There Are No Safe Places

Thursday was one of those classic “I hate Russia & I want to stab sharp objects into this country” days. I’m not going to tell you why, comrades – since that is water under the bridge now – but I will inform you that lovely Anna Mikhailovna saved me. She walked with me almost until midnight and on our walk together I took this picture. It is the brand spankin’ new Hyatt Hotel in Yekat.

On Wednesday I started a new life. I’m not going to tell you exactly what this ‘new life’ is all about and why I decided to start one, comrades, but I will inform you that it is great so far. Incidentally, on Wednesday my Korean roommates left to go to Europe for three weeks and I’ve been all alone during the four first days of my new life. Well, not completely alone – of course. I fought a small war against the Russian Federation on Ural soil on Thursday – and came out of the battle victorious. Nevertheless, I can’t be proud of this victory because I pity them all and as I pity them I realize two things: 1) that I love them; and 2) that I must be my own enemy, i.e. Russian at heart. Why do I realize this? Because ‘Russian love’ is pity. And no, comrades, those are not my words, but the words of Varlam Shalamov. Anyway, it’s true no matter who said it.

Yesterday was Jennifer’s farewell party. Tomorrow morning she’s leaving Yekat on a plane destined for the U.S. of A. For me it feels really strange because Jennifer was here in Yekat when I arrived herein August 2006. For me her leaving is strange because she was my neighbor for a year, then we shared a small room for a year, and then we sat next to each other in class for a semester at the master’s program and to me Yekat and Jen are closely connected to each other. I gave her my last [and only] dollars to use for beers and American food. I marked the bill for this. She gave me her Oxford’s Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary and now I will finally learn advanced English. This is great! She also gave me back lots of my own books that she had at her place and last night I started reading Nabokov’s “Transparent Things” and felt a surge of pleasure going through my whole body. I haven’t read in English since… February? It is not that I don’t like reading in Russian or that it doesn’t pleasure me, but I have a deep feeling about the English language that is hard to explain, but I feel it in poetry and literature. I feel the English language when it jumps and catches air underneath its wings and takes off. That’s when I feel the English language. Is it my choice? For poetry and literature? I do like the sound of it. But I like the sound of Russian and Swedish, too. What is my choice? I have a hard time making choices. I hate choosing. I am incapable of making choices. Whenever faced with a choice I always close my eyes and choose whatever my fingers touch upon first.

On Friday night I found myself writing in Russian even though I wanted to write in English. It was surprising but I allowed it because I wanted to see where it was going. On Friday I watched “Australia” and realized that the frame story of it is the same as used in fairy tales. As simple as it gets. And you know the works of art that are what they are – this they in themselves are what they are about and nothing else and they’re just one big ‘sign’ in themselves, as Lotman would’ve said? “Australia” is just that – one big simple sign. The title says it all. The whole movie is a repetition of the title and constant triggering the most basic of human senses. It is a great work of art because it is a complete esthetic whole. After seeing “Australia” I had a vision and wrote on it and got drunk on raspberry Absolut but had forgotten that I almost never drink anymore so my body is not prepared to deal with alcohol and thus I woke up still drunk and had my period arrive at the same time as my hangover in the afternoon while saying goodbye to Jennifer. That was not so great.

Currently I’m fixing with my gradschool application and then I saw this movie by Michael Moore called “Sicko” and it made me very much not want to go anywhere near the U.S. of A. again in my life. I freaked out for a while and I didn’t know where to go in this world. Then I remember a poem that I wrote in August 2005 called “There Are No Safe Places”. It is true. And the poem is still great even though I think some things in it are too tightly connected with certain events in my life at a certain point that I right now would like to have no imprinted in a good poem like this but I do suppose that’s life. Even Pushkin went back and edited all of his youth poetry because he wanted people to miss the fact that he had a foot fetish. But the scholars figured it out anyway. I’m not going to do what Pushkin did. After all, I’m not Pushkin. I’m just this girl and I’m more like Tolstoy since I’m all about starting new lives. Like the one I started on Wednesday. I think this will be great.

there are no safe places
the entire world is on fire
you can’t hide in the bathroom
dogs will chase you in the morning
there are no safe places
in my mind are only echoes
of all the things I never heard
and the “I love you”s
you liked to say and say and say
there are no safe places
if I open the door the rain comes
the cold is going to eat me alive
there are no safe places
everything is dangerous and dark
my eyes look and look and you know
there are no safe places

Today I went to MEGA with Ksenia and her friend Natasha to buy cheap groceries at Ashan. It was really a fun day and I also bought two plates, three glasses and one tea spoon at IKEA. I do not know why I bought one tea spoon. It was on sale. I bought fresh mushrooms and red onions and when I came home I fried them up together – a few of them – and ate it and loved it. Mushrooms taste so good. Red onions look great on a white plate. I did not use one of my new plates, though. After dinner I decided to listen to Regina Spektor’s new album “Far” and clean our communal kitchen which I did for four hours. At times like these I wish I had my own place instead of living with assorted Asians and sharing a kitchen with strangers who cannot keep anything clean in… well, Asia as a matter of fact. But let’s not forget that there are no safe places so I am okay with where I am at the moment.

Fatalist

Even the trolley bus can look good in Ural summer sunset.

Friday the 19th – that was last Friday – I had my last exam and found out the name of the class as the teacher – she’s almost old enough to have been Lenin’s comrade back in the 1920’s – wrote «отлично» [‘excellent’ – my fourth straight A!] into my «зачётная книжка» [it's this little blue book that all Russian students have into which the teachers put the name of the class passed and the grade received]. The class was called «История эмоциональной культуры» [“History of Emotional Culture”] – now that’s something my future employers are sure to be very impressed by! After the exam me, lovely Anna Mikhailovna and Katya went for cherry beers at noon and after that I came home, stumbled into my bed and slept for four hours.

On Saturday evening of the 20th of June I went to a restaurant with some of my students to celebrate the Swedish holiday of Midsommar. The service was terrible – I had forgotten that this is still Russia no matter how Swedish the holiday you decide to celebrate is. Anyway, my students were sweet and the evening was filled with red wine and good conversation and so not completely ruined by the fact that we had to wait almost an hour to get our orders.

On Sunday I went to the grocery store and was told that my visa card had got demagnetized. Fortunately, I had enough cash with me to pay for my food but the humiliation didn’t end there. As I was approaching the dorm coming back from the grocery store I saw my former more handsome half going in that direction with another woman. He gave me a guilty look and smiled a weird smile and I didn’t even notice what the girl he was with looked like because I was so highly disturbed by how he looked. Two things hit me as I saw him on that Sunday evening: 1) he looks weird and is not handsome and is still wearing the clothes I bought for him back when we were together; and 2) I should stay away from the opposite sex until I’m thirty because clearly I am not mentally old enough to make healthy choices when it comes to men since I was with him for almost two years and have actually been thinking I might’ve made a mistake when I called it quits with him.

