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Group Writing: Understanding Why the Russians Don’t Smile (and We Do)
“So, my dear, I am guessing that you are American?”
I w
as surprised by the question, even though I had seen this serious older woman every morning for over a week behind the pastry counter in the market next to my hotel in St. Petersburg. I responded in my customary overly-effusive manner, and bubbled, “Why yes. How did you know?” “That,” she replied, pointing at my lower face. “Only Americans smile at everything.”
Her terse but honest comment verified what I had often observed during my travels in Russia: we smile, they don’t. And because they don’t, they are suspicious of those that do. A helpful cabbie explained the general Russian consensus concerning a smiling stranger: 1. They are insane, or 2. They are an American.
American smiles are frequently taken as a mark of insincerity in this dour nation. What we might consider an expression of courtesy or goodwill can be interpreted as misplaced levity: “You can’t possibly be happy all the time, so why are you smiling?” Russian humorist Mikhail Zhvanetsky described Americans smiling “as if they were plugged into the wall” and novelist Maxim Gorky observed the only thing you see on an American face is teeth. Ouch.
I actually have a great affinity for Russia, her culture and her people. I am attempting a screenplay set during the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944) and plan to make a third extended visit to St. Petersburg again next year, so I have more than a passing curiosity concerning the Russian frown. This is what I have come to understand concerning this national pastime.
First of all, not smiling is as much a part of this culture as borscht and vodka. Read a Russian novel, see a Russian play, listen to a Russian symphony and you’ll quickly understand that this is simply part of the centuries-old national character. In Dr. Zhivago, Alec Guiness’s Yevgraf Andreyevich Zhivago muses that Russian people have a “cursed capacity for suffering.” Chalk it up to brutal winters and seemingly endless wars. But don’t take the Russian reluctance to smile as a lack of emotion; far from it. Russians get very emotional when they elect to share their life stories; even if you are a relative stranger. (You may not get a smile, but you will get a story.) Being a relative stranger also doesn’t inhibit their use of personal space; i.e. there isn’t any. Up close and personal is their style. I have learned this is largely due to years of communal living. It is natural to be in everyone’s face.
Another factor contributing to downturned mouths is the relative homogeneity of the Russian population. Recent research indicates that a nation’s overall emotional expressiveness is correlated with diversity. In other words, the larger the number of immigrants, the more the native population is apt to smile to socially bond and build trust, especially if there are language barriers. Even many years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is much about the Russian society that remains “closed.”
Finally, I have discovered a strong sense of fatalism in the older generations of Russians who remember the Soviet Union. They are not lazy or indifferent, but rather seem to have transferred their responsibility for change to an outside agency – destiny, luck, or the government. This results in a certain emotional malaise … and a lack of smiles.
I encounte
red this non-smiling fatalism in a kind gentleman I met on a street corner in St. Petersburg. I don’t know his name or exact age or much about him, really. But I saw him every morning down the block from my hotel where he sat with his accordion as he played plaintive songs. I always stopped and listened and gave him a round of applause and 100 rubles. (Don’t faint; that’s about $1.80.) We briefly “chatted,” mostly through short phrases and hand gestures. But I found out he didn’t like how big and busy the city had become; and he felt his luck had run out; and like many of his generation, he harbored a certain nostalgia for the Soviet Union. I sensed he missed the sense of personal empowerment that comes with belonging to a powerful nation. “We were strong then and we will be strong again!” And being strong means you are selective with your smiles. Strength is definitely the quality Russians admire most in their president, and ours. I never saw a picture of either man with a smile on his face during my entire time in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Strength also means resiliency. Cultural communications author Anna King writes, “The [Russian] national ability to overcome hardships has been proven by history. As the words of a modern Russian pop song have it, ‘We Russians will get up from our knees despite everything!’” I also have come discovered this to be true. The Russian people will stand and they will squarely face the future.
Just don’t expect them to smile.
Published in Group Writing
I think this is because we become the mask. “Fake it until you make it” works (to an extent). So yes, we are happier. And we should be! We live in the richest country in all of human history in a time of unparalleled safety. Our nation has some scars (many self-inflicted), but the last century for Russia has been horrific. It’s no wonder they see smiling as a sign of mental feebleness.
I can agree with all of that.
But they do smile, just not as frequently. And I see lots of fake smiles around me these days. There has got to be a more reliable way to know.
There certainly have been attempts to measure happiness, such as the World Happiness Report. The fact that it comes from the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations might make one question the methodology, but even so their data shows that Americans (#18 on their list) are happier on the whole than Russians (#59).
It was often the only picture they had of the deceased, it was either that or slowly lose memory of a loved one’s features.
Sometimes, they would try to paint in living eyes, creating an ‘uncanny valley’ effect.
My family has such a picture from my mother’s side of the family, the little boy of one of her Great Aunts. We can’t dishonor their memory by throwing the picture away, but its never a fun experience to absently open the picture (its in a folding frame) while going through family photos.
Thank you for citing this report. Questionable methodology aside, it is always of interest … especially since the “happiest” nations seem to routinely be in the Scandinavian corner of the planet, thus debunking the theory that being cold and/or having limited sunlight for part of the year is a downer.
I have never heard of this fascinating practice from years past. Thank you for sharing this. (And I can certainly understand how it is difficult to come across photos like that.) This is what I love about R. threads – you can never tell where they will lead.
If you think that’s fascinating, how about this? When my great-grandmother died, there was much unhappiness in certain sections of the family that her husband had taken her away from her children to a far corner of Texas, where she died. And then, to make matters worse, she was buried on the farm/ranch. Some years later, after my great-grandfather had died, too, a niece had her remains disinterred and reburied in a town cemetery.
There is a photo of the disinterred bones, which we saw when it was brought to a family reunion in the 90s. I don’t remember paying it much attention (and it’s possible I now have a copy) but my wife does and thinks it’s really strange.
Mrs R did come with me when we went to visit her grave last year. Very few family members have been there. It’s in the southern tip of Texas. A few miles further and we would have been in Mexico. We plan to visit her village in Poland in a few weeks. I don’t know of any other family members who have made that trip. Took me quite a while to even figure out where it was.
Pat Sajak had an interesting post about the same sort of thing involving Poland.
Involving a photo of a family member’s bones?
No, having difficulty finding out where his antecedents were from.
Thanks for that link. I have been tripped up by that “d,” too, in trying to learn a little Polish. (I’m doing it mostly with the help of the Pimsleur course.) There are a lot of Russian/Polish cognates, and that sometimes helps with vocabulary. But the Polish version of the “d” sound in Russian words often becomes more like our “j” sound in the Polish cognates. But I still tend to keep the “d” as part of my pronunciation, as I’m used to the Russian word. And sometimes the Polish speakers in the Polish course do, too. Especially (but not always) the female speaker in the Pimsleur course. So it seems there is some variation. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there are even other variations when you get to certain places in southern Poland (like Pat Sajak’s ancestral place) or so I’ve heard.
My ancestors were German, so in many cases I have to translate from what they told us to the Polish versions of place names. There are more wikipedia-type resources on the web for doing that now than there used to be, and a Polish genealogy forum on the internet has been helpful, too. And sometimes my ancestors mixed German and Polish together, and sometimes didn’t. That combination actually has been helpful. My DNA results and other information I’ve found leads me to think there was not such a complete separation between German and Polish communities as I had once been led to believe.