A Russia of My Own*

The Human Experience

2009-07-06T23:36:00.003+06:00

Now avaliable in a body near you!

This was the picture I tried mms:ing my mother on Friday evening - of me picking strawberries in a village outside of Chelyabinsk, a town in the Southern Urals that's known for two things: out-of-this-world radiation and rough men. Are the two connected? Probably. Anyway, look Mother, could I be wearing anymore red?!

Unproductiveness

2009-07-02T20:08:00.002+06:00

This Russian-kind-of-crazy-looking green and orange building is my favorite. Incidentally, it was only cleaned it up this good for Dima Medvedev’s visit in the middle of June. That’s because it is “The Residency of the President of the Russian Federation in Yekaterinburg”. Anyway, I think it looks weirdly splendid.

My plans for the summer of 2009 were splendidly lucid, comprehensible and set in stone – I was going to work, work and then work some more. I was supposed to read all the books I never get a chance to read during the academic year. I was supposed to work on my dissertation [with a little help from all the books I am supposed to have read on literary theory]. I was supposed to prepare for the conference in Swedish as a foreign language in Stockholm in August; I was supposed to prepare for my lecture on Shalamov at Gothenburg University in September. I was also supposed to work in form of writing enough blog post for my ‘paid blogging’ during the month of July for the whole month of August, so that I would be able to take that month of and just enjoy myself and my vacation.

So far the summer of 2009 has only been marked by one word and that word is ‘unproductiveness’.

On Monday I spent the entire day in bed reading Nabokov and eating various things I should probably not being eating without practicing hard physical labor on a field somewhere. On Monday evening I suddenly felt a strange urge to write a letter to my future professor at Berkeley – strange it was because it was more sudden than anything else; I haven’t written to her in six months. In my letter I confessed that I’ve experienced ‘an unexpected twist in my academic interests’, i.e. that I’ve fallen flat on the floor for the entire body of works produced by Varlam Shalamov. She answered me within ten minutes that she considers Shalamov to be the best 20th century writer on this side of WWII. Wow! She said she’d love to read my essay comparing Shalamov and Dusty. She also said that my idea for a doctor’s dissertation comparing the two isn’t so crazy, after all, but could be done. Wow! Then she spent the rest of her letter convincing me that Berkeley is the best place for me and it was as if the world had turned up-side-down because abruptly I wasn’t the one trying to get in, but she was in fact trying to get me to come to them. Wow! Then I answered her letter to me just as fast as she had answered mine. Her next answer came only a day later, in which she explained that there’s no reason for me to continue to bother the department during the summer holiday. Back off, Josefina, back off – is what she said, in other words. Anyway.

On Tuesday I had tea with the people at the Literature Museum here in Yekaterinburg and they asked me to write an article about my book for their magazine. I said yes. They said: “Mail it to us before Thursday then!” I had not seen that coming. Anyway, I wrote an article explaining which places in Yekaterinburg are presented in my Russian novel and I think it turned out alright.

On Wednesday I had Anna Mikhailovna and Katya over in the evening. We ate plenty of tasty things and drank chocolate soy milk that I bought – unbelievable! – in a Russian store that very same day. Katya is allergic to milk products just like me, so yes, you could say that we’re almost soul mates. Anna Mikhailovna is just lovely and does not have to be allergic to anything to be cool. I finally worked up the courage to ask her to make me a painting of Shalamov – and she said yes! I can’t wait. I am not only a huge admirer of Anna Mikhailovna’s paintings, I also own a few of them [they were gifts from the artist herself] and have begun collecting them. Secretly. I plan on selling a few of them fifty years from now and in that way buy a college education for my grandchildren. On Wednesday evening I tasted raspberry beer that Katya brought and I have come to the conclusion that beer is a wonderful thing. When it doesn’t taste anything like beer and contains almost no alcohol.

Today – today is Thursday – I spent almost four hours with my former more handsome half. We took a long walk around town and talked, talked, talked. It was very nice. We had lunch together at a beautiful restaurant with Russian cuisine called ‘Demidov’, where I had never been before. I had the mushroom soup; he enjoyed the borsht. The food was splendid, as was the interior of the restaurant. I’ve never seen such a huge bear hanging on a wall that was shot on Kolyma! Now that’s what I call hunting. As a matter of fact, I had not thought I would have such a great time with my former more handsome half today as I had. I think we could actually turn out to be good friends. And he told me not to write anything about his ‘personal life’ here, to which I answered: “You told me you don’t read my blog anymore!” But I cave in regard to his right to privacy and thus – my lips are sealed in that matter.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to Chelyabinsk for the weekend. With Ksenia. On a bus. We’re going to go swimming and so that’s why I’m bringing my swimsuit which I haven’t used since… on Tjörn in August 2008.

Next week I hope to start being productive. Or at least pretend to be on my blog. I just need… rest. You know, don’t you, comrades?

There Are No Safe Places

2009-06-28T23:02:00.006+06:00

Thursday was one of those classic “I hate Russia & I want to stab sharp objects into this country” days. I’m not going to tell you why, comrades – since that is water under the bridge now – but I will inform you that lovely Anna Mikhailovna saved me. She walked with me almost until midnight and on our walk together I took this picture. It is the brand spankin’ new Hyatt Hotel in Yekat.

On Wednesday I started a new life. I’m not going to tell you exactly what this ‘new life’ is all about and why I decided to start one, comrades, but I will inform you that it is great so far. Incidentally, on Wednesday my Korean roommates left to go to Europe for three weeks and I’ve been all alone during the four first days of my new life. Well, not completely alone – of course. I fought a small war against the Russian Federation on Ural soil on Thursday – and came out of the battle victorious. Nevertheless, I can’t be proud of this victory because I pity them all and as I pity them I realize two things: 1) that I love them; and 2) that I must be my own enemy, i.e. Russian at heart. Why do I realize this? Because ‘Russian love’ is pity. And no, comrades, those are not my words, but the words of Varlam Shalamov. Anyway, it’s true no matter who said it.

Yesterday was Jennifer’s farewell party. Tomorrow morning she’s leaving Yekat on a plane destined for the U.S. of A. For me it feels really strange because Jennifer was here in Yekat when I arrived herein August 2006. For me her leaving is strange because she was my neighbor for a year, then we shared a small room for a year, and then we sat next to each other in class for a semester at the master’s program and to me Yekat and Jen are closely connected to each other. I gave her my last [and only] dollars to use for beers and American food. I marked the bill for this. She gave me her Oxford’s Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary and now I will finally learn advanced English. This is great! She also gave me back lots of my own books that she had at her place and last night I started reading Nabokov’s “Transparent Things” and felt a surge of pleasure going through my whole body. I haven’t read in English since… February? It is not that I don’t like reading in Russian or that it doesn’t pleasure me, but I have a deep feeling about the English language that is hard to explain, but I feel it in poetry and literature. I feel the English language when it jumps and catches air underneath its wings and takes off. That’s when I feel the English language. Is it my choice? For poetry and literature? I do like the sound of it. But I like the sound of Russian and Swedish, too. What is my choice? I have a hard time making choices. I hate choosing. I am incapable of making choices. Whenever faced with a choice I always close my eyes and choose whatever my fingers touch upon first.

On Friday night I found myself writing in Russian even though I wanted to write in English. It was surprising but I allowed it because I wanted to see where it was going. On Friday I watched “Australia” and realized that the frame story of it is the same as used in fairy tales. As simple as it gets. And you know the works of art that are what they are – this they in themselves are what they are about and nothing else and they’re just one big ‘sign’ in themselves, as Lotman would’ve said? “Australia” is just that – one big simple sign. The title says it all. The whole movie is a repetition of the title and constant triggering the most basic of human senses. It is a great work of art because it is a complete esthetic whole. After seeing “Australia” I had a vision and wrote on it and got drunk on raspberry Absolut but had forgotten that I almost never drink anymore so my body is not prepared to deal with alcohol and thus I woke up still drunk and had my period arrive at the same time as my hangover in the afternoon while saying goodbye to Jennifer. That was not so great.

Currently I’m fixing with my gradschool application and then I saw this movie by Michael Moore called “Sicko” and it made me very much not want to go anywhere near the U.S. of A. again in my life. I freaked out for a while and I didn’t know where to go in this world. Then I remember a poem that I wrote in August 2005 called “There Are No Safe Places”. It is true. And the poem is still great even though I think some things in it are too tightly connected with certain events in my life at a certain point that I right now would like to have no imprinted in a good poem like this but I do suppose that’s life. Even Pushkin went back and edited all of his youth poetry because he wanted people to miss the fact that he had a foot fetish. But the scholars figured it out anyway. I’m not going to do what Pushkin did. After all, I’m not Pushkin. I’m just this girl and I’m more like Tolstoy since I’m all about starting new lives. Like the one I started on Wednesday. I think this will be great.

there are no safe places
the entire world is on fire
you can’t hide in the bathroom
dogs will chase you in the morning
there are no safe places
in my mind are only echoes
of all the things I never heard
and the “I love you”s
you liked to say and say and say
there are no safe places
if I open the door the rain comes
the cold is going to eat me alive
there are no safe places
everything is dangerous and dark
my eyes look and look and you know
there are no safe places

Today I went to MEGA with Ksenia and her friend Natasha to buy cheap groceries at Ashan. It was really a fun day and I also bought two plates, three glasses and one tea spoon at IKEA. I do not know why I bought one tea spoon. It was on sale. I bought fresh mushrooms and red onions and when I came home I fried them up together – a few of them – and ate it and loved it. Mushrooms taste so good. Red onions look great on a white plate. I did not use one of my new plates, though. After dinner I decided to listen to Regina Spektor’s new album “Far” and clean our communal kitchen which I did for four hours. At times like these I wish I had my own place instead of living with assorted Asians and sharing a kitchen with strangers who cannot keep anything clean in… well, Asia as a matter of fact. But let’s not forget that there are no safe places so I am okay with where I am at the moment.

Fatalist

2009-06-24T22:06:00.003+06:00

Even the trolley bus can look good in Ural summer sunset.

Friday the 19th – that was last Friday – I had my last exam and found out the name of the class as the teacher – she’s almost old enough to have been Lenin’s comrade back in the 1920’s – wrote «отлично» [‘excellent’ – my fourth straight A!] into my «зачётная книжка» [it's this little blue book that all Russian students have into which the teachers put the name of the class passed and the grade received]. The class was called «История эмоциональной культуры» [“History of Emotional Culture”] – now that’s something my future employers are sure to be very impressed by! After the exam me, lovely Anna Mikhailovna and Katya went for cherry beers at noon and after that I came home, stumbled into my bed and slept for four hours.

On Saturday evening of the 20th of June I went to a restaurant with some of my students to celebrate the Swedish holiday of Midsommar. The service was terrible – I had forgotten that this is still Russia no matter how Swedish the holiday you decide to celebrate is. Anyway, my students were sweet and the evening was filled with red wine and good conversation and so not completely ruined by the fact that we had to wait almost an hour to get our orders.

On Sunday I went to the grocery store and was told that my visa card had got demagnetized. Fortunately, I had enough cash with me to pay for my food but the humiliation didn’t end there. As I was approaching the dorm coming back from the grocery store I saw my former more handsome half going in that direction with another woman. He gave me a guilty look and smiled a weird smile and I didn’t even notice what the girl he was with looked like because I was so highly disturbed by how he looked. Two things hit me as I saw him on that Sunday evening: 1) he looks weird and is not handsome and is still wearing the clothes I bought for him back when we were together; and 2) I should stay away from the opposite sex until I’m thirty because clearly I am not mentally old enough to make healthy choices when it comes to men since I was with him for almost two years and have actually been thinking I might’ve made a mistake when I called it quits with him.

On Sunday night I decided to use my visa card one last time online until I had to contact my mother and force her to order a new one for me back home in Sweden that’ll probably only get here in the mail in two weeks time [and that’s me being positive]. I bought flight tickets to go home and regretted the choices for my flight dates as soon as I received a ‘surprise news’ from Aeroflot – they’ve switched to electronic tickets now! Even if you fly Aeroflot you can use your booking code to check-in at the airport like in the rest of the modern world and you no longer need to go down to their office and pick up paper tickets. Of course this is great news. But I will miss going to my local Aeroflot office and spending time with the cute girls in unflattering orange and dark-blue outfits… I’m flying out of Yekat on the 30th of July and flying back to Russia on the 13th of September. At first I’ll be in Stockholm for a couple of days; I’ll pass the TOEFL in Stockholm on the 1st of August and then head further west. It’ll be great. I’ll be back with my friends and family for almost three weeks before I have to go to a conference in Stockholm for a few days on the 22nd of August.

On Monday I requested transcripts of my BA degree from my university in Gothenburg to be sent to Berkeley this summer. This week I’m going to write a long letter to my future professor there. I’m all set to leave Russia. Or perhaps I’m just all set for applying to Berkeley. I’m not sure I’ll get in, but I am sure of one thing – I’m going to do my very best in order for them to be unable to turn me down. I’ll take this summer to work on my application and on getting everything right. I think it will be fine. I need to brush up on my English for the TOELF but I’ve got this huge book on how to prepare for it just lying on my desk for three months already so it should be all great if I just open it and start studying.

On Tuesday evening I went home to Ksenia with Marina and we drank and ate good stuff and enjoyed a splendid sunset from Ksenia’s ninth floor apartment out in the suburb. Ksenia gave me 6000 rubles that she owed me for flight tickets that I bought for her a while back so I’m not completely stripped off cash even though I don’t have a working visa card. Since the beginning of June I’ve been sick. And I thought it was the same sickness that I had in late December/early January but I was too busy to think about it during all my finals so I just stuffed myself with painkillers for three weeks and tried not to think about it. But Marina told me I should go but I am very afraid of hospitals and doctors and giving blood tests so I almost started to cry. Then today – Wednesday – I had Natasha make an appointment for me with a gynecologist at the clinic she goes to. Said and done; she followed me there and made sure everything was okay, and then left me to go find out what I’m suffering from. The gynecologist turned out to be a man. At first this freaked me out big time. Then I came into his office and he turned out to be a very kind man and asked me lots and lots of questions. The clinic got my birth year wrong and put 1983 instead of 1985 and I think that helped me greatly to deal with my ‘age issue’. When he looked at me and said: “So you’re going to turn 26?” this didn’t sound horrifying to me at all and I actually felt okay when I corrected him: “No, I’m only almost 24.” The good news is that there’s no problem with my ‘female organs’ and that the sickness I had six months ago hasn’t come back. He said I have problems with digestion and that from the look of it I am probably allergic to milk products because that would cause my stomach to hurt in such a way. Well, I kind of knew that I might be allergic to milk products, and that’s why I’ve cut things like milk, yogurt and ice cream out of my diet. The only thing I haven’t been able to let go off is cheese. He gave me some medication to take for ten days and if things aren’t fixed by them I should come back and check all of my allergies because it could be serious. Yikes! Also he told me something else that might ruin my plans on having five children one day. He even gave me three pictures for me to show to the doctor when I get pregnant – or when I’m starting to plan a family [whatever comes first] – and suggested I aim for one kid instead. Great! My life is just great. This means that I’ll actually have to pick my ‘baby daddy’ with care since I might only be able to have one of those…

The visit to the doctor and the medicine cost a third of what I’ve got to live on until my visa card arrives in the mail. Maybe a little bit more. I’m not very good with numbers. This might actually be good, though, because I’ve decided that this summer of 2009 will be my ‘summer of health’. I intend on cooking at least one real, good, healthy meal every day [considering I hadn’t cooked a single meal for almost five months this should be interesting] this summer and working out and just being good to myself. Not cooking food helped me manage to study full-time, work two jobs, write a novel in Russian and re-do the first Swedish translation of Dusty’s Siberian notebook, but might not have worked wonders for my health… So that’s what I’m going to focus on. Getting healthy and working on everything one day at a time. I might even go to a real club to dance one of these days this summer. I haven’t been to a club in like forever. I haven’t wanted to go to a club in like forever. But I would very much like to go dancing. I would like that.

Okay, let’s finish this entry on a weird note: a guy befriended me on the Russian Facebook and I thought I knew him so I said ‘alright’. Then I couldn’t figure out how we knew each other and so I sent him a message and asked him. He answered: “No, we don’t know each other. I just saw you on TV and thought you seemed interesting and hard-working and so I wanted to hang out with you. You don’t mind hanging out, do you?” I answered that I’m really a very boring person and he should be careful. Since then – nothing. This proves the rule about ‘no men before 30’ is excellent! After all, everything happens for a reason.

Madness

2009-06-18T00:59:00.002+06:00

Have you ever seen Lenin’s prospect empty, comrades? No, I didn’t think so! Can’t help but to quote lovely Anna Mikailovna’s blog at the sight of this: «Эх ты совок!»

Obvious signs of madness are abundant in my current life. The final in “History of Russian Literary Theory” was passed on Monday in a way that makes the word ‘madness’ seem far to bleak a term to describe it fully; and yet it was full of pure, plain madness. I wasted both my physical and psychological sanity while preparing for it during last weekend and it turned out that the professor had already made up her mind about me long before the final. My last blog entry made Anna Mikhailovna laugh [she even copied my whole entry and posted it into her own blog!] and it made me happy to have been able to bring joy into her life during such mad times as these. In general, I received an easy ‘ticket’ on the final – about Potebnya [the guy who insisted that no human being can ever really understand another human being] and his influence on later literary theory homeboys like symbolists, futurists, Vygotsky and Bakhtin. While I wrote down my answer on a piece of paper the professor said: “Josefina! Sit up straight! My back hurts just from looking at you! Now that you’re young you might think it’s nothing and that sitting like that is alright, but when you grow old you’re going to be sorry!” I didn’t know what to say; for a moment I thought I had failed the exam due to bad posture [I do have terrible posture when I write – which is why I have tried to sit up straight while studying these past three days, something that has lead to constant pain in my back…] but I managed to do my best because it turned out that I had memorized all answers to all the questions while I sacrificed my mental sanity during last weekend. She gave me a five no questions asked and I was left wondering why I received a five – or, as it is called in Russian: «отлично» [excellent] – because I answered well, or because I’m a foreigner, or because she appreciated how I tried to explain my answer in ‘funny’ terms [I wrote my answer in my own ‘special’ style of writing, where the line between the severe and the absurd is oh-so-thin that some people prove unable to understand and therefore take offence], or because I made a few grammatical mistakes and she decided to take pity on me. While I explained my answer to her it hit me – suddenly – that she must have been very cute when she was young. She’s still kind of cute, actually.

Anyway, what matters is that I got a five, and that I have collected three fives from three finals so far. Now only final remains – on Friday. Let the madness continue!