On Sunday night I decided to use my visa card one last time online until I had to contact my mother and force her to order a new one for me back home in Sweden that’ll probably only get here in the mail in two weeks time [and that’s me being positive]. I bought flight tickets to go home and regretted the choices for my flight dates as soon as I received a ‘surprise news’ from Aeroflot – they’ve switched to electronic tickets now! Even if you fly Aeroflot you can use your booking code to check-in at the airport like in the rest of the modern world and you no longer need to go down to their office and pick up paper tickets. Of course this is great news. But I will miss going to my local Aeroflot office and spending time with the cute girls in unflattering orange and dark-blue outfits… I’m flying out of Yekat on the 30th of July and flying back to Russia on the 13th of September. At first I’ll be in Stockholm for a couple of days; I’ll pass the TOEFL in Stockholm on the 1st of August and then head further west. It’ll be great. I’ll be back with my friends and family for almost three weeks before I have to go to a conference in Stockholm for a few days on the 22nd of August.

On Monday I requested transcripts of my BA degree from my university in Gothenburg to be sent to Berkeley this summer. This week I’m going to write a long letter to my future professor there. I’m all set to leave Russia. Or perhaps I’m just all set for applying to Berkeley. I’m not sure I’ll get in, but I am sure of one thing – I’m going to do my very best in order for them to be unable to turn me down. I’ll take this summer to work on my application and on getting everything right. I think it will be fine. I need to brush up on my English for the TOELF but I’ve got this huge book on how to prepare for it just lying on my desk for three months already so it should be all great if I just open it and start studying.

On Tuesday evening I went home to Ksenia with Marina and we drank and ate good stuff and enjoyed a splendid sunset from Ksenia’s ninth floor apartment out in the suburb. Ksenia gave me 6000 rubles that she owed me for flight tickets that I bought for her a while back so I’m not completely stripped off cash even though I don’t have a working visa card. Since the beginning of June I’ve been sick. And I thought it was the same sickness that I had in late December/early January but I was too busy to think about it during all my finals so I just stuffed myself with painkillers for three weeks and tried not to think about it. But Marina told me I should go but I am very afraid of hospitals and doctors and giving blood tests so I almost started to cry. Then today – Wednesday – I had Natasha make an appointment for me with a gynecologist at the clinic she goes to. Said and done; she followed me there and made sure everything was okay, and then left me to go find out what I’m suffering from. The gynecologist turned out to be a man. At first this freaked me out big time. Then I came into his office and he turned out to be a very kind man and asked me lots and lots of questions. The clinic got my birth year wrong and put 1983 instead of 1985 and I think that helped me greatly to deal with my ‘age issue’. When he looked at me and said: “So you’re going to turn 26?” this didn’t sound horrifying to me at all and I actually felt okay when I corrected him: “No, I’m only almost 24.” The good news is that there’s no problem with my ‘female organs’ and that the sickness I had six months ago hasn’t come back. He said I have problems with digestion and that from the look of it I am probably allergic to milk products because that would cause my stomach to hurt in such a way. Well, I kind of knew that I might be allergic to milk products, and that’s why I’ve cut things like milk, yogurt and ice cream out of my diet. The only thing I haven’t been able to let go off is cheese. He gave me some medication to take for ten days and if things aren’t fixed by them I should come back and check all of my allergies because it could be serious. Yikes! Also he told me something else that might ruin my plans on having five children one day. He even gave me three pictures for me to show to the doctor when I get pregnant – or when I’m starting to plan a family [whatever comes first] – and suggested I aim for one kid instead. Great! My life is just great. This means that I’ll actually have to pick my ‘baby daddy’ with care since I might only be able to have one of those…

The visit to the doctor and the medicine cost a third of what I’ve got to live on until my visa card arrives in the mail. Maybe a little bit more. I’m not very good with numbers. This might actually be good, though, because I’ve decided that this summer of 2009 will be my ‘summer of health’. I intend on cooking at least one real, good, healthy meal every day [considering I hadn’t cooked a single meal for almost five months this should be interesting] this summer and working out and just being good to myself. Not cooking food helped me manage to study full-time, work two jobs, write a novel in Russian and re-do the first Swedish translation of Dusty’s Siberian notebook, but might not have worked wonders for my health… So that’s what I’m going to focus on. Getting healthy and working on everything one day at a time. I might even go to a real club to dance one of these days this summer. I haven’t been to a club in like forever. I haven’t wanted to go to a club in like forever. But I would very much like to go dancing. I would like that.

Okay, let’s finish this entry on a weird note: a guy befriended me on the Russian Facebook and I thought I knew him so I said ‘alright’. Then I couldn’t figure out how we knew each other and so I sent him a message and asked him. He answered: “No, we don’t know each other. I just saw you on TV and thought you seemed interesting and hard-working and so I wanted to hang out with you. You don’t mind hanging out, do you?” I answered that I’m really a very boring person and he should be careful. Since then – nothing. This proves the rule about ‘no men before 30’ is excellent! After all, everything happens for a reason.

Madness

Have you ever seen Lenin’s prospect empty, comrades? No, I didn’t think so! Can’t help but to quote lovely Anna Mikailovna’s blog at the sight of this: «Эх ты совок!»

Obvious signs of madness are abundant in my current life. The final in “History of Russian Literary Theory” was passed on Monday in a way that makes the word ‘madness’ seem far to bleak a term to describe it fully; and yet it was full of pure, plain madness. I wasted both my physical and psychological sanity while preparing for it during last weekend and it turned out that the professor had already made up her mind about me long before the final. My last blog entry made Anna Mikhailovna laugh [she even copied my whole entry and posted it into her own blog!] and it made me happy to have been able to bring joy into her life during such mad times as these. In general, I received an easy ‘ticket’ on the final – about Potebnya [the guy who insisted that no human being can ever really understand another human being] and his influence on later literary theory homeboys like symbolists, futurists, Vygotsky and Bakhtin. While I wrote down my answer on a piece of paper the professor said: “Josefina! Sit up straight! My back hurts just from looking at you! Now that you’re young you might think it’s nothing and that sitting like that is alright, but when you grow old you’re going to be sorry!” I didn’t know what to say; for a moment I thought I had failed the exam due to bad posture [I do have terrible posture when I write – which is why I have tried to sit up straight while studying these past three days, something that has lead to constant pain in my back…] but I managed to do my best because it turned out that I had memorized all answers to all the questions while I sacrificed my mental sanity during last weekend. She gave me a five no questions asked and I was left wondering why I received a five – or, as it is called in Russian: «отлично» [excellent] – because I answered well, or because I’m a foreigner, or because she appreciated how I tried to explain my answer in ‘funny’ terms [I wrote my answer in my own ‘special’ style of writing, where the line between the severe and the absurd is oh-so-thin that some people prove unable to understand and therefore take offence], or because I made a few grammatical mistakes and she decided to take pity on me. While I explained my answer to her it hit me – suddenly – that she must have been very cute when she was young. She’s still kind of cute, actually.

Anyway, what matters is that I got a five, and that I have collected three fives from three finals so far. Now only final remains – on Friday. Let the madness continue!

