Porn and Lenin in New Russia

http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/unameric...s_and_class.php

ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA—A young girl in an A-line skirt and pig-tails stands beside her mother on Nevksy Prospekt, St. Petersburg's main thoroughfare, the equivalent—to borrow from Gary Schteyngart—of New York's Fifth Avenue, Chicago's Michigan Avenue, and L.A.'s Sunset Strip, all in a single package.

 

On this bright, Russian afternoon, a small moment in the sea of pedestrians, the little girl and her pig-tails whip back and forth as she lunges at a fly, spitting enormously, missing the insect and giggling. She repeats, tongue darting in and out as if I've encountered a soft-skinned, blonde lizard.

 

Yards away, Pepsi sponsors a tent on prime sidewalk real estate. An underfed, half-assembled Darth Vader serenades a crowd of enthusiastic teenagers in Gucci T-shirts and tight denim.

 

Meanwhile, in an underground café nearby called the Stray Dog, participants and faculty from the Summer Literary Seminar attend a reading. Refuge for a century of Russia's avant garde, the brick-lined lair seats three dozen of us in the back room. Two men are set to read, both in town for a weeks-long festival celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Daniel Kharms, the preeminent poet of Russia's Absurdist tradition.

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