man kan ju inte bli kär

A picture taken during my last day in Yekaterinburg and my last ‘walk & talk’ with K.

On the eve of my last day in Russia, it is with the intention to reflect back on the month of June 2011 that I sit down alone with my laptop Ilona. My last day in Russia was spent on my own walking around in a stuffy scorching hot Moscow; originally this day was to be spent hand in hand with a man walking around the same city but sometimes things don’t turn out the way we planned. Perhaps it is better that it turned out this way: this way, we will never know what could have been. Today was supposed to have shown us what we have and what we are and if we really are anything at all or if it was simply three lovely days when our two so very separate lives suddenly coincided on a train from Moscow to Vologda. I told myself upon my return to Yekaterinburg that I must learn to be grateful for what we received then and not hope for something we might never achieve in the future; yet I allowed myself to dream – to unteach a weak heart romance appears to be a lifetime project – and what is even more: I allowed myself to fall in love. At first the thought of letting my heart open up again scared me: I’ve known enough heartaches by now to recognize impossibility, incompetability, irrationality without further investigation. Then I thought: “What the hell!” and gave into the sheer extravagance of this lavish emotion. I don’t think we should ever regret any emotions felt or shared or merely experienced – no matter the consequences that followed – for this life of ours is too short for fear. I closed my eyes, said a small prayer, took my chances – and everything fell through and nothing was my reward for choosing to be brave yet again this time. Well, I wouldn’t exactly say nothing at all; I might not have found ‘the love of my life’ [please hold this against me in the future: it seems to me that I won’t ever find it and that I will be happy anyway] but I acquired the presence of yet another good man in my life. Does that make it worth it? Why does it have to be worth anything? Why not simply let it remain what it was: those few days by his side – he is considerably older than me but I don’t think anymore information about him as an individual needs to be displayed in this format [I guess you’ll just have to trust me, comrades, as I assure you he is handsome and kind] – was a time when I realized that I’m not a girl anymore. It took all this time for me to understand that now I’m all grown up; now I’m a woman only beginning to bloom – in two weeks I’m turning 26 and, in my opinion, I’ve never looked this good before in my life. But the peak is yet to come, comrades. Though to tell you the truth, it did puzzle me some while I was by his side: how come such a man never tired of telling me how beautiful I am, when I see myself as kind of short, kind of chubby, and not even really that pretty when seen up close? Perhaps I am beautiful, despite all the imperfections? I think that is what makes it worth something – what should make anything in the life of anyone worth anything – the way he made me feel. He made me shine; even though we are going to soon be far apart as our separate lives continue in so very different parts of the world, I aim to go on shining. He could have been by my side in Moscow today and we might have come to understand that we were meant for each other and I would have left Russia with a ‘boyfriend’, as I understand the correct term to be; but we might just as well have agreed on the opposite: it was nice while it lasted but let’s not destroy part I by obliging ourselves to part II. Sometimes life forces you to check the only option left: none of the above.

Instead, I spent the day in Moscow with myself.

I walked in circles around downtown for hours while the sizzling hot sun did its best to melt all of me away. I didn’t take a single picture. I took a break in a café during the hottest hours while I ate lunch and finished reading Trifonov’s «Дом на набережной», which is such a splendid work of fiction that I wished nothing more than to remain within the language of the novel long after it was over. After lunch, I did stay with the language and on this rare occasion I kept my inner dialogue in Russian. I experimented with the sound of the words inside my head, played with grammatical forms, constructed imaginative dialouges; many times I went back in my mind and redid the sentences again and again until they became perfected, until they sounded like something I could write. During my last day in Russia I wrote a short story in Russian in my head. I don’t know if I will ever write it, if it will reach paper sometime and end up here on the blog one day. I prefer not to be certain at this point. When I couldn’t take the heat anymore I went to the apartment that one of my friends let me stay in while he is away – it occurs to me that I do indeed have some of the greatest friends in this country – where I first took a cold shower and then laid on his couch and looked around at the walls covered with bookshelves and so many books, so so so many books. I started reading «Что делать?» but not very intesively; rather I eagerly studied his coveted library with curiosity and came to the conclusion that at times it is best if you let life make some of the choices for you. I didn’t plan on spending my last night in his library. But I think it was what I needed: just like Shalamov, I’ve always dreamt of having such a library myself one day. While I was in Russia this month, I acquired about 13 kilos of books and shipped them to myself in Berkeley. I think also this is indicative of where my life is heading for even though I love this country in a way that perhaps not even Russians themselves love her – I left my life elsewhere and right now I’m ready to go home and be reunited with it. I long to be in my home – especially in my new home with Critical Companion where we will live together starting in August – to place my beloved books in order on the bookshelves and to feel that also I belong somewhere.