The last subject is known in our ‘study plan’ as “Modern Concepts of Literary Theory” but has not contained anything of this during all of the spring semester. Mostly during classes we have had to make presentations on our future Master’s dissertations and give constructive criticism on each other’s presentations and future dissertations. The professor is 80 years old and dresses as if she was younger than us – also this is a clear sign of increasing madness in life at this moment in time – and suddenly in May she proclaimed that the main theme of this class was ‘personality in literature’ and gave us a list of articles about this to read in a Russian literary theory magazine. The articles are about journals, letters, dreams [during night] and different hardships in the personal lives of writers that may or may not have left an imprint on their fiction. Kafka is in almost every article, which I – at first – saw as a good sign since Kafka is my friend and floats my boat and we get along perfectly. I see myself in Kafka, and I think – but this is my personal opinion, of course – that Kafka would’ve seen himself in me had he lived now or had I lived back then when he was alive. Yesterday I managed to read all but two of the articles and felt on top of the world, so I went for a walk and enjoyed Yekaterinburg without cars as we have two international summits in town this week and there has been a rumor that it is forbidden to drive through town this week, but that’s just a rumor, though. Russians are tricky, indeed. Anyway, so I continued my reading today with the two last articles and both of them were very interesting – one was about Tolstoy and his diary and written by the professor who might actually become my future academic guidance counselor at Berkeley if I’m accepted to gradschool there; the other was about Andrei Bely’s correspondence with Meyerhold and was even more interesting. Today was an unbearable hot day in the Urals and I spent all of it inside lying in my bed reading these articles; then I slept for a while and had strange visions of Andrei Bely and remembered a dream I had the night before [last night, that is]. That dream was indeed strange, as strange as the visions of Bely I had today during the day – having visions of Bely can never be a good sign; it can only be a sign of madness – in my dream I saw one of my professors, who also happens to be a famous poet and writer and for whom I took a class that was pretty pointless during this semester called “Russian Textual Personality” and during every lecture he proclaimed Pushkin to be a genius. News, indeed, I know! That was the main point of his course; but not the main point of my dream. In my dream he lived in my room here at the dormitory, but it wasn’t my room, but his room and I was visiting him there. For the longest time I helped him to make coffee – because he couldn’t figure out how MY coffee machine works – and then he invited me to spend the night and I agreed, but then I noticed a camera standing by his bed and realized that he was intended on filming our night spent together and so I declined his offer. Then I woke up and realized that I had been sexually aroused by him in my dream and thus I was greatly puzzled during the entire morning. The important thing to know about this professor is that he is actually sixty years old, but looks like forty, something that is so rare in Russian in general and among Russian men especially that it is indeed worth mentioning. He looks very good, actually, and I think I am afraid of him because once I tried to take another class with him and he would always stare at me during lectures and so I stopped going to class because I didn’t like him staring at me. Also I think he knows that I’m a writer and that I’ve published a book now and he also knows that I know that he doesn’t agree with ‘young people writing novels’ because in his mind that is not allowed – you can write short stories and poetry, that’s alright, but novels! No, leave that to Pushkin, he can handle it good enough for all of us. Basically, I think this is the core of our relationship. If there’s any core at all, that is.
Then Okino, the only other foreigner [since Jen left] in my group – she’s from Mongolia – called me tonight and asked me about Friday’s final and I realized that I really didn’t know what was going to go down on Friday, so I called Irina – the girl from whom I’ve been copying notes to the three other finals – and Irina told me that there’s actually a list of questions that we have to prepare for the final that is only a day away now. I was in panic a few hours ago! I told her to mail me the list, which she did, and then I forwarded it to Okino, and the list of questions turned out to be mad, mad, madness because the articles suggested as ‘preparation’ for the questions have nothing to do with the questions at all and I have no more strength to do anything at all and that’s why I’m blogging tonight because my head cannot eat anymore information and besides, the fifth question – about dreams [at night] – one can choose ahead and I decided that I am choosing that ahead and if she asks me about anything else then I will fake a heavy accent and rely on the fact that she likes me. Or at least I used to think that she liked me but now I’m not sure anymore, but I will really, really, really try to me her like me tomorrow and on the final on Friday. Tomorrow will be ‘consultation’ which is the thing in Russian universities before finals when the professor explains just what to ‘expect’ during the final. I am even planning on copying her way of dressing and looking really sweet and wearing my lucky earrings with the Swedish flag on them and hope that she’ll take pity on me and ask me about things like why I’m in Russia and not pressure me too hard and anyway, I did a good presentation on my future dissertation during class even though that might actually work against me since I was a little ‘too good’ because I have a terrible habit of talking in front of ten people as if I’m giving a speech to the masses after the October Revolution. On the other hand, I have read all of the articles and I’ve been to all of the classes expect the last one because then I was in Tomsk on a conference and I should be forgiven this because that’s important to me as a future scholar and if she sees me as a future scholar, then she might go easy on me. I think that was the deal on Monday, actually, the professor knows that I’m superserious and she knows that I intend on spreading the love for Russian literature around the world and so she didn’t want to mess it up by giving me a bad grade even though I don’t think I’m the least better than anyone else who got a four.

On Monday afternoon I was interviewed for TV again and the interview was alright except it was embarrassing when they wanted to film a page from my book up close and chose the page where the two main characters have sex. Now that only happens in a mad, mad, madness-like life like mine. They didn’t see it though, but I’m sure they noticed it once they got back to the TV station. Then I wasn’t so interested in seeing myself on TV again so I didn’t even watch it when they told me that it would be on because I watched myself on TV last week and was horrified at the sight of my arms – they look terribly fat! – and the sound of my voice – I must from now on never utter another word in public. Last week the reporter said that it had been a pleasure to interview such ‘an intellectually developed person’ as me and that was of course nice to hear because people don’t say things like that to me very often, almost never, and on Monday the reporter tried to make me compliment by asking me how old I am, and then when I told him, he exclaimed: “You look good! I wouldn’t have thought you to be twenty even!” But that was a lie even though it was a sweet compliment because he didn’t believe me to be nineteen years old because how to hell could I have had received five years of higher education already had I been nineteen years old still? Today another journalist sent me the article about me for a paper that’s coming out on the 27th of June and I read it and corrected it and sent her pictures from Tomsk to go with it and I really liked the article because I sounded like such a happy-go-lucky individual and that’s how I want to seem. On Monday when they filmed me for TV I felt terrible bloated and then yesterday I felt just fine and today I feel even happier with my body so I can’t for the world figure out why people always want to film me on TV or in movies when I’m feeling bloated and think that I should go on a starving diet for at least a year to loose all the terrible fat on my arms… Actually, my arms aren’t that bad – they just don’t look good on TV. Besides, I can look however I want to look because I’m intellectual, you know. I think I’m getting sick, though. I cannot and I will not specify exactly what I’m coming down with since I consider that to be private.


Yesterday my former more handsome half came over to help me with a problem on my computer and we talked for a while and he told me that he’s drinking heavily and driving his own car these days and working a lot and that his parents have been to Austria to visit his sister there and that they now cannot fathom Russian reality. Yesterday I felt like touching him in naughty ways but I didn’t – maybe that’s where the dream about my poet-professor came from? We decided to have coffee and hang next week once all of this madness is over. I can’t wait for this madness to be over. All I do is dream of the afternoon of the 19th of June when everything will be done. I can’t study anymore. My brain will not study anymore. I just want to stay in my bed and not read anything anymore and think about things that I’m going to write that people will not read, and if they’ll read them then they will not like them, of that I am sure. I’m about to realize everything now because I’ve already taken the first step – publishing my first novel and having a close friend of mine [my professor Alexey] refuse to call it ‘a complete esthetical piece of art’ but that’s alright, I’ve concluded, since I know that he doesn’t like Kafka and I see myself like our time’s Kafka. Right now I’m planning on writing a short story called “My Best Friend God” about God becoming human because She decided to check things out down on Earth and take a ‘hiatus’ for about a hundred years or so. So She meets a human man and they become friends and that’s about all I’ve got at this moment so far. In general I want to write something using all of my Old Testament knowledge and show people that God is really not better than us; it’s all in the Good Book for those who really want to know. When I first had this idea I felt like it was a huge sin and so I would plan the short story for a while and then confess to God about my sinful ideas for just as long and whenever I spoke about it I always felt like God was going to cut me down any moment now. I think I might have to talk to God tonight about writing about my sinful idea here on my blog, too, because I think God appreciates me keeping our dialogue honest and open. I have also thought of returning to either “Letters to Father” or “Girl in Pink”. I don’t know what it will be but something will come out of this summer because I will be free and I will have time to write away the hot Ural summer nights once again…

 My camera broke a while back and next week I’m going to buy a new one. Yesterday I realized that I’m going to turn 24 a month from now and I’m still in panic because I feel like I haven’t done anything with my life and that I’m already old but also I think that’s a personal problem of mine since I’ve made ‘youth’ too big a part of my personality.

