« March 2005 | Main | May 2005 »
April 30, 2005
Feeling maudlin
I just completed my final unit of Russian-language assessment. It went ok, except I have no idea how to say "mortgage".
A big shout out to brilliant and enigmatic mathematician, Maxim (my sketch of him, above, c.1999), who taught me my first Russian words, six years ago (and in doing so, changed my life forever): "On tol'ko droog". (I'll leave you to divine the context.) Maksimka, ty pomnish'?
Posted by michele at 2:19 PM | Comments (7)
April 29, 2005
Final hurdle
I am speed-reading my way through Goncharov's Oblomov for my Great Russian Novel exam (my last ever) on Wednesday. Just how boring is it possible for a novel to be? I'm also rereading Anna Karenina for maybe the seventh time in my life, and can confirm that even on the seventh reading I am finding new things to be irritated by. When I was younger, I think I was merely bored by Levin, but these days my blood boils.
Excerpts from a pleasant day in the fields, mowing for shits and giggles with one's indentured servants (yes, I know that serfs had been liberated by this point, but it's not as though they were suddenly upwardly mobile) :
The scythe cut of itself. These were happy moments. Still more delightful were the moments when they reached the stream where the rows ended, and the old man rubbed his scythe with the wet, thick grass, rinsed its blade in the fresh water of the stream, ladled out a little in a tin dipper, and offered Levin a drink."What do you say to my home-brew, eh? Good, eh?" said he,
winking.And truly Levin had never drunk any liquor so good as this warm
water with green bits floating in it, and a taste of rust from
the tin dipper.
(Oh, how humbly lyrical. How appetising: tetanus kvas.)
The old man crumbled up some bread in a cup, stirred it with the handle of a spoon, poured water on it from the dipper, broke up some more bread, and having seasoned it with salt, he turned to the east to say his prayer."Come, master, taste my sop," said he, kneeling down before the
cup.The sop was so good that Levin gave up the idea of going home.
(Mmmmm, sop. This must be the most plausible passage ever.)
Prince Stepan Arkadyevich takes Levin to dinner at the Angleterre:
"Well, then, how if we were to begin with oysters, and so change the whole program? Eh?""It's all the same to me. I should like cabbage soup and
kasha better than anything; but of course there's nothing like
that here."
(Spare me.)
These are just silly examples of the brain rash this whole book gives me.
(Oh, sorry, I cut and pasted from an online version which doesn't give the translator's name. This is very bad policy. What would Lawrence Venuti say?)
Posted by michele at 2:01 PM | Comments (2)
Literary zakuski
SovLit's Miniature Summaries of Monumental Works, "for those too lazy or unable to read them in the original".
A scan of these is an exercise in desolation:
"A resilient, lovingly generous, selfless, and dignified old woman endures a life of hardship, a loveless arranged marriage, the loss of children in the war, and neglect and disappointment from other children." (Fyodor Abramov, Wooden Horses)"Soldiers take pity on a woman with a baby and let her ride on their troop train. It turns out, however, that the baby is really a sack of salt. The soldiers feel insulted and cheated. (Thinking that she was a mother they didn't even try to violate her.) So they throw her off the moving train." (Isaak Babel, Salt.)
(I love the succintness of this:) "Hopeless moral dilemmas tear apart the protagonist." (A. Arosev, Torment)"A husband writes a semi-illiterate story (with many misspellings) about how his wife ran off with another man. He takes the story to the editor of a local paper who, after a good laugh, tries to persuade the man that publishing the story isn't a good idea--or at least it should be edited. Instead, the man snatches back his story and walks home, crying." (Vasily Shuksin, Story.)
These little morsels are like literary zakuski. You nibble a couple, and then you're ready for a very stiff drink.
Posted by michele at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)
April 26, 2005
A solicitation
The Great Russian Novel is all well and good, but what is new and fresh (preferably in translation, though I should probably make myself read more Russian so that my degree does not become a lie) that is worth reading? Suggestions please.
Posted by michele at 1:47 PM | Comments (13)
Dirty legacy
(Novokuznetsk, 1992 - Gerd Ludwig)
A candy-coloured gallery of Soviet pollution.
Posted by michele at 11:03 AM | Comments (1)
April 25, 2005
"Tolstoy, 34, seeks Anna 07939 666328"
(My pick of the London Review of Books Personals. They're all worth a read, actually.)
What message is this personal ad trying to convey? One of two things, I suggest:
"Greying, tormented moralist seeks fleshy woman first to objectify and then to throw under oncoming train."