The greatest blessings in life we have a tendency not to notice.

When I was waiting for the train to Stockholm together with Mother in Gothenburg in late May, I remember her saying that those so very close friendships that I have created with wonderful people in three countries are exceptionally rare. I take them for granted; for example, I take for granted that everyone else also has a Marina in their life with whom they can live for a month and delight in a truly beautiful coexistence. My time living with Marina in Yekaterinburg was nothing short of blissful: every night after our work at the university was done we would cook dinner together, eat together, and then talk with each other for hours while drinking tea. The same goes for my friend K. inYekaterinburg; only now do I understand how strange it is that she and I found each other in this huge world of ours for it might as well never have come to be and we could have not realized how much of our lives that we must share with each other – for somehow life is only real when shared with others – yesterday during our last ‘walk & talk’ I finally comprehended that what we have created between ourselves is a relationship where we can say anything – but we can also say nothing. We can walk side by side in complete silence and feel that there is no need to say anything at the moment for the friendship is so strong and firm and mutual that continuous understanding is inescapable anyway. This fall, she’s moving to Budapest to begin her independent journey in a master’s program and I’ve already decided that I will meet the New Year of 2012 with her there. This kind of close relationship – ‘inescapable friendship’ we might call it – is something I enjoy also with K. and A. in Gothenburg and, needless to say really, with Critical Companion in Berkeley. As it turns out I also have a wonderfully friendly collective of young Shalamov scholars in Moscow that trusts me so boundlessly that they allow for me sleep in their apartments while they are not there. Some things might not have turned out the way I had hoped in my life, though when I face the facts – I like to often face the facts and reflect upon their various aspects – I always end up repeating what I’ve said so many times before: it is even better than I could have imagined. When I first read Shalamov during the fall of 2008 and felt that this is what I should be doing with my career, I could not have known where my love for this writer would lead me one day. I didn’t think I would become blessed with an amazing academic collective of intelligent peers, with strong friendships, with intellectual challenges from so many different people and that on a hot evening in late June I would sit on the balcony of one of them with a view over Moscow while writing yet another post for my blog. I sure didn’t think I would go to Vologda three times and fall in love with a great man on my third visit there. I didn’t think that what I write would be published, read and even cited [I saw my article cited in someone else’s article a few days ago and I was stunned]. Yet here is only the beginning…

When all is said and done I might have made strange choices, taken some weird turns, allowed myself to do things that more rational people don’t do over the years but I would not have any of it undone today. When I packed my bags and moved to Russia at nineteen I had no idea where this road would take me one day. I was only certain of one thing: I had come to stay. Eventually I moved away, but a part of me I can never tear away from this country. Not only is my career forever bound to Russia, salso are my heart and my soul and my mind. Tomorrow when I get on that plane to Stockholm, I let the Russian Josefina remain behind. The person I’ve become here – the person I am when here – can not survive anywhere else in the world. Do I feel a sting of regret for having tied my life to Berkeley for five more years [if not more]? That once again I must leave? No, it is not regret that I feel. Rather, I am at peace with my predicament of always being ‘the displaced person’. I don’t really have any other home than the space where I choose to place my books – currently this space is in Berkeley – and I’m more than okay with always moving between three countries: between my family on the Swedish west coast [with certain touch-downs in Stockholm to enjoy the enduring dialogue with my professor M.], my almamater in the Urals [interrupted by increasingly frequent visits to Moscow and Vologda], and my ongoing doctorate education in northern California. When I was in Yekaterinburg, one of my beloved professors at my old department said to me: “You are a true citizen of the world!” Because I can travel like this? Because I’m never without a ticket back from somewhere or to somewhere? I don’t know if I would advise anyone else to create such an existence for themselves; it does make you tired sometimes. It demands one to always be a step ahead of the present situation and to always be prepared to take responsibility for one’s own actions. You can’t be irresponsible and lead the life of an international scholar. That simply won’t do, comrades. Maybe it sometimes makes me sad that I do not get to travel anywhere for fun anymore; there’s always a conference somewhere to prepare for and always some text that needs to be written and another text that must be read.