Summing It Up

On account of my published Russian novel I made the news Wednesday/Thursday this week in Yekaterinburg [they even did a story about me for TV!], but then my professor Alexey told me he doesn’t like it because it is ‘sentimental female prose’ and this was such a huge blow to my ambitious sense of self that I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown for a while. Since then my life has looked exactly like the picture above – studious.

A brief summary of the history of Russian literary theory:

As with everything else in Russia’s history, literary theory started its long and winding road to becoming an independent, and thus also ‘real’, science much later here than in the rest of Europe. As with everything else in history, this is a story of scholarly men with long beards and their theories which resulted in or out of hard practical work, 90% out of which – because of a strange twist of fate – were called Alexander Nikolayevich. Sometime in the 18th century, while classicism and romanticism were fighting it off with each other out west, a young, poor country boy walked from Arkhangelsk by foot to Moscow in order to receive higher education. This kid’s name was not Alexander, but Mikhail – Mikhail Lomonosov. Lomonosov grew up to be what his friends but not family liked to call ‘a walking Russian university’ because he had his fingers in all scientific cookie yars of the time. Incidentally, the first Russian university in Moscow still bears his name to this day. Lomonosov wrote a book about ‘the three styles of Russian language’ which was pretty good for teaching his fellow Russians how to speak and write properly, but his work was not a real ‘literary theory’. This was because the change of epistemical systems had not yet taken place in history before Lomonosov died. Then it happened and instead of just one norm being considered to be ‘the norm’ there was a revelation in society that opened people’s eyes on the fact that the strict rules of classicism had been retarded and that romanticism – with its sharp interest toward the human personality and the individual’s freedom and all the mystical, magical ways this could be portrayed in literature – was really the way to go.

In the year 1800 something really awesome happened in Russia and after that people went crazy with romantic nationalism and the specifics of different national literatures for a whole century. The very, very old Russian epic novel “The Word of Igor’s Battle” was published for the first time and Russians were liked: ‘Wow! We have works of our own to draw inspiration from! Who needs France and ancient Greek epics anyway?’ [Since then academically oriented Russians have discussed whether or not this historical piece of fiction really is as ancient as the guys who discovered it claimed it to be for over two hundred years; the last word on this has yet to be said, but it is likely that yes, it really is THAT old.] After this everything went extremely fast – speaking in 19th century terms – and many men with long beards started to ponder on the idea of literature and how to best write a history of Russian literature. The problem of the terms ‘poetic’ and ‘rhetoric’ were obvious right from the start. ‘Poetic’ had been the term for science about poetry: about different kinds and styles and rhyme in general, whereas ‘rhetoric’ had been used in connection with prose. For the longest time prose suffered badly in Russian literary thought because romanticism refused to let go and allow for realisms to enter the scene, and everybody knows that romantics thought prose to be a ‘lower’ kind of literature, whereas poetry was the real stuff. Things looked pretty hopeless there for a while – with all this newfound and newborn love for everything ‘truly’ Russian in their hearts, and a burning wish to classify and study Russian literature, they didn’t know where to start. But things are, as is the general rule, always darkest right before the sunset. Eureka! Let’s not waste our time with all these old-fashioned poetic and rhetoric nonsense but let’s pay attention to the esthetic value of literature instead! The question on everybody’s lips was: ‘how is the idea of beauty portrayed in poetry and prose?’ And so it was decided and the men with the fluffy beards started writing books about this. The break from classicism had been finalized; now there was indeed no going back.

Merzlyakov wrote the first book on the history of Russian literature in 1811 and managed to fixate a whole bunch of names and information on authors that would’ve otherwise been lost to the cruelty of time. In 1814 Grech wrote a book about literature in which he explained that literature is a social phenomena, a product of the historical life of the nation [he didn’t know it back then, of course, but this idea of his was going to be everyone’s favorite in the 19th century]. Then Pushkin’s old schoolmate and future Decembrist Kyukhelbeker also decided to get a piece of the cake and wrote a book in which he – for the first time ever – stated that there are different directions in literature, and the success of literature depends on these directions. This was in 1824, the year before he stood up with the rest of the Decembrists against the tsar and was sent to Siberian exile for speaking his mind. Classic Russian move – get rid of the smart, free-thinking people…

It might have seemed like everything was fixed for literary science now, but – alas! – this was not the case because by the 1830’s it became obvious that the esthetic values praised before proved helpless when it came to dealing with works of literature that were not made according to the standard. The esthetic values were fixed and thus incapable of adapting to the new Russian literature with people like Pushkin, Gogol and Lermontov spinning their pens in new, unexpected directions. Thus Koshansky decided that there was a need for a ‘university-based science’ when it came to literature that would study not just simply ‘beauty’ but originality in literature. At the university many new, progressive ideas on originality flowed freely – Polevoy wrote about ‘the fight between directions in literature’ [Marxists will thank him for this a century later], thus shedding the first light on the idea of a ‘historical aspect’ when studying literature, and Kireevsky wrote a couple of works that later become the foundation for historical poetics.

Then it was time for Belinsky to enter the stage with his critical articles on literature. Belinsky was born in Finland, and grew up in a small town and later moved to the capital to receive higher education and lived a short life in outright poverty in Russia while he wrote his endless critical essays on Russian literature and made literature a communicative scene in Russia. Early in his short but fruitful career Belinsky argued that literature is only literature if it serves NO OTHER PURPOSE but literary ones; thus he considered Griboedov’s “Woe from Wit” to not be literature at all since its purpose was to make fun of current society. Later he changed his views a little bit and stopped being so categorical. Yet even when he was trying to not be categorical his friends still called him ‘furious Vissarion’ because of his outrageous manners in public. Belinsky divided writers in two groups: ‘geniuses’ and ‘talents’. The genius catches the ideas and feelings that are ‘in the air of the time’, but it’s the talent that brings them to the broad masses. The genius writes literature [in the highest sense of the word], whereas the talent writes just normal books that people can read and even like. Belinsky was sick for most of the 1840s but it didn’t stop him from noticing that the young Dostoevsky was a genius, but then he realized – after reading “The Double” – that Dostoevsky was such a genius that this book made no sense and could probably only be understood about a hundred years later. Belinsky was right. Belinsky didn’t live to see a large part of the most talented young men in Russia’s capital sent to Siberia for trying to speak their minds on the issue of slavery in 1849 – he died in 1847.

