Yet the grumpy museum attendants suspiciously followed us everywhere and barked at us for attempting to explore on our own, without their vigilant supervision. Instead of answering our polite questions about what we were looking at, they gruffly instructed us to read the information sheets beneath the exhibits and visit the rooms in strictly clockwise order. “Nelzya! Vam tuda!” (It is forbidden to go this way. You have to go that way!)
Never mind. Overwhelmed by the richness of Goncharov’s life and work and by Ulyanovsk’s literary heritage—the town was also a place where Pushkin and the Decembrists resided—we wanted to buy Goncharov’s books, and Oblomov most of all. So we approached a table strewn with souvenirs at the exit.
There was no one there. The guard barked at us, confirming the obvious: “The ticket lady has stepped away.” When she would return he would not or could not say.
If we learned anything visiting museums across Russia, it was that those who sell tickets or souvenirs are often absent from their stations when you need them most. Sometimes a lack of visitors might be to blame, but there is a deeper problem: even after two and a half decades of capitalism, customer service, at least outside Moscow, is not a priority. The Goncharov museum might stand as a monument to Russian high culture, but the recently renovated restrooms lacked toilet paper, paper towels, and soap, even as its clean white tile walls bore illustrations of blue swans and pink flamingos. After examining for hours the stately home of one of Russia’s literary giants, one wonders why one’s tour must end on a note of exasperation and personal humiliation. Perhaps, however, this humiliation has a point in a country where people are subordinate to the state. If the authorities don’t believe citizens deserve rights, citizens, accordingly, don’t believe they have a right to civilized comfort. The Soviet Union, it must be remembered, was notorious for its deficit in toilet paper, and citizens resorted to using yesterday’s Pravda newspaper pages instead. Incidentally, in Stalin’s times this was a grave crime, which made the use of the restrooms a truly trying experience.
Wet hands or not, we were nevertheless determined to buy a Goncharov souvenir. The souvenir stand lady returned. We asked for a copy of Oblomov.
“We don’t have one.”
“Why not?”
“They are not available.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “The municipal authorities have not issued the relevant order for us to sell such books here.”
Selling postcards of Ulyanovsk was one thing, but the classics of Russian literature, presumably for lack of demand, quite another. The saleslady sent us to the bookstore nearby. We followed a muddied path to a sign reading BUKINIST (secondhand bookseller). We entered the dilapidated, disorderly shop, with tomes old and new strewn on a table, stacked on the floor, and piled on the stools—a bibliophile’s dream, one would think. But before long, the disheveled shopkeeper was apologizing to us. No, he had no copies of Goncharov’s works, either.
“Try the basement,” he suggested. “They have school textbooks down there.”
Downstairs we found no Goncharov. However, pasted to the door under a sign reading ADMINISTRATION was a portrait of Putin, cut out of a calendar. Along the wall stood stacks of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. We finally asked the female shopkeeper how we were to obtain a copy of Oblomov.
“Try online,” she said, barely lifting her gaze from a computer screen.
The next morning was cold and gray, unusually so for a May day. We ventured down to the Volga embankment to take a tour along the river. The port was open, yet empty, with no boats scheduled to run. Vendors still peddled (to whom, we wondered) the souvenirs of the area—tiny magnetic portraits of Lenin, Karamzin, Goncharov, and even Stalin (even though the dictator had no relation to Ulyanovsk), and, of course, Putin.
We approached the ticket office inside the dock building.
“Two tickets for a boat tour, please,” we asked the woman behind the window. She shook her head: there were no boats running.
“The weather is bad,” she added, in a friendly but basically indifferent way, “but if you want to rent the whole vessel for six thousand rubles [about $100] for yourselves, you can.” We decided to do just that and were quickly ushered aboard an old cruise ship meant to take as many as 120 passengers.
Our cruise ship was a remnant from the Soviet days. The remaining craft are half a century old, but many have been modernized and refurbished. In 2011 one sank near Kazan, another Volga town, and more than sixty people lost their lives. The ships have been better managed since then. We hoped ours would be.
Under leaden skies, chilled by a wind ruffling the pewter-hued surface of the water, we pulled out from the port, passing a gloomy junkyard—or, rather, docked passenger ships, including the former giants of Soviet waterways, ones with hydrofoils that lifted the hulls out of the water, allowing them to reach speeds as high as a hundred miles an hour. Now they sit as rusting behemoths. It was painful to remember that during Soviet times and even as late as the 1990s, these winged craft circulated among all the Volga’s major towns, including Kazan, Samara, and Nizhny Novgorod.
Denizens of the Volga, of course, have always used the river to get about. But in 1956 the river became Khrushchev’s special project—as anticapitalist as he was, he was also searching for ways to improve people’s lives after the harsh Stalin decades. At the time over three thousand hydrofoil vessels coursed the country’s major waterways at high speed, ferrying people quickly and easily to their destinations. Inspired by the Soviet state space program, the craft were emblazoned with names like “Rocket” or “Meteor.” But then came the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Yeltsin government abandoned industrial projects and public services in favor of privatization. That killed the shipyards producing the hydrofoils and left the speedy craft known as meteors to rust away in their nautical graveyards.
A mechanic on our boat told us that he used to pilot the meteors from the Khrushchev era, but then, he said, they were declared cost-ineffective, so he was compelled to switch to excursion craft running at more leisurely speeds. His eyes dreamy with nostalgia, he listed at least seven routes those meteors used to run in the region.
“Now people smarter than us own them,” he declared sarcastically. “Our speedboats are being used as far away as Vietnam and China. You can find some still gliding down rivers in Canada, Greece, Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Thailand, and Turkey.” He paused. “I rue for what we had and stupidly destroyed.”
The mighty matushka Volga, spreading away on both sides of us, should have been breathtaking, yet what struck us was the shambolic, neglected shoreline that has only recently begun reviving. Still, for an hour and a half we had a large, majestic Volga liner on the river all to ourselves—something impossible to imagine anywhere else, at any other time, and at so little cost.
The sun finally appeared, right after we sailed under Ulyanovsk’s recently built President Bridge—one of the longest in Europe, the mechanic told us. It is one of the two bridges in Ulyanovsk, and with a typically Russian story behind it. By 2009, work on the structure had been stalled for over two decades, but then Putin came to town and voiced his displeasure at the delay. In quick order, the bridge was completed. Another, older bridge we passed beneath bore the name Imperial. It dated from the 1910s, when Emperor Nicholas II visited Ulyanovsk.
In Russia, where the welfare of the state takes precedence over the needs of the citizenry, public works are often enacted to meet the exigencies of the bureaucracy rather than to help people live more comfortably. The President Bridge, indeed, has been a necessary improvement, lessening traffic bottlenecks in the region, but functioning waterways would be an even bigger improvement. A demand for them has yet to reach Putin’s desk, it seems.