February 27, 2005
The Golden Age of Russian Cooking
A collection of food passages from Russian literary classics, featuring Lermontov, Goncharev, Turgenev...
Posted by michele at 5:58 PM | Comments (0)
February 26, 2005
Nedelya Kak Nedelya
I have just read, for the first time, a Russian novel (in Russian, needless to say) from start to finish: Nedelya Kak Nedelya, by Natalya Baranskaya. I feel invincible, hear my rolled-r roar! (Ok, well, it was really more of a novella, strictly speaking, but two years ago I was still having to painstakingly sound out words almost letter by letter, so allow me my bit of vainglory, hm?)
I liked the book a lot, though there may be some bias here owing to my feeling intensely smug and accomplished throughout my reading. It was really compassionate and poignant without ever being manipulative - quite a bit like Chekhov in that way. Recommended.
Posted by michele at 5:01 PM | Comments (0)
February 24, 2005
Nabokov and Pushkin
"The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, one of this century's few genuinely synaesthetic writers, shared with his mother the faculty of coloured hearing. In his autobiography Speak Memory, Nabokov describes the colours which the letter-sounds always conjured for him: 'The long a of the English alphabet ... has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. The black group also includes... hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped).'" (from 'Senses and Sensibility', a Fortean Times case study of two Russian synaesthetics.)
(Cassidy Curtis, with admirable precision, has drawn up colour charts of his happy affliction, letter-colour synaesthesia. Dr Hugo Heyrman provides a small directory of synaesthetes on the web.)
Nabokov may have been "genuinely synaesthetic", but I am not convinced by these sound/texture associations, which must have been written during one of his more tiresome moments; see also his 4-volume annotated translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (which he defends in the very tetrameter he removed from the text!)
I got Tom Beck's Onegin for Christmas this year, and despite his one glaring use of the word "OK", I like the translation, and so does the Guardian, which has this to say about Nabokov's attempt:
"he produced a very weird poem indeed, as accurate as he knew how, but unrhymed, often unscanned and with some very odd-sounding formulations (an animal's horns are "buttsome". Some might, along with Tom Beck, have preferred "thrusting"). "Uneven and sometimes banal", said Edmund Wilson, and much worse, in a review, and Nabokov's and Wilson's friendship lay in smithereens."
Here Nabokov expounds on his translation theories, defining three types of translator and three grades of linguistic evil.
Idle Words has this rapturous piece on Pushkin, if you need an introduction, or even if you don't.
Posted by michele at 3:35 PM | Comments (1)
February 23, 2005
There is no expiration date.
The obnoxious fishiness and delicate wistfulness of shprotnyi pashtet.
Posted by michele at 2:53 PM | Comments (0)
February 21, 2005
What is a state?
In 2000, Dov Lynch and Eric Baudelaire travelled through the breakaway, ex-Soviet states of Transdniestria, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh, asking themselves, "What is a state? Lines on a map, or the will and identity of a people? An act of imagination, the consequence of a series of actions, or acceptance by other states?"
This was the result. The journal is inevitably an absurdity harvest, infused with that same awareness, which recurs in all Soviet bloc travel narratives, that "Rules that govern the rest of the world simply don't apply here." It's also a thoughtful account of the arbitrariness of "statehood".
Photograther Eric Baudelaire's visual narrative of Abkhazia.
Posted by michele at 4:25 PM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2005
You know you've been in Russia too long when...
8. In winter, you choose your route by determining which icicles are least likely to impale you in the head.
43. Your coffee cups habitually smell of vodka.
44. You know more than 60 Olgas.
96. The word "salad" ceases for you to have anything to do with lettuce.
Full list here.
Posted by michele at 3:45 PM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2005
Yulia Tymoshenko, style icon
Ukrayinska Pravda tracks the fashion evolution of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who accepted the post dressed like a cross between Bettie Page and Vasilissa the Wise.
Posted by michele at 2:15 PM | Comments (3)
February 17, 2005
Big Russian Soul
4. You've just slammed someone's arm in the door of your PAZ mikroavtobus trapping him half-on, half-off your vehicle as you begin to drive away. Do you:
- apologize profusely?
- curse him for being so slow to get on the bus?
- Stare straight ahead, ignoring his cries?
5. You are sitting on a park bench when a woman walks by who is smiling for no apparent reason. Which of the following best describes your first impression of the woman?
- She has a healthy outlook on life.
- She must be thinking about an anecdote she heard.
- She's a "well-worn piece of bast."
- She's insincerely pretending to be friendly the better to conceal the arctic aloofness of her soul.
- She's a simple-minded invalid.
- She's drunk.
- Her smile is insincere. She is an automaton, programmed to smile without provocation.
- Her smile is insincere. It is the permanent smile of a weak-minded dupe.
Rate the size of your Big Russian Soul.
Posted by michele at 2:26 PM | Comments (0)
Former Soviet Republics - where are they now?
Economics Uzbek-style. Mark and Michelle travelled across Siberia and the Silk Road to Istanbul, cheerfully recording absurdities along the way.
"The Azerbaijani capital of Baku is reeling from the hangover of its aborted oil boom."
The BBC reports on the cult of the Turkmen leader, under whose authority Turkmen civil liberties go from strength to strength: in December 2004, "nearly 80% of voters took part in parliamentary elections where no opposition candidate was standing".
A thank-you, then, is in order. Turkmenistan Distilleries Inaugurate New Vodka To Honour President (AP). "It wasn't clear how the decision to produce a vodka could be reconciled with Islam, which Niyazov -- a former atheist -- now embraces." (From Danko's Cult of Turkmenbashi pages.)
Posted by michele at 12:17 PM | Comments (1)
February 16, 2005
Natalya Demkina's X-ray vision
As I saw on Channel 4's Monday-night broadcast of the documentary Bodyshock, teenager Natalya Demkina's ability to diagnose illness with her X-ray eyes mysteriously dissolves when she is prevented from interacting with the subject. Dr Chris Steele, ITV's resident MD, is nonetheless impressed.
10 year-old Natalya Luvova accepts James Randi's million-dollar challenge to prove she has parapsychological powers, and fails.
Both Natalyas are preceded by a long tradition of Russian psychic claims: Alla Vinogradna and Ninel Kulagina are discussed in this article by Massimo Polidoro.
Polidoro writes: "For years, psychic research in the USSR, owing to the aura of secrecy that surrounded it, has been regarded as some kind of myth. It was said, for example, that the Russians were far ahead in parapsychological discoveries and that the West had better invest more in the field to avoid a "psi-gap"." This was the CIA's incredible response to the threat of Soviet psychic warriors.
Posted by michele at 7:56 PM | Comments (0)