In the 1850’s everyone in Europe were in love with nationalism and with the nation [their nation, that is] and decided to do what they had never done before – to gather different kinds of folklore: mainly fairytales and myths. So the Mythological School in literary theory was born in Europe. Suddenly people everywhere realized how everything in life and society was connected with each other. And so this was something that must be studied, and did they study in the middle of the 19th century! Oh boy! Everyone and their mom went around collecting folk literature and trying to find out which country had been first with which stories. This turned out to be more difficult a task then they had first imagined. In Russia the men with the curly beards were also on the train, but everything was – as is the general Russian rule – not as easy for them as for the rest of Europe. The Russians asked themselves – like they had done before and would always come to continue to do – how Russia was to progress further? Some said that Russia should try to keep up with Europe, that Europe’s the way to go, that Russia’s is after all a part of Europe, but all behind and must change everything to become more European and not so retarded and left behind. They called themselves ‘Westerners’. But there was another group of intellectual Russians that argued that this was nonsense, that Russia is not a part of Europe at all, Russia is her own country with her own road and we don’t need Europe to tell us what to do. This group called themselves ‘Slavophiles’. They continued to argue with each other until the revolution of 1917 put an end to such ‘frivolous behavior’ [‘because now it is clear that the way of the world is the way of Russia and the way of Russia is to the bright future of communism’]. The brothers Grimm in Germany founded the Mythological School once and for all, claiming that all myths have a divine source and that folklore is the product of the nation’s collective artistic efforts. This idea caught on in Russia very fast.

Buslaev stated that the source for myths is language, and that in the word one can find everything one needs to know about the people which uses this word. But, alas!, with time the people forgets the ‘real’ meaning of the words as they become usual and not so connected with mythological tradition. Orest Miller brought the mythological method even further by saying that one can learn things about the people by studying their myths even if these myths are also present in other nations and peoples, because ‘Russian myths carry information about Russian reality’. Later Miller corrected his views, but he never accepted the theory of ‘borrowing myths between peoples’ since he still wanted to believe that the Russian myths were just that – completely and only Russian. Also belonging to the mythological school of literary theory was Alexander Nikolayevich [the first of many ‘Alexanders Nikolayevichs’] Afanas’ev who listened to Buslaev’s lectures at the university and then got a job in a state archive where he could gather folklore. He collected different kinds of folklore in a three volume book and also interpreted them in his own very special style. Afanas’ev wanted to know where myths came from and that’s what he was focused on. He came to find that myths are tightly connected with the evolution of language. Later Afanas’ev reached the conclusion that all myths come from the ancient Aric people [!]. He said that the only way to study myths is to compare them with the myths of other people and times. He lived a short but difficult life and got his first bestseller the year before his death – he published Russian fairytales for children. Before Afanas’ev it wasn’t considered ‘cool’ to study fairytales in Russia, but after his death most people concluded that it was alright.

At the same time in France a French guy who also had a beard said that one must search for the objective reasons for why literature ‘occurs’. He said that literary theory must be like all other ‘real’ sciences and thus he introduced positivism in literary theory. The search for the source could then begin. In literature he saw only the society which had ‘given birth’ to it. The school he founded was – no big surprise – called The Cultural-historical School because he paid attention to just that: culture and history. He didn’t real care much for what was in the books, and that made many writers of the time pretty angry with him since he studied ‘second and third rate books’ but he said that was the correct thing to do because often the best books have very little of ‘society’ in them. In Russia Pypin embraced these ideas and brought the Cultural-historical School into the Russian university. Pypin was interested only in the historical meanings of literature and didn’t care for ‘pure art’ or esthetical pleasure at all. In Moscow University the professor Tikhonravov greeted Pypin’s idea with open arms and started to study literature from the point of view of how the cultural and historical life of the people was portrayed in it. Tikhonravov was so impressed with positivism that he studied huge amounts of literature before he drew any conclusion and this impressed both his students and other professors so much that the new school soon became very popular. Close to these men with extensive beards was Dmitry Ovsyanko-Kulokovsky [funniest name in Russian literary history] who had studied under Potebnya in Kharkov and came up with his own concept: the Social-psychological Concept. His foundation was the teachings of Potebnya about how everyday thoughts are tightly connected with artistic thoughts. He also has many other original ideas and in general he did a lot of good for the science. His main work was “The History of Russian Intellectuals” (1906-1911) in which he studied types of Russian intellectuals as portrayed in Russian literature. He said that in literature there are only two things: either experience or observance. All characters in literature come either from the writer’s experience or from his/hers observance.

Now that the men with wavy beards had come to the conclusion that not only is the people’s art important to literature, but things as history, society and psychology too, it was time for a new school to arrive on the scene – the Comparative-historical School. It was later to give birth to Comparativism in the 20th century, but during the 19th century it was only just getting started. The two most important figures in this school were Alexander Nikolaevich [told you so!] Veselovsky and his younger brother Alexey Veselovsky. Alexey did not become as famous as his older brother, but he did a lot for studying the influence of foreign literature on Russian literature. For this he was also widely criticized because Russians never want to hear that they’re not first with something. His big brother Alexander knew many, many languages and studied literature in direct connection with life of the society in which it had been written. He compared everything with everyone and their mom. He wasn’t too much into the idea of ‘borrowings’ between peoples, he insisted that people are very much the same everywhere on this planet of ours and that’s why most myths are the same on Iceland and in India. Alexander also did another great thing – he further developed the idea of ‘historical poetics’, and formed clear rules for the studying of different kinds of literary forms and how they’ve evolved over time. He also said that literary science should compare, compare and once again compare –comparing is the job of our science. Not enough comparing always lead to poor results. Alexander survived his time and is still the man in most literary theory circles.

At the same time in Ukraine there was a man with a short beard called Potebnya. Potebnya wasn’t aware of it at the time, but he would become a legend because he came up with many interesting and original ideas. His most famous idea is the one about ‘the inner form’ of the word. According to Potebnya, every word consists of three parts: the outer part (sound), the inner form (the etymological meaning) and the normal connotation of the word. The inner form is the most interesting, because by figuring it out we will learn how this word was created and what it meant to begin with. In the beginning, Potebnya argued, everything was simple and people were aware of the inner form of the words. Then time came along and people forgot about the inner form of the word. Yet the inner form is what gives birth to literature, and poetry especially. Potebnya stated that language is art and as such it is the source for poetry and science. Potebnya also had another idea – that people can never really understand each other. Everybody, he said, have different life experience and view everything differently and thus we can never really understand how something we say will be heard by other and we can never know what people really mean when they talk to us. This was the main point of his psycholical interpretation of literature. Then Potebnya died back in Ukraine and everyone with a beard started to discuss his ideas everywhere in Russia. Potebnya’s students published a journal in which they evolved the ideas of their teacher and everyone since then is still trying to find the ‘inner form’ in words up until this day. The Symbolists, like Andrei Bely, saw in Potebnya a friend and an ally, who had also spoken about the ‘magic of the word’ even though Potebnya had never uttered as much as a word in that direction. Also the Futurists used Potebnya’s ideas when they created their ‘new’ language, containing ‘more Russian than all of Pushkin’s poetry’. Bakhtin said Potebnya had got it all wrong because of course one cannot stare only on the inner form of the words when studying literature – what about the story, what about the characters, what about everything else? Bakhtin didn’t like Potebnya, even though he respected him greatly for starting such a productive discussion. Bakhtin was, as we all know, all about the dialogue. And with Potebnya he could indeed have a productive dialogue. It could be argued that all of Potebnya’s ideas were misinterpreted by everyone else since Potebnya’s major thought was that nobody can ever understand anybody else. And yet Potebnya’s ideas were and still are very popular. If they’re understood – now that’s a whole other chapter!