"Pompous fool who hasn't read a book since university seeks easily-impressed romantic just educated enough to recognise a literary reference, but too dim to grasp its full, morbid connotations."
Posted by michele at 5:53 PM | Comments (2)
Turn-of-the-century technicolour
('Armenian women in holiday attire', S. M. Prokudin-Gorskii)
"A Russian photographer, named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, working in the years just before World War I, developed an ingenious process for creating color image projections. Take three black and white photographs of the same scene, each one through a different colored filter (green, red, and blue, the three additive primaries). Later, using a special projector, project the plates back through the same filters, and get a single color image on the wall. Not exactly a color photograph, but still very, very interesting and quite ahead of its time."
I like this one, this one and this one. I imagine respectable middle-class women having dirty holidays in the Crimea, Chekhov-style. "Fyodor Stepanovich, you are to unhand me at once!" *giggle* *swoon*
Posted by michele at 3:12 PM | Comments (1)
Russian men vs. American men
Imagine a huge hall. On one side a table of seven American men, on the other seven Russians, all having a rousing good time, with piles of food and batteries of bottles. Which group would I join? I'd make a bee-line for the Russians. Why?
...
Seven men would fly up out of their chairs, set before me a plate full of food and glasses filled to the brim with wine, water and vodka. They would tell me how glad they were that I showed up to lighten an otherwise dull evening. They would compete with each other to get my attention, each out-doing the others in flattering toasts to my beauty, intelligence, kindness. Of course, it would all be perfect nonsense. They might, in fact, rather resent my presence, since before I arrived they were busy hammering out a deal to corner the market in precious metals or discussing the latest scam to get around-with dubious legality-the tax code. But they've been trained to be nice to women, and besides, they really like women.
My unsubtle excerpting doesn't do justice to this lively article. (My linking to it is not necessarily an endorsement of its conclusions, by the way.)
When I lived in Hong Kong I used to go out with a nuclear physicist from Novosibirsk whose idea of a date was setting off late at night on a five-hour hike with several bottles of red wine, a tub of marinating shashlik, and the rest of his research team. The last leg of the hike was down a rocky slope without a path, which I can't decide whether the wine made more, or less, dangerous. I certainly would never have walked down it sober. At the very bottom was a small and deserted beach, where we'd pitch a tent, light a fire and cook oniony shashlik at god knows what hour of night. We did this all through the winter.
When we woke up there'd usually be some stray cows milling about and befouling the sand. Climbing back in the daylight was usually less entertaining, but the plus-side to the Russian man's inborn misogyny is a kind of perverse chivalry which meant, at least, that I never had to carry the barbecue or any of the camping equipment.
Posted by michele at 2:24 PM | Comments (2)
April 24, 2005
I am very, very looking forward to this
A Day at the (Brighton) Beach.
I was faced with an enormous selection of Moldavian wine, much of which was packaged in what I can only call "non-traditional wine packaging." That is, some of the bottles were shaped liked people.
Posted by michele at 5:03 PM | Comments (0)
L is for Lake Climax
An A-Z of Nabokov's Lolita - just so. Kind of compulsive.
Posted by michele at 4:52 PM | Comments (0)
April 23, 2005
An ex-Soviet shudder
There is this repulsive man from Kyrgyzstan whom I am constantly running into around campus, ever since I manned the Russian stall at the Global Village back in February. (We were so desperate for new Russian Society members that we started giving out free vodka shots at noon.)
"Are you Russian?" he asked.
"No, I'm half American, half Chinese."
He looks me up and down, slowly and deliberately.
"You don't look Chinese," he says, with a particularly suggestive sneer.
Since that day I seem to run into him a couple of times a week, and have noticed a pattern in his acknowledgement of me. If I'm in trousers, he doesn't even seem to register me in his field of vision. If I'm wearing a skirt, he waves and calls to me from across the square.
Posted by michele at 4:26 PM | Comments (0)
The Mayakovsky Button
Product Design finalist in the 2005 Design Innovation Awards. Ochen' avant-garde.
Posted by michele at 2:10 PM | Comments (0)
Poorly-conceived
The new British ad campaign for Diageo Corporation's Smirnoff Ice (murky, unpleasant alcopop) includes a weblog purportedly maintained by their Siberian spokesmodel, "Uri".