The last subject is known in our ‘study plan’ as “Modern Concepts of Literary Theory” but has not contained anything of this during all of the spring semester. Mostly during classes we have had to make presentations on our future Master’s dissertations and give constructive criticism on each other’s presentations and future dissertations. The professor is 80 years old and dresses as if she was younger than us – also this is a clear sign of increasing madness in life at this moment in time – and suddenly in May she proclaimed that the main theme of this class was ‘personality in literature’ and gave us a list of articles about this to read in a Russian literary theory magazine. The articles are about journals, letters, dreams [during night] and different hardships in the personal lives of writers that may or may not have left an imprint on their fiction. Kafka is in almost every article, which I – at first – saw as a good sign since Kafka is my friend and floats my boat and we get along perfectly. I see myself in Kafka, and I think – but this is my personal opinion, of course – that Kafka would’ve seen himself in me had he lived now or had I lived back then when he was alive. Yesterday I managed to read all but two of the articles and felt on top of the world, so I went for a walk and enjoyed Yekaterinburg without cars as we have two international summits in town this week and there has been a rumor that it is forbidden to drive through town this week, but that’s just a rumor, though. Russians are tricky, indeed. Anyway, so I continued my reading today with the two last articles and both of them were very interesting – one was about Tolstoy and his diary and written by Irina Paperno, who might actually become my future academic guidance counselor at Berkeley if I’m accepted to gradschool there; the other was about Andrei Bely’s correspondence with Meyerhold and was even more interesting. Today was an unbearable hot day in the Urals and I spent all of it inside lying in my bed reading these articles; then I slept for a while and had strange visions of Andrei Bely and remembered a dream I had the night before [last night, that is]. That dream was indeed strange, as strange as the visions of Bely I had today during the day – having visions of Bely can never be a good sign; it can only be a sign of madness – in my dream I saw one of my professors, who also happens to be a famous poet and writer and for whom I took a class that was pretty pointless during this semester called “Russian Textual Personality” and during every lecture he proclaimed Pushkin to be a genius. News, indeed, I know! That was the main point of his course; but not the main point of my dream. In my dream he lived in my room here at the dormitory, but it wasn’t my room, but his room and I was visiting him there. For the longest time I helped him to make coffee – because he couldn’t figure out how MY coffee machine works – and then he invited me to spend the night and I agreed, but then I noticed a camera standing by his bed and realized that he was intended on filming our night spent together and so I declined his offer. Then I woke up and realized that I had been sexually aroused by him in my dream and thus I was greatly puzzled during the entire morning. The important thing to know about this professor is that he is actually sixty years old, but looks like forty, something that is so rare in Russian in general and among Russian men especially that it is indeed worth mentioning. He looks very good, actually, and I think I am afraid of him because once I tried to take another class with him and he would always stare at me during lectures and so I stopped going to class because I didn’t like him staring at me. Also I think he knows that I’m a writer and that I’ve published a book now and he also knows that I know that he doesn’t agree with ‘young people writing novels’ because in his mind that is not allowed – you can write short stories and poetry, that’s alright, but novels! No, leave that to Pushkin, he can handle it good enough for all of us. Basically, I think this is the core of our relationship. If there’s any core at all, that is.

Then Okino, the only other foreigner [since Jen left] in my group – she’s from Mongolia – called me tonight and asked me about Friday’s final and I realized that I really didn’t know what was going to go down on Friday, so I called Irina – the girl from whom I’ve been copying notes to the three other finals – and Irina told me that there’s actually a list of questions that we have to prepare for the final that is only a day away now. I was in panic a few hours ago! I told her to mail me the list, which she did, and then I forwarded it to Okino, and the list of questions turned out to be mad, mad, madness because the articles suggested as ‘preparation’ for the questions have nothing to do with the questions at all and I have no more strength to do anything at all and that’s why I’m blogging tonight because my head cannot eat anymore information and besides, the fifth question – about dreams [at night] – one can choose ahead and I decided that I am choosing that ahead and if she asks me about anything else then I will fake a heavy accent and rely on the fact that she likes me. Or at least I used to think that she liked me but now I’m not sure anymore, but I will really, really, really try to me her like me tomorrow and on the final on Friday. Tomorrow will be ‘consultation’ which is the thing in Russian universities before finals when the professor explains just what to ‘expect’ during the final. I am even planning on copying her way of dressing and looking really sweet and wearing my lucky earrings with the Swedish flag on them and hope that she’ll take pity on me and ask me about things like why I’m in Russia and not pressure me too hard and anyway, I did a good presentation on my future dissertation during class even though that might actually work against me since I was a little ‘too good’ because I have a terrible habit of talking in front of ten people as if I’m giving a speech to the masses after the October Revolution. On the other hand, I have read all of the articles and I’ve been to all of the classes expect the last one because then I was in Tomsk on a conference and I should be forgiven this because that’s important to me as a future scholar and if she sees me as a future scholar, then she might go easy on me. I think that was the deal on Monday, actually, the professor knows that I’m superserious and she knows that I intend on spreading the love for Russian literature around the world and so she didn’t want to mess it up by giving me a bad grade even though I don’t think I’m the least better than anyone else who got a four.

On Monday afternoon I was interviewed for TV again and the interview was alright except it was embarrassing when they wanted to film a page from my book up close and chose the page where the two main characters have sex. Now that only happens in a mad, mad, madness-like life like mine. They didn’t see it though, but I’m sure they noticed it once they got back to the TV station. Then I wasn’t so interested in seeing myself on TV again so I didn’t even watch it when they told me that it would be on because I watched myself on TV last week and was horrified at the sight of my arms – they look terribly fat! – and the sound of my voice – I must from now on never utter another word in public. Last week the reporter said that it had been a pleasure to interview such ‘an intellectually developed person’ as me and that was of course nice to hear because people don’t say things like that to me very often, almost never, and on Monday the reporter tried to make me compliment by asking me how old I am, and then when I told him, he exclaimed: “You look good! I wouldn’t have thought you to be twenty even!” But that was a lie even though it was a sweet compliment because he didn’t believe me to be nineteen years old because how to hell could I have had received five years of higher education already had I been nineteen years old still? Today another journalist sent me the article about me for a paper that’s coming out on the 27th of June and I read it and corrected it and sent her pictures from Tomsk to go with it and I really liked the article because I sounded like such a happy-go-lucky individual and that’s how I want to seem. On Monday when they filmed me for TV I felt terrible bloated and then yesterday I felt just fine and today I feel even happier with my body so I can’t for the world figure out why people always want to film me on TV or in movies when I’m feeling bloated and think that I should go on a starving diet for at least a year to loose all the terrible fat on my arms… Actually, my arms aren’t that bad – they just don’t look good on TV. Besides, I can look however I want to look because I’m intellectual, you know. I think I’m getting sick, though. I cannot and I will not specify exactly what I’m coming down with since I consider that to be private.

Yesterday my former more handsome half came over to help me with a problem on my computer and we talked for a while and he told me that he’s drinking heavily and driving his own car these days and working a lot and that his parents have been to Austria to visit his sister there and that they now cannot fathom Russian reality. Yesterday I felt like touching him in naughty ways but I didn’t – maybe that’s where the dream about my poet-professor came from? We decided to have coffee and hang next week once all of this madness is over. I can’t wait for this madness to be over. All I do is dream of the afternoon of the 19th of June when everything will be done. I can’t study anymore. My brain will not study anymore. I just want to stay in my bed and not read anything anymore and think about things that I’m going to write that people will not read, and if they’ll read them then they will not like them, of that I am sure. I’m about to realize everything now because I’ve already taken the first step – publishing my first novel and having a close friend of mine [my professor Alexey] refuse to call it ‘a complete esthetical piece of art’ but that’s alright, I’ve concluded, since I know that he doesn’t like Kafka and I see myself like our time’s Kafka. Right now I’m planning on writing a short story called “My Best Friend God” about God becoming human because She decided to check things out down on Earth and take a ‘hiatus’ for about a hundred years or so. So She meets a human man and they become friends and that’s about all I’ve got at this moment so far. In general I want to write something using all of my Old Testament knowledge and show people that God is really not better than us; it’s all in the Good Book for those who really want to know. When I first had this idea I felt like it was a huge sin and so I would plan the short story for a while and then confess to God about my sinful ideas for just as long and whenever I spoke about it I always felt like God was going to cut me down any moment now. I think I might have to talk to God tonight about writing about my sinful idea here on my blog, too, because I think God appreciates me keeping our dialogue honest and open. I have also thought of returning to either “Letters to Father” or “Girl in Pink”. I don’t know what it will be but something will come out of this summer because I will be free and I will have time to write away the hot Ural summer nights once again…

My camera broke a while back and next week I’m going to buy a new one. Yesterday I realized that I’m going to turn 24 a month from now and I’m still in panic because I feel like I haven’t done anything with my life and that I’m already old but also I think that’s a personal problem of mine since I’ve made ‘youth’ too big a part of my personality.

Summing It Up

2009-06-13T23:33:00.005+06:00

On account of my published Russian novel I made the news Wednesday/Thursday this week in Yekaterinburg [they even did a story about me for TV!], but then my professor Alexey told me he doesn’t like it because it is ‘sentimental female prose’ and this was such a huge blow to my ambitious sense of self that I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown for a while. Since then my life has looked exactly like the picture above – studious.

A brief summary of the history of Russian literary theory:

As with everything else in Russia’s history, literary theory started its long and winding road to becoming an independent, and thus also ‘real’, science much later here than in the rest of Europe. As with everything else in history, this is a story of scholarly men with long beards and their theories which resulted in or out of hard practical work, 90% out of which – because of a strange twist of fate – were called Alexander Nikolayevich. Sometime in the 18th century, while classicism and romanticism were fighting it off with each other out west, a young, poor country boy walked from Arkhangelsk by foot to Moscow in order to receive higher education. This kid’s name was not Alexander, but Mikhail – Mikhail Lomonosov. Lomonosov grew up to be what his friends but not family liked to call ‘a walking Russian university’ because he had his fingers in all scientific cookie yars of the time. Incidentally, the first Russian university in Moscow still bears his name to this day. Lomonosov wrote a book about ‘the three styles of Russian language’ which was pretty good for teaching his fellow Russians how to speak and write properly, but his work was not a real ‘literary theory’. This was because the change of epistemical systems had not yet taken place in history before Lomonosov died. Then it happened and instead of just one norm being considered to be ‘the norm’ there was a revelation in society that opened people’s eyes on the fact that the strict rules of classicism had been retarded and that romanticism – with its sharp interest toward the human personality and the individual’s freedom and all the mystical, magical ways this could be portrayed in literature – was really the way to go.

In the year 1800 something really awesome happened in Russia and after that people went crazy with romantic nationalism and the specifics of different national literatures for a whole century. The very, very old Russian epic novel “The Word of Igor’s Battle” was published for the first time and Russians were liked: ‘Wow! We have works of our own to draw inspiration from! Who needs France and ancient Greek epics anyway?’ [Since then academically oriented Russians have discussed whether or not this historical piece of fiction really is as ancient as the guys who discovered it claimed it to be for over two hundred years; the last word on this has yet to be said, but it is likely that yes, it really is THAT old.] After this everything went extremely fast – speaking in 19th century terms – and many men with long beards started to ponder on the idea of literature and how to best write a history of Russian literature. The problem of the terms ‘poetic’ and ‘rhetoric’ were obvious right from the start. ‘Poetic’ had been the term for science about poetry: about different kinds and styles and rhyme in general, whereas ‘rhetoric’ had been used in connection with prose. For the longest time prose suffered badly in Russian literary thought because romanticism refused to let go and allow for realisms to enter the scene, and everybody knows that romantics thought prose to be a ‘lower’ kind of literature, whereas poetry was the real stuff. Things looked pretty hopeless there for a while – with all this newfound and newborn love for everything ‘truly’ Russian in their hearts, and a burning wish to classify and study Russian literature, they didn’t know where to start. But things are, as is the general rule, always darkest right before the sunset. Eureka! Let’s not waste our time with all these old-fashioned poetic and rhetoric nonsense but let’s pay attention to the esthetic value of literature instead! The question on everybody’s lips was: ‘how is the idea of beauty portrayed in poetry and prose?’ And so it was decided and the men with the fluffy beards started writing books about this. The break from classicism had been finalized; now there was indeed no going back.

Merzlyakov wrote the first book on the history of Russian literature in 1811 and managed to fixate a whole bunch of names and information on authors that would’ve otherwise been lost to the cruelty of time. In 1814 Grech wrote a book about literature in which he explained that literature is a social phenomena, a product of the historical life of the nation [he didn’t know it back then, of course, but this idea of his was going to be everyone’s favorite in the 19th century]. Then Pushkin’s old schoolmate and future Decembrist Kyukhelbeker also decided to get a piece of the cake and wrote a book in which he – for the first time ever – stated that there are different directions in literature, and the success of literature depends on these directions. This was in 1824, the year before he stood up with the rest of the Decembrists against the tsar and was sent to Siberian exile for speaking his mind. Classic Russian move – get rid of the smart, free-thinking people…

It might have seemed like everything was fixed for literary science now, but – alas! – this was not the case because by the 1830’s it became obvious that the esthetic values praised before proved helpless when it came to dealing with works of literature that were not made according to the standard. The esthetic values were fixed and thus incapable of adapting to the new Russian literature with people like Pushkin, Gogol and Lermontov spinning their pens in new, unexpected directions. Thus Koshansky decided that there was a need for a ‘university-based science’ when it came to literature that would study not just simply ‘beauty’ but originality in literature. At the university many new, progressive ideas on originality flowed freely – Polevoy wrote about ‘the fight between directions in literature’ [Marxists will thank him for this a century later], thus shedding the first light on the idea of a ‘historical aspect’ when studying literature, and Kireevsky wrote a couple of works that later become the foundation for historical poetics.

Then it was time for Belinsky to enter the stage with his critical articles on literature. Belinsky was born in Finland, and grew up in a small town and later moved to the capital to receive higher education and lived a short life in outright poverty in Russia while he wrote his endless critical essays on Russian literature and made literature a communicative scene in Russia. Early in his short but fruitful career Belinsky argued that literature is only literature if it serves NO OTHER PURPOSE but literary ones; thus he considered Griboedov’s “Woe from Wit” to not be literature at all since its purpose was to make fun of current society. Later he changed his views a little bit and stopped being so categorical. Yet even when he was trying to not be categorical his friends still called him ‘furious Vissarion’ because of his outrageous manners in public. Belinsky divided writers in two groups: ‘geniuses’ and ‘talents’. The genius catches the ideas and feelings that are ‘in the air of the time’, but it’s the talent that brings them to the broad masses. The genius writes literature [in the highest sense of the word], whereas the talent writes just normal books that people can read and even like. Belinsky was sick for most of the 1840s but it didn’t stop him from noticing that the young Dostoevsky was a genius, but then he realized – after reading “The Double” – that Dostoevsky was such a genius that this book made no sense and could probably only be understood about a hundred years later. Belinsky was right. Belinsky didn’t live to see a large part of the most talented young men in Russia’s capital sent to Siberia for trying to speak their minds on the issue of slavery in 1849 – he died in 1847.

In the 1850’s everyone in Europe were in love with nationalism and with the nation [their nation, that is] and decided to do what they had never done before – to gather different kinds of folklore: mainly fairytales and myths. So the Mythological School in literary theory was born in Europe. Suddenly people everywhere realized how everything in life and society was connected with each other. And so this was something that must be studied, and did they study in the middle of the 19th century! Oh boy! Everyone and their mom went around collecting folk literature and trying to find out which country had been first with which stories. This turned out to be more difficult a task then they had first imagined. In Russia the men with the curly beards were also on the train, but everything was – as is the general Russian rule – not as easy for them as for the rest of Europe. The Russians asked themselves – like they had done before and would always come to continue to do – how Russia was to progress further? Some said that Russia should try to keep up with Europe, that Europe’s the way to go, that Russia’s is after all a part of Europe, but all behind and must change everything to become more European and not so retarded and left behind. They called themselves ‘Westerners’. But there was another group of intellectual Russians that argued that this was nonsense, that Russia is not a part of Europe at all, Russia is her own country with her own road and we don’t need Europe to tell us what to do. This group called themselves ‘Slavophiles’. They continued to argue with each other until the revolution of 1917 put an end to such ‘frivolous behavior’ [‘because now it is clear that the way of the world is the way of Russia and the way of Russia is to the bright future of communism’]. The brothers Grimm in Germany founded the Mythological School once and for all, claiming that all myths have a divine source and that folklore is the product of the nation’s collective artistic efforts. This idea caught on in Russia very fast.

Buslaev stated that the source for myths is language, and that in the word one can find everything one needs to know about the people which uses this word. But, alas!, with time the people forgets the ‘real’ meaning of the words as they become usual and not so connected with mythological tradition. Orest Miller brought the mythological method even further by saying that one can learn things about the people by studying their myths even if these myths are also present in other nations and peoples, because ‘Russian myths carry information about Russian reality’. Later Miller corrected his views, but he never accepted the theory of ‘borrowing myths between peoples’ since he still wanted to believe that the Russian myths were just that – completely and only Russian. Also belonging to the mythological school of literary theory was Alexander Nikolayevich [the first of many ‘Alexanders Nikolayevichs’] Afanas’ev who listened to Buslaev’s lectures at the university and then got a job in a state archive where he could gather folklore. He collected different kinds of folklore in a three volume book and also interpreted them in his own very special style. Afanas’ev wanted to know where myths came from and that’s what he was focused on. He came to find that myths are tightly connected with the evolution of language. Later Afanas’ev reached the conclusion that all myths come from the ancient Aric people [!]. He said that the only way to study myths is to compare them with the myths of other people and times. He lived a short but difficult life and got his first bestseller the year before his death – he published Russian fairytales for children. Before Afanas’ev it wasn’t considered ‘cool’ to study fairytales in Russia, but after his death most people concluded that it was alright.

At the same time in France a French guy who also had a beard said that one must search for the objective reasons for why literature ‘occurs’. He said that literary theory must be like all other ‘real’ sciences and thus he introduced positivism in literary theory. The search for the source could then begin. In literature he saw only the society which had ‘given birth’ to it. The school he founded was – no big surprise – called The Cultural-historical School because he paid attention to just that: culture and history. He didn’t real care much for what was in the books, and that made many writers of the time pretty angry with him since he studied ‘second and third rate books’ but he said that was the correct thing to do because often the best books have very little of ‘society’ in them. In Russia Pypin embraced these ideas and brought the Cultural-historical School into the Russian university. Pypin was interested only in the historical meanings of literature and didn’t care for ‘pure art’ or esthetical pleasure at all. In Moscow University the professor Tikhonravov greeted Pypin’s idea with open arms and started to study literature from the point of view of how the cultural and historical life of the people was portrayed in it. Tikhonravov was so impressed with positivism that he studied huge amounts of literature before he drew any conclusion and this impressed both his students and other professors so much that the new school soon became very popular. Close to these men with extensive beards was Dmitry Ovsyanko-Kulokovsky [funniest name in Russian literary history] who had studied under Potebnya in Kharkov and came up with his own concept: the Social-psychological Concept. His foundation was the teachings of Potebnya about how everyday thoughts are tightly connected with artistic thoughts. He also has many other original ideas and in general he did a lot of good for the science. His main work was “The History of Russian Intellectuals” (1906-1911) in which he studied types of Russian intellectuals as portrayed in Russian literature. He said that in literature there are only two things: either experience or observance. All characters in literature come either from the writer’s experience or from his/hers observance.

Now that the men with wavy beards had come to the conclusion that not only is the people’s art important to literature, but things as history, society and psychology too, it was time for a new school to arrive on the scene – the Comparative-historical School. It was later to give birth to Comparativism in the 20th century, but during the 19th century it was only just getting started. The two most important figures in this school were Alexander Nikolaevich [told you so!] Veselovsky and his younger brother Alexey Veselovsky. Alexey did not become as famous as his older brother, but he did a lot for studying the influence of foreign literature on Russian literature. For this he was also widely criticized because Russians never want to hear that they’re not first with something. His big brother Alexander knew many, many languages and studied literature in direct connection with life of the society in which it had been written. He compared everything with everyone and their mom. He wasn’t too much into the idea of ‘borrowings’ between peoples, he insisted that people are very much the same everywhere on this planet of ours and that’s why most myths are the same on Iceland and in India. Alexander also did another great thing – he further developed the idea of ‘historical poetics’, and formed clear rules for the studying of different kinds of literary forms and how they’ve evolved over time. He also said that literary science should compare, compare and once again compare –comparing is the job of our science. Not enough comparing always lead to poor results. Alexander survived his time and is still the man in most literary theory circles.