After such an interesting century it was high time for the 20th century to arrive, which for Russian literary theory this meant enormous changes in many different ways. It marked the return of the Mythological School with a little help from such symbolism theoretics like Vyacheslav Ivanov and Andrei Bely. They realized what was to come out of the 20th century while the rest of society felt like they were expecting the Doom’s Day any day now – the return of the myth. The symbolists said the symbol and the myth are one and the same and with this they felt pretty content with themselves. Then came the October Revolution of 1917 and everything changed again. Now people began to believe in a bright new day to be just around the corner and they started to build a new society. While building this new society it was soon obvious that such a new society demanded a new kind of human being and that was the biggest challenge of them all. Some people said ‘screw this, I’m heading for Europe’ and left the bright new Soviet Union. Other people wanted to hang on in there, but Lenin told them not to bother and sent the smartest people away on a boat since they would just have been bothering him with their higher education and smart ideas had they been allowed to stay. In all of this new things took place in literary theory. The Formalist School said ‘no more trying to figure out if Pushkin was a smoker or not because seriously that has nothing to do with his art’ and paid all their attention to the form of literary works. The Georgian academic Marr decided to quote Marx, Lenin and Engel in all of his articles on his new linguistic theory called ‘Yafetology’ which stated that languages had occurred as a result of class struggle. Franz-Kamenetsky studied the Bible in the Soviet Union in a brand new way and said, among many other things, that Jeremiah had been for the party and that his work as a prophet had also been an act of class struggle. Everything in the Bible was mythical, he said, Jesus and God are also mythological characters, and that was that.

Marr with his pseudo-science and Franz-Kamenetsky with his constant Bible bashing had a female friend – and enter the first literary theory worker without a beard! It was a true sensation! Her name was Olga Mikhailovna Freudenberg and she studied ancient Greek literature. Her theories were clear on many points: there is no genesis at all for literature, everything moves from facts into factors and then from factors into facts and start all over again. And literary process is a process of destroying the myth. She also said that the metaphor arrives in language when there is no difference between the myth and the words. At about the same time another very popular school in Russian literary theory was Psychoanalysis. It was popular around the whole world at this time – the beginning of the 20th century and some people still cling on to it to this very day. It was based on the theory of Freud. Freud said that people have a part of themselves about which they are not aware – this he called the ‘unconscious. There one can find all the things that people – because of society and culture and what not – are not allowed to show in everyday life. In the unconscious lay all of those things about which we rather not talk or confess to. Art, said Freud, is the result of sublimation – a defense reaction to all of the things hidden in the unconscious. Sublimation leads people with much trouble on their mind, of which they don’t like to talk, to do things like paint paintings, write books or do scientific research. This they do because society says these things are ‘okay’. Thus, according to Freud, art is always the result of mental disturbance, and the job for literary theory is to study prose and poetry in order to figure out exactly what the writer was trying to cover up for. Freud wrote in his very famous book “Dostoevsky and Parricide” that Dusty’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov” is the sole result of Dusty wanting to kill his father and marry his mother and also being afraid of being castrated and suffering from bisexuality. In Russia everybody loved Freud right away and Ermakov, for example, started the Psychoanalytical Institute in Russia and dedicated himself to finding out all of Pushkin’s hidden mental problems. Freud’s former student and close friend Carl Gustav Jung said: ‘This is madness!’ and was forced to come up with a theory of his own to counter Freud’s. Thus Jung stated that there is a collective subconscious, and that it is the same in all people, and because of it we all have the same archetypes. Literature is built on archetypes and so are myths and that’s why we in literature can find not only myths but also different archetypes. Jung was pretty mad at Freud because his theory made all artists mentally diseased and so he wanted to find another way to use psycholical theories that weren’t so off the wall. Because he still thought everything could be explained psychologically.

Jung’s theories was used by many people and proved very correct when it comes to analyzing American Hollywood movies or American soap-operas since they use only archetypical characters and situations.

This was a short summary of what I’m supposed to know on Monday. In the process of writing this I had come to the conclusion that a) I know some things; and b) I haven’t got a clue about other things.

Fire!

This is a historical document, comrades, for two reasons: 1) it is the only time I’ve ever fired an 18th canon ball in Siberia [May 2009 in Tomsk]; and 2) it was taken with my camera that my father gave me back 2005 which died the other day. I was planning on buying a new one, but still… does this mean I have actually become one of those people who never throw anything away but waits till things fall apart on their own? [or get stolen, as is always the case with my cells…]

When you look at things from a certain angle everything seems to be going splendid. I received a scholarship for next year, I am invited to the conference in Swedish language for teachers abroad in Stockholm in August [they even asked me to gave a presentation on my ‘theoretical system in practice while teaching Swedish through music’!], I found out that I received the highest grade on both my exam yesterday and the exam last week [when I burst out in tears not once but TWICE – oh, the shame! the shame!], and both of my professors – A. here and M. back home – are so impressed with me that they have completely changed their view of me. M. read my article comparing Shalamov’s “V banje” with the chapter “Banja” from Dusty’s “Notes from the Dead House” and liked it so much that he suggested me as a doctorate student at Gothenburg University next year – without asking me first! sneaky indeed – but they turned him down for financial reasons [I suppose studies in Russian literature is not a priority area in science these days]. A. is reading my Russian novel with pleasure and treating me like a writer – gasp! – and even managed for me to meet with a journalist for an interview yesterday. He wants to make me ‘news’. And the weather in Yekaterinburg right now is highly pleasant. I should be on the top of the world, right?

But when you look at things from another angle everything is not going as splendid as the reality portrayed above. Once again it is proved that everything is indeed – ‘relative’. I have a final next Monday which I have no idea how to prepare for. The subject is “History of Russian Literary Science” and shouldn’t be too hard, if it weren’t for the fact that the history in question is 19th century and all books written on the subject of Russian 19th century literary history were published in another time on what seems to be another planet – the Soviet Union. I spent six whole hours this evening reading through “Schools in Russian Literary Theory before Marxist Literary Theory” [this being in Russian and written in the 1930-40’s] and trying to sort out real information from countless quotes by Lenin and endless stating of the obvious fact that “this school was faulty because it failed to pay accurate attention to the most important thing in literary theory – the study of struggles between classes”. No matter what the scholars tried to do back in the day, nothing can ever please the Marxist scholars. At times they put far too much importance on the author’s personality, when his personality should be determined only by his class and thus by the other classes struggling with this class, and at other times they sure do write theories about how society is important in forming literature, but then – alas! – again they forget to portray just how the struggle between classes went down in this society at the time. The only ‘okay’ person, the Marxists’ only ‘homeboy’ among 19th century scholars, seems to be Belinsky – but then again the article on Belinsky was written with such burning propagandistic flavor that even I thought to myself: “Here was a man!” Belinsky, you see, comrades, was the first Russian Marxist. This he was while Marx himself was but a youngster not knowing anything of the time when a country would exchange all kinds of philosophy for ‘Scientific Communism’. So I have no idea how to prepare for this final. If I keep this up I will only be able to specify the different kinds of class struggle apparent in the 19th century on the exam while what I should be doing is explaining the different schools in literary thought in Russia and how they’re connected with each other.

