Russian Language Blog

In the US there is a good saying “woman’s work is never done”. Or as Russian women might say делам по дому конца краю не видно (lit. can’t see the end to house work). So what is considered женская работа (woman’s work) in Russian households? Let’s find out and, since house chores have to be done no matter where in the world you live, let’s learn some useful phrases along the way.

Let’s start with распределение домашних дел (division of chores) or figuring out who does what in a household. In Russia, with its more traditional approach to gender roles, most routine chores are a woman’s domain. As some women (and men) say у нас распределение обязанностей – муж зарабатывает, жена на хозяйстве и деньги тратит (our division of responsibilities is the husband earns and the wife keeps the house and spends).

Grammar Note: since chores are by their nature repetitive activities that never end (sigh), we use imperfective aspect a lot unless we are talking about our to-do list for a particular day:

Мыть полы и стирать бельё – это женская работа (To mop floors is woman’s work)

Сегодня мне нужно помыть пол и постирать (Today I must mop the floor and do laundry)

Some of these housekeeping responsibilities include

Уборка (n. cleaning) – some women prefer to have one day a week that they designate as уборочный (adj. cleaning) while others do по чуть-чуть каждый день (a little bit every day). Even though most husbands do not помогать убирать (help to clean) for these ежедневный (daily) or еженедельный (weekly) chores, they do pitch in for генеральная уборка (spring cleaning) since it involves some heavy work and even minor repairs.

Мытьё (n. washing) – whether it is мытьё посуды (washing dishes), мытьё полов (mopping floors) or мытьё окон (window washing) it is a typically woman’s task. I still remember my mom standing bravely on the wide подоконник (window-sill) of our 5^th-floor apartment, washing the outside of the windows.

Готовка (n. cooking) – приготовление еды (preparing meals) isn’t always done by women. In fact, many men will boast of their excellent cooking skills, particularly when it comes to шашлык (shish kebab), жаркое (pot roast) or any number of meat and fish dishes. Occasional, typically holiday or picnic, cooking is what many men do eagerly and proudly. Yet the daily duties of preparing завтрак (breakfast), обед (dinner) and ужин (supper) are typically left entirely to women.

Стирка (n. laundry) – ok, to be fair, in the “good” old days of my Soviet childhood, way before my parents bought стиральная машина (clothes washer), my father helped somewhat. Specifically, he helped my mother отжать (to wring) large and heavy items, such as bedding. He was quite exceptional that way, the only man in our entire подъезд (block of apartments) to do so. I guess now that washing machines are no longer luxury items, men don’t help much with this either.

Глажка (n. ironing) – I once did a quick survey of how many of my friends’ husbands knew where their wives kept гладильная доска (ironing board) and утюг (iron). And let me tell you, there wasn’t much difference between American and Russian men on this one.

So what’s left now that cleaning, washing, cooking, laundry and ironing are done? How about покупка продуктов (grocery shopping)? It is not always solely a woman’s responsibility though. Many husbands help, particularly with подвезти до магазина (driving to the store) and поднести тяжёлые сумки (carrying heavy bags). After that, there are just such мелочи (little things) like полив цветов (watering flowers), уход за домашними животными (taking care of house pets), and занятие детьми (here: taking care of children). Oh, and she shouldn’t forget to вынести мусор (take out trash).

Little wonder that at the end of the day women валятся с ног (dropping with fatigue). Oh, and most have full-time jobs as well. So you can frequently hear women using the following phrases to describe this situation of continuous загруженность (heavy workload):

Я верчусь, как белка в колесе целый день, а он приходит с работы и сразу за компьютер – устал, видите ли (I am spinning like a squirrel in a wheel all day and he comes from work and gets on his computer right away because he’s tired)

Вы, Марина, просто святая – на Вас весь дом держится (You, Marina, are a saint – the entire household rests on your shoulders)

Я, как Золушка, в доме за всеми убираю (I am like Cinderella, cleaning after everyone in the house)

Пашу, как лошадь, что на работе, что дома (I work like a horse both at home and at work)

У тебя муж просто ангел – и по хозяйству помогает и с дочкой занимается (Your husband is an angel what with helping you around the house and taking care of your daughter).

Я считаю, что убирать со стола – не мужское дело (I believe that cleaning up after a meal is not a man’s job)

Вот у Наташи в доме всегда чисто и уютно. Как она всё успевает, просто ума не приложу (Natasha’s house is always clean and cozy. How she manages to get it all done, I have no idea)

Now that you’ve learned these new phrases, tell us what are your least favorite or most favorite chores? Do you like подстригать газон (mow the lawn), мыть машину (wash the car), возить детей на футбол (drive children to soccer practice)? What are some chores that you do that I haven’t included in this post?

If you have the time, you might like the Russian-language sitcom Сваты. Much of it is available on YouTube. It’s a good sitcom to practice conversational Russian as well as to try to figure out who’s who in this crazy extended family.

