Amazing Moments in Travel Writing: published excerpts from other writers
To appreciate the final lines of Gary Shteyngart’s Travel & Leisure essay, “To Russia for Love,” you have to read the beginning of the essay first:
“Only love is matter,” some besotted loverboy has scrawled along one of St. Petersburg’s ethereal romantic canals. Whether this is merely bad English or some newfangled law of physics we will never know, but one thing is certain: it’s summertime in Russia’s loveliest city, and everyone seems to be tying the knot….
The essay finishes with this:
…. We are at a recently built church, the freshly painted cupolas glowing brightly amid the drab Soviet-era surroundings. K. wears a traditional Ukrainian shirt embroidered around the cuffs and collar. Small Yakut women huddle together, adjusting their headscarves. The choir sings brightly, adding light to the multitude of flickering candles and golden icons. “God have mercy,” the priest changes. Bride and groom cross themselves. Holy water is drunk from a little golden cup. Hanging on to the priest’s heavy saffron robe, K. and Yana circle the altar three times, a symbol of eternal marriage. The priest gives a speech centering on the Adam and Eve-rib story. The idea seems to be “Man has dominion over women, but, hey, don’t go nuts with that dominion.” Exhausted by the ceremony, I walk out into the paltry northern sunshine, knowing that the party will now resume at Yana’s mother’s house. More iceberg vodka and happy toasting await. Russian weddings remain the maximalist and sentimental affairs they have been since the time of Ivan the Terrible. Regimes come and go, lives worsen and improve and worsen again, global warming may yet cause the Neva River to cascade out of its granite banks, but in the end “only love is matter.”