It's not so much offensive as poorly-researched and unconvincing. Double-decker buses all over Britain have been sporting, for some weeks, such pearls of "Siberian" wisdom as "Never judge a book by its movie". What were ad-men Bartle Bogle Hogarty going for? It seems to me that Russian stereotypes are there for the applying, but Uri is a strange pastiche of lad culture and Alaskan fur-trapper.
Posted by michele at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)
April 22, 2005
"Moscow's Gilded Ghetto"
"Only in the millionaire's suburb of Rublyovka are houses so pricey that a helicopter is thrown in like a carpet upgrade."
Posted by michele at 4:18 PM | Comments (0)
"Customer service a la Russe"
Question: How many blondes in Moscow's Sephora store does it take to sell one mascara? Answer: Five.
An assessment of Russian customer service, where the rule of thumb is not "the client is always right", but "the only good client is a dead client".
Posted by michele at 2:39 PM | Comments (0)
Who the hell named this airport?
(The BBC's Steve Rosenberg is stranded in Mineralnye Vody, his least favourite Russian airport.)
A security guard checks everyone who walks in. When I arrived he peered suspiciously at my British passport.
"You know," he said, "America's trying to destroy Russia," ramming home his point with an imaginative combination of gestures using his fingers and elbows.
"Sorry," I replied meekly, "I'm British".
"British!" he responded raising his eyebrows. "Then you must go and drink some tea!"
(Steve's ordeal is only just beginning.)
Posted by michele at 2:24 PM | Comments (2)
The Moscow that might have been
Let's give Fritz Lang a really big budget!
Unrealised architectural projects, 1930s-50s.
Posted by michele at 2:11 PM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2005
Pleasure and guilt
Since I had my Russian oral finals yesterday, I finally feel as though my Russian is my own, unsullied by the dread of exam assessment or by the student's game of peer oneupmanship ("My soft Ls are softer than yours", and so on.)
I sometimes feel guilty about these pages, and hope I have not done too much to consolidate the stereotype of Russian people as vodka-guzzling fatalists, frozen in time in some Soviet tableau. I get annoyed by this page's colour scheme, by the obviousness of my themes, by the poignancy of it all - is Russia really more "poignant" a country than any other?
This is about all I can offer from the outside, though. I've decided to move to New York rather than back to St Petersburg because I want to choose somewhere that offers at least the potential for "settling". I calculated, the other day, that since leaving highschool I've packed up my things and undertaken a major move eighteen times. I'm bored and exhausted by it all and I'd like clusters of friends rather than a global connect-the-dots.
This is all sounding very final, but it's not meant to be.
Posted by michele at 2:32 PM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2005
Another academic milestone
Tomorrow, between 1:15 and 1:35 pm, in a small room on the 10th floor of David Hume Tower, I will speak Russian on an involuntary basis (tautology?) for the very last time. If I ever speak Russian again, it'll be over a strong drink somewhere in New York City, to impress a man ("Yes darling, I have a Rrrrrussian degree"), and not hunched over a tape recorder with an unsteady voice, sweaty palms and a seven-digit candidate number.
Actually I rather like speaking Russian, especially ever since I had my soft-L revolution. (I can hear them! I can make them!)
I am graduating in fifteen days. Time now for a small vodka at Teviot bar, which is what passes for Russian revision in these disaffected final weeks.
Posted by michele at 4:17 PM | Comments (2)
April 5, 2005
Leave of absence
I am sad that this is apocryphal:
"The Machine Translation system rendered The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak into the Russian equivalent of The vodka is good, but the steak is lousy."
(Variants of this story have been spotted in American newspapers as early as 1956 - no such translation system existed until much more recently.)
For now, I am taking a couple of weeks off to ensure that the phrase, "Michele handed her dissertation on time and was awarded a most respectable mark for it", will be the very opposite of apocryphal.
(In the meantime, if anyone would like to shed some light on the "Should-I-move-to-New-York-or-St-Petersburg" quandary: see comments bar below.)
Posted by michele at 1:23 PM | Comments (4)
April 4, 2005
Moscow Court Rolls Collective Eyes
"The plaintiff, Igor Smykov, filed the suit against television station RenTV almost three years ago, claiming the two series were morally degenerate and promoted drugs, violence and homosexuality, The Moscow Times reported Monday."
Which two series? Why, The Simpsons and Family Guy, of course. To his credit, Igor Smykov wanted a modest $10,770 in compensation.
"The plaintiff said that his son Konstantin, who was 6 in 2002, approached his parents after watching an episode of Family Guy and asked them what cocaine was. After he was reprimanded, Konstantin called his mother a toad, Smykov said."