At the same time in Ukraine there was a man with a short beard called Potebnya. Potebnya wasn’t aware of it at the time, but he would become a legend because he came up with many interesting and original ideas. His most famous idea is the one about ‘the inner form’ of the word. According to Potebnya, every word consists of three parts: the outer part (sound), the inner form (the etymological meaning) and the normal connotation of the word. The inner form is the most interesting, because by figuring it out we will learn how this word was created and what it meant to begin with. In the beginning, Potebnya argued, everything was simple and people were aware of the inner form of the words. Then time came along and people forgot about the inner form of the word. Yet the inner form is what gives birth to literature, and poetry especially. Potebnya stated that language is art and as such it is the source for poetry and science. Potebnya also had another idea – that people can never really understand each other. Everybody, he said, have different life experience and view everything differently and thus we can never really understand how something we say will be heard by other and we can never know what people really mean when they talk to us. This was the main point of his psycholical interpretation of literature. Then Potebnya died back in Ukraine and everyone with a beard started to discuss his ideas everywhere in Russia. Potebnya’s students published a journal in which they evolved the ideas of their teacher and everyone since then is still trying to find the ‘inner form’ in words up until this day. The Symbolists, like Andrei Bely, saw in Potebnya a friend and an ally, who had also spoken about the ‘magic of the word’ even though Potebnya had never uttered as much as a word in that direction. Also the Futurists used Potebnya’s ideas when they created their ‘new’ language, containing ‘more Russian than all of Pushkin’s poetry’. Bakhtin said Potebnya had got it all wrong because of course one cannot stare only on the inner form of the words when studying literature – what about the story, what about the characters, what about everything else? Bakhtin didn’t like Potebnya, even though he respected him greatly for starting such a productive discussion. Bakhtin was, as we all know, all about the dialogue. And with Potebnya he could indeed have a productive dialogue. It could be argued that all of Potebnya’s ideas were misinterpreted by everyone else since Potebnya’s major thought was that nobody can ever understand anybody else. And yet Potebnya’s ideas were and still are very popular. If they’re understood – now that’s a whole other chapter!

After such an interesting century it was high time for the 20th century to arrive, which for Russian literary theory this meant enormous changes in many different ways. It marked the return of the Mythological School with a little help from such symbolism theoretics like Vyacheslav Ivanov and Andrei Bely. They realized what was to come out of the 20th century while the rest of society felt like they were expecting the Doom’s Day any day now – the return of the myth. The symbolists said the symbol and the myth are one and the same and with this they felt pretty content with themselves. Then came the October Revolution of 1917 and everything changed again. Now people began to believe in a bright new day to be just around the corner and they started to build a new society. While building this new society it was soon obvious that such a new society demanded a new kind of human being and that was the biggest challenge of them all. Some people said ‘screw this, I’m heading for Europe’ and left the bright new Soviet Union. Other people wanted to hang on in there, but Lenin told them not to bother and sent the smartest people away on a boat since they would just have been bothering him with their higher education and smart ideas had they been allowed to stay. In all of this new things took place in literary theory. The Formalist School said ‘no more trying to figure out if Pushkin was a smoker or not because seriously that has nothing to do with his art’ and paid all their attention to the form of literary works. The Georgian academic Marr decided to quote Marx, Lenin and Engel in all of his articles on his new linguistic theory called ‘Yafetology’ which stated that languages had occurred as a result of class struggle. Franz-Kamenetsky studied the Bible in the Soviet Union in a brand new way and said, among many other things, that Jeremiah had been for the party and that his work as a prophet had also been an act of class struggle. Everything in the Bible was mythical, he said, Jesus and God are also mythological characters, and that was that.

Marr with his pseudo-science and Franz-Kamenetsky with his constant Bible bashing had a female friend – and enter the first literary theory worker without a beard! It was a true sensation! Her name was Olga Mikhailovna Freudenberg and she studied ancient Greek literature. Her theories were clear on many points: there is no genesis at all for literature, everything moves from facts into factors and then from factors into facts and start all over again. And literary process is a process of destroying the myth. She also said that the metaphor arrives in language when there is no difference between the myth and the words. At about the same time another very popular school in Russian literary theory was Psychoanalysis. It was popular around the whole world at this time – the beginning of the 20th century and some people still cling on to it to this very day. It was based on the theory of Freud. Freud said that people have a part of themselves about which they are not aware – this he called the ‘unconscious. There one can find all the things that people – because of society and culture and what not – are not allowed to show in everyday life. In the unconscious lay all of those things about which we rather not talk or confess to. Art, said Freud, is the result of sublimation – a defense reaction to all of the things hidden in the unconscious. Sublimation leads people with much trouble on their mind, of which they don’t like to talk, to do things like paint paintings, write books or do scientific research. This they do because society says these things are ‘okay’. Thus, according to Freud, art is always the result of mental disturbance, and the job for literary theory is to study prose and poetry in order to figure out exactly what the writer was trying to cover up for. Freud wrote in his very famous book “Dostoevsky and Parricide” that Dusty’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov” is the sole result of Dusty wanting to kill his father and marry his mother and also being afraid of being castrated and suffering from bisexuality. In Russia everybody loved Freud right away and Ermakov, for example, started the Psychoanalytical Institute in Russia and dedicated himself to finding out all of Pushkin’s hidden mental problems. Freud’s former student and close friend Carl Gustav Jung said: ‘This is madness!’ and was forced to come up with a theory of his own to counter Freud’s. Thus Jung stated that there is a collective subconscious, and that it is the same in all people, and because of it we all have the same archetypes. Literature is built on archetypes and so are myths and that’s why we in literature can find not only myths but also different archetypes. Jung was pretty mad at Freud because his theory made all artists mentally diseased and so he wanted to find another way to use psycholical theories that weren’t so off the wall. Because he still thought everything could be explained psychologically.

Jung’s theories was used by many people and proved very correct when it comes to analyzing American Hollywood movies or American soap-operas since they use only archetypical characters and situations.

This was a short summary of what I’m supposed to know on Monday. In the process of writing this I had come to the conclusion that a) I know some things; and b) I haven’t got a clue about other things.

Fire!

2009-06-10T01:21:00.003+06:00

This is a historical document, comrades, for two reasons: 1) it is the only time I’ve ever fired an 18th canon ball in Siberia [May 2009 in Tomsk]; and 2) it was taken with my camera that my father gave me back 2005 which died the other day. I was planning on buying a new one, but still… does this mean I have actually become one of those people who never throw anything away but waits till things fall apart on their own? [or get stolen, as is always the case with my cells…]

When you look at things from a certain angle everything seems to be going splendid. I received a scholarship for next year, I am invited to the conference in Swedish language for teachers abroad in Stockholm in August [they even asked me to gave a presentation on my ‘theoretical system in practice while teaching Swedish through music’!], I found out that I received the highest grade on both my exam yesterday and the exam last week [when I burst out in tears not once but TWICE – oh, the shame! the shame!], and both of my professors – Aleksey here and Magnus back home – are so impressed with me that they have completely changed their view of me. Magnus read my article comparing Shalamov’s “V banje” with the chapter “Banja” from Dusty’s “Notes from the Dead House” and liked it so much that he suggested me as a doctorate student at Gothenburg University next year – without asking me first! sneaky indeed – but they turned him down for financial reasons [I suppose studies in Russian literature is not a priority area in science these days]. Aleksey is reading my Russian novel with pleasure and treating me like a writer – gasp! – and even managed for me to meet with a journalist for an interview yesterday. He wants to make me ‘news’. And the weather in Yekaterinburg right now is highly pleasant. I should be on the top of the world, right?

But when you look at things from another angle everything is not going as splendid as the reality portrayed above. Once again it is proved that everything is indeed – ‘relative’. I have a final next Monday which I have no idea how to prepare for. The subject is “History of Russian Literary Science” and shouldn’t be too hard, if it weren’t for the fact that the history in question is 19th century and all books written on the subject of Russian 19th century literary history were published in another time on what seems to be another planet – the Soviet Union. I spent six whole hours this evening reading through “Schools in Russian Literary Theory before Marxist Literary Theory” [this being in Russian and written in the 1930-40’s] and trying to sort out real information from countless quotes by Lenin and endless stating of the obvious fact that “this school was faulty because it failed to pay accurate attention to the most important thing in literary theory – the study of struggles between classes”. No matter what the scholars tried to do back in the day, nothing can ever please the Marxist scholars. At times they put far too much importance on the author’s personality, when his personality should be determined only by his class and thus by the other classes struggling with this class, and at other times they sure do write theories about how society is important in forming literature, but then – alas! – again they forget to portray just how the struggle between classes went down in this society at the time. The only ‘okay’ person, the Marxists’ only ‘homeboy’ among 19th century scholars, seems to be Belinsky – but then again the article on Belinsky was written with such burning propagandistic flavor that even I thought to myself: “Here was a man!” Belinsky, you see, comrades, was the first Russian Marxist. This he was while Marx himself was but a youngster not knowing anything of the time when a country would exchange all kinds of philosophy for ‘Scientific Communism’. So I have no idea how to prepare for this final. If I keep this up I will only be able to specify the different kinds of class struggle apparent in the 19th century on the exam while what I should be doing is explaining the different schools in literary thought in Russia and how they’re connected with each other.

Thank God that I have the best academic group! We’ve divided all the questions between us and will send each other all of our answers by e-mail after Thursday, once we find out exactly what’s going to go down on the actual exam on Monday morning. Tomorrow I will read through all of my notes [I’ve already copied notes from the lecture I missed from a girl in my group] and pray that something will materialize in my brain. The professor who read this course is an absolutely lovely woman, but she holds her lectures in accordance to the strict art form of ‘stream of consciousness’, meaning that her talk is sometimes so complex that she makes Proust read like a children’s book with only illustrations.

As if this wasn’t enough, I have other problems on my mind. Yesterday I found a gorgeous dress at Mango which I wanted to buy for a) the conference in Sweden in August; and b) my cousin’s wedding in September; but I could not because I have… this is embarrassing… too big breasts. Since when? It was a distressing situation, indeed, yesterday in the store. Adding to this I am still very much single and can’t even for the life of me figure out how I’m ever going to meet anyone. I’ve tried online dating and that wasn’t for me. I live my life mostly in the university where the chances of meeting men are as probable an event as meeting the Pope in a strip club [slight, very slight]. Also I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m most likely not the kind of girl any man would want to meet – for obvious reasons. All I really want is a kind man with higher education who’s capable of holding conversations on various topics ranging from my shoes to Soviet concentration camps [the switch can sometimes be so sudden that I don’t even see it coming myself]. And who wouldn’t mind taking long walks in the evenings and then drinking wine with me in my communal kitchen while exchanging hilarious jokes regarding life or talking seriously about God. Where is this man? Is there such a man?

I don’t want to be regarded as ‘sexy-weird’. I want to be seen as either sexy or weird, but never in a combination! That combination is horrible! Maybe that’s my problem?

Confessions of a Scandinavian

2009-06-06T20:33:00.003+06:00

The question on all comrades’ lips this past week has been: ‘What will it be like when Alexander Rybak meets Josefina [yes, and not the other way around]?’ You can rest assured now that the scene has been interpreted in advance by lovely Anna Mikhailovna, who happens to be a great artist. Объявляю себя изменницей Родине и подам на норвежское гражданство! По политическо-музыкальным причинам…

Such a great day the 6th of June is! Sweden’s National Day, Pushkin’s B’day, and – coincidentally – a day which I spent solely digging around in textbooks and notebooks trying to figure out all the fine nuances of ‘functional grammar’. I think I got it now, though. The key to passing a Russian exam is easy because the system in itself is easy. A week or so before the exam the student is given a list of questions to which the student must prepare answers. Answers are best prepared using the notes you kept in class while taking the course; but your notes may not always be very easy to understand [my notes circle around question marks and the words «что-то» and «что-то другое»] and therefore you can always copy the notes from the best student in your group and prepare your answers according to her notes [it is always a girl]. Then the professor tells you how many questions will be on each ‘ticket’ on the exam. My next exam on Monday the 8th of June on the subject of “Modern concepts of linguistics” will have two questions on each ticket. Once you know this, then you must start by preparing the questions you like the most, and once you’ve prepared those answers you begin praying to God that these questions will be on your ticket on the exam. Praying is, unfortunately, not enough when it comes to passing Russian university exams. One must also think about these questions all the time, and not think at all – even for a short moment! – about the questions which you have not yet prepared answers for/have prepared answers for but still don’t understand them at all and sit and look at your hand moving the pen across the paper while wondering in amazement how a part of your own body ever got to be so independent. The student must be very careful to memorize only the phrases he or she understands, trying not to put to much stress on the sentences which seem like the book with the seven seals.

The foreign student in Russia will read the answers out loud; trying to think of funny things to say that has something to do with their native language even though it is not necessarily connected to the question on the ticket. For example, when talking about Bondarko’s ‘functional-semantic field’ the foreign student – if the foreign student is a native of Scandinavia [excluding Finland] – says something like: “Well, this idea with ‘functional-semantic fields’ is really different between different languages, because not every language has all of these fields. Russian and Swedish have different fields because Russian has aspect in their verbs, while Swedish don’t, but then again Swedish has articles, which Russian doesn’t.” Then the foreign student says something strange in their own native Scandinavian language – for a rather large amount of time – which nobody understands, while the professor wonders why ever did the Iron Wall have to come tumbling down, and the case has been stated. The foreign student should not use examples of aspect in Russian verbs as this is a magical, mysterious and mythical area of Russian grammar which can never be understood by outsiders and thus could seriously harm both the professor’s image of the student and the student’s sense of self.

Here’s the last part of my novella “Ten Shades of Kindness”:

10.

The next year Mikaela started first class and I went back to my work at the hospital. Mikaela was without a doubt best fitted for studies out of our six children. She received the highest grade in every subject from the first year till the last. The years that followed were marked by our children starting school every second year. Erik worked as an engineer and with time became a supervisor at the factory. After Erika had started school, when I was 41 years old and Erik was 45, I started to work on my doctor’s thesis at the local institute of medicine. I defended it the same year as Mikaela finished school with a golden medal as she was the best pupil that year and applied to the same Medical Academy that I had graduated from in the capital. She was accepted with a promise of a large stipend and left our provincial town for life on her own five days away with train in the big city. When we found out that she was accepted, I wrote a letter that was long overdue to Dr. Solomon, who turned out to still be working as a professor there. He answered straight away and told me that it would be his honor to help my daughter to get oriented both in her studies and in the capital. Two years later also Gabriel and Raphael finished school. Gabriel remained with us as he started to study at the technical institute to become an engineer, whereas Raphael applied and was accepted to the state university in the biggest city in our region, located on the south end of our country’s largest lake. There he began his studies at the history faculty. Already when he was very little he had loved to figure things out on his own and never took things for granted, and every time Raphael said something was in a certain way or another he gathered proof of the opposite before arguing his case. I told Gabriel that his grandmother, my mother Mikaela, had been a history professor and then he said that’s what he wanted to become too. Two years after this Daniel and David finished school and both of them decided to remain in the provincial town. Daniel began studying at the pedagogical institute, but David decided to follow in the footsteps of both his father and his older brother Gabriel by applying to the technical institute to become an engineer. Daniel was the quietest and tidiest of our children, he was always the one who helped me out with both cleaning the house and cooking dinner, whereas David liked to play sports and was a star in the school’s soccer team.

Two years later, in the beginning of same summer that Erika finished school and stated that she wanted to become a writer and for this purpose she would apply to the philology faculty of the same state university where Raphael was studying, Mikaela returned from the capital. She and her fiancée, with whom she had studied for six years, had received their first work placements from the state at the same hospital where I was still working. By then I and Erik owned our own house on the same street where we had once lived in a communal apartment. Our two-storey wooden house had enough rooms to accommodate all of our children in it during the summer holiday. In the beginning Mikaela and her fiancée, strangely enough called Emmanuel, the same name as the doctor that had once helped both me and my husband greatly in camps during the war, also lived with us in a room of their own on the second floor.

One evening in June all nine of us sat down around the kitchen table to have dinner together.

“Mom, how did you two meet?” Erika asked suddenly as I was passing her the salad.

“I’ve already told you that story a million times.”

She was the first to shake her head. Then all the other children – or perhaps the word ‘young adults’ would be more fitting now – followed her example by doing the same thing. “No, I don’t think you’ve ever told us about it!”

“Allow me,” Erik said and placed his hand on mine. He was sitting next to me at the table. “The first time I saw your mother was when we were both in a large crowd about to be forced into a concentration camp. You’ve heard of concentration camps, right? Well, both I and your mother spent the whole war in such camps. I liked your mother the first time I saw her. She was the prettiest girl of all the many thousands prisoners there and I couldn’t help but notice her and feel an instant urge to introduce myself. But she didn’t see me at all, and so I had to make my way closer and closer to her through the huge crowd. Once I had got close enough I had to wait for the appropriate moment to catch her attention. I found my opportunity when she almost fell and I caught her. And that’s how we met.”

I smiled at him for a while, and then, quite unexpectedly, at the thought of this remote memory I started to laugh. “Then your father was bright enough to get into a fight with some officer in the camp and got himself shot in the arm. And I was so desperate to see him in the hospital that I told them I was his wife…”

“That’s how I figured your mother was into me too,” Erik added also laughing.

“And after the war you were married for real?” David asked.

I looked at Erik and he looked at me too and we shook our heads simultaneously.

“You were never married?” Gabriel asked.

“Because of my desperate and impulsive statement in that camp we were written as married in our documents, but we never married. We never had a wedding,” I explained.

There was silence at the table for a moment.

“But… that makes us all illegitimate children? Bastards?” Erika said in surprise and looked at us both.

“Beautiful bastards!” Erik laughed.

Mikaela looked at me for a long while before she said: “You should have a wedding. You should have a church wedding! Just like I and Emmanuel will have next summer,” she blinked at her fiancée sitting next to her, “except you should get married now. As soon as possible to save the honor of your children and make them legitimate. Finally!”

“We’ve already been together for thirty years, I don’t think that’s necessary,” I said.

“But you must!” Raphael argued and all of the young people at the table agreed with him in noisy comments.

“Besides,” Erik began in a loud and firm voice in order to be heard over them and their noise, “what makes you think we’ll have a church wedding? Isn’t the country we live in after all an atheistic state?”

“But the cross around your neck, your silver cross!” Daniel disputed, and pointed at it. By some trick of fate it was hanging on the outside of Erik’s white shirt that evening, though it usually was below it and rarely on public display.

“This cross belongs to another world,” he said. “I got it from my mother when I was baptized a very, very long time ago. Besides, even if I’m a Christian, your mother isn’t and she might not agree to a church wedding. Am I right?” he gave me a serious and at the same time inquiring look.

“My parents were Jewish but I don’t ever remembering anyone of them ever reading the Torah or even going to the synagogue. I don’t think they were very religious, and if you ask me, then I don’t know what my religion is,” I said and returned his stern look by shrugging my shoulders.

“But for us?” Erika began. “Won’t you have a wedding for us?”

In that moment Erik rose from his seat at the dinner table. “Get up,” he said to me.

I got up from my chair and stood up in front of him. Then he got down on one knee and held out his right hand.

“Martina, will you marry me?”

“This is all so sudden, I don’t know…”

And everyone started to laugh.

“I guess that if you really, really want to, then… Then yes.”

