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May 30, 2005
The lighter side of the disappearing lake
When approached about the lake's disappearance by Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Bush shrugged his shoulders and blinked, "What'cha gonna do 'bout it," then hit Putin in the groin with the current version of the Senate's proposed Energy Bill.
U.S. Steals Lake, Mocks Russian Village
Posted by michele at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)
Eavesdropping
("You must blog this," he said. So I am.)
Overheard on the patio at Fabiane's self-service, Williamsburg:
"I feel like I'm in Russia.
"Have you ever actually been to Russia?"
"No."
(By the way, I heavily recommend the Cobb salad chez Fabiane.)
Posted by michele at 11:36 AM | Comments (0)
May 28, 2005
Khodorkovsky silliness
The reading of the verdict is no laughing matter for attorneys defending the 41-year-old Khodorkovsky and business partner Platon Lebedev, but it has prompted some comically exaggerated language from them.They were especially irritated by the appearance this week of dozens of pieces of road-paving equipment outside the courthouse, which they said was work aimed at keeping demonstrators supporting Khodorkovsky at a distance.
''Each day is something different. Today it happens to be the roads. God only knows what they'll do to us tomorrow -- a plague of locusts -- I'm not really sure,'' lawyer Robert Amsterdam fumed.
Posted by michele at 9:29 AM | Comments (0)
May 25, 2005
Dark forces at work?
The BBC reports: residents of a village in the Nizhny Novgorod region are trying to solve the mystery of a lake that disappeared overnight.
Posted by michele at 4:58 PM | Comments (1)
Quite lovely.
Dasha, Dmitry, Ilya and two Yurys are the daily type typeface collective.
Posted by michele at 4:54 PM | Comments (0)
I'm in russophile heaven
I went to Russian Bookstore No. 21 on Fifth Avenue today. I am so happy that this exists! (I'm also excited that the subway ticket machines come with a Russian interface, is this ridiculously dorky of me?) I was looking through the Erofeevs and the Pelevins when the proprietress asked me some question in Russian and I spun around, startled. "What?" I spat, not used to being spoken to in Russian - though I suppose the lady had assumed quite reasonably that it was safe to do so, what with my quite happily browsing the shelves of a Russian-language establishment.
"When one is spoken to in Russian, one ought to reply in Russian," the male store attendant chipped in.
"Not in America," I said.
For the fifteenth or sixteenth time in the last few days, a remark which had sounded coy and charming in my head fell utterly flat. My well-intentioned dryness is winning me few adherents in the US of A.
I shut up and paid $7 for Erofeev's Entsiklopediya Russkoj Dushi. To show that there were no hard feelings, the nice lady gave me a little magazine to take home. I went off for a Thai lunch with a boy-into-whose-eyes-I-have-recently-stopped-being-able-to-look, a meal consisting primarily of granulated sugar.
Posted by michele at 3:03 PM | Comments (0)
May 23, 2005
My continued Russian edjumacation.
Yesterday was Russian Jew Theme Day here in New York City, at least in my small corner of it.
Mike of the blini episode took me to Brighton Beach, where I looked longingly at some ciyrki, and marvelled at the sheer number of boutiques in place to keep people dressed and shod much as they would be in Odessa. Also, I can now pronounce and identify "Lubavitcher".
In the evening we had dinner at the home of some of his family friends on the Upper West Side (which I'd never seen before and is excitingly gothic), where I found that if I chill out and stop beating myself up I can actually understand extended Russian-language anecdotes on such subjects as the problem of syringes in Australian public toilets and government measures to tackle it. My hosts were warm and charming.
Posted by michele at 9:52 AM | Comments (1)
May 21, 2005
The measure of my powers
So I'm sitting in the Croissant D'Or in Holloway yesterday afternoon.
"Shhhh," I say to Michael. "I'm trying to work out what Slavic language is being spoken by the couple behind me."
I listen, staring blankly ahead, trying to find bits of Russian to work from.
Then it hits me. It is Russian. This is the measure of my powers: four years and one Russian degree, and I can now identify spoken Russian in under ten minutes. Bravo, I'll drink to that. A large glass of my own bile, that is.
(I'll be in New York by the end of today, ladies and gentlemen.)
Posted by michele at 5:42 AM | Comments (0)
May 20, 2005
Abandoned
Where did all the spaceships go? Kazakhstan, that's where.
Still life in automobile plant, Moscow.
Posted by michele at 5:52 PM | Comments (0)
Moscow and the decline of modernism
Moscow's modernist architecture: a worthy slideshow with audio commentary, from the New York Times.
Posted by michele at 11:01 AM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2005
Lost in transliteration
I know I declared a pereryv but this is too cute not to blog.
You know how Japanese people sometimes have trouble distinguishing between L and R sounds in English? For the last 20 years this Russian restaurant has been operating in Tokyo:
(A stolovaya is a sort of humble cafeteria. I guess the name was chosen according to the same principles that govern the elevation of terms such as 'trattoria' and 'bistro' outside their home cultures.)
Their menu actually looks quite delicious.
Posted by michele at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2005
A little pereryv.
I'm afraid crossing the Atlantic in search of fame and fortune doesn't leave much time or energy for russophilia.
I'll be writing about the move and whingeing about things you never even thought to complain about over at the daily isolato.
Posted by michele at 12:48 PM | Comments (0)
May 11, 2005
The Willy-Nicky Letters
Telegrams, in their original English, between cousins Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nikolai in the run-up to the First World War.