Want to play a quick game of associations? I’m going to say (ok, write) a word and you quickly reply with whatever word comes to mind. Ready? Here we go: FAMILY…

Now, play this game with a native Russian speaker: СЕМЬЯ… and they will likely respond with ячейка общества. The набившая оскомину (here: overused, old and boring) Soviet phrase семья – ячейка общества can be translated as “family is society’s fundamental unit”. So let’s talk about this fundamental unit.

Russians have plenty of words that describe family ties. And many are confusing. It all starts with свадьба (wedding). In English language men and women simply get married. In Russian, a woman выходит замуж while a man женится:

• Не хочу учиться, а хочу жениться! (I don’t want to study, I want to get married) says Mitrofanushka (diminutive of a man’s name Митрофан) in Denis Fonvizin’s comedy Недоросль (The Minor).
• Уж замуж невтерпёж (Already can’t wait to get married) is a phrase sometimes used as in articles for and about women. By the way, it is a very handy mnemonics for a grammar rule: all adverbs ending in sibilant consonants (ж, ч, ш, щ) must end with a soft sign (ь) except these three – уж (already), замуж (marry), невтерпёж (can’t bear any longer).

As we already discussed, молодожёны (young couple) acquires not just their вторая половинка (second half) or спутник/спутница жизни (masculine/feminine life partner), but a whole new extended family.

Жена (wife) gets свекровь (husband’s mother) and свёкор (husband’s father) and becomes невестка (daughter-in-law) to the husband’s entire family, except for the father. To her father-in-law, she is сноха (daughter-in-law). If her husband is not the only child in the family, his брат (brother) becomes wife’s деверь (brother-in-law) while сестра (sister) becomes wife’s золовка (sister-in-law).

• У меня дома аврал. Завтра свекровь со свёкром приезжают и мы все готовимся. (It’s crunch time at home. My husband’s parents are arriving tomorrow and we are getting everything ready)
• Я у золовки, за детьми присматриваю, пока она в магазин поехала за молоком. (I am at my brother’s sister, watching the children, while she went to pick up milk)

Муж (husband) gets тёща (wife’s mother) and тесть (wife’s father) and becomes their зять (son-in-law). If his wife is not the only child, her brother becomes husband’s шурин (brother-in-law) while sister becomes свояченица (sister-in-law).

• У меня шурин – электрик, вот и помог с ремонтом. (My wife’s brother is an electrician and helped me out with remodeling).
• Свояченица со свояком разводятся и она пока у нас живёт (My wife’s sister and her husband are getting divorced and for now she is staying with us).

As stories go, долго ли, коротко ли (after a while), супруги (husband and wife) become родители (parents) when they have their own bundle of joy, сын (a son) or дочь (a daughter).

Now all those parents-in-law become бабушки (grandmothers) and дедушки (grandfathers) and start doing their best spoiling their внук (grandson) or внучка (granddaughter). And sisters- and brothers-in-law now call themselves дядя (uncle) and тётя (aunt).

• У меня шесть младших братьев и сестёр. Пока что у них нет детей, так что на Новый год моя дочка получает гору подарков не только от бабушек и дедушек, но и от всех дядь и тёть. (I have six younger brothers and sisters. They don’t have children yet, so come the New Year my daughter gets a pile of gifts not just from the grandmothers and grandfathers, but from all the uncles and aunts as well).

But what about the two sets parents of the happily married couple? After all, they become each others родственники (relatives) as well. They become сваты (parents of a child’s spouse) – сват (father of child’s spouse) and сватья (mother of a child’s spouse). This might be particularly confusing because there is a similar-sounding Russian word сваха means a match-maker.

Even more relatives join the extended family after a child gets baptized. First, there are крёстный отец (godfather) or simply крёстный and крёстная мать (godmother) or simply крёстная. These godmother and godfather become  кум and кума not just to the families of their крестник (godson) or крестница (goddaughter), but to each other as well.

Finally, let’s talk about cousins or двоюродные братья (male cousins) and двоюродные сёстры (female cousins) who might also be the old-fashioned and now rarely-used кузены (male cousins) and кузины (female cousins). Not much to say here other than when cousins grow up and have children of their own, these children become троюродные сёстры (females) and троюродные братья (males) to each other. When they grow up and have children, these kids become четвероюродные brothers and sisters to each other. Same goes for дядя, тётя, племянник (nephew) and племянница (niece) ties between cousins and their children. The words are the same, but the adjective двоюродный/ая is added.

And now it’s practice time. Get out your family album and look through it figuring out who’s who in your extended family. And don’t forget about yourself. For example, I am мама, жена, дочь, племянница, двоюродная тётя of two adorable двоюродные племянницы, троюродная сестра and, of course, сноха и невестка. It’s your turn now.

I loved Rob’s comment on my Valentine’s day post.  If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might remember Rob’s previous guest posts, including Chemistry for Muggles as well as his exhaustively researched comments, both on the blog and on the Facebook page. This particular comment was so amazing that I figured, it needed to be more visible (with Rob’s kind permission). Without further ado, here’s Rob:

From memory, here’s a two-line Russian “poem” about love, author unknown, circa 1993:

Верный парень, нормальный,
Ищет спутника жизни.