Two weeks later we were married in a small church. And as I started my ascendant down the aisle and saw him standing in front of the priest and all of our six children sitting in the front row, I couldn’t help but thinking that the life I had lived had been a good one. I had entered into one world, where there had been a chandelier in the dining room and many old books on history and medicine in the living room, to be sentenced as a political prisoner and go through concentration camps, and come out into another world where I became a doctor and raised six children on a dirt road in a provincial town with a former illiterate thief. I had taught him to read and write and he had taught me how to remember the past without living in it. Despite all the cruelty, all the losses and deprivations I had experienced along the road, I came to realize that very little of it mattered in the end. In the end what matters is that I was able to share most of it with a man who’s first and foremost quality is kindness.

Excited?

2009-06-02T21:48:00.005+06:00

Oh my eyes, my eyes! This is one of the downsides to living in Russia: Dima Bilan with his shirt off on an ad for ‘his’ new Oriflame fragrance. Dima Bilan does not ‘excite’ me [that’s the name of his perfume] but then again, who does? I’ll tell you who does – Alexander Rybak, the Norwegian [by way of Minsk] winner of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. I’m listening like crazy [and dancing even crazier] to his album “Fairytales” while having fantasies of the two of us ‘på tur’ in the mountains of Norway complete with backpacks and knitted hats… Now that’s an exciting image!

Generally speaking, today was a good day. This morning I woke up to two messages on my phone with great news. The first one was from my mother saying that I received the scholarship [of 85 000 Swedish Crowns] from The Swedish Institute for next academic year here at Ural State in Yekaterinburg. Yay! It will be my third year as the Swedish Institute’s ‘stipendiat’ here in Russia and will give me a solid financial opportunity to finish the Master’s program I’m currently studying at. The second message was from my student Ksenia saying that she also received her scholarship from The Swedish Institute and that she’ll be studying next fall semester at a university in Sweden. For free! Yay! My work as a Swedish teacher in the Ural Mountains has proved fruitful indeed: two of my students received scholarships to study Swedish for six months in Sweden, one student was accepted to a Master’s program at Lund University, and two other students are going to study the language on a course there this summer. This fall I should advertise my classes with the words: ‘Beware of actual chances of ending up in Sweden if you plan to attend!’

Today also marked the day of my first real ‘exam’ at a Russian university. It was a rather tricky exam in the subject of linguistics – something about which I know practically little to nothing – and was divided up in two parts between two professors. The first professor gave me a four, which I think is exactly what I deserve, but the other professor [who seems to be more aware of my disadvantages as a foreign student lacking Russian as a native language] gave me a five. The final grade for the exam will be derived from the total of these two grades. I would be happy with a four, even though it would be my first four ever during five years of studying at Russian universities. It only hit me about a week ago that I have never received anything less than «отлично» [the grade five can also be translated into a word that means ‘excellent’ in Russian] during all of my years as a student here. I’m okay with a four because even that should be considered a stretch for me since I am not a linguist. During the first part of the exam today, as I listened to the other students answering the professor’s questions and then compared my answers to theirs, I started to cry. I didn’t cry during the exam because I was afraid of not passing it, and certainly not because I wanted to professor to take pity on me, but because I realized that I can never ever answer as well as the other students. It is impossible. And that made me very sad. The pure realization of the fact that there’s a barrier in language which I have not yet crossed, and a distressing comprehension of that I cannot ever cross it. There’s something in my personality that always wants to be the best and when being the best doesn’t depend on me it makes me rather upset. I must face the fact that I’m disadvantaged to begin with, and to stop comparing myself to everyone else in my class [because they’re really the best of the best] but be happy with every little victory won by me, every little obstacle overcome by myself.

My next exam – also in linguistics – is on Monday the 8th of June. After that I have two exams in literary theory [but that will be easier and more fun since that’s something I both know and love] and on the 19th of June this madness will be over. It’ll be alright. I can do this!

I think I’m in love with Norway. I managed to be in love with Norway [by way of Alexander’s violin] for almost a week until I realized that I’m actually more Norwegian than he is. I am – as a matter of fact – 25% Norwegian. Now all I really want to do is learn Norwegian, read Ibsen in original and start having mixed feelings about the 6th of June but get all warm in my heart when thinking of the 17th of May…

About the girl behind the blog

2009-05-29T22:13:00.002+06:00

This is the beginning of a slide show I decided to call: "a Russia of my own - about the girl behind the blog". I only got as far as to the fall of 2006 but I promise to continue... [Yes, this is procrastinating on a high level].

Russian Women

2009-05-29T21:45:00.004+06:00

…is the name of the long poem by Nekrasov out of which we today at Ural State staged part I: “The Princess Trubetskaya”. It is indeed that time of the year – the time when the foreign students of Ural State perform Russian classics with an unmistakably odd but still cute accent. Caleb [USA] and I did a good job, just like the four Chinese kids that played a scene from Gogol’s “The Inspector General”.

Don’t get me wrong, I love acting. Especially I like the part when I get to put on an adorable 19th century style dress and have my hair done for an hour. But this past week was crazy and today it feels so good that we’ve done what we promised we’ll do – give Ural State our best and show our love for Russian literature in the process – and that it’s over now. This week I passed three tiny finals [they’re called «зачёт» and it means the mark is only a ‘pass’ or ‘no pass’ without any real grade] while we practised this play almost every day. I didn’t have any time to work because I was writing an essay and on Thursday only my home girls – Nadia, Ksenia and Marina – showed up for Swedish class so we went for cherry beer instead. Marina received a scholarship to study the spring semester of 2010 in Sweden – with a little help from a recommendation letter written by her teacher, i.e. me! It feels a little unreal to be sending my first student on a scholarship, but on the other hand it also makes me feel very proud of her. She really is a great student and she deserves it. Except for school and rehearsals and cherry beer nothing of importance has happened lately. And I don’t expect anything extraordinary to happen in the near future – my first exam for the class “History and Methodology of Linguistics” is on Tuesday. I’m very nervous. I’m mostly procrastinating.

The other day it hit me that I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. It occurred to me that I’m getting close to an age in which most people make up their minds in regard to what they want to do in life, but that I right now feel like I’m getting more and more undecided. Partly this could be due to the fact that I’ve already done very much – pretty much everything I planned on doing. I published a novel – not in a real book, but still – and now I, strangely enough, feel relieved because I know I can do it. I know I can do very many things. What I don’t know is what I am going to do next.

I got an offer by a Russian director who’s a friend of mine to play in his short movie. I think I’ll do it, even though he wants to have the meeting on Sunday evening when what I should be doing is studying… Oh well, what don’t we do for arts? Because art is, in my strictly personal opinion, the next best thing to science. Or was it the other way around? The more time I spent with science, the more I come to realize that it resembles art so much that it’s almost impossible to know where one ends and the other one begins.

Here’s part 9 of my novella “Ten Shades of Kindness”. Yes, you probably thought I had forgotten all about it, but as it turns out – I haven’t! Enjoy!

A year later it was summer yet again in the provincial town we had come to call our home. Raphael and Gabriel celebrated their first birthday in May, Mikaela was almost three years old and I returned to my work at the hospital. One afternoon in June I came home and found Erik sitting in the communal kitchen with an illustrated children’s book in his hand and a troubled look on his face. I had just spent an hour waiting in line outside the grocery store to buy oranges, and placed my precious catch on the table in front of him with a victorious smile on my lips. I sat down across the table from him and started pealing an orange. He opened the brightly colored book on the first page and pointed with his finger on the first sentence of it.

“What letter is this?” he asked.

“B.”

He frowned, moved his close to the open page and looked at it for a long time in silence without saying anything. I gave him half of the orange I had finished peeling and he started eating it.

“Mikaela asked me today why the story in this book is always the same when you read it, but always different when I do it. And I couldn’t tell her it is because her mother can read but her father can’t.”

I looked at him without saying anything.

“Martina, I think I have to learn how to read,” he said. “I don’t want my children growing up with an illiterate parent like I did. I want to learn how to read and write. Will you help me?”
“Of course,” I answered. “I’ve always thought of offering to help you with that, but I guessed that you didn’t want to because you never ask me about it.”

He blushed. “For 36 years I have pretended that I didn’t want to, that I didn’t need to know anything more than I already knew. But now I’m finally brave enough to admit that I know nothing. And I don’t want to be a bad role model for my children. Because if I can’t read then they might grow up to think it’s alright for them to do the same.”

The next day I went to the book store and bought a children’s book about how to learn to read and write. Every night after tucking our children into bed we sat together at the table in the communal kitchen while he learned both to read and to write the alphabet letter by letter. In the beginning when the other people living together with us in the same apartment, with which we shared the kitchen, asked us what we were doing he was too embarrassed to admit to it. He mumbled that he was ‘brushing up on some basic things’. But as he grew more and more confident in himself he told them frankly and plainly that he had been illiterate upon until a few days ago. Every afternoon when I came back from the hospital, as he worked the night shift and was always at home at that time of day, I found him always sitting with a book in his hands. By the fall that year he felt sure enough of himself to begin leaving small notes in my bag the night before, notes that I always found when I opened it around lunchtime to retrieve my lunch bag from it. They consisted out of nothing but a few sentences in the beginning, but became longer and longer the colder it became outside. During the winter his tiny notes had turned into real letters – love letters.

It must have been around New Year that I became pregnant for the third time. By March and the international women’s day I found out that I was expecting twins again, which led me to think about having an abortion, something that I had never ever considered before in my life. My salary as a doctor at the hospital had been steadily increasing during my two and a half years there and was together with his paycheck just enough to support the five of us financially. I was not sure that our humble family budget, with me on maternity leave for another year with two more children, could stretch that far without leading us into outright poverty. When I told Erik about my doubts and tried to dress the option of abortion in as delicate and kind words as possible, he bluntly answered:

“I’ll take on an extra shift and work three days straight instead of two.”

On the 2nd of September when I was 32 years old and he was 37 our fourth and fifth children were born – two twin boys which we named David and Daniel. During the year that I stayed at home and took care of five small children Erik was offered to begin studying at a night school and take engineering classes there. The classes were for free and a part of a state program aimed at giving workers who had been deprived of higher education a chance to receive instruction in different professions. He attended classes three evenings a week instead of going to work, and the hours he lost there were subsided by the state.

“Now you can’t tell me that this country was better before,” he said with a wide smile on his lips when he came home and showed me his first diploma in early June after finishing one year of studies.

Thanks to his newly acquired proof of education he was given a job as an engineer at the same factory and no longer had to work the nightshift. Not only did he work during the day from this point on, but he also received twice as much in payment. After my year on maternity leave I didn’t go back to the hospital for two reasons. The first was because I found out that I was pregnant again and the second because it proved impossible to find room in one and the same kindergarten for five children at once. On the 20th of April I gave birth to my sixth child – a baby girl that I convinced Erik we should name Erika, even though he protested in the beginning. After he saw that she resembled him in character more than any other of our children he was much content with my choice. Erika became his favorite. I didn’t have any favorites, but I suppose that could’ve been because they had all been inside of me and none of them reminded as much as me as Erika did of him. Even though she was the smallest of our children already at birth, and never grew to be taller than me – which all of our other children of course became, especially the boys made the most of their fathers tall genes – her personality was an immediate reflection of his. She possessed all of his subtle humor, his splendid ability for keeping secrets and always got into fights both in kindergarten and later also in school. She always came home with scratches on her knees and elbows and was the only one of our children to receive poor grades for behavior.

But Erika’s fighting spirit had yet to surface when I turned 34 and he turned 39 and we celebrated Mikaela’s sixth birthday by taking our first summer holiday together as a family. The provincial town in which we lived was located a few hours north of our country’s largest lake, and we traveled by train to the south of it to spend three weeks by its shore in a tent. When I brought him and the children to the beach on the day of our arrival, I was afraid that I had forgotten how to swim. I stepped out into the water and felt the coldness surround my legs, at first I hesitated, but then I suddenly threw myself into the glittering blue lake.

“You can swim?” Erik asked as he still stood on the shore holding Erika in his arms. Next to him in the warm sand Daniel and David were playing.

“I used to swim in the sea when I was child,” I answered. “My parent’s always rented a house by the shore every summer.”

“And I learned how to swim in the river by our house in the village where I grew up…”

While I swam and swam in the cool water he remained by the shore with our children. When I came back – perhaps a whole hour had passed by without me noticing it – he dived into the water himself and swam away for a while. I watched him from the shore and he waved back at me.

Post-Tomsk

2009-05-24T22:11:00.003+06:00

Here I am in action at the conference on Thursday afternoon last week in the great city of Tomsk. For those of you who don’t speak Russian – I’m talking about the first translation of F. M. Dusty’s ‘Siberian Notebook’ into Swedish [my own translation]. I received third place! Just like last year…

All in all, this was yet another good trip to Tomsk. Nothing ever goes wrong in Tomsk; Tomsk is cool. On Tuesday I took the train to Novosibirsk and in Novosibirsk on Wednesday I caught the [five hour] commute train north to Tomsk. The city was cold, but this I had foreseen on weather prognosis for next week and therefore I was prepared and not lost to freezing in Siberia. The journey there went smoothly and I was met by my professor Aleksey’s friends – Nina and Sergey – at the train station on Wednesday evening. In their apartment a gathering of Russians ‘generation older’ were drinking wine, vodka and singing Russian traditional thief songs. It was wonderful. On Thursday I went to the conference’s opening and it was nice, but I noticed that it wasn’t as big as last year. As I walked around the exhibition with the foreign students’ works I looked or my scientific work – which I didn’t find anywhere – and then I saw a woman sitting reading an «альманах» [’literary miscellany’]. So I asked her where I might find my book in Russian: “In All Your Rooms”. She gave me a wide, bright smile and said: ‘So you wrote this?’ holding up the thick journal with poetry, essays and prose written by foreign students in Russia. In it I found almost 100 pages out of the 170 pages dedicated to publishing my Russian novel: «Во всех комнатах твоих».

I am a published writer! In Russian! In Siberia!

After this I think I was in chock for the following two days that the conference lasted and I am still having problem dealing with the reality of having published a novel. Okay, so not in a ‘real’ book, okay, so only in a journal made by and made for foreign students in Russia, but still! I’m amazed. I can’t believe this has happened to me.

The conference was interesting, but I didn’t do as good a job as I could’ve done and I’m not really content at all with my performance. Yet I received third place. Also I scored two diplomas in the nomination for ‘A New Reading of Russian Classics’ both for my scientific work and for my novel. I am guessing I’m the only one in that nomination anyhow.

In general I enjoyed Tomsk. I went to the philosophy faculty of Tomsk State University and met up with all of my friends from last year. Dina had made me a doll (!) with her own hands. Dina makes dolls these days. I can’t really explain the doll, but she’s awesome! Maybe I’ll post a picture or something, or I’ll keep Marfa to myself. Yes, the doll’s name is Marfa. Marfa is wonderful. Dina and I hung out and on Friday night we even went to a club and listened to rock music. Dina knew the singer in the band from Moscow and she asked him to sing a song for me and he did! We even danced!

On Saturday at noon I got to fire a canon ball from the highest spot in Tomsk. I got to dress up like a Russian 17th century lady and fire it with a burning stick. It was a lot of fun.

All the Russians in Tomsk advised me to take the bus from Tomsk back to Novosibirsk on Saturday, which I did and it was almost death. The road was thin and terrible and the bus made half a century ago and had since then only traveled the roads of death in Siberia.

On the train from Novosibirsk to Tomsk I ended up in the same train as this man – Martin – from Switzerland. When I told him where I’m from he almost laughed his head off. Why? It’s an insider joke that only people from Sweden and Switzerland can understand because in Russia they always confused our countries and Swedes get praised for chocolate and Swiss for ABBA. Martin and I talked until midnight last night and then we talked the whole day today in the train. I didn’t see it coming but I apparently had a lot of things I want to say. I couldn’t stop talking and he didn’t mind listening. It was fun to talk to someone who’s much older than me and still doesn’t treat one as a child. He’s a physicist. On his was back from a conference in Beijing by train to Switzerland.

My body seems to think it is still on a train. I am all stuck in the train motion… Well, this was my trip to Tomsk 2009. As always a pleasure, Siberia!

8.

2009-05-17T21:40:00.003+06:00

Mr. L. lived, lives and will live forever! [Hope not, comrades…]

Clearly, I should be doing something. I have two big essays to write and I can’t decide which one to start writing first. Clearly, I’m only loosing time doing what I’m doing as we speak [or rather – not doing at all], i.e. being unable to decide what to start working on and thus not reading up on nothing at all when I could be doing something. Also I’m really, really tired. I don’t even feel like writing “Word of the Week: «Победа» [Victory]” for my other blog. All I feel like doing is sitting in front of my computer and play with my hair and watch the hours go by. I’ll probably call my parents tonight, though. Before Tomsk. I can’t do anything before Tomsk it seems like. I can’t even decide what to wear on the conference. I had the perfect outfit picked out, but that’s a summer outfit, and the Siberian weather forecast for next week promises little summer. I’m completely lost at what to do. Today in the supermarket it hit me that I must buy food for the train trip and found myself lost at what to buy. I’m pretty filled with apathy at the moment, I think. On Friday, during a hilarious and over six hour long MSN-conversation with my awesome friend Annie, I joined a Swedish online ‘dating’ community called VildaWebben and left it twelve hours later. Clearly, there was nothing there for me to do. Whoever it is I’m looking for, he’s not there, and if he was there I would conclude that he is – after all – not meant for me. The site was appalling mostly because it revealed how terribly low the knowledge of correct Swedish orthography is in my home and native land. And I can’t, clearly, date a man who doesn’t know how to spell.

Last night I watched a good Ingmar Bergman movie: “Efter repetitionen”. I think I’m starting to like Bergman. The horror! Also I’m addicted to Pernilla Andersson’s latest album “Gör dig till hund”. Her lyrics are wonderful. I intend to use at least one of her songs in my teaching, this academic year or maybe next. But I’m too consumed with apathy at the moment to think about preparing Swedish lessons tonight. I have a new idea for a short story in two parts but as I tried to start writing it last night I just kept falling asleep. I want to stretch my writing to another level but right now all I can think of is sleeping. I don’t even have much of an appetite at the moment. I have the Ural’s greatest stash of junk food in my room – you name the snack, I’ve got it – but I don’t want to eat anything but a «сметанник» and I arrived too late at the grocery store today to buy one. This week’s number of «Русский репортер» was surprisingly good and interesting. Everybody I know in Russia reads “Russian Reporter” right now.

Some times I feel like everybody’s moving forward in life while I’m being left behind. People are having long-term relationships, my cousin’s getting married in September, and I’m just… dragging myself along the road and taking the day as it comes and staying up far too late at night and not doing half of everything that I should be doing. I feel like taking a break. From everything. Tomsk could not have arrived at a better moment in my life than next week.

I haven’t heard from the Swedish Institute yet. About next year’s scholarship. Don’t know if I’ll receive it or not. For the first half of May this worried me much, but tonight I find myself indifferent. I think I’ll sleep on this. Take Shalamov with me to bed and drift into his wondrous world of GULAG camps on Kolyma.

