Russian Language Blog

(“This book changed my life…”)

…and it could change yours, too!

No, I’m NOT talking about Dianetics, or Think and Grow Rich, or Lose Two Pounds A Day The Herbal Way, or whatever.

Я имею в виду вот эту книгу (“I have in mind this book here”):

ВНИМАНИЕ! Чтение этой книги может привести к новой привычке! Беречь от детей до тринадцати лет! (“WARNING: Reading this book may be habit-forming! Keep away from children under 13!”)

And how did this book change my life? Well, it started like this…

Когда-то в детстве (“Sometime in my childhood”), когда я был мальчиком, и мне было лет не больше десяти (“when I was a boy of no more than ten years”), we were living in Ankara, Turkey — где мой отец работал в американском посольстве (“where my father worked at the U.S. Embassy”.)

Since we were in the general neighborhood of the Soviet Union, наши родители наняли турецкую студентку (“our parents hired a Turkish college-girl”) who was fluent in English to watch me and my little sister for a week, while they улетели на экскурсию в Москву и Санкт-Петербург Ленинград (“flew off on a guided group tour to Moscow and Leningrad”).

They returned full of stories about the trip — although to ease our annoyance at being left behind, they reassured us that we would have been bored out of our minds, because the tour was so museum-oriented.

And they also brought home some cool souvenirs. Of course, there were the obligatory матрёшки (“nesting dolls”) and шкатулки с миниатюрами (“lacquer boxes with painted lids”).

I was especially entranced by the богородские игрушки (“carved wooden toys” named for the village of Bogorodskoye), with moving mechanisms activated by рычаги (“levers”) or swinging маятники (“pendulums”):

A typical богородская игрушка. There are also богородские резьбы (“Bogorodskое-style carvings”) that are similar in style but don’t necessarily have moving parts.

And since I was an avid reader, they also gave me a number of Russian books — in English translation, of course. I later found that some of them are now regarded as classics of Soviet “kid lit” — for example, Aleksandr Raskin’s Как папа был маленьким (“When Daddy Was a Little Boy”).

But the one that affected me most was the one above — Vasalisa the Beautiful, a сборник русских сказок (“anthology of Russian fairy-tales” — the editor and primary translator is Zheleznova, Irina).

Of course, I was fascinated partly by the highly exotic settings and events: heroes climbing into the ears of talking horses; избушки на курьих ножках (“huts on hen’s feet”); magical apple trees growing from a buried телячья кишка (“calf’s intestine”); unkillable wizards who hid their mortality in the point of a needle inside an egg inside a duck inside a hare…

And although the book was in English, the language itself made an impression on me. Note how vividly the speed of the villain’s horse is described in this passage:

The English translations of some сказки take minor liberties, but the language here is очень близкий к оригиналу (“very close to the original“), in which the talking horse boasts «Можно ячменя насеять…» (“One could sow some barley”), etc.

So, this one book of traditional fairytales lit a lasting curiosity in me about Russia and its culture, and this was definitely a factor that encouraged me to pick Russian for my foreign-language requirement when I started college way back in 1989. And here I am today!

After a LOT of persuasion, Yelena convinced me to вступить в команду (“join the team”) as an official writer for the Transparent Russian Blog. Of course, I’m still skeptical about the wisdom of this, because по правде говоря, мне кажется что я “владею” русским языком на таком же уровене, что и Тарзан. (Frankly, I think that my “command” of the Russian language is about on the same level as Tarzan’s.)

But if she thinks it’s a good idea, I’ll trust her — and I’m thrilled by the chance to discuss Russian on such a great forum, share some of what I’ve learned over the years. And always remember, I’m a learner, like you guys — so to quote a Russian saying that was supposedly a favorite of Ronald Reagan, Доверяй но проверяй (“Trust, but verify” — i.e, when in doubt, ask Yelena or another native speaker!)

Ladies and gentlemen, the Russian internet is filled with spectacular things! While browsing through some Russian blogs today – colloquially known in Russian as «жж» which is short for «живой журнал» [live journal] – I came across a link to a wonderful collection of pictures painted by the artist Поваляева [Povakyaeva]. Since these paintings were to good not to share, that’s exactly what I’ll do! And I give you a few of them here, with the ‘explanations’ to them both in Russian and with English translation. Anyone with a soft side for the intellectual will laugh out loud!

«Поэт Владимир Маяковский ищет свой паспорт в широких штанинах» [The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky looks for his passport in huge pants].

«Писатель Марсель Пруст разыскивает утраченное время…» [The writer Marcel Proust searches for lost time...]

