Культурный хлам

Napa Valley July 16th 2008. There are many interesting things to be noted about this particular photograph. Yes, it was taken on my 23rd birthday. But that is hardly interesting. What is interesting, however, is that at the time I was unaware of the following things: 1) that I was going to start [and finish!] the MA program in Russian literature at Ural State; 2) that I was going to apply [and get accepted!] to graduate school at Berkeley; and 3) that I was not going to marry my more handsome half M. Interesting to note is also that I’ve lost approximately 7 kilos [or maybe even 10, as people here in Russia are of differing opinions about my weight – some say I lost 7 during my two years in the MA program, others claim 10. I am deathly afraid of getting on the scales so I trust mirrors and the opinion of others] since this picture was taken… Also I’m suspecting that my hair will be this long again for my 25th birthday this summer as I have noticed some serious growth on my head lately.

Comrades, I’m half a day ahead of my plan for writing my thesis! Yes, this weekend wasn’t spent solely on «Подросток» [“A Raw Youth”], but as a matter of fact I skipped right ahead and worked on the chapter on «Бесы» [“The Devils”] instead on Saturday and finished it today [sixteen pages – do I hear a “hurrah”?]. Right away upon its completion I started with «Подросток» [75% finished already], and because my professor Aleksey told me that the scholar from Czech Republic can’t fly in tomorrow morning for the conference here on Wednesday I don’t have to take him to lunch tomorrow and can thus stay home and finish that chapter and perhaps even get a head start on «Село Степанчиково и его обитатели» [“The Village of Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants”] in the evening. After that novel I only have the most dreaded chapter of them all left to do research for and then write clever conclusions on – some 300 quotations from “The Siberian Notebook” in “Notes from the Dead House”… The thesis has now grown into some 80 pages; I’m aiming at 100 for then I know for sure it will land at around 120 by May 1st [which is when I have to finish its first version; then on May 3rd I’m off to a conference in Kazan’ where I’ll spend four days with lovely Shalamov]. Am I boring you with this information, comrades? I think I’m boring myself. My mother proved very wise when she told me: “See how you like writing one thesis before you say you want to write several of them…” I would be lying if I said I “don’t like writing this thesis”, but also I would be lying if I said that I don’t find any pleasure what so ever in it. I guess my biggest problem with the whole thing is that it is so time-consuming. Especially on days when it is warm outside and the sun is shining. On those days it is extra time-consuming and to be seated in front of my computer for ten hours a day seems much worse than the 4 years Dusty spent in the prison where he compiled the notebook which I am now studying in depth. Okay, so you might argue with me now and say: “But you’ve written six full length novels? Didn’t that take time? And planning? And didn’t you sometimes just want to escape it and go out in the sun and meet up with friends and forget about the whole thing at times?” These are all valid arguments, dear comrades. But when I write a novel I’m always writing simply and solely for myself; whereas a thesis is written a) according to the definitions as stated by literary science and the current regulations for a MA thesis at Russian universities; b) to complement previous scholarly works on the subject [thankfully for my subject there’s only a handful of those]; and most importantly c) in a strict yet forthcoming union with the ideas, comments and thoughts that my professor Aleksey takes pleasure in informing me of from time to time. Today I spent three hours writing a presentation on the Siberian notebook in Dusty’s novel “The Devils” for a conference here in Yekat on Thursday, which I sent to Aleksey straight away. He returned it to me within a couple of hours [with corrections] and said it was нормально. I guess that is also one of my problems with the thesis: I would like to have more feedback! Right now it feels sort of like I’m in a dark and secluded room somewhere on the moon writing away day and night without knowing at all how it will be received by other people down on Earth.

«Культурный хлам» can be translated as ‘cultural rubbish; trash’. You see, the past week wasn’t all consumed by the thesis but I managed to receive a huge package from the Swedish Institute. In it was, among other things, a copy of the huge two volume Svensk ordbok publicerad av Svenska akademien [Swedish dictionary]. I played with it on my own for two days and had so much fun that I also played with it together with my third year students of Swedish in class. In it one of the funniest things are the several popular phrases from various areas of Swedish culture [mainly from songs and books] scattered in it here and there. During class I happened to call these fascinating little bits and tiny pieces of my national heritage культурный хлам. This made my students laugh at me. And I love it when people laugh at me. I don’t know how I even lived without this dictionary before; now I am decided on getting me one of those for myself. This one I will have to leave to Marina here in Yekat when I leave.

In between thesis writing I’ve managed to make some notes for my future novel that is a sort of new version of “Letters to Father” but nothing like it at all because it has changed so much already inside of my mind and in my notes on it that it doesn’t feel like I’m ruining the old novel by writing a new one anymore – for the two are separate now inside of my head. The main characters are no longer Marion and Joseph like in “Letters to Father” but Marion and Miriam and in my notes I sometimes call them “The Sisters Karamazov”… It is a story of all the diseases of our current human society; each of the four main characters who are all brothers and sisters will be first and foremost a ‘type’ that can be found everywhere among us today, even though not entirely for they will have some personal traits also. a) Marion is ‘the eternal student’, financially independent [due to tragic reasons] and in a relationship with ‘the working class boy’, with whom she cannot make any commitments for she has never felt passion [and in the novel she will come to feel passion for the first time with tragic results]. b) Joseph is the ‘upper class man’ partly because of a personal choice, partly due to lying to himself [hating his rich step-father yet taking his name and his money and seeing himself as a part of that family rather than his mother’s family and ignoring the social status of his real father – the son of a simple farmer], who is a doctor [prestigious profession] and in and out of relationships as other people change their status on Facebook. c) Jonathan is the ‘settling for too little too early’; he got engaged to his girlfriend in school at the age of sixteen, married her at eighteen and had his first child at the age of twenty. He is studying to receive a profession [teacher] and to later live a common, quite life [sadly his brother and “The Sisters Karamazov” get in his way a little in that regard]. This is, in my opinion, a very common type in my generation. And then there’s d) Miriam – the most interesting type for she is modelled after me! – ‘the severely detached from homeland yet strangely attached to native heritage globetrotter’ [also a very common type in my generation, I’m afraid], who has lived abroad for the past eight years or so, visiting Sweden only at short times once or twice a year. She is the only one of the siblings who are without a recorded intimate past. Perhaps it is held secrete; perhaps there has truly never been a man in her life. She stays with her half-sister Marion when in Sweden. Marion owns a house on Brännö outside of Gothenburg where their father Gabriel [sentenced three times for rapes of underage girls] will eventually come to be murdered in the novel. The plot constitutes of a sort of “who did it?” story, and as we speak I am not myself entirely clear as to who did it. All I’m certain of at this stage is that Miriam confesses guilty to the murder already the next morning when the police come knocking on Marion’s door after finding the body in the water… Most certainly, they all could’ve done it – and they all at one point or another stated that they wanted to murder their father. Among other notes that I’ve done for these characters are that 1) Jonathan will use no less than five times different versions of the popular expression “han har inte alla kantareller i korgen”; 2) Marion speaks with several subordinate clauses, often using old words and always correct grammatical constructions; 3) Joseph is all colloquial speech [says things like “tjena” and asks “hur e läget?” in text-messages and Marion hates it]; and 4) Miriam quotes and sings Evert Taube’s “Brevet från Lillan” through out the whole novel, as well as many other Swedish traditional folk songs [Olle Adolphson, Cornelis Vreeswijk, Dan Andersson].

Needless to say, this novel will be written in Swedish and in Swedish only. It will be a heartfelt tribute to my native language and an open attack on the country where it is spoken.