Here’s part 8 from my novella “Ten Shades of Kindness”. I’m probably the only one who reads it but I like it very much. I’ve decided to write whatever I feel like writing starting a few months back and not be ashamed of the way I view the world. If you don’t like it then I’m probably not something you should be reading. For those of you, who hold a different opinion, enjoy:

During my last year at the Medical Academy I lived not in the student dormitory, but in Dr. Solomon’s apartment, in his library which he had declared my room after the summer. In the beginning of August Erik moved to the small town where his friend had a promised him a job. He started working at the furniture factory and after two weeks he was given a room in a communal apartment located in a building where only workers from that factory lived. In late August I brought Mikaela and all of her things with me to that town and left her there with him. At first I had thought I would be unable to leave her there the day before the 1st of September, but as I saw him that morning holding her in his big, safe and kind hands I knew it was my duty to leave. In the communal apartment were four rooms; in the three other rooms lived three other families, and two of those families also had small children. Erik worked the nightshift at the factory. During the night Mikaela was constantly under the observation of the young mothers in the other families, who also gave her breakfast in the morning and cared for her until lunchtime when Erik usually woke up. Every Saturday evening I took the commute train from the capital to the small town and he came to meet me at the station with her in his strong arms. Every Sunday morning I awoke in Erik’s small room in a double-bed with Mikaela sleeping between me and my husband. Every Sunday evening I took the commute train back to the capital and in that manner my sixth year at the Medical Academy passed by quicker than initially imagined. With every month Mikaela grew bigger and bigger, with every month her light blonde hair turned darker and darker, and on her first birthday she had brown curls and brown eyes. Yet she had been born blonde with blue eyes.

Mikaela’s birthday was celebrated with Dr. Solomon’s family in his apartment in the capital and marked the last time I spent both there and in the capital. Upon finishing the Academy I, like everyone else in those days when finishing higher education, received my first work placement as a doctor in a hospital from the state. My placement was at a hospital located in a provincial town in another end of our large country, over five days with train away from the capital. I, like everyone else receiving such government placements, were ordered to remain at my first work for no less than five years. I left with Mikaela and we took the train to the faraway province in the end of June. Erik had promised to follow us as soon as he was allowed to resign from his work at the factory.

Many, many years later he told me that he remembers me best as he saw me on the day of his arrival in that provincial town when I was 29 years old and he was 34. He said to me that in his memory I will always remain as I was on that day when I came to meet him one late September evening in dusk.

“My train arrived about half an hour early at the station. You hadn’t made it all the way there yet then but I knew the street where you lived, and I asked a fellow passenger who also got off at that station where it was. Then I directed my steps in that direction, hoping I would meet you half-way. It was a warm day, almost as warm as if it had still been summer, and completely without any wind. It didn’t feel like fall yet. The sun was still far from setting as I walked down the main street with two large bags hanging from each shoulder. I departed from the main street’s broken asphalt onto a smaller dirt road, lined with small wooden houses, some of which were very old but well-taken care of, others of which were not but almost falling apart. Everywhere was this certain provincial stillness; there were no people around, only lights in the windows. I could tell both on the ground underneath my feet and by the smell in the air that it had recently rained. The ground was muddy and the air was fresh with a sweet smell of someone’s wood stove burning. There were many chickens and cats strolling around on the street, farther away I passed by a few cows, as I walked and walked farther down the long road. Then I saw you coming from the opposite direction. You were dressed in big green rubber boots that reached all the way up to your knees, with a white cotton nightgown underneath a far too large knitted brown cardigan. It was open and hung almost all the way down to your knees. You had rolled up the sleeves a couple of times as they would have been far too long for you otherwise. And there you walked up to me with your long blonde hair let out, it hung down along the sides of your arms in long, straight locks that glittered in the day’s last sun rays. And I thought to myself when I saw you coming toward me that everything about this little woman is beautiful – those naked, tiny knees, that small button nose, those full lips around your slightly open mouth, and that determined look in your silver grey eyes that looked more and more up at me the closer you came. And I will always remember you like that – with spots of mud both on your boots and on your knees and on your white nightgown… I took you into my arms and lifted you up and thought to myself that isn’t it wonderful that so much can fit into such a little body, that everything I love can be so light and tiny that I can lift it up and spin it around and kiss it everywhere,” he said. “And I came to love you more, every little piece of you, the more I saw how petite yet strong everything about you were… Some might call that passion, some might call that pure physical love, the feeling I experienced every time I placed my hands against yours and the difference in size between them seemed so natural, essential and beautiful. But I call it love between a man and a woman.”

But his memory of that day came many years later. Now was still that same fall, our first fall of living together. He found work as a guard in a factory in the provincial town that was much bigger than the small town outside the capital where he had lived with Mikaela before. It had almost half a million inhabitants and not only a theater, but also three movie theaters, a couple of museums and restaurants, five or six markets, many schools and even a few institutions of higher education. I worked in the central hospital during the day and he worked twelve-hour shifts for two days and then rested two days. During the days when he worked Mikaela was in the kindergarten by my hospital but when he didn’t work he always stayed at home and took care of her. The week before New Year I found out that we were expecting a second addition to our family, which arrived in late May in the form of twin boys. As a working member of society the state granted me a year of leave from the hospital to take care of the babies.

Erik came in a car that he had borrowed from his superior at the factory and picked us up at the hospital when I was allowed to return home after giving birth. The whole way back home to our apartment, which consisted of a small bedroom, an even smaller kitchen, but no bathroom as the building lacked plumbing, Erik had an odd, enigmatic smile on his broad lips. He said very little during the whole journey back home along broken asphalt and dirt roads. The reason for his secretive smile was explained when I entered our bedroom and found two cribs made out of wood standing next to each other by the only window.

“Did you…?” I began my question, but didn’t finish it. I walked up to the cribs and put down the boy in my arms in one of them. There was still plenty of room in it. I tucked him into to it, softly covering his body with the white wool blanket.

“Yes, I did,” he answered and placed the other baby boy in the other crib.

Later that night, when Mikaela had fallen asleep on the sofa, we sat next to each other on our bed in the dark bedroom and looked at our children. The room was silent and yet not completely; slow, even breathing from three pairs of lungs could be heard in the dark. And he placed his head on my shoulder and looked up at me.

“What do you think about Gabriel?” he asked.

“I think Gabriel is a very good name. For that one? The bigger one?” I pointed at the crib closest to our bed.

Erik nodded.

“What do you think about Raphael?” I asked.

“That’s also a very good name. For the smaller one? The one who came out second, or I mean, third?” he smiled at me.

I nodded.

That night we didn’t go to sleep for a very, very long time. First he sat with his head resting on my shoulder, then he laid down and placed it in my lap, and all the while we listened to the breathing of our children. Both hoping one of them would wake up and cry and at the same time hoping they wouldn’t.

Сентенция

2009-05-15T21:52:00.004+06:00

This is Henrik, the newest addition in my bed. Here he is looking out of the window on a sunny afternoon wearing his favorite pieces of jewelry: the St. George bow and an earring with Sweden’s and Russia’s flags. Some folk say he’s being such a copy-cat of my tattoo Raskolnikov, but people are – as is the general rule – wrong. Henrik is a mouse, not a cat.

«Сентенция» is 1) a short story by Varlam Shalamov [the last short story in his second collection of “Stories from Kolyma” called “The Left Bank”; it is dedicated to Nadezhda Mandel’shtam – yes, she was the purged poet Mandel’shtam’s wife], and 2) the Russian way of writing the Latin word ‘sententia’ which means a) feeling; b) opinion; thought; c) vote; d) sentence. Coincidentally, this word will also become my next tattoo. I plan on doing it once I’ve 1) tested my love for Shalamov for at least six more months to see that it will last, and 2) passed all the three state exams [Russian literature, philosophy, English] of the master’s program I’m currently studying at. This means I will have a new tattoo some time in February next year. I’m thinking it would fit nicely somewhere on the lower half of my left leg.

It will, obviously, be a symbol for Russian 20th century literature. My friends told me that ‘no one will get that reference’ but what does that mean to someone who already has a symbol for Russian 19th century literature tattooed on the back of her right shoulder that nobody understands? Everybody always says only “Crime & Punishment” and that’s about as far as their thinking goes. My new tattoo will be in Latin. My friends also said that if I get to live long enough then I will have symbols for many centuries of literature on my body… and then I could work extra as a «шпаргалка» during finals at institutions for Slavic languages & literatures!

Today was a good day. I bought my train ticket to Tomsk today – I’m leaving for Siberia on Tuesday at about 2 pm. I’ll probably be back on Sunday evening or Monday morning, depending on what train back I’ll get tickets for. I’m excited about going back to Tomsk again. I’m sure that both the conference for foreign students in Russia and meeting all of my friends from Tomsk State’s philosophy faculty will be great. Also I’m looking forward to the riding the train again. I bought a little more expensive ticket this time, and I’ll be traveling in «купе» instead of «плацкарте» as I deem myself a little too old and my nose a little too sensitive for the ‘barn wagon’, especially in May when Russia turns into a very hot country.

Today I – finally – had the courage to start a conversation with my old friend A. [calling him just a ‘flirt’ would be unfair to both of us because it was more than that – we were more than that – he taught me to love this city during our long walks late at night and for that I will always be grateful to him] at the university. During this whole academic year we’ve avoided so much as looking at each other, though we meet every week at the faculty, and we haven’t said even a single word to each other since ‘it’ was over last spring. I don’t know why I spoke to him today. I was sitting and looking at him and I realized that he is as a matter of fact a very good man and that I’m not the same girl as I was last year and why should we ignore each other when we could be friends since after all we’re so much alike? In the beginning of our conversation he seemed not very keen on talking to me. He even had a stab at hinting at our previous ‘connection’ but I ducked like a good girl and switched the subject. He did that because he is after all a little bit like me and can be just as mean as I can. During our conversation he even smiled a couple of times and it hit me – after all he still has the looks and the brain of a man in my taste. The only thing that turned me off was that he wasn’t wearing glasses. But you can’t have everything, right? Today I at first thought a lot about how mean I was to him a year ago. Then I began thinking of how mean he was to me a year ago. I think we’re too alike to be a couple, but it could work for being friends. Or at least saying hello to each other when we meet. After all we’re not strangers; as a matter of fact few men on this planet have had their tongues as far down in my throat as he had.

Also I met another old friend today at the faculty – Julia, the German woman who works at the consulate! Julia, Julia, Julia! It was great to see her again. What can I say? Life can be simple sometimes, days can be good, but this can be hard to notice when you’ve got four difficult exams to pass within a month and no desire at all to sit and study when the sun is shining outside and all you want is a man to take you for a walk and ask to hold your hand…

My stomach began to show growth only in January. During the spring, as I took the train to visit Erik on the last Sunday of every month and turning up bigger and bigger with each time, we always spoke of and guessed at what would come first: the birth of the baby or his release from prison. Both of them turned out to happen on the same day – on the 18th of July when I was 28 years old. A month before I had managed to finish my fifth year at the Medical Academy with only one year left before I was to receive my diploma and become a real doctor. As soon as I found out that I was pregnant I was forced to tell Dr. Solomon of my condition and he proved to be a very understanding man in such delicate situations. Dr. Solomon had three children of his own, but only one of them still lived at home with him and his wife in their rather spacious apartment in the center of the capital. Apart from teaching at the Academy he ran a small private clinic from his home in the afternoons. He was one of the few doctors still permitted to do so in those days, and besides this was only a couple of years before he was required to give up both the apartment and his home clinic and move into smaller living quarters, loosing all of his patients at once. Private work was frowned upon by the state. It was decided once and for all that medical care was to be provided only for free at hospitals run by the state. But that was still in the future when Dr. Solomon invited me to stay with him and his family in their apartment after giving birth. He promised that he would furnish his library with a couch that could be made out into a double-bed and provide with enough room both for me, my husband and the new addition to our little family.

I gave birth to a baby girl early in the morning on the 18th of July, a rather cold and rainy summer day in the capital. Later the same day Dr. Solomon came to visit me and remained with me until the evening. At first he played with the baby for a long time; made her both laugh and cry as he made funny faces and different strange sounds. Then we talked for a long while and in the end he remained sitting next to me with his silver-framed small, round glasses on the tip of his pointy nose as he read the paper. Dr. Solomon enjoyed reading the paper and commenting articles out loud, which he was doing when Erik turned up in the door. Erik was wearing strange, old-fashioned clothes that seemed as if they had come straight from another time and another world; it took me a while before I gathered that this must have been what he had worn upon entering prison almost eight years ago. Eight years ago then were indeed another world. Nobody wore such black hats or such shiny boots made out of brown leather anymore. He took off his hat and remained standing almost in embarrassment in front of us both. Dr. Solomon raised himself up from the chair next to the bed in which I was lying, holding the baby in my arms, and gave my husband his hand to shake. They shook hands.

“Good evening, sir,” Dr. Solomon said in a manner that was no longer acceptable in our new society but fitted Erik’s current appearance perfectly.

Erik bowed his head slightly. “Good evening, doctor.” Then he looked at me with eyes that showed he was not sure if he had enough courage to walk up to the bed.

“Please, have a seat,” Dr. Solomon said and invited him to sit down on the chair. “I’ll go out for a smoke.” After saying this he left the room.

Erik sat down on the chair and bent his head down toward the baby in my arms. She was wrapped tightly in a white blanket and her pink, soft face was the only part of her body available to public viewing. “Is this…?” he whispered, and I lifted her up toward him.

“Here. Take her and hold her.”

He took her into his hands and held her close to his chest, right under his neck, as if he didn’t know how to hold a baby but wanted to keep her as near to his face and body as possible. Most likely he didn’t know how to hold a baby yet then. “It is a girl?”

I nodded. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

He looked at her and smiled. His eyes became wet and it seemed as if he was about to cry. But he didn’t start to cry that day in the hospital. “She’s the most beautiful child I have ever seen in my life. Have you chosen a name for her yet?”

I bit my lip. “Not yet, but I have a suggestion. Do you want to hear it?”

He nodded.

“Mikaela,” I said.

“Mikaela? Why?”

“You don’t like it?” I asked, and he wanted to object by starting to shake his head, but instead of letting him speak I decided to give a foundation for my choice. “My father’s name was Michael and my mother’s name was Mikaela, and ever since I found out that they both died during the war I’ve wanted to name my first child in honor of one of them. And since she’s a girl she should be named in honor of my mother.”

“That’s a very good idea, and a very good choice for a name,” he smiled first at me and then at the child in his arms. “Welcome to the world, little Mikaela. Martina, I never knew my mother. She died when I was only four or five years old. I remember very little of her. I grew up with my father and my two older brothers in a small village far, far away from here. You probably never even heard of it, that’s how tiny and insignificant it is. When I was in one of the camps I heard that it got completely destroyed in the war… My father had a farm there and I never went to school when I was a child because we all had to work on the fields or take care of the animals,” he looked up at me and blushed a little. “I can’t even read. I have memorized a few words by the way they look and I’m pretty good at numbers and counting, but that’s as far as my education goes.”

“I thought they teach illiterate prisoners to read in prison these days?”

He blushed even more and confessed: “If you admit that you’re illiterate, that is. If you don’t, then they won’t.” He stroked with one of his big, rough fingers along the soft cheek of the little child in his arms and smiled at her. “I want it to be different for her. And it will be different for her because she will have you. I bet you weren’t born in a village, and that both your parents had higher education?”

“Yes, my mother was a history professor at the university and my father was a surgeon,” I answered.

“And I won’t let you become anything less but a doctor too,” he said. “I’m going to take care of Mikaela during the first year of her life while you finish the Academy in the capital. I promise you that.”

I hesitated. “Are you sure?”

“I have a friend in a small town about an hour north of the capital, he’s the director of a furniture factory there and he’s promised to give me a job and help me find an apartment. And while we live there you can come visit us every weekend. The job won’t give me much money, but it will be enough to live on and we won’t at least starve,” he said and bent his head down to kiss Mikaela on her forehead. Then he looked at me for a long time without saying anything, as if he was searching to find something in my face, within my eyes, to see what they had once seen. He frowned a little bit after a while and asked: “In the apartment where you grew up, was there a chandelier in the dining room?”

I nodded.

“And you were their only child?”

I nodded again.

“Had it not been for that camp I don’t think we would have ever met,” he concluded.

I corrected him: “Had it not been for that war, we would’ve never have met.”

Dr. Solomon knocked on the door carefully before entering into the room again. Erik was already informed that we were allowed to stay with him in his apartment, but I wasn’t to be let out of the hospital yet for a few days, and thus the two men left me alone with Mikaela about an hour later. They both promised to come back the next day.

I held Mikaela in my arms and looked down into her big, blue eyes. The world that I had been brought into had been different just as the childhood that awaited her would differ from the childhood I had experienced. She would not eat breakfast at a little café in the morning or drink hot chocolate there in the afternoons after school, and there would be no chandelier with lit candles over her head at dinner time. She would not come to know the summer trips to the sea that I had taken every year with my parents; the sea shore was far from the capital and belonged to another country now. One thing would, nevertheless, be almost the same – one of her parents would be a doctor. The other would not be a professor but an illiterate former thief, but I supposed that could be considered only a tiny detail when thinking of the big picture. I wondered if she would come to believe me in the future, if I were to tell her that there had been another way of living before, a life in which the highest ideal had been kindness.

Баня

2009-05-12T21:45:00.003+06:00

Today is time for another entry in the ‘fashion section’ of my otherwise very nerdy & literary blogg. Here is a picture for all of you who a) have always craved to find out what the restrooms at Ural State look like, b) want to see just how cute my new white top from Esprit that I bought on Saturday is. [The little pink thing that can be seen underneath the top is my iPod – yes, I always carry it in my bra since most of my miniskirts lack pockets…] Today was a warm and sunny day here in Yekat and I’m very proud of this outfit – even my academic guidance counselor Aleksey complimented me on it! [I would’ve never bought a top with this much cleavage had not Ksyusha insisted that I must.]

Yesterday was also a sunny and warm day here in Yekat. Only Ksyusha, Nadia and Andrey showed up for our Swedish movie club in the evening, so we decided to not watch “Ondskan” but go and drink cherry beer instead. [Andrey was, however, not invited because he would’ve probably declined such an invitation anyway.] I drank cherry beer together with the girls at the Old Dublin pub, on their ‘uteservering’ downtown, and it turned out to be a most cozy and comfortable Monday evening, even though Nadia was most upset to have missed “The Cruelty” as she believes it could teach her a thing or two necessary to know in life. Then I stayed up until 3 am finishing my latest academic article – a splendid little analysis of intertextual connections with Dusty’s chapter «Баня» [“Sauna”] in Shalamov’s short story «В бане» [“In the Sauna”]. I got so caught up in the process that I found it hard to stop myself and tell myself that enough is enough, after all 11 pages is more than the 10 minutes I get to read the article in class on Thursday. I love analyzing literature. I love literature. I love Dusty. I love Shalamov so much that I downloaded every single picture of him from the official Russian site about him and then sat for hours just envying the women next to him in the pictures. Neither of his wives were very pretty, I must admit. But his last love was [and still is, probably] not just pretty, but actually beautiful. Good for you, Varlam! But what about me? Clearly, I am losing my mind. The other day I swear I saw Shalamov on the street. Obviously, my mind was gone long before this and what is leaving me are the last scraps of my sense.

Since I went to bed so late I also woke up with less than one hour to eat breakfast, put on my make-up and arrive in time for classes at 2 pm. Gosh, it was tight. But I managed. Tonight I will continue my quest into the art of Shalamov and start ‘a philological analysis’ of one of his shorter short stories. It will become an essay for this class in linguistics that I have to pass [why?] and the great thing about it is that it should be about ‘everything’ in the text. And translating from ‘philology language’ into normal language this means that an analysis of a one page short story should be at least ten pages long. I can’t wait! I’m such a nerd. But it wasn’t until about a month ago that I started to finally get the hang of things, to understand literary theory and literary analysis. Now I’m addicted. Who knew there could be so much in such few words? Whoever says literature can’t be studied scientifically is just a party pooper, comrades, in my strictly personal opinion.