«Поэт Александр Блок ночью идёт в дежурную аптеку [The poet Alexander Blok goes to an all-night open pharmacy].

«Писатель Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский работает над ключевой сценой будущего шедевра» [The writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky works on the key scene of his future masterpiece].

P.S. If you can’t see the pictures here you can see them on this link! And there’s a lot more pictures there, I only picked my own favorite ones to show here!�

Of course I’m only kidding. Even in Russia VOGUE is still VOGUE, and not «ВОГ», though it would be awfully funny if that was the case. Once upon a time, in a far away past, when I lived in Omsk and used to buy last month’s old copy of this magazine «в подземном переходе» [in the underground passageway] for 35 rubles (those were indeed the days!), they printed a couple of pages with old pictures from the first (and we should also note – the last) photo session by Vogue in the Soviet Union. Back then, in 1982, they used «ВОГ» as the Russian translation of the magazine’s name. The photo session was, for various reasons, a highly «любопытный» [curious] thing – and it’s too bad that I didn’t save any of the pages that I tore out and taped up on the refrigerator in my Siberian dorm room – imagine the epitome of Western couture displayed in a landscape of communal and/or communstic farms, kitchens and factories. And then you’ll have a pretty good idea of what Vogue managed to do in Moscow and Kiev, where they shoot the pictures some 26 years ago. Now a photo session with such clothes is no rare occasion in Russia, as this country has had its own Russian language edition of the fashion mag for 10 years. And for half of these years I’ve been buying copies of it, which is, yes, I admit, as a literary scholar, my biggest guilty pleasure. Many people, however, don’t really get Vogue. They often misunderstand Vogue. They think that it is what it is not. Many ask themselves (and sometimes me): “What’s the point of buying a magazine filled with shoes and clothes from stores that to you never will be anything but museums?” Or even worse: “Why buy a magazine all about luxury in a kiosk next to which a couple of «бабушки» are begging for a couple of rubles to buy bread, then go home and look at Наталья Водянова [Natalia Vodianova] wearing the latest Manolo Blahniks all the while you’re secretly in love with H&M’s shoe collection?” Reading Russian Vogue is, in my opinion, the essence of Russian life right now, at this moment in world history (being early 21^st century), being as it solely deals with beautiful, expensive things. But it’s not just about «роскошь», actually it is more about «искусство». Some might think that this is just my defense speech, that looking at pumps is alright if they’re shot by a famous photographer, and maybe it is!

In the beginning after moving to Yekaterinburg, and away from old cheap old copies of magazines, I couldn’t afford to spend about 140 roubles on a «глянцевой журнал». But last Saturday, while at home sick with the flue, I decided to pamper myself. And it doesn’t really matter that it looks like this where I live – because dreams are only as sweet as long are they’re not even close to reality.

But now for something completely different – or not really – art. Russian art. The October edition has a rather captivating and thoughtful, if somewhat too short, article on provocative Russian art. It was written by the director Evgeny Mitta. He tries to find answers to questions often asked by the Russian public concerning modern art. I don’t know about you, but I personally love to be offended. I don’t know why. Especially I love being offended in museums and art galleries. I blame my old art teacher for this, because she taught us that the worse a painting makes you feel, the more of your unknown or unconscious feelings does it portray. If that’s true, then we should all seriously give the whole affair that aroused around the «целующиеся милиционеры» “kissing police men” of last year a second thought…

«Что оскорбительного в гомосексуальном порыве вдух милиционеров?» [What is offensive in the homosexual impulse (alt. burst of homosexual emotion) of two policemen?]

And I just love the painting on the picture above, for obvious reasons perhaps, but isn’t it just so charming? Naked Russian writers in a paradise-like landscape, could a girl ask for anything more? From the left: Достоевский, Толстой, Маяковский, Гоголь, Ахматова, Цветаева. It was made by the artistical duo Александр Виноградов & Владимир Дубосарский, who have been working together since 1995, and done quite an impressive number of provocative works.

And for some reason I also very much like the painting on the first page of the article – chasing after a watermelon outside a GUGAL camp…

Everybody has their own relationship to art, I suppose. I was lucky enough not to only have an art teacher who told me that taking offense to a work of art was actually a good thing, I was also blessed with a grandmother who brought me to the art museum in Gothenburg and patiently thaught me the great art of looking at paintings. In Russia – увы! – there’s a big problem, though; almost all the ‘good’ paintings are in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and out in the ‘province’ where I’m living we’re left with the – yes, that’s right – the left-overs. Or local painters. And that’s not too bad, actually. They’re masters waiting to be acclaimed. Or so I presume!