On my last day in Yekaterinburg I gathered some of my oldest students and we had a farewell party at Marina’s place. They had made me a gift: a scrapbook called “Svenska i Uralbergen 2010-2011” about what the academic year there had been like for them without me. When I read what they had written to me, I almost started to cry – I was so touched because of how I had managed to touch their lives. One day I will be a teacher again and some years after that I will become a professor and I can’t wait to spend my life teaching the next generation. Often I think about what I would like to teach them. Obviously, as a Slavic scholar I will teach Russian language and Russian literature. But that will not be everything: I don’t want to simply teach people the poetry of Pushkin and Lermontov, the great novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the moral necessesity of Shalamov – I want to teach a love for literature, how to love literature. It seems to me that not only are we what we read, but we become what we have read. Perhaps that’s easy to say for someone who always carries at least one work of fiction in their handbag. But I think there’s more to reading than simply opening a book and entering another world – another way of viewing the world – it is about learning who we are, where we have been and recognizing that there is always another perspective, another opinion, another story out there we have yet to take into account, to make our own, to experience.

Shalamov said that his works constitute a guide for how to act in a crowd. No doubt was he right – that’s why Shalamov can never be read enough as we are sentenced to lead life not in solitude but among others – but I would add: literature is a guide for how to be human. Every new novel we read, every new writer we spend time with, every new language we imitate inside our head; all of this opens up yet another little fragment of what is means to be us.

Tomorrow I leave Russia with the feeling of being immensily blessed: by what was, what never became and that which is coming next.

The Seven Year Itch

Моя первая квартира. Санкт-Петербург, сентябрь 2004.

My first apartment. Saint Petersburg, September 2004.

Мой первый костюм. Омск, июль 2005.

My first suit. Omsk, July 2005.

Мой первый Альма матер. Екатеринбург, август 2006.

My first Alma Mater. Yekaterinburg, August 2006.

Моя первая картошка. Екатеринбург, сентябрь 2007.

My first potato. Yekaterinburg, September 2007.

Моя первая научная конференция. Томск, апрель 2008.

My first scientific conference. Tomsk, April 2008.

Мой первый фильм. Екатеринбург, июнь 2009.

My first movie. Yekaterinburg, June 2009.

Моя первая диссертация. Екатеринбург, июнь 2010.

My first dissertation. Yekaterinburg, June 2010.

Мое первое возвращение в Россию. Екатеринбург, июнь 2011.

My first return to Russia. Yekaterinburg, June 2011.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Tonight I should walk across seven fields

pick seven different flowers

place them under my pillow

dream of my future husband

like when I was a child

as if the place where I grew up

still remains somewhere today

as if childhood never came and went

as if on the other side

of the street I’m on tonight

once again the ocean awaits

to greet me through the eyes of a kid

who never got enough of salty winds

who always escaped in the night

who ran through the wet grass

all the way down to the cliffs

cold slippery stone against bare feet

who looked out at the sea

to dream of what life will be one day…

A little girl with a pen and a notebook

full of promises and hopes and dreams

alone with the sound of the waves.

All I kept was the notebook –

the pen ran dry long ago –

still lying open in the lap of this woman…

Tonight she does not pick seven flowers

like in her childhood there are no seven fields

no well to spin around

no man’s reflection to meet…

Then there were grey naked cliffs

now a city of concrete and steel –

this woman has walked all the paths

her little girl ever dreamed of

seen other seas and known other things

not mentioned in her innocent notes

all of her dreams became a life –

laying down on an empty pillow

old dreams have become

found replacement in new

and she remembers…

Nobody ever appeared

in her midsummer night dreams

every time waking up to a clear mind

yet every year the ritual was repeated…

How many times can a heart hope?

How many flowers until he appears?

Seven, fourteen, two hundred and one?

How to be sure in the morning

who the man was in your dream?