Here’s part 6 of my novella. The war is over, and we’re more than half-way to the end, and yet – the hardest things to overcome are still ahead of us. Enjoy:

The telephone number of the prison was listed in the catalogue and I called it to find out when it would be possible for me to come visit Erik. I was told that the only day when visitors were allowed was Sunday, which was good for me because that was the only day of the week when I didn’t have classes at the Academy. The last Sunday in October I took the train from the capital to the small town to visit him. I didn’t tell my professor, Dr. Emmanuel’s close friend Dr. Solomon, that I was going out of town that weekend. I had managed to save up some money during August when I was working and could pay for the train tickets there and back on my own. The same Sunday I bought a dark pink lipstick and put on the only dress I owned at the time – light brown in color and made out of a far too thin fabric to be worn so late into the fall. I made sure that my hair was newly washed and didn’t put it up in a pony tail. It was still before noon when I arrived at the train station and walked by foot from there to the prison. I asked for directions and it only took me about twenty minutes to walk there. Upon entering the prison I showed my new passport – when I applied for it, something that was made possible only after I was officially rehabilitated, I had wanted to ask them to put Erik’s last name on it, but such a request proved unnecessary. My last name was automatically changed to his. I was led by a guard to a room on the second floor in the prison’s main building, in which I was told to wait. The room was rather large; the walls were white, there was a couch standing along one of the walls in front of which was a low coffee table. The room had one window that was taller than it was wide and lacked curtains. I walked up to it. Outside the sun was shining: the morning had been cloudy but now the sky had cleared. The view from the window was the least inspiring – all that could be seen where other brick buildings and a part of the concrete wall.

The door opened and I turned around. He bent down his head slightly as he walked through the door and stopped. The door closed behind him. He was wearing a light gray shirt and pants of a darker gray shade – usual prison ware, to which I had become so used by then that I hardly took any notice of it. He seemed much bigger than I had remembered him being, but that could have been in part due to the fact that he had gained back almost all of his initial weight and in addition to this put on some muscles since our last meeting. Either he had a physically demanding work at this prison or the prisoners here were allowed to do sports and lift weights in their free time. Perhaps it was a combination of the two. His brown hair was cut short, his eyes – of the exact same color as his hair – showed hesitation as they met mine.

We stood facing each other on a distance of a couple of meters for a long time without saying anything. Neither of us moved at all and I began doubting my reasons for coming to visit him. I looked at him and saw a stranger in front of me – a stranger with whom I had shared a few brief and amusing conversations every morning and every evening during one month’s time almost five years before. I was thinking it would probably be best for the both of us if I just left him, and the memories of him, there in prison and forgot all about it – when he walked up to me and grabbed a hold of my right hand. He took it in both of his hands, as if warming it at first, then opening up the palm of my hand and stroking his thumb across it. He lifted my hand up and placed it against his cheek. When he felt the touch of my hand against his cheek he started to cry.

“I remember this,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Come, let’s sit down on the couch,” he said.

We sat down next to each other on the couch. He still held my hand in his.

“You’ve been released?”

I nodded. “I had served almost all of the five years I got before I found out that my sentence was defective in the first place.”

“You were a political prisoner?” he asked and I nodded. “I didn’t know. But I think there are many, many things I don’t know about you, even though you and I are husband and wife… Do you know how I found out we’re married?”

I shook my head.

“After the trial in camp, do you remember? When I was sentenced to another ten years? I’ve been cleared of those charges now, though. And after the trial, when they gave me the documents to sign, I saw your number written there in them under ‘spouse’. I don’t know who wrote it there, and I didn’t ask.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? When we met in the other hospital? I didn’t know…”

“Back then I was in no state to speak of anything serious at all.”

“I only found out recently, at the same time I found out that I was to be rehabilitated…”

“Congratulations,” he said. “Martina, I’m not a political prisoner. And I’m older than you, not by much in years perhaps, only five years older, but much older in experience, life experience. Do you know why I’m here?” he asked and I nodded. “I was a professional criminal, a thief and a robber, before. I was sentenced to ten years for breaking into a house to steal and accidentally murdered two people there – an old couple.”

“Accidentally?”

“I didn’t plan on doing it. I had never killed anyone before in my life. I didn’t think they were home…” he hesitated, swallowed and let go of my hand. “I killed them with my bare hands. With these hands. I’ve been fighting my whole life, and when you’ve fought your whole life it is hard to stop and not fight anymore.”

“Don’t stop now,” I said.

“You don’t understand what I’m saying to you, do you?” he looked at me and I couldn’t understand the look on his face. It was unlike anything else I had seen before, yet I had seen so much before. It could have been disappointment, but it could also have been the look of a man who was trying to force himself to stop believing in something he had believed in for a long time. “I can’t ask anything of you. I can’t ask you to come visit me here every month, I can’t ask you to wait for me until I’m released next summer. I can’t ask you to remain my wife. You know the truth about me now. You must understand that we can’t be together. I can’t ask such a sacrifice of you.”

I nodded in silence, looking down at my feet on the floor. He sat next to me without touching me, without trying to take my hand again.

“You’re the only one I’ve got,” I whispered, not knowing these were the words that were going to come out of my mouth when I opened it to say something. I hardly even knew myself that I was going to say anything at all in that moment. But I had spoken.

He moved closer to me on the couch. He put his arms around me, and I placed my head against his chest. He stroked his hand over my hair, pulling me closer and tighter, tighter and closer to him. He kissed me on my forehead, and then I turned my face up toward his.

“I like your lipstick,” he said, smiling. “I haven’t seen a woman wearing lipstick for many, many years…”

I smiled.

“Can I kiss you?”

He kissed me. He held me tight and kissed me again and again and again. And it seemed to me in that moment that it wasn’t our first kiss, but that I had been kissed by him many, many times before and that I had been so tightly wrapped inside of his arms many, many years before. When he removed his shirt to reveal his naked chest, on which were tiny curls of brown, soft hair and a cross made out of silver, it seemed to me that I had already touched all of this skin before. When he pressed his body close to mine, after also I had slipped out of my dress, it was as if I had already felt the cold touch of his silver cross against my chest long before… I lost myself inside of his embrace and only woke up to reality when a guard opened the door and told us it was time for me to leave. I left and he remained.

Desire

2009-05-11T00:01:00.004+06:00

This is me outside «Театр Коляды» [Kolyada’s Theather] earlier this evening. The picture is published for two reasons: a) to prove to my mother that I’m still a ‘full-figured woman’, and b) to show three items that I bought yesterday when I and Ksyusha went shopping all Victory Day long: the red skirt, the brown shoes, the brown leather bag. I am very much in love with my new bag – it is so soft and spacious!

Two weeks ago one of my students, Lena, who is actually more a friend than a student to me, told me that Nikolay Kolyada, a local playwright and theater director here in Yekaterinburg, is a genius. She told me that I should be ashamed of myself for living almost three years in this town without ever going to see one of his plays. I didn’t like the idea of missing out on a neighborhood theatrical genius, especially since I not only love theater, have played many roles in many plays, but in fact studied for three years on the theater program at the gymnasium back in Sweden. I also consider my current work as a teacher to be an instantaneous expansion of my previous education as an actress. Said and done, Lena and I bought tickets to the next not sold-out play, which turned out to be a Russian version of Tennessee Williams’ play “A Streetcar Named Desire” on the 10th of May, which was today. Since I had never been to a play directed by Kolyada before I didn’t know what to expect, except something clearly ingenious – and that expectation proved correct from the very first scene to the last. [No, I haven’t seen the movie with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando from 1951, but I plan to do so in a not too distant future.] It was marvelous! There are not even enough words in the English language to explain how wonderful a play it was, how inventive and creative the whole stage set-up was, every little detail was thought-through, disturbing and lovely at the same time, yet, of course, very emotionally strong. Lena is indeed right when she says that one can only watch one Kolyada play every six months. You can’t handle more than that emotionally, because his plays turn your soul inside out [which is actually a very, very good thing and rare to come by in our day and age]. I especially liked the acting of the woman who played the lead role of Blanche, though the star of most of Kolyada’s plays, the man who played Stanley, was also very good. But the woman who played Blanche played it so well she has me convinced that tonight I won’t find her sitting at home drinking tea with her husband in the Urals, but at a mental hospital somewhere in the American South in the 1940’s. When I watched the play I kept thinking to myself: ‘this is the kind of theater I always dreamed of, this is just the kind of theater I always wanted!’ I felt such an enormous urge to go and watch each and everyone of his plays, something that will probably be more than a little difficult, as the season is close to an end now and because the theater is very small [it has only about 60 seats] and almost every show is always sold-out far in advance. I must also write a few words about the theater in itself – it is located in an old wooden house just a few minutes walk from Ural State’s main building, and this old house has only one little stage, about the size of an average living room, with two doors, and that gives the play itself a highly interesting dimension. The smallness of it all, the intimacy of the setting, creates this special atmosphere of being right there in the middle of play, as if you’re a part of it, and going through of all the emotions depicted on stage only a meter away. Also Kolyada’s solutions for changing the scenery between scenes were impressive, and just the way I had always wanted them to be. No closing of curtains, and no needless explanations for things that can’t be explained… anyway. I am full of respect for Kolyada, and can’t wait to see a play that he has written himself. I think that would be even better. All in all, I am impressed and happy to have had the chance to experience such high quality culture for the tiny price of 400 rubles. The exact same amount as I paid for my new shoes on Saturday!

I am glad that people like to read my blog. I consider it not only a window into my life, but also into my soul/brain/heart, which is filled with an abundance of different things that can’t always be explained without using an excessive amount of words. I love words, though. I think in words more than in images, I think. But living the way I do – using three languages in different capacities on a daily basis – creates much confusion when it comes to words. I sometimes name things in Russian first, and other things in Swedish, whereas there are some things that I can only name in English. Weird. There was a time when I tried to figure out in which language I think, but that made me even more confused than before so I stopped trying to figure it out. Sometimes I’m afraid that I’m loosing my native language, because I don’t get to use it as much as I would like to, and each lesson is always a difficult switch for me. And now that I don’t have Jen around to speak English with every day I have noticed a decline in that language as well. The more I surround myself with Russian – and the better I know this language – the worse off my other languages become. But I can’t be perfect. Thus I admit that my three dictionaries are my most reliable friends and that Word’s spell-check is a necessity in my life I cannot be ashamed of.

Here’s part 5 of the short story previously known as “Ten Shades of Kindness”, currently under the working-title of “Overcome” [note to self: inform Anya of this first thing on Tuesday]:

When the war ended in June I was 27 years old. After the war many prisoners were given amnesty, especially political prisoners, among whom I was one. We were released early from prisons and camps alike. Dr. Emmanuel kept his promise, and as soon as I had received all the necessary documents I was allowed to leave camp and my work at the hospital. Upon leaving I brought practically nothing with me, except for memories and medical experience. Memories I tried to hold on to hard in order not to forget anything and such medical experience that I hoped I would never have to use it again. In my hometown I tried at first to find out what had happened to my parents during the war. I took a bus from camp into town to find the street on which we had lived and the three-storey brown house on it in which we had lived on the top floor. The building had had a small café on the ground floor. Before the war I often had breakfast with my parents in that tiny café as they had been on friendly terms with the owner, a passionate, loud but kind man living on the second floor of the house with his large family consisting of five or six children. Sometimes after school the owner had treated me to a cup of warm chocolate for free while I waited for my parents to come home. In the café there had been large, wide windows with red curtains and its name written on them in big golden letters. Neither the street nor the house or the café had survived the war. I spent two weeks in my hometown trying to find out anything about my parents, sleeping wherever I was allowed to – mostly I spent the night in the apartments of kind people who were friendly enough to let me sleep on their couch and give me a meal in the morning. In the end I found out what had happened to my parents, after standing in long lines at many different state offices for hours and hours. My parents had been arrested not long after my arrest; my mother had been brought to the same female prison where I was at the time, though I don’t recollect seeing anyone even resembling her there. But, on the other hand, that was long ago now and there were many prisoners there. She didn’t survive until the transport to the camp but was shot in prison. My father ended up in a camp straight away. He remained there for two years, what happened to him after that is unclear. Most likely he got sick and died, or he could have been executed. The options are, after all, far from abundant.

In July I took the train to the capital and went to the Medical Academy, where I was greeted warmly and kindly on account of Dr. Emmanuel’s recommendation letter. In the dormitory I shared a room with three other female students, out of whom I was the oldest. In order to earn some money to live on I started to look for a job, even though one of Dr. Emmanuel’s good friends – a professor at the Medical Academy – helped me out greatly in the beginning, both by inviting me to have dinner with him and his family every evening and supporting me with countless interesting conversations on medicine and philosophy. Thanks to him I found a job as a nurse in one of the smaller hospitals in the same area of the capital where I was living. I worked there until the fall semester began.

It wasn’t until October that I was called to a hearing about my rehabilitation as a former political prisoner. I had not given my rehabilitation any thought since my release, as no formal document of this kind had been necessary when I was accepted to the Academy, which was otherwise always the case with former political prisoners. The hearing was most interesting. It took place in one of the many rooms of the large main court building in the capital, and the only people present were two lawyers and one guard. The room was small and I was asked to take a seat in front of the table in the middle of it. I sat down. On the table there were two files; one was rather thin whereas the other one was much thicker. The lawyers sat down in front of me at the table and opened the thinner file. The guard remained standing at the door. The room had no windows. The walls were painted a bleak shade of gray. The two lawyers explained to me that I was going to be rehabilitated. Rehabilitation meant being cleared of all former charges against me and receiving all of my civil rights back. The two lawyers spoke to me in gentle voices as they explained everything the state was going to give back to me.

The only thing they didn’t offer me back was those five years of my life I spent in prison and different camps.

“Now let’s talk about your husband,” one of them said as he closed the thin file and opened the thicker file. Inside of it were many papers of different colors.

“My husband?” I asked, not sure if I had heard it right.

“Yes. It says here in your documents that you are married to this prisoner,” and he said Erik’s number. “Also your number is stated in his files under ‘marital status’. You are aware of the fact that he is not a political prisoner, and will not be given any amnesty after the war?”

What could I answer? All I did was nod slowly.

“He was sentenced to another ten years in prison while he was in one camp, of which I’m sure that you are aware, but that case has been reopened and already dismissed as faulty. What remains for him to serve is only one year, as he had already served two years of his first sentence when the war began. He was originally sentenced to ten years for robbery and manslaughter, but I think with the times being what they are these days, and considering his otherwise exceptionally good behavior in prison, that he’ll be released next summer.”

I didn’t know what to say. “That’s good,” I said.

“After his release he will not be allowed to live in the capital, a rule of which I am sure that you are aware,” said the other lawyer.

“And I’m certain that you would like to know the whereabouts of your husband at the present moment?” the first lawyer asked.

“Very much so,” I answered.

They explained in which prison he was currently kept, close to which city it was located – it turned out to be only three hours away from the capital outside of a small town.

“And now you’re probably wondering if you are allowed to visit him?”

I nodded.

“And I can delight you with the following information – you are allowed to visit him once a month for two hours,” said the first lawyer, smiling a broad smile and showing all of his large, white teeth as if this information was the height of kindness that could be shown both to me and to him under the existing circumstances.

“Thank you,” I said.

I walked out of the room and out of the building with a new piece of paper in my bag – a piece of paper that proved not primarily to the world, but foremost to our state, that I had never been neither a member nor a founder of any secret student organization.

Graphomania

2009-05-08T23:59:00.005+06:00

Meet Dusty, world famous writer with a beard worthy envying. Here he is standing in Mayakovsky Park in Yekat, but for some reason Mayakovsky wasn’t enough for this park. The love for literature is so strong there that they have a whole alley with heads of Russian writers like the one pictured above – Pushkin, Griboedov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Lermontov, Gogol’…

As I’m publishing part 4 out of 10 of my short story “Ten Shades of Kindness” here today I must use a little disclaimer: ‘The short story needs a new name’, says Anya. Anya has read it all and says that she likes it, but that there are only shades of kindness in the beginning, then the focus switches and something else appears. I understand that Anya is correct. The short story is not about ten shades of kindness; it is about kindness in general and maybe not really about kindness that much really, but actually a ‘family saga’, as she identified its genre. I proposed to her that I would rename it “Kindness in a Cruel Century” but she said that’s not a very good idea. I haven’t come up with a new name yet, but when I do you’ll be the first to find out, comrades. Maybe someone else has any suggestion? I think “Overcome” could be a good name… but I must first tell Anya about this, I think.

Yesterday evening I decided – for the fun of it – to read through my own blog from beginning to end. The impression is shattered. I have written very much here, much more than I thought, because I always feel like I’m short and sweet and not a ‘graphoman’ at all, but that I spend my words sparingly. Yesterday evening this thesis was proved faulty. I must suffer from a very troubling and disturbing form of graphomania, comrades, because most of my own posts were to long for me myself to even read through them. Some were fun to read again [like the post when I rhyme Russian cities pronounced with an American accent with naughty sexual actions] but very many seemed tedious and boring to me. The post where I watch Tolstoy and Dusty fight in the ladies room was alright, I guess. I have come to conclusion that the best thing on this blog is that ironic comments to the pictures. And that’s not too bad, I guess. The most important in life are, after all, the smaller things.

Tomorrow is Victory Day, and I plan to go shopping with friends for summer clothes and new shoes since the heat has finally arrived in the Urals and I have realized that I have nothing to wear. I love Russia because it can go from snow one day to 25C and sunshine three days later. I also love Russia because here you can go to the library and take out a book that was published in 1923 and it will say that it was published in ‘Petrograd’. I went to the library today and spent a couple of hours there preparing for next week’s literary seminary on psychoanalysis in literature. I’ve always been against that because I read Freud and he was off the walls, let me tell you, with thinking every novel or short story or poem is a result of repressed sexual emotions concerning wanting to do one’s father or mother. Today I read Karl Gustav Jung and realized that if Freud had been off the wall, then Jung was right on the spot. The Russian translation of his German book was so good that I got completely lost in it and realized many important things that I should’ve known long ago. Currently I’m almost always sweating not only because it is hot hot hot outside, but mostly because the exams are less than a month away. While I’m downloading answers to different exams from Russian websites [I heart the Russian internet – you can find anything and there are no rules] I keep thinking of ways to escape the madness that is about to take place. I’m not worried about my two exams in literary theory, because that’s interesting and I don’t mind learning what I need to know for that, but what’s wanting me to fake a strong Swedish accent are my two exams in linguistics. I have come to the conclusion that I must relay on my fellow students and steal their notes. Or I could run away and hide under a stone somewhere in Ufa and hope they won’t come looking for me. Yes, I think the last option is the one I prefer most. I have to write an essay about a contemporary paradigm in linguistics for one exam, and the problem is that I am still unsure as to what a ‘paradigm’ actually is. I brought up this with the teacher and she sighed deeply and said: “You should probably stop by my office some day and I’ll explain it to you.” That was almost two months ago. Conclusion: it is still not too late to go run away and hide under that stone…

Other than this nothing has happened. My life is utter stillness right now. I haven’t had a date with a man in almost four months. I don’t want a relationship, and I don’t think I want to have sex that much, only a little bit, but what I really want is that feeling in your stomach, you know, the excitement, the tension, someone to think about… If not then it is only a matter of time before the closest monastery will call me up and ask if I shouldn’t stop kidding myself and join.

