My Renaissance history lecturer tells the story of her difficulty as a student when she was deciding in which area of history she would undertake further study. Her professor obligingly introduced her to a famous scholar of Renaissance history who looked at her and exclaimed, 'If you study the Renaissance, the stones of Florence will speak to you!'
It is an enlivening prospect, the possibility of a place coming alive through books, of feeling with your senses the human stories embedded in it. During the Russian winter, in the small city of Yaroslavl, far away from Florence, my collection of books began to speak to me; their words and descriptions began to wander through my head every time I walked into the frozen street.
Yaroslavl, a small industrial city, sits at the point where the great Volga meets one of its tributary rivers. Ancient silver domed Orthodox churches and classical mansions line the river banks and behind them the skyline is clouded by smoke stacks. In the streets, buses throw up mud as their engines stutter in the cold; old women, bent over and covered in blankets, beg for coins outside the city's churches; young people stroll arm in arm.
Winter there is cold and sometimes hard, as it has been in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Many people are continually underemployed or underpaid, and the GFC led to factories closing and rising unemployment. The much discussed 'contract' between Russia's elite and ordinary Russians, whereby the latter sacrifice their civil and political rights for economic wellbeing, is not delivering.
People in places like Yaroslavl are beginning to find themselves without civil and political rights or economic wellbeing — not free but held fast, imprisoned by restrictive circumstances, unable to move to seek opportunity elsewhere. The streets in the late afternoon are silent and ice covers the ground.
In the silence, Simone Weil's words stood out. She wrote that freedom, personal and political, is a vital need of the soul, that harm is being done to men and women whenever they cry out inwardly: 'why am I being hurt?' Although people may be mistaken as to who is inflicting suffering or why, 'the cry itself is infallible'. The streets of Yaroslavl are quiet, but the quietness feels like the 'infallible cry' of hardship.
In Yaroslavl, the experience of political disenfranchisement spreads a culture of disempowerment to every corner of people's