Posted by michele at 3:35 PM | Comments (0)
April 3, 2005
Somewhat lowbrow today
My favourite Russian trademark of all time is Myagkii Znak toilet paper. One wonders, naturally, if there is a budget range called Tvyordyi Znak.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Myagkii Znak brand toilet roll does not yet have a web presence. This is the most topical thing I could find:
V Moskve u platformy Tushinskaya est' rynok. Vyhozhu.
Stoit tetka, torguet. Podhozhu:
- Tualetnaya bumaga est'?
- Est'
- Myagkaya?
- Aga, vsyu noch' myala.
(Apologies!)
Posted by michele at 2:50 PM | Comments (0)
April 2, 2005
Minor urban mystery
Has anyone else seen the graffiti stencilled around Edinburgh which reads, in Cyrillic lettering, dyevyat' (Russian for the number 9)? I first started seeing these three years or so ago. There appears to be only one master stencil, rather stylised. Does anyone know the significance of this, and is it unique to Edinburgh?
While we're on the topic, Lyndon Allin compiles Moscow graffiti.
When I first moved into my apartment building in Ozerki, I saw something that left me feeling quite reassured about the local thuggery: in the "foyer", above a skeleton of hollowed-out mailboxes-in-name-only that looked rather like an abandoned metal beehive - the bold graffito, "Pet Shop Boys".
Update: I've somehow managed to find a photo online. (Supersubtle googlestry.)
(Photo by duncancumming.co.uk)
Posted by michele at 1:38 PM | Comments (7)
April 1, 2005
"Like puzzle pieces"
There comes a point when expressing yourself in one language is not enough. The only way you can make what you want to say clear and solid you have to speak at least two different tongues. I never had a problem filling in the blanks of one language with another language. English and Russian come together like puzzle pieces when you learn where each piece goes. But I am lucky; no one I know could construct that puzzle because they would only have half the pieces.
(From Olga Boyko's Confessions.)
I'm not going to pretend that my Russian is at anywhere near the level it would need to be to influence or enhance my English in any concrete way. But I know what Olga Boyko is talking about. My mother is the only person who can interpret my hybrid of English and kitchen Cantonese, which I've spoken since we moved from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, when I was seven years old. We moved back a few years later, but it stuck. I've never really tried to dissect it, but I'm vaguely aware of some loose, unconscious rules that determine which language is used for which sentiment. It's seamless - a single Cantonese noun will crop up in a long English sentence, or vice versa. Adjusting my voice for Cantonese tones and monosyllables means that the English in between is choppy and oddly inflected.
My Cantonese, which I've called kitchen Cantonese ever since I heard the head of our Russian department dismiss a student-in-disgrace, the child of Russian immigrants, as a speaker of "kitchen Russian", is a funny artefact, not really of its time. It's a survey of the Cantonese habits of one not particularly talkative family (I lived for many years with my mother's parents), is almost entirely uninfluenced by television (I could never stand Hong Kong broadcasting) or peers (I went to an English/French school), and is utterly free of any "cuss words": I couldn't swear convincingly if I tried. Furthermore, it contains hopelessly out-of-date expressions, equivalents of "Heavens above!" and so on, which I am probably the only person under 50 in Hong Kong to use. Huge chunks of specialised vocabulary are missing, I can barely watch the news. Crucially, it's the Cantonese of an illiterate person - I can't read any Chinese. And yet my grammar and intonation are native and perfect.
And now for the "puzzle pieces". Certain concepts mean themselves more in Cantonese than in English, and vice versa - I can't really explain it. (To be honest, it is only when I substitute a Cantonese word for an English one that this is my reasoning - if the "decision" can be said to be motivated by any sort of reasoning. When I substitute an English one, it's generally because I don't know its Cantonese equivalent!) My kitchen Cantonese is a sentimental, spontaneous little prosthetic to my cerebral English, language of my self-control. The combination must sound very strange to everyone but my mother. She, in turn, speaks to me in her own hybrid, which favours Cantonese.
A personal dialect, born of migration. A small page on the tendencies of Runglish, one that's a little more widespread.
Posted by michele at 2:55 PM | Comments (5)
A higher class of domestic spat
Beautiful sentence:
"Apparently the couple would have debates about the color of Monday and the taste of E-flat."
(Vlad and Vera Nabokov, synaesthetes. I wrote about this earlier. A reader alerted me to this small article.)
Posted by michele at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)