After two years in my first camp I was relocated to another camp. This happened not long after my hometown had been reclaimed by our country, and this other camp was located outside of that same city. The reason for my relocation was immediately connected with the doctor I had worked with in the first camp – Dr. Emmanuel – who was designated to be the head doctor of the hospital at the newly opened camp there. Dr. Emmanuel stated that he wanted to bring two of his best nurses with him to help organizing the work at the new hospital; I was one of them. The other nurse was not a prisoner like me, and thus I was not allowed to travel with them, but had to be transported in a train with other prisoners that were also being relocated. In the second camp my life was much the same as in the first one: I slept in a barrack with all the other female prisoners, in the morning I went to work in the hospital, and in the evening after work I returned to the barrack for dinner and sleep. In this hospital, which was rather big, we received not only sick or injured prisoners from our own camp, but also the worst cases from other camps and even soldiers that had been wounded in the war. We were often swamped with grave and difficult cases, and even though my main function was that of a nurse, I sometimes had to work as Dr. Emmanuel’s personal secretary. He taught me many things I had not known before, even though I already knew much even before entering the Medical Academy in my hometown – my father had been a doctor, a surgeon. Although Dr. Emmanuel agreed that a talent for medicine can come with heritage, he also argued that it depends equally much on attentive eyes and kind fingers. He said I had been blessed with a combination of the three.

It was an early summer morning when I was sitting by the desk of Dr. Emmanuel filling out documents with information about different patients. I had worked there about two months then. Dr. Emmanuel rarely checked up on new patients himself, unless their state of health was in a very poor condition. That morning a nurse came in to tell him that three prisoners had recently been brought to the hospital, and that he had been asked by another doctor to take a look at them himself. These prisoners came from one of the worst camps – we never used the word ‘death camp’ back then – and were dying from hunger and pure physical exhaustion. Dr. Emmanuel left in haste. About an hour later he popped his head into his office, where I was sitting, and asked:

“Martina, what’s your husband’s number?”

I told him Erik’s number. I never forgot it; I still haven’t forgotten it. Of all the many things that happened to me during the war, of all the things I was forced to see during those years, I managed to forget most. But not his number, never his number.

“He’s here,” said Dr. Emmanuel. “Come with me.”

I followed him to one of the rooms in the same building were sick prisoners were examined by doctors before being registered as new patients. I had anticipated seeing Erik in an appalling shape and poor health, and yet, I could not have expected what I found lying on the examination table in the middle of the room. It was Erik, but only half of the man I had known two years earlier remained of him. What I met was a wounded, ailing and miserable piece of human body, consisting of nothing but what seemed like a big pile of discolored skin stretched over bones. He was awake, but far too weak to even raise his head up from the table when he heard someone entering the room. Dr. Emmanuel allowed for me to walk up to him. I took his big, bony hand in mine, and looked into his watery brown eyes. At first he seemed not to recognize me, so I bent down closer to his face, permitting him to see my face more clearly at a close distance.

“Is it you?” he asked.

“Yes. Is this you?”

“Almost,” he answered.

Dr. Emmanuel walked up to the table on the opposite side. “We’re going to bring you back to life,” he said, “don’t you worry about it. Your wife will help you. Won’t you?”

“I will,” I affirmed, stroking with my other hand over Erik’s cheek, then I turned to the doctor and said: “Could you please see to it that he’s put in a bed big enough to fit him? That’s always been a problem. I think you understand.”

Dr. Emmanuel nodded. “If we can’t find such a bed then I’ll see to it personally that we make a bed for him out of a couple of thick, soft mattresses on the floor.”

The doctor remained true to his word. A bed was made for Erik in one of the rooms on the third floor of the hospital, in which there were five instead of six beds as one bed was missing on the spot in front of the window. On this very spot right under the window a comfortable sleeping place was made for him, and I went to see him there in the evening as soon as my shift was over. He was sleeping. I sat down next to him on the floor. I corrected the two blankets he had been given and made sure that both his feet were covered well. At first I sat up straight, looking at his face in the dark, but later I laid down next to him as there was still a little room left on the wide mattress provided for him. He came to for a while as I held his hand, constantly touching it softly with my thumb.

“Are you still my wife?” he asked.

“I’m not still your wife,” I answered, “I can’t be, because I never was. What do I know, maybe you already have another wife somewhere out there…”

“No.”

“You don’t?”

“I’m unmarried, I have never been married,” he answered. “You’re my only wife.”

That night I fell asleep by his side. I only woke up in the sunrise, as the first bright rays warmed my face enough to wake me. I crept out of his bed and went straight to work. I don’t think anybody – except for maybe Dr. Emmanuel – found out about our first night together as husband and wife. Never again did I fall asleep by his side in that hospital.

Erik’s health improved slowly but steadily during the first month. He gained back a lot of weight, though of course far from all of the weight he had lost to begin with. After the first month Dr. Emmanuel suggested I should accompany Erik on a walk in the tiny park outside the hospital. This park was nothing more than a couple of paths around some small spots of grass surrounded by four different buildings belonging to the hospital, but there were many trees there. It was still summer: they were still green when we went for our first walk together. In the beginning he leaned on me with his arm on my shoulders as I steadied him with my arm around his waist. After three weeks he was strong enough to walk without my help. Suddenly one day he stood up straight, and I backed away. He took a few steps. The first were unsteady as his legs were still weak, but the next ones were braver and more secure, as he walked farther and farther away from me. He stopped about ten meters ahead of me and turned around, holding out his right hand toward me.

“Take my hand,” he said. “I want to walk hand in hand with you.”

I walked up to him and took his hand.

“We’ve never walked hand in hand before,” I said.

“It feels nice, doesn’t it?” he smiled. “And there are many, many more things we haven’t done, even though we’re husband and wife…”

“Can you promise me something?”

He nodded.

“Promise not to forget me when this war is over.”

“When this war is over, Martina,” he began, “I’ll find you. Tell me your number and I promise that I will search for you until I find you.”

“You’re not mad at me for telling them I’m your wife?”

“You saved my life,” he said.

“It is only my duty,” I said.

“And what kind of duty is it this time?”

“My duty as a future doctor.”

One week after this conversation, when he walked on his own for the first time and I held his hand for the first time, he was declared healthy and dismissed from the hospital. He was not sent back to the camp from where he had come, but to the prison from which he had been removed initially to the first camp in which we met. Dr. Emmanuel was with me when he left the hospital, and stood with me on the steps leading up to the main entrance of the hospital while we watched the black truck drive away. In it were Erik and nine other prisoners, all declared healthy.

“I often watched you and him walking together in the park from my office,” said the doctor. “And I was always curious, always wanted to ask you, doesn’t the height difference bother you? How can you manage to talk to each other when you’re not even tall enough to reach up to his shoulders?”

“It is not too difficult,” I answered. “You get used to it. You only really have to talk a little bit louder, that’s all.”

“He has eight more years to serve in prison of his last sentence. But you’ll be out of here within eight months. What do you plan on doing?”

“I want to continue my studies and become a doctor,” I said.

“I was hoping you would say that. I’ve seen you work both here and in the old camp, and I can tell that you would make a very good doctor. I can recommend you to best Medical Academy in the capital, if you would like that. I think I can arrange it with them to take you on for free and give you a place in their dormitory, also without payment. I’ll write a letter of recommendation for you. It would be a great loss for medicine if you weren’t allowed to become a doctor.”

“Thank you,” I said and smiled at Dr. Emmanuel.

Как носить Георгиевскую ленточку [How to Wear the St. Georg Ribbon]

2009-05-06T20:55:00.004+06:00

Now let’s answer today’s important question: «Как носить Георгиевскую ленточку?» [How to wear the St. George Ribbon?]

«На куртке» [on your coat; jacket]. Doesn’t Dostoevsky (he’s on the little pin) look good next to orange and black?

«На сумке» [on your bag].

«На Чебурашке» [on your Cheburashka].

«На голове как бантик!» [on your head like a bow!] This is as patriotic and peace-loving I get :)

3.

2009-05-03T21:10:00.005+06:00

What is this I see hiding underneath the snow? Maskrosor, comrades, små gula fina söta gulliga sköra maskrosor!

Today in the morning I finally finished reading the thick book on Shalamov. I shouldn’t I feel proud of myself for finishing over 1000 pages in only one month [but you mustn’t think that’s all I’ve read this month, comrades, because as a lit major I read at least that many pages every week but that’s always obligatory reading, whereas Shalamov is not, oh no, he’s not, not at all] but I still do. I feel a strange yet deep connection to that man, even though I came to like him less and less the more I read about him, the more I learned about him and the closer I got to know him. I think I know him pretty well at this point. At first I thought he became categorical and severe and uncompromising only in his old age, but after reading the letter he sent to some officials during his first time in a concentration camp, when he was not even 22 years old, I have come to the conclusion that he was always that way. He was always stern in his – sometimes silly, sometimes the opposite – convictions. I don’t think he liked anyone or even less the USSR before his years in death camps on Kolyma, but that his disapproval of everything and everybody began early in life. But – this will sound strange – I like him all the more because of it. And I think he likes me too. Yesterday was a lovely Saturday with bright sunshine here in the Urals and I went for a long walk in the Mayakovsky Park with myself – or so I thought. During the walk I felt as if someone was walking with me, and this someone kept pouring inspiration into me, and I felt more uplifted and inspired and stronger than I have felt in a long while. It was as if someone took my hand and walked with me and talked to me. I felt so blessed because I realized that it was him, that Shalamov came to visit me yesterday. You know, comrades, Dusty never came [or comes] to me in that way, even though we are very close, we were especially close during my first year in Omsk. But Dusty always kept me on a distance; he never shared anything with me of his own, though he inspired me often. I suppose that’s because Dusty is must bide his time between millions and millions of fans and scholars alike. Shalamov’s time is still ahead of him; I still have some time to have him all to myself… Here’s a short poem I wrote about yesterday. I’m sorry it is in Russian. But then again, the reasons for my choice of language here must be obvious to anyone and clear to everyone.

*

Мы стоим и смотрим на берёзы,
идём в лесу и стираем слёзы.
Ничего не слышно вокруг,
рядом ты появляешься вдруг.
И время кажется ничтожным,
и расстояние совсем ложным,
ибо ты здесь со мной,
когда звучит голос твой.
Не говорим про романы крупные,
а обсуждаем рассказы хрупкие,
новые и короткие и ясные,
с мелкими деталями связанные.
И, кажется, встретились мы уже,
может, в зеркальной луже,
где-то давно в Москве весной,
так же гуляли мы с тобой.
Прости меня, Варлам, прости,
что мои рифмы очень просты,
что стихи пишу неумело,
что к тебе отношусь смело,
что смею тебя по имени назвать,
и не боюсь откровенно сказать,
спасибо за прогулку дружную,
спасибо за погоду нужную,
за слова прикосновения нежней,
спасибо за твою руку в моей.

And here’s part 3 of “Ten Shades of Kindness”:

One evening when I had been in camp for about a month I didn’t see him standing waiting for me in the back of the kitchen barrack after work. I thought he might be late, so I sat down at a table in the far back and started to eat my dinner – cabbage soup and yellowish, steaming hot water colloquially called ‘tea’ – slowly as I waited for him. He didn’t come. I looked up and around me all the time, trying to catch a glimpse of him somewhere, but I didn’t find his face anywhere among the many faces of sallow and stern-looking prisoners, silently and rapidly finishing their soups, then sipping their ‘tea’ almost in slow motion. I determined that I had no other choice but to ask one of the male prisoners if they had seen him. I turned to the man sitting across the table from me, an old man with a grey beard and black, bushy eyebrows, hanging low and close above his green, deep-set eyes. He could’ve been a professor before ending up here, I thought to myself as I gathered up the courage to ask him.

“Excuse me,” I opened up the dialogue, “but you don’t happen to know if anything happened in the brick factory today. If not everyone has yet returned from work?”

He looked up from the steel bucket in front of him, meeting the worried look on my face and thinking to himself for a while. “If something happened at the brick factory today?”

“Yes?”

The old man nodded. “Something happened alright. Why do you ask?”

“I… I need to know,” I answered, but as such an answer failed to please him, I was forced to add: “I’m waiting for someone, but he hasn’t come.”

“Oh… Yes, there was a fight today at the factory. One of the prisoners got into an argument with an officer, the officer told him he should carry more bricks than he was carrying, and the guy answered that he’s already carrying more than the norm, so the officer should just get off his back and leave him alone. Then the officer said something about the norm being calculated for normal people and not for giants, but that for giants there is another norm and this made the guy so mad that he hit him. He hit him so hard the officer landed straight on the floor and lost consciousness immediately. Three other officers soon came running to beat him up, but they didn’t succeed, since he beat them up instead. All three of them! Then came more officers, and they started to shoot…”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Don’t worry, miss, he only got shot in the arm. He didn’t die or anything. Just passed out and they had to wait for two other officers to come and carry him out of there to hospital.”

“The hospital? There’s a hospital here?”

The old man nodded. “I haven’t been there, but I’ve heard that it’s on the other side of camp.”

“Thank you,” I said and left the table.

I ran out of the kitchen, came out of the barrack and looked around me for the nearest officer. It was a warm April evening; the sun was still far from setting in the west. There were almost no other prisoners around, everyone gone back to their barracks already. I looked around me and searched for a long time until, almost suddenly, I recognized an officer standing not far from the kitchen barrack, on the left far corner of it, with his back turned against me. I ran up to him. He turned around as he heard my fast steps approaching him, and gave me a stern look, as if he wanted to claim that even running hastily was considered a crime in this camp.

“Officer,” I began, “you must help me.”

“Help you?” the officer’s stern look was gone, now he looked me as if he were concerned. “What’s happened?” The sudden kindness of his face surprised me and I had to gather myself and my thoughts for a second.

“They brought… they took… My husband was taken to the hospital today, but I don’t know where the hospital is. He was shot today I heard, and I don’t know if he’s going to be alright, if he’s going to live… I have to see him!”

“What’s his number?”

“His number?”

The officer put his right hand on my shoulder in an effort to calm me down and repeated: “Your husband’s number. Which is it? It’s the only way we can find out where he is. If he is in the hospital, if you tell me his number.”

It didn’t take me long to remember Erik’s number, and I told it to the officer.

“You come with me,” he said and started to walk.

I followed him. We walked through the camp, passed between the many thick concrete walls with barbed wire which separated the different parts of the camp from each other, a camp that turned out to be bigger and bigger the longer we walked through it. At every passing point the officer repeated Erik’s number, pointed to me and said ‘this is his wife’. In the end we made it to the hospital – a rather large five-storey white-wash brick building with dirty, dark windows that was located on the edge of the north end of the camp. The officer opened the door for me, and I walked into the hospital ahead of him. The smell inside was dense, damp and sweet, it was cold inside the thick walls despite it being a warm spring evening outside. We walked together through a dark corridor, passing by many closed doors across the stone floor. Everywhere was a certain kind of silent stillness, not a sound except for the noise of our shoes hitting against the hard floor. He stopped in front of a door and knocked. It didn’t take more than a few seconds before the door was opened, and a tall man in a white robe showed himself. His hair was grey, but he wasn’t an old man yet. He was wearing thick glasses with broad, black frames, and looked at us both with a somber, uncompromising look on his face.

The officer repeated the same thing to the doctor as he had already said several times during our journey through the camp to the hospital.

“You’re his wife?” the doctor turned to me.

“Yes,” I answered.

“That’s all, officer,” the doctor said to the officer, who at that response bowed. “I’ll have her out of here within the hour. You can arrange for someone to come pick her up and accompany her back to the camp, or you can wait yourself.”

“I’ll have it arranged,” said the officer, bowed himself again, after which he detached himself from us and started walking back through the dark corridor.

The doctor had kind eyes behind his thick glasses. He nodded to himself for a long while in silence, before he took my hand and patted it softly a few times. He walked out of the door, locked it behind him, and pointed toward the stairs leading up to the other stores a few steps further down the corridor.

“He’s on the fourth floor,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“Have you been married long?” he asked.

“No… only a year.”

The doctor nodded and hummed something to himself, but I couldn’t make out what. We walked up the four flights of stairs and then through an identically dark corridor as the one on the first floor. The only difference on the fourth floor was that the doors were fewer and farther apart from each other, and that they were standing wide open. I recognized the smell. It was the same hospital smell I had come to know so well after four years of medical studies – both sweet and sour, this solid and soggy smell of human wounds, human decay mixed with strong medicine and weak sterile detergent. He led me to the last door in the corridor, but stopped before entering into the room.

“Your husband has been shot in the arm,” he stated calmly. “He’s going to be alright. He is not unconscious anymore, but he might be sleeping now and it is not for certain that he’ll awake. Be careful. A shot wound is always serious.”

“I know,” I said.

“You know?”

“I’m a fourth year student at the Medical Academy,” I told him. “Or… I was before. Before this. I was going to become a doctor.”

He smiled a gentle smile. “Then you know what to do. There’s a bucket with water, you can take some new water and a cloth and…”

“Pat his face with it to remove sweat and try to bring down the fever,” I added.

“Exactly.”

The doctor left. I entered the room. His bed was standing by the second window out of three in the big room, in the corner. I shouldn’t have smiled when I saw him laying there in a bed far too small for him, but the view was too comical and touching for me not to smile a caring smile. His feet were hanging outside the edge of the bed, and his injured right arm had been placed on a table next to the bed. His left arm rested in a similar manner on a smaller table on the other side of the bed, as his body was large enough to take up the entire mattress. There was no room for his arms in it. I sat down on the table on which his right arm was resting, dipped the cloth into the cold water in the bucket I had placed next to me. I started by stroking his forehead with it. His dark brown hair was wet from sweat and seemed black at the roots. His face was flushed, his eyes closed, his cheeks flaming read, yet the rest of his body, especially his neck, was almost white in color. They had dressed him in a pale grey hospital shirt and covered him with a yellow wool blanket. The blanket only covered him from the chest down to his ankles. The blanket was too small and short to reach down to his feet, which were bare and also seemed bleak: white and bloodless. I stroked his face with the cloth, softly tracing along the edges of his sharp cheekbones with it. Once in a while I dipped it in the water next to me to keep the cloth’s touch fresh and cold.

I put down the cloth and placed the palm of my hand against his forehead. He still had a fever. At that moment he awoke and a pair of brown eyes looked straight up at me.

“Martina?” was his first word. “What are you… how did you… how come you’re here?”

“I told them I’m your wife,” I said, dipping the cloth into the water once again.

Erik didn’t say anything.

“Are you in pain?” I asked.

“I got into a fight.”

“So I heard,” I nodded, patting the cloth gently against his neck.

“Once I get well…” he started, and moaned a little before continuing: “They said I’m going straight into isolation until the trial. I’ll be sentenced again. For beating four officers to death.”

“To death?”

“Almost. If they hadn’t shot me, then… Maybe more than almost. Martina, they say I’ll probably get ten more years. And I won’t spend them here in this camp, but in a place far more awful than this, a real disgusting place, they say, that’s far away.”

“How much time are you allowed in order to get well?”

“I get one month, then isolation and trial.”

I didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything. We looked at each other. I stayed with him for half an hour. Before I left him I kissed him on his forehead. His eyes were closed.

On my way out of the room one of the other patients stopped me and begged for something to drink and I gave me him some water. Then another patient asked me if could fix his bandage that had come undone and I so helped him with that, after which a third man wanted me to bring him some more painkillers. As I answered him that I would tell the doctor without delay, the doctor himself turned up in the door. I informed him about the situation, and he suggested we should go and get the medicine together.

“So you’ll know where to find them in the future,” he added.

“Why?”

“We need another nurse, and I would like to ask you if you will agree to work here instead of at the sewing factory?” he asked.

I agreed.

Erik remained at the hospital for one month: his arm healed better and faster than I had presumed. Then one morning, five officers came to lead him away to the isolation cells. I didn’t know then where the isolation cells at the camp were located, and I never found out. All I found out was that he was sentenced to another ten years and left the camp immediately after his sentence. I remained in that camp for two more years.