Thanks for your telegram conciliatory and friendly. Whereas official message presented today by your ambassador to my minister was conveyed in a very different tone. Beg you to explain this divergency!... Your loving Nicky
Posted by michele at 1:31 PM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2005
Somewhat off-topic
Ok, so this isn't strictly (or even at all) russophile, but the page is in Russian... Skin-crawling little photos of deep-sea horrors. (Give me a break, I just got done with university - what do you want, novels in verse of my own composition?)
Posted by michele at 5:00 PM | Comments (0)
Avatars Karamazovy
I am amused by the choice of four silhouette personas on conradish.net's (home to kickass, pre-dictionaried classics) very inactive forum.
Posted by michele at 4:18 PM | Comments (0)
"This is a small homage to hundreds of performers who covered themselves with sombreros to become Slavic Mexicans."
When, in 1948, relations soured between Joes Stalin and Tito, Russian films lost popularity, and Yugoslavia looked to Mexico for entertainment.
Posted by michele at 2:35 PM | Comments (2)
May 8, 2005
Fantastic resource for people with shaky Russian
Online text of Nabokov's Priglasheniye na kazn'; click on any word you don't know, and the English translation appears in a box at the bottom. Tremendous.
(Update: I arrived at the Nabokov through someone else's link, and didn't realise that the site's main page offers dozens of other works in the same format.)
To return to the topic of Nabokov's synaesthesia, and the condition in general: B. M. Galeyev is somewhat sceptical.
Posted by michele at 5:33 PM | Comments (0)
Catacombs of Moscow
"According to Mikhailov there are about six levels under Moscow, and in some places as many as 12, including old sewer systems, fountain foundations, and sloping drainage tunnels entangled in the depths."
These depths house families, ex-cons, torture chambers fallen into disuse, the occasional human skull, and, possibly, the lost medieval library of Tsar Ivan the Terrible.
Posted by michele at 4:40 PM | Comments (0)
I can't believe this exists.
Moscow "Street Ass" gallery.
Posted by michele at 4:25 PM | Comments (3)
May 6, 2005
'The Talking Parcel' Learns to Speak Russian
Mark Hooker reviews Natalia L. Rakhmanova's ("the first - and the best - Russian translator of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit") adaptations in her translation of Gerard Durrell's story for children, The Talking Parcel.
The first real challenge for the Russian translator was the Parrot's introduction, in which he chides the children for calling him "a parrot." "I'm not a parrot, I'm THE parrot." (p. 11)
Posted by michele at 12:44 PM | Comments (0)
This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen.
Learn Russian the unforgettable way!
The Russian word for JUICE is SOK. You must imagine drinking JUICE from a SOCK, AS VIVIDLY AS YOU CAN, for 10 seconds. Unless you picture the image for the full 10 seconds, you will not experience for yourself how amazingly effective the method is.
The Russian for BUTTER is MASLO. Imagine my slow sister spreading butter.
The Russian for BEER is PEEVO. Imagine being peeved at not having any beer.
Oh, I get it. Using this method, one can commit such words as "dostoprimachatel'nosti" (sites of interest to tourists) to memory, quickly and easily: just imagine Dosto(evsky), working as a Petersburg tour guide at a low point in his career, telling a prima donna that she's nothing but nasty chattel. Dosto-prima-chattel-nasty. Foolproof!
Dear god.
Order this revolutionary course here for only $9.99! Best of all, the programme features "No Grammar and no sentence structure" - and we all know how incidental grammar is to the Russian language, don't we?
Posted by michele at 11:21 AM | Comments (1)
May 4, 2005
Good news and bad news
The good news is that I finished school this morning. The bad news is that I am now the unemployed holder of a degree in Modern European Languages (French and Russian), and statistics suggest that the holders of such degrees stay unemployed.
Posted by michele at 1:12 PM | Comments (6)
May 3, 2005
Soviet culinary relic
(Salat iz ovoschej i ryby - Fish and vegetable salad)
Images from a Soviet cookbook c. 1940s-50s, illustrating the eternal Russian obsession with garnishes, often exceeding the volume of what is actually to be eaten.
Posted by michele at 5:31 PM | Comments (1)
Why is O Henry so popular in Russia?
Translation as tragedy and farce, by Mischa Gabowitz.
In terms of cultural exchange, the old adage that Russia is both a European and an Asian country is clearly false: it is definitely European - a provincial European country, to be exact, since non-European literatures are much better represented in the United Kingdom, France or Germany than in Russia.
I give you also Vladimir Dubisskiy's Living On The Edge, an homage to his uncle Nick, who died in his Chernobyl laboratory - tangentially relevant, because he loved O. Henry, and because I was always amused by the ubiquity, in Russian bookstores, of O. Henry anthologies and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. (I suppose the Soviets encouraged the translation of these works because they contained the least possible amount of politically sensitive material. Also, O. Henry does seem to deal inordinately with the miserable lives of the capitalist poor.)
Posted by michele at 3:21 PM | Comments (0)
May 2, 2005
Stalin's English-language curriculum
Readings from a Stalinist textbook for 7th Graders.
"Not all children in capitalist countries can go to school. Many parents are too poor to send their children there. Often children do not like school because in some countries teachers still beat the children."
See this page for some rather liberal editing of the Charles Kingsley classic, The Water-Babies.
Posted by michele at 12:00 PM | Comments (0)