “Now, who’s going to teach me Russian?” I called out over Bessie. Six people raised their hands. “Can you teach me to ride the трамвай?” I pronounced it TRAM vay.
“Это произносится «трамвáй» (ударение на второй слог),” they said in unison.
Now I’m puzzled.
“We say trahm-VAI,” Ramon said. “Stress the second part.”
“Трамвай, трамвай, трамВАЙ!” I repeated back. Irena and Anna stood up and swayed a little to Bessie Smith’s seductive contralto.
“Not bad,” Ramon said to me, using American vernacular, which, as it turns out, taught me that students often know more than we give them credit for.
Maybe, I thought, we all do. Maybe we all do.