Genitive: part III

2009-05-03T20:06:00.000+06:00

During the last two years it has become more and more popular to make old Soviet propaganda serve capitalistic ends here in Russia. This is just one twist on the current theme of ‘economic crisis’ worldwide: «Сервис отличный, нормальные цены, пусть не пугают тебя перемены!» [The service is excellent, the prices are normal, don’t let the changes scare you!]. Under the picture (with a boot added in photoshop as the ad above is for a shoe store) it says: «Служим народу» [We serve the people]. Anyone who remembers, i.e. knows, what it says in the original version?

2.

2009-05-01T20:30:00.003+06:00

«У всех на устах – тёмное в белом!» ['On everybody's lips – dark in white!]. Don’t you just love this Russian ice-cream ad, comrades?

Today is a great holiday – the 1st of May – and it has been snowing in Yekaterinburg for almost six hours now. We’re back to winter just as we are supposed to be celebrating the coming of spring. Yesterday it was so warm outside that I walked to university with only a hoodie over my polka dot dress; today I took a walk dressed for a polar expedition. Life in Russia is full of surprises. Let’s continue reading “Ten Shades of Kindness” instead:

At breakfast the next morning I saw him again. He was standing at the back of the kitchen barrack as I was handed my morning meal – a round, small steel bucket containing some sort of grayish, watery porridge, a steel cup with bleak, more yellow than brown but nevertheless hot tea, and 500 grams of dark bread. He had already finished his breakfast and was standing leaning with his back against the barrack wall, drinking his tea slowly and smoking a cigarette of poor quality. The smoke coming from it was more black than grey. In the kitchen barrack almost all of the male prisoners, and some of the female, smoked such cigarettes after breakfast. I walked up to him. Our eyes met on my way there, and he greeted me with a smile. He recognized me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“For what?”

“For saving my life yesterday,” I said.

He shook his head. “It was only my duty.”

“Duty?”

“It is the duty of the strong to protect the weaker,” he explained. “My name is Erik,” he added, pointing to the number pinned onto his prison shirt, “but you should probably try to remember this number instead, as that’s seemingly the local tradition.”

“When in Rome…” I smiled and held out my hand: “Martina.”

We shook hands and he suggested we should sit down at the nearest table, where two spots had recently been made available. We sat down next to each other. I started eating and he continued smoking.

“They don’t cut women’s hair here?” he noted, nodding in the direction of my still long, dark blonde hair; dirty, greasy and pulled back in a home-made pony tail.

“Apparently not,” I said, swallowing yet another tasteless mouthful of porridge. “They give everybody an equal amount of food here?”

“The only difference is that women get 500 grams of bread, men 800.”

“You finished yours already?”

He nodded.

“Take this,” I said and handed him my loaf of bread.

He shook his head. “I can’t take your bread.”

“I don’t need it, but you might.”

He hesitated for a second, but only for a short second, before taking it and putting it into the pocket of his pants. “Thank you.”

“It is only my duty,” I said. “It is the duty of the small to help the bigger.”

“I’ve never heard of such a duty,” he said laughing.

“You live and you learn.”

And also I laughed a little.

We left the kitchen together and our ways were separated. He went with the other men to the brick factory; I went with the other women to the sewing factory. I never saw him during the day. We met only for a short while every morning, for about fifteen minutes while we ate breakfast – it was always the same, only the color and consistency of the porridge changed on a daily basis. In the evening we met again during dinner. He was always waiting for me on that very same spot every morning and every evening in the kitchen barrack – leaning against the wall in the back of the barrack, always already having finished his meal, always smoking one of those poor quality cigarettes. Every evening we remained together in the kitchen barrack until it closed, sitting close to each other and talking about everything and nothing, and during my conversations with him the world around us seemed not to matter – not the war, not the camp. When we talked it was as if we were in another world. Every morning I gave him my bread. In the beginning he tried to resist, but soon he started to take it and thank me without any resistance. He realized I was right – he needed it. On the camp ration no one could both live and work, unless you weren’t of exceptional small frame. I was lucky to be of such a frame. He was not so lucky.

"Аффтар жжот!"

2009-05-01T20:15:00.001+06:00

Н. В. Гоголь [N. V. Gogol'] burning his second volume of «Мёртвые души» ["Dead Souls"] and the people in the background saying: «Аффтар жжот!» which is Russian internet slang for «автор зажигает!» [the author (of a post etc) rules, i.e. sets on fire].

Ten Shades of Kindness: 1.

2009-04-29T20:50:00.004+06:00

Work it, teddy! “Striptease. The third Open Championship in the Urals.” The interesting thing about this ad – which I didn’t pay any attention to when I took the picture – is that the striptease championship will take place in ‘Gold Club’, where I have worked. Two days with my students singing Swedish traditional Christmas songs in December last year… Or what did you think, comrades?

During two days my internet didn’t work. Life in Russia is full of surprises. The first day was difficult for me, but the second day turned out blissful, calm and relaxed. And I thought to myself that if my paycheck wasn’t immediately connected to the internet then I would probably use it much more seldom than I do. On Monday I was quite unexpectedly given work to do, a translation that had to be done within a couple of hours. It was the most boring text one can imagine – about some appliance concerning different screws used when broken bones are put back together again in difficult operations. As quickly as I had done it I repressed all my memories of ever having translated it. I earned 2000 rubles for my translation. Pretty good. The spring semester is slowly coming to end, the winter in the Urals is also about to be wrapped up and I took a long walk with my friend Anya today. We had the most interesting conversation about culture, history, literature, philosophy and relationships between men and women. She is one of the few people I know that can follow me when I go off into the deep end of my analysis of the current condition of the world we live in today. She is very smart and a writer and so we have much in common. Plus we have read much of the same books and think alike, or maybe not always think alike, but what we have in common is that we both think a lot. Some would say too much, but let’s not get into what ‘some’ say as that more often than not is the silliest things.

In my last post I wrote a little bit about my latest work of fiction – a novella called “Ten Shades of Kindness”. Back then I was rather appalled by what I had produced, and saw no prospect in the tale what so ever. Since then it has been read both by Anya, and by my good friend Annie in California, and both of them greeted me with very surprising comments in favor of me continuing the novella. That’s why I have chosen to publish it here on my blog, though not all of it at once, as it is rather long [longer than I would’ve wanted it to be, but one cannot always be the God of one’s creation], but in small sections. The novella is divided into ten smaller sections, which will not surprise anyone as it goes by the name of “Ten Shades of Kindness” [Anya suggested I would shorten it to “Seven” because that’s a better number, but that would mean cutting the 20th century short of a few decades, something that would be unforgivable]. I haven’t finished it yet, yesterday I stopped on the 8th shade of kindness, which means some might change in the earlier shades, but at the current moment I am okay with what has been written so far. After all, this story came to me one morning, without being asked to do so, and I can only what is in my power as a writer. Am I pleased with it? Yes. What is it about? About kindness. And since it is about kindness, then nothing that is not ‘kind’ will not be allowed any room in the novella. Even though I am open to all kinds of comments, suggestions and criticism, you must first know, comrades, that I am not trying to disclaim the cruelty of our past century, what I’m trying to do is only switch the focus a tad in the opposite direction. My plan is to post all of the novella here over the next month. Enjoy.

Shortly after the war began – one month into my fourth year as a student at the Medical Academy – I was arrested. Many others with me faced a similar destiny at around the same time. I was 22 years old and lived with my parents in an apartment in the center of our city. One October night I was arrested and accused of being a member of a secret student organization – only when they handed me the documents with my sentence two months later did I find out the name of this ‘secret student organization’. I had never heard of it before, yet – apparently – I was not only a member, but one if its founders. I spent three months in a female prison before the prison was taken over by the country we were at war with. After this all the prisoners were relocated by train to a camp far out in the countryside. I had never been there before.

It was an early, cold and grey morning in March when the train stopped at the station. The doors opened and we were told to get off. Other trains constantly kept arriving to the station with incessant large streams of people from other prisons. Both male and female prisoners were mixed with each on the station, everywhere pushed and shoved from one side to the other by large groups of five or ten officers in dark green uniforms, shouting messages sometimes to us, sometimes between each other. We were led out of the station – it was a small town train station consisting of but one tiny two-storey dark red brick building – and told to walk down the muddy main street, passing by empty small wooden houses, until the enormous crowd was stopped on what seemed to be a large square in front of tall steel gates, around which were concrete walls with barbed wire on top. We waited there an endless damp morning. I was surrounded by huge amounts of different people, all dressed in dissimilar kinds of prison ware – grey, light blue, blue, light grey, black and all these never-ending brown coats – of different ages and backgrounds and – quite possibly – sentences, as stated in their documents, consisting of no more than a little piece of yellowish paper. I could hardly find enough room around me to stand up straight by myself. All the time I was jostled in one direction or another. Either I got an arm in my side, or someone shouted something to someone else over my head, and unremittingly people were stepping all over my feet until they went numb and I didn’t feel them anymore.

I fell backwards, and as I was falling I thought to myself – of course I would have to die trampled to death on a cold day in March…

Yet I didn’t fall. The person standing behind me caught me, or not caught me exactly, but allowed for me to land with my head against his chest, falling with my back against his stomach. He caught a hold of me by putting his large hands on my shoulders, pressing me tighter to himself, thus sheltering me from constantly being hit or pushed by strangers around us. I tried to turn around slightly to look up at him and catch a glimpse of his face, but for a long while this was impossible as there was not enough room to make even the slightest movement. Not until much later – perhaps a whole hour passed – did I succeed in looking up at him. I saw that his face was much higher up above me than I had previously thought. He smiled down at me. I didn’t understand. He put his right arm around me, across my chest, right below my neck, as he protected me from the others with his left arm.

When it started to rain he opened up his brown coat and invited me to hide inside of it. After this I didn’t see anything of what was still going on outside. I only heard the voices, the screams, the ceaseless steps of boots against the filthy, mud-covered ground beneath us… But I wasn’t listening anymore. Inside his coat it was warm and safe and smelled of male sweat and road dirt. There was a slight, yet distinct, smell of strong, bitter coffee coming from his dark blue prison shirt. I remember that smell better than I remember any other of smells of the war.

It was already dark outside when he opened up his coat and revealed to me that we had made it all the way up to the camp gates. It was still raining. Ahead of us were but a few female prisoners, behind us no more than twenty men, out of which most seemed to be injured soldiers, holding themselves up on walking sticks made out of tree branches or other wood items. Soon it was my turn. I handed over my documents – a torn piece of paper on which were written my number, name and sentence – to the officer standing by the gate. He looked at it swiftly, not paying attention to anything else but my number. He directed me to the left, where there was a rather short line of women going into a one-storey barrack made out of raw wood. I entered the camp, and turned around just as the officer gave back the paper to the kind stranger.

He directed his steps to the right, to another barrack – which looked just the same as mine – into which an almost identical line was going. Only that line was made up of men.

The Ambitious Generation

2009-04-24T20:43:00.003+06:00

And who is this I see trying to earn a few bucks on the side by doing ads for Turkish Airlines in Russia?

As a part of the MA program I’m studying at we must take a foreign language class. My foreign language is Russian, though I tried to take English in the fall but that turned out to be madness, I tell you, madness. The two other foreign girls in the program – the American Jen and the Mongolian Okino – failed to show up to class today and I was left on my own for about an hour of ‘speaking class’ with our amazing professor Irina Sergeevna. I don’t know how we got to speaking about marriage, but anyway, the conversation on love, relationships and tying the knot was started between us. I told her that lately I’ve been getting the message from the world around me [i.e. Russian society around me] that my time is almost up – I’m still not married and next year I’ll turn 25. She put it to me bluntly – yeah, you’re getting the message alright. And if you don’t get married within the next year then you’re not ever going to get married in this country. If you’re not ‘plucked’ before 25 you’re an old maid. And if you give birth for the first time when you’re 28 they call you ‘an old mother’ in Russia. This country is stressing me out. Even though I know that I made the right decision when I broke up with my former more handsome half, I also know that being single in Russia puts me in an awkward position as a ‘dangerous and unsteady’ member of society. Or people just think I’m weird. Or that there must be something wrong with me.

Every cloud, as the saying goes, has a silver lining, however: there’s a rumor going around Ural State that I’m married to someone ‘back home’ – in some versions my husband is Swedish, in others he’s American or even French. I’ve never heard anyone talk about it to my face; I’ve only heard ‘rumors of the rumor’. And with that I can rest assured that I’m not a complete weirdo in the eyes of Yekat as in their mind there’s at least some kind of man in my life whose socks I’m bound to be found washing when at home during vacation.

No, I don’t mind being single. But I would also not mind sharing a bottle of red wine with a man at least one evening a week. Yet there’s no chance I’ll be able to meet any man at all at this moment in my life – the philology department, where I spend 90% of my time, consists of hundreds of gorgeous women and a couple of funny-looking men. I’m not saying a male philologist can’t be handsome – my very own academic guidance consular Alexey is an excellent example of the opposite – what I’m saying is they’re most likely not.

The past week has been without large events and filled with little moments of clarity. While reading through 800 out of 1000 pages about Shalamov, I found that Shalamov was often compared with Bunin – all my comrades probably see the connection here, since you must all have at least read a brief introductory to theoretical poetics – and so it seemed to me on Sunday evening (or maybe it was on Monday night, I don’t remember) that I should be the first writer to combine the two. [There was a time when I imagined I would be the first to combine Tolstoy and Dostoevsky into one little female body, but that was – of course – a folly. Besides, that was when I was like really young, like 22 or something.] In order to achieve this I began writing a short story about the 20th century. The key, as I have seen in both Bunin and Shalamov, is to write about something you know as if you didn’t know it or about something you don’t know as if you knew it, which is why I chose to write about the 20th century – a century with which I was but momentarily acquainted. I chose a story that I had toyed with during the previous weekend – about a man who saved a woman from being trampled to death in a large crowd of prisoners waiting to be let into a concentration camp. Later she saves his life in return by telling the guards in the camp that she’s his wife, and so on and so forth their relationship evolves through the 20th century. In the short story were to be found all those typical 20th century things – like world wars and prisons and public rehabilitation after being a political prisoner. I decided to call it “Ten Shades of Kindness”. Throughout the week my work on the short story went well. I worked on the details like Shalamov and I worked on every sentence like Bunin and changed colors here, adjectives there, in general, I thought I was working it like a professional. Then – oh the horror! – last night I realized that the ‘short’ story was already 12 pages long, and I had but covered 6 out of the 10 shades of kindness I had planned on portraying. I changed the genre from ‘short story’ to ‘novella’ in order to give myself some space. That’s a folly, though. What it comes down to is that I’m not working in either of these genres; I’m writing a novel. I’m always writing a novel. Wise men and brave women say that the novel as a genre died long ago but I disagree with wise men and brave women. [It is in part due to my current disagreement with everything.] The novel has just been mistreated during the 20th century; it has been written too many times by too many people unqualified to write novels. Shalamov was honest with himself, and said straight away: “No, I am not a novelist. I only write short stories”. Bunin wrote novels but his short stories are the real playground for his ‘mastership’.

“There is only one truth,” Shalamov said, “the truth of the talent.”

During this week I have come to the conclusion that I am neither Bunin nor Shalamov, and that all my diligent work on the form of my story completely killed what is best and most important in my art – the dialogue. After all, I might be able to brag about very little when it comes to my skills as a writer, but if there’s one thing I have the right to be proud of, then it’s my dialogues. Last night I was sitting staring into my computer screen at these two people I’ve literally forced onto each other and perceived that they have nothing to say to one another. I thought I would choose two ‘typically 20th century’ characters – a female doctor sentenced for a political crime she did not commit and a male thief sentenced for manslaughter when what he was really guilty of was murder. But my doctor refused to stand on her own two feet – and a character must stand on his or her own in order to carry a story [this time I tried – in vain probably – to write from the point of view of the woman, though I usually stick with a male perspective] – while my thief seemed physically repulsed by the entire idea of this doctor clinging onto him, claiming they’re ‘married’. The entire evening yesterday did I push him into kissing her. Only when he finally kissed her did I comprehend that it was low and despicable of me to do such a thing and that I shouldn’t have.

I love short stories. I love reading Bunin and Shalamov for the lessons in literature as an art that can be learned from them, but I shouldn’t trade what I’ve already mastered for another try at something I’m terrible at. Lessons learned, points taken. During the past week I also reached my dream weight – I haven’t weighed this much [or this little!] since I was 17. For the first time since I came to Russia almost 5 years ago I’m not considered mortally obese in comparison with Russian girls. It feels good, even though my favorite skirt will soon be too big to stay up on my hips. I know why I’ve lost weight – it is directly connected with me being single. No red wine in the evenings has lowered my daily calorie intake with at least 25%. I’m speculating, of course, because I haven’t counted. All I know is that I’ve drunk alcohol four times since I came back from Sweden, and that was almost three months ago now.

Easter!

2009-04-19T23:32:00.004+06:00

This delicious slice on my plate comes from the bigger white squared thing in the background, a traditional Russian Easter treat called «пасха», just like Easter itself is called in Russian - «Пасха» (except the holiday is spelled with a big P).

A week ago, when it was Easter back home in Sweden and according to my good ol’ Protestant Church, I wasn’t feeling the holiday at all. It didn’t feel like Christ had risen at all. But today, when it’s Easter in Russia, I’m feeling the whole huge spectrum of this main event in human history – Jesus Christ beat death, rose from the dead and as a result we now have eternal life! How awesome on a scale from 1 to 10 isn’t that, comrades? I think it might actually be an 11, since this thing clearly goes out the roof! Today I celebrated it twice. At first during the day, when Ksyusha came over with a «кулич», this traditional piece of pastry usually eaten on Easter in Russia, and we drank Swedish coffee together while we ate it. Then in the evening I was invited over to my friend Katya and her sister Daria, with whom I celebrated this holiday two years ago by going to the full length six hour long Orthodox Easter service at a monastery outside of Yekaterinburg. Back then their mother celebrated with us, but since then she’s joined that very same monastery and won’t be coming back to the city ever again. I don’t know why exactly, but I think that’s a very awesome thing of her to do. A very inspiring and brave step to take. Her daughters are lovely. Tonight Daria had invited her friend Zhenya, who’s Catholic, to spice up the conversation, since I’m a Protestant and she knows that very well. The conversation was lovely, kind, beautiful, as was the whole evening. It is not often that it is possible to gather together three young women of three different Christian denominations in one and the same small kitchen somewhere in the Urals and have such a deep, heart-to-heart discussion about faith. We discussed differences in our ‘religions’ and asked questions about each other’s ways in prayer, service and studying the Bible. And we shared very many deep and profound thoughts with each other, yet the conversation never turned ugly, neither did the tone become the least harsh. I’ve come to the conclusion that I respect people of all religions, as long as they have some sort of faith in God. God is my best friend, as I believe I have already written here many, many times, and I don’t like it when people offend my best friend by saying ‘he doesn’t exist’ or other follies. I almost started to cry on the marshrutka back to my dorm tonight because I felt so truly blessed after our long and pleasant evening together. We should gather more often and learn more about each other. After all, we agree on the most important point – that Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead on this day and that we have eternal life in him. Also we study the same Bible every day, and pray in almost the same way to the same God on a daily basis. I believe a relationship with God is the greatest gift ever given to humans. And if we can meet each other and learn from each other, than that’s the best thing that can come out of it. Even though Daria wanted to switch the subject when I started to explain that it’s okay to be homosexual in the Swedish Protestant Church, she heard me out and for that I respect her. I respect her point of view because I know the source of it – the Bible. And she – I hope – can also see where I’m coming from – love. If you love someone, it shouldn’t matter what sex they are. Love is more important. I love Easter! Happy Easter everyone!

This is me and the "кулич" - yummy!