We shall meet again, in Petersburg

Dear Columbia,

I do not officially come home until early June, but the semester already seems to be coming to a close. Moreover, your semester is actually ending, which means that this is the last time you will hear from me until we are together again. I will not be the same as I was in December. But neither will you. Your seniors, some of whom have seemed so very much a part of my last three years, will be gone. A whole class of new Columbians will eagerly and anxiously burst through the gates (shortly after which they will pretend to be too cool for such earnestness). In some ways, we will not be whom we were when I left. We may not know each other at all, at first. And then we will again, but differently.

There was a Soviet poet by the name of Osip Mandelstam (though to call him Soviet seems somewhat wrong, since he distinguished himself by writing a 16 line poem that completely berated Stalin and was then sent to starve to death in a labor camp). He penned a poem that begins, “We shall meet again, in Petersburg.” The bitter irony of it is that he wrote it at the time when St. Petersburg was known to all as Leningrad, renamed by the Soviet regime Mandelstam so strongly resisted. He was not simply saying that he and whoever the poem’s recipient was would one day find themselves in this particular city. He was moving them out of their misspent present and into a moment in time that they could make sense of—a time of Petersburg, and not of Leningrad.

But that time was not necessarily in the past. The poem begins, “We shall meet again, in Petersburg” but continues, “as though there we’d buried the sun, / and for the first time, speak the word / the sacred, the meaningless one.” Later on, he writes, “Bored, by a fire we warm ourselves, / perhaps the centuries will pass, / and beloved hands, women’s, blessed, / will gather up the weightless ash.” I cannot be certain of what Mandelstam meant (furthermore, this is a column for a student paper, not a sad attempt at literary criticism). I do think, though, that one reading of these lines might suggest that Mandelstam was urging his reader to wait for him and for their city to catch up to a time when they could speak that sacred, meaningless word and shake off centuries’ ash. His Petersburg—this place of freedom, belonging, and poetry—is, in this work, still ahead of him.

Maybe we all have a Petersburg—a time and place in the future at which the terrible yearning for what was finally mingles with the courage to face what is and the hope to meet what will be. Maybe it’s in their Petersburg that your seniors, for example, out in the world, will think not of their fond college days (or daze), but rather of how what they learned therein has helped to bring them to where they are. Maybe that’s where the enthusiasm next year’s entering class had at the moment they received the 21st century equivalent of the thick envelope will be reclaimed and recalibrated to reflect the reality of the college life that is not what they expected and dreamed of, but, in its own way, infinitely better. Maybe it’s in this metaphorical Petersburg that I’ll finally be able to start to comprehend fully what the semester in literal Petersburg has meant to me. Maybe it’s there that I’ll find my place in you again, Columbia. It won’t be the same one that I gave up to come here. But we will understand the sacred, meaningless word in ways we didn’t and couldn’t before.

Tell those who are leaving goodbye for me, Columbia. Tell them I wish them all the best and that I hope they find whatever it is they’re looking for when they, for the first time, speak the word. Tell that, too, to the future first-years visiting for the first (or umpteenth) time. Tell them all to read Mandelstam.

So long for now, Columbia.

We shall meet again, in Petersburg.

From Russia with love,
Emily

Emily Tamkin is a Columbia College junior majoring in Russian literature and cultures. She is studying abroad in St. Petersburg this semester. She is a former Spectator editorial page editor. Foreign Correspondence runs alternate Tuesdays.