 Thank God that I have the best academic group! We’ve divided all the questions between us and will send each other all of our answers by e-mail after Thursday, once we find out exactly what’s going to go down on the actual exam on Monday morning. Tomorrow I will read through all of my notes [I’ve already copied notes from the lecture I missed from a girl in my group] and pray that something will materialize in my brain. The professor who read this course is an absolutely lovely woman, but she holds her lectures in accordance to the strict art form of ‘stream of consciousness’, meaning that her talk is sometimes so complex that she makes Proust read like a children’s book with only illustrations.

As if this wasn’t enough, I have other problems on my mind. Yesterday I found a gorgeous dress at Mango which I wanted to buy for a) the conference in Sweden in August; and b) my cousin’s wedding in September; but I could not because I have… this is embarrassing… too big breasts. Since when? It was a distressing situation, indeed, yesterday in the store. Adding to this I am still very much single and can’t even for the life of me figure out how I’m ever going to meet anyone. I’ve tried online dating and that wasn’t for me. I live my life mostly in the university where the chances of meeting men are as probable an event as meeting the Pope in a strip club [slight, very slight]. Also I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m most likely not the kind of girl any man would want to meet – for obvious reasons. All I really want is a kind man with higher education who’s capable of holding conversations on various topics ranging from my shoes to Soviet concentration camps [the switch can sometimes be so sudden that I don’t even see it coming myself]. And who wouldn’t mind taking long walks in the evenings and then drinking wine with me in my communal kitchen while exchanging hilarious jokes regarding life or talking seriously about God. Where is this man? Is there such a man?

I don’t want to be regarded as ‘sexy-weird’. I want to be seen as either sexy or weird, but never in a combination! That combination is horrible! Maybe that’s my problem?

Confessions of a Scandinavian

The question on all comrades’ lips this past week has been: ‘What will it be like when Alexander Rybak meets Josefina [yes, and not the other way around]?’ You can rest assured now that the scene has been interpreted in advance by lovely Anna Mikhailovna, who happens to be a great artist. Объявляю себя изменницей Родине и подам на норвежское гражданство! По политическо-музыкальным причинам…

Such a great day the 6th of June is! Sweden’s National Day, Pushkin’s B’day, and – coincidentally – a day which I spent solely digging around in textbooks and notebooks trying to figure out all the fine nuances of ‘functional grammar’. I think I got it now, though. The key to passing a Russian exam is easy because the system in itself is easy. A week or so before the exam the student is given a list of questions to which the student must prepare answers. Answers are best prepared using the notes you kept in class while taking the course; but your notes may not always be very easy to understand [my notes circle around question marks and the words «что-то» and «что-то другое»] and therefore you can always copy the notes from the best student in your group and prepare your answers according to her notes [it is always a girl]. Then the professor tells you how many questions will be on each ‘ticket’ on the exam. My next exam on Monday the 8th of June on the subject of “Modern concepts of linguistics” will have two questions on each ticket. Once you know this, then you must start by preparing the questions you like the most, and once you’ve prepared those answers you begin praying to God that these questions will be on your ticket on the exam. Praying is, unfortunately, not enough when it comes to passing Russian university exams. One must also think about these questions all the time, and not think at all – even for a short moment! – about the questions which you have not yet prepared answers for/have prepared answers for but still don’t understand them at all and sit and look at your hand moving the pen across the paper while wondering in amazement how a part of your own body ever got to be so independent. The student must be very careful to memorize only the phrases he or she understands, trying not to put to much stress on the sentences which seem like the book with the seven seals.

The foreign student in Russia will read the answers out loud; trying to think of funny things to say that has something to do with their native language even though it is not necessarily connected to the question on the ticket. For example, when talking about Bondarko’s ‘functional-semantic field’ the foreign student – if the foreign student is a native of Scandinavia [excluding Finland] – says something like: “Well, this idea with ‘functional-semantic fields’ is really different between different languages, because not every language has all of these fields. Russian and Swedish have different fields because Russian has aspect in their verbs, while Swedish don’t, but then again Swedish has articles, which Russian doesn’t.” Then the foreign student says something strange in their own native Scandinavian language – for a rather large amount of time – which nobody understands, while the professor wonders why ever did the Iron Wall have to come tumbling down, and the case has been stated. The foreign student should not use examples of aspect in Russian verbs as this is a magical, mysterious and mythical area of Russian grammar which can never be understood by outsiders and thus could seriously harm both the professor’s image of the student and the student’s sense of self.

Here’s the last part of my novella “Ten Shades of Kindness”:

10.

The next year Mikaela started first class and I went back to my work at the hospital. Mikaela was without a doubt best fitted for studies out of our six children. She received the highest grade in every subject from the first year till the last. The years that followed were marked by our children starting school every second year. Erik worked as an engineer and with time became a supervisor at the factory. After Erika had started school, when I was 41 years old and Erik was 45, I started to work on my doctor’s thesis at the local institute of medicine. I defended it the same year as Mikaela finished school with a golden medal as she was the best pupil that year and applied to the same Medical Academy that I had graduated from in the capital. She was accepted with a promise of a large stipend and left our provincial town for life on her own five days away with train in the big city. When we found out that she was accepted, I wrote a letter that was long overdue to Dr. Solomon, who turned out to still be working as a professor there. He answered straight away and told me that it would be his honor to help my daughter to get oriented both in her studies and in the capital. Two years later also Gabriel and Raphael finished school. Gabriel remained with us as he started to study at the technical institute to become an engineer, whereas Raphael applied and was accepted to the state university in the biggest city in our region, located on the south end of our country’s largest lake. There he began his studies at the history faculty. Already when he was very little he had loved to figure things out on his own and never took things for granted, and every time Raphael said something was in a certain way or another he gathered proof of the opposite before arguing his case. I told Gabriel that his grandmother, my mother Mikaela, had been a history professor and then he said that’s what he wanted to become too. Two years after this Daniel and David finished school and both of them decided to remain in the provincial town. Daniel began studying at the pedagogical institute, but David decided to follow in the footsteps of both his father and his older brother Gabriel by applying to the technical institute to become an engineer. Daniel was the quietest and tidiest of our children, he was always the one who helped me out with both cleaning the house and cooking dinner, whereas David liked to play sports and was a star in the school’s soccer team.

Two years later, in the beginning of same summer that Erika finished school and stated that she wanted to become a writer and for this purpose she would apply to the philology faculty of the same state university where Raphael was studying, Mikaela returned from the capital. She and her fiancée, with whom she had studied for six years, had received their first work placements from the state at the same hospital where I was still working. By then I and Erik owned our own house on the same street where we had once lived in a communal apartment. Our two-storey wooden house had enough rooms to accommodate all of our children in it during the summer holiday. In the beginning Mikaela and her fiancée, strangely enough called Emmanuel, the same name as the doctor that had once helped both me and my husband greatly in camps during the war, also lived with us in a room of their own on the second floor.

One evening in June all nine of us sat down around the kitchen table to have dinner together.

“Mom, how did you two meet?” Erika asked suddenly as I was passing her the salad.

“I’ve already told you that story a million times.”