I never met the author and don’t know his name; I doubt he had any intentions to be a poet, and I’m sure he would have laughed at the idea that his short объявление (ad; announcement) in the Знакомства (Personals) section of a бульварный (low-brow; vulgar) tabloid newspaper was anything close to “poetry”! Certainly, there’s nothing original or imaginative in the six words; it’s a rather standard and clichéd first sentence in a “seeking love” ad.

But it was poetry for me, as an American student of Russian who was teaching English in Moscow, as a 22-year-old homosexual who had just finished university and had only recently “come out of the closet”; who had already met some young gay and lesbian Russians, and who understood that their futures as gay people in Russia would be a bit more difficult than my own future when I returned home to America.

For me, back in 1993, there was so much significance packed up in that short ad, which struck me like a haunting крик души из тюрьмы одиночества (the scream of a soul from the prison of loneliness).

The ad probably appeared (if my memory is correct) in the back pages of СПИД-Инфо — which, in 1993, may have been the only Moscow publication that was willing to print gay/lesbian personals ads. (By the way, СПИД-Инфо literally translates as AIDS Info — but make no mistake, this was not a sober-minded educational journal intended to teach the public about AIDS and “safe sex”; it was a sleazy tabloid with celebrity sex-gossip and blurry B&W pictures of pretty women showing their breasts, and aimed mostly — though not exclusively — at heterosexual men. I used to buy it because I’d figured out that it was a good source for slang terms that you don’t learn in a college Russian course, such as трахаться (to screw/bang/shag).

So if the same two lines of Russian had appeared in a Brighton Beach newspaper in 1993, they would not have had quite the same Romantic impact for me — they would have seemed less like a послание в бутылке, одновременно полное отчаяния и надежды (a message in a bottle, simultaneously full of despair and hope) — because by 1993, prospects for gays in America were considerably brighter than in Russia.

It’s also possible that the words sounded more “poetic” to me, as a learner of Russian, than they would to a native speaker. The expression спутник/спутница жизни was quite new to me then, and it struck me as a wonderful, colorful, крылатое выражение (“unforgettably catchy phrase”; literally “winged expression”), though perhaps to a Russian it’s only a moth-eaten banality one sees in Знакомства ads.

Let me try to explain the wonderful genius that this phrase holds for a foreign student of Russian. Every English speaker knows the word “sputnik”, but for most of us, it’s simply the name of a beep-beep-beep-ing metallic object, smaller than a basketball, that the Soviets launched into orbit in 1957. However, when you’re a beginning student of Russian, they teach you that спутник is actually the generic Russian term for “satellite”, including natural satellites — so the Jovian moons Io, Ganymede, Europa, etc., are спутники Юпитера, “satellites of Jupiter.” A bit later, your teachers explain that спутник can also refer to a person, with the meaning “traveling companion”, and that when used in this sense, it also has a feminine form, спутница. And even later, you are taught how to analyze the Slavic etymology of Russian words: the-пут- in спутник is related to the noun путь (“way” or “path”), and from the same root comes words like попутчик, which was sometimes translated into English as “fellow traveler,” a Cold War euphemism for “Communist.” But спутник and попутчик are not identical, because the prefix с- suggests a closer and more intimate connection than по- does… [etc.]

So — with the above in mind — if you’re an American student of Russian in 1993, and you see the phrase спутник/спутница жизни in the “Personals” section of a Russian newspaper, you quickly understand from the context that the meaning is close to “life partner” or “significant other”. But, recalling your professor’s explanation of the difference between спутник and попутчик, you know that “life partner” totally fails to capture the metaphorical color of the Russian.

After thinking about it for a while, I decided that an appropriately poetic and idiomatic translation of “спутник/спутница жизни” would be:

“a driving buddy for the road-trip of life.”

Anyway, there was another surprise waiting for me. Probably 95% (or more) of the population is heterosexual. Thus, if you saw the phrase “…ищет спутницу жизни” in an ad, you could generally be sure that the subject of the verb искать (“to seek; to look for”) was мужчина (a man), парень (a guy), or мужик (a man); and if you saw “я ищу спутника жизни”, you could safely assume that “я” was a женщина (a woman) or девушка (a girl).

And thus it came as a moment of astonishment when I read the words “парень ищет спутника…”, and I had to stop and remind myself that both парень and спутник were nouns мужского рода (“of masculine gender”)!

Thus, a парень (guy) was looking for another male… not as a mere партнёр (which can signify “sex-partner”), but as a “traveling companion on Life’s journey”. More than that, the парень had described himself as верный (honest and loyal), and also нормальный (ordinary).

Usually, if a Russian writing a Personals ad describes himself/herself as нормальный/нормальная, you can translate it as “ordinary, likeable, down-to-earth”. But I would assume that for a gay or lesbian in Russia, the word might have a more assertive meaning: “I am not abnormal.”

From Googling, I find that sputnik zhizni is still a popular phrase today, for heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. And nowadays, the expression does not, and cannot, have the same poetic quality that it did back then — because the Internet has taken away much of the одиночество that was once the daily reality for Russian gays and other small minorities.

But Верный парень, нормальный, ищет спутника жизни seemed like poetry to me in 1993, and спутник жизни will always have a poetic quality…