Russia: Banya Culture, Ballet and the Country That Spans Eleven Time Zones
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Russia spans eleven time zones — when it is midnight in Kaliningrad, on the Baltic, it is already late morning in Kamchatka, on the Pacific. The country contains the world's largest forest, the world's deepest lake, and a fifth of the world's fresh surface water. It is less a country in the conventional sense than a continent that chose to organise itself as a single political entity. Understanding Russia requires accepting the scale as the primary fact about it.
The banya — the Russian steam bath — is an institution comparable to the Finnish sauna and older than any specific tradition attached to it. Extreme steam, birch branches used to beat the skin and improve circulation, repeated plunges into cold water or rolling in snow. The banya is experienced as simultaneously physical and spiritual — a cleansing of the entire person that goes beyond the surface. Friendships and business relationships are frequently deepened in banyas, where rank and clothing disappear together and conversation happens on equal terms.
Russian ballet is the world standard by which all other ballet is measured. The Bolshoi and Mariinsky theatres train dancers from childhood in a system of extraordinary rigour that produces technical ability without precedent in any other tradition. Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and Sleeping Beauty — choreographed in Russia in the 19th century — are the repertoire that defines what the world means by classical ballet. The art form arrived in Russia from France and Italy and was transformed into something distinctly Russian: more athletic, more dramatic, more technically extreme.