Perhaps this one is like all of our human rituals –

what remains of a more simple time –

like childhood memories

an echo from a past

when the summer was limitless

just like the sea

the notebook filled up with stories

for no one to read

life not what happened to us

rather an infinite untold tale

with the end ever open.

and we leave traces everywhere

This is my former student Dina with her daughter Sonechka. During my final semester as a Swedish teacher at Ural State last year, Sonechka became my youngest student ever – she attended class up until the week before she was born! Since then Marina has taken over and is now home-schooling both mother and daughter. I hope Сонечка will remember тётка Жоня! 

Ржд – властелин российских отношений

Some happy Shalamov scholars on Sunday evening in Vologda.

Today I got back to Yekaterinburg after spending a beautifully hectic and strangely exiting week in Moscow – including a weekend in Vologda – and it feels like I was gone for much longer than seven days. It feels like I managed to live an entire little life during the time I was there. The International Shalamov Conference went splendid. I don’t think it could have been any better than it did. Of course, for me it meant mostly a lot of work; we were busy working nonstop from morning until almost midnight for three days, including the day before the conference which took place on Thursday and Friday. I think that during this week I slept about four hours each night, if not less. I stayed with some great friends of mine in Moscow who are also Shalamov scholars and together we pulled this whole thing off. For me it was a great learning experience, personally as well as professionally. Not only did I get the opportunity to be on the ‘inside’ of such a magnificent academic project but I was also blessed with meeting so many brilliant scholars from around the world whom I admire and who inspire me. The fourth collection of scholarly work on Shalamov was published – finally! – in connection with the conference and at last I got to see my article that I wrote back in 2009 published. It was sort of a strange sensation to see my name in such a selected edition, especially considering that I was but twenty-three years old when I wrote it. I couldn’t stop thinking to myself “a child wrote this!”, but I guess it is a good piece of research no matter how old the person was when the person produced it. I did my presentation on “the bad Bildungsroman” on Friday and when I arrived at the conference it turned out that not only was I making my presentation, but I was also in charge of that whole section on Shalamov’s poetics. I’ve never been in charge of a section at a conference before and I consider also this a healthy learning experience – even though I didn’t really know how to act while doing it…

On Friday night a large group of Russian as well as international Shalamov scholars got on the train to Vologda – Shalamov’s birth town – to continue our conference and enjoy a couple of cultural excursions into the Russian north. Some of us crammed into one of those small compartments on the train together – the leading Russian Shalamov scholar from Vologda, a professor from Detriot and a professor from Oxford among others – to drink and have Det Goda Samtalet. In the same compartment just happened to be a man from Vologda who had never read Shalamov before in his life, but who was so impressed with our intellectual conversation, our loving dedication to Shalamov as well as our remarkable ability to drink that he decided to join our conference during the two days that we were in Vologda. This man turned out to be the kind of man I didn’t think existed – not only in Russia, but in the world: not only interesting and kind and funny and handsome, but he even smells nice and dresses nice. Needless to say, I did not waste any time before letting him know my favorable opinion of him. There is something special about Russian trains; there is something even more special about the people one meets on Russian trains. After this journey I concluded: «Ржд [Российские железные дороги] – властелин российских отношений» [“Russian Railways – the lord of Russian relations(hips)”]. On Saturday we first had a conference at the Shalamov house, then we went to the Stalin museum, after that we walked around town and then saw a play based on Shalamov. After the play we ate and we drank once again and after we were done doing that, the same man and I and one of the actors in the play decided to go out dancing together. When I found myself getting down – and sweaty – on some random dancefloor in Vologda at midnight it was one of those moments in life when one involuntarily asks oneself: “Is this really happening to me?” After dancing I and the man – I think it is rather indicative that I won’t even use an initial for his name at this point – went for a walk along the river in Vologda. It was one of the most beautiful white nights in my life. It was warm and the moon was bright yellow and the sky was only ever darkblue. Needless to say, I made it back to my hotel late. On Sunday all of us went on an excursion two hours north of Vologda, where we visited the same beautiful places that I saw when I went to Vologda a year ago. A year ago we started planning this conference – now that I’m writing this, it has already come and gone. In several ways, it does feel surreal. We did it. I was a part of it. And I can’t get over the