She was the first to shake her head. Then all the other children – or perhaps the word ‘young adults’ would be more fitting now – followed her example by doing the same thing. “No, I don’t think you’ve ever told us about it!”

“Allow me,” Erik said and placed his hand on mine. He was sitting next to me at the table. “The first time I saw your mother was when we were both in a large crowd about to be forced into a concentration camp. You’ve heard of concentration camps, right? Well, both I and your mother spent the whole war in such camps. I liked your mother the first time I saw her. She was the prettiest girl of all the many thousands prisoners there and I couldn’t help but notice her and feel an instant urge to introduce myself. But she didn’t see me at all, and so I had to make my way closer and closer to her through the huge crowd. Once I had got close enough I had to wait for the appropriate moment to catch her attention. I found my opportunity when she almost fell and I caught her. And that’s how we met.”

I smiled at him for a while, and then, quite unexpectedly, at the thought of this remote memory I started to laugh. “Then your father was bright enough to get into a fight with some officer in the camp and got himself shot in the arm. And I was so desperate to see him in the hospital that I told them I was his wife…”

“That’s how I figured your mother was into me too,” Erik added also laughing.

“And after the war you were married for real?” David asked.

I looked at Erik and he looked at me too and we shook our heads simultaneously.

“You were never married?” Gabriel asked.

“Because of my desperate and impulsive statement in that camp we were written as married in our documents, but we never married. We never had a wedding,” I explained.

There was silence at the table for a moment.

“But… that makes us all illegitimate children? Bastards?” Erika said in surprise and looked at us both.

“Beautiful bastards!” Erik laughed.

Mikaela looked at me for a long while before she said: “You should have a wedding. You should have a church wedding! Just like I and Emmanuel will have next summer,” she blinked at her fiancée sitting next to her, “except you should get married now. As soon as possible to save the honor of your children and make them legitimate. Finally!”

“We’ve already been together for thirty years, I don’t think that’s necessary,” I said.

“But you must!” Raphael argued and all of the young people at the table agreed with him in noisy comments.

“Besides,” Erik began in a loud and firm voice in order to be heard over them and their noise, “what makes you think we’ll have a church wedding? Isn’t the country we live in after all an atheistic state?”

“But the cross around your neck, your silver cross!” Daniel disputed, and pointed at it. By some trick of fate it was hanging on the outside of Erik’s white shirt that evening, though it usually was below it and rarely on public display.

“This cross belongs to another world,” he said. “I got it from my mother when I was baptized a very, very long time ago. Besides, even if I’m a Christian, your mother isn’t and she might not agree to a church wedding. Am I right?” he gave me a serious and at the same time inquiring look.

“My parents were Jewish but I don’t ever remembering anyone of them ever reading the Torah or even going to the synagogue. I don’t think they were very religious, and if you ask me, then I don’t know what my religion is,” I said and returned his stern look by shrugging my shoulders.

“But for us?” Erika began. “Won’t you have a wedding for us?”

In that moment Erik rose from his seat at the dinner table. “Get up,” he said to me.

I got up from my chair and stood up in front of him. Then he got down on one knee and held out his right hand.

“Martina, will you marry me?”

“This is all so sudden, I don’t know…”

And everyone started to laugh.

“I guess that if you really, really want to, then… Then yes.”

Two weeks later we were married in a small church. And as I started my ascendant down the aisle and saw him standing in front of the priest and all of our six children sitting in the front row, I couldn’t help but thinking that the life I had lived had been a good one. I had entered into one world, where there had been a chandelier in the dining room and many old books on history and medicine in the living room, to be sentenced as a political prisoner and go through concentration camps, and come out into another world where I became a doctor and raised six children on a dirt road in a provincial town with a former illiterate thief. I had taught him to read and write and he had taught me how to remember the past without living in it. Despite all the cruelty, all the losses and deprivations I had experienced along the road, I came to realize that very little of it mattered in the end. In the end what matters is that I was able to share most of it with a man who’s first and foremost quality is kindness.

Excited?

Oh my eyes, my eyes! This is one of the downsides to living in Russia: Dima Bilan with his shirt off on an ad for ‘his’ new Oriflame fragrance. Dima Bilan does not ‘excite’ me [that’s the name of his perfume] but then again, who does? I’ll tell you who does – Alexander Rybak, the Norwegian [by way of Minsk] winner of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. I’m listening like crazy [and dancing even crazier] to his album “Fairytales” while having fantasies of the two of us ‘på tur’ in the mountains of Norway complete with backpacks and knitted hats… Now that’s an exciting image!

Generally speaking, today was a good day. This morning I woke up to two messages on my phone with great news. The first one was from my mother saying that I received the scholarship [of 85 000 Swedish Crowns] from The Swedish Institute for next academic year here at Ural State in Yekaterinburg. Yay! It will be my third year as the Swedish Institute’s ‘stipendiat’ here in Russia and will give me a solid financial opportunity to finish the Master’s program I’m currently studying at. The second message was from my student Ksenia saying that she also received her scholarship from The Swedish Institute and that she’ll be studying next fall semester at a university in Sweden. For free! Yay! My work as a Swedish teacher in the Ural Mountains has proved fruitful indeed: two of my students received scholarships to study Swedish for six months in Sweden, one student was accepted to a Master’s program at Lund University, and two other students are going to study the language on a course there this summer. This fall I should advertise my classes with the words: ‘Beware of actual chances of ending up in Sweden if you plan to attend!’

Today also marked the day of my first real ‘exam’ at a Russian university. It was a rather tricky exam in the subject of linguistics – something about which I know practically little to nothing – and was divided up in two parts between two professors. The first professor gave me a four, which I think is exactly what I deserve, but the other professor [who seems to be more aware of my disadvantages as a foreign student lacking Russian as a native language] gave me a five. The final grade for the exam will be derived from the total of these two grades. I would be happy with a four, even though it would be my first four ever during five years of studying at Russian universities. It only hit me about a week ago that I have never received anything less than «отлично» [the grade five can also be translated into a word that means ‘excellent’ in Russian] during all of my years as a student here. I’m okay with a four because even that should be considered a stretch for me since I am not a linguist. During the first part of the exam today, as I listened to the other students answering the professor’s questions and then compared my answers to theirs, I started to cry. I didn’t cry during the exam because I was afraid of not passing it, and certainly not because I wanted to professor to take pity on me, but because I realized that I can never ever answer as well as the other students. It is impossible. And that made me very sad. The pure realization of the fact that there’s a barrier in language which I have not yet crossed, and a distressing comprehension of that I cannot ever cross it. There’s something in my personality that always wants to be the best and when being the best doesn’t depend on me it makes me rather upset. I must face the fact that I’m disadvantaged to begin with, and to stop comparing myself to everyone else in my class [because they’re really the best of the best] but be happy with every little victory won by me, every little obstacle overcome by myself.

My next exam – also in linguistics – is on Monday the 8th of June. After that I have two exams in literary theory [but that will be easier and more fun since that’s something I both know and love] and on the 19th of June this madness will be over. It’ll be alright. I can do this!

I think I’m in love with Norway. I managed to be in love with Norway [by way of Alexander’s violin] for almost a week until I realized that I’m actually more Norwegian than he is. I am – as a matter of fact – 25% Norwegian. Now all I really want to do is learn Norwegian, read Ibsen in original and start having mixed feelings about the 6th of June but get all warm in my heart when thinking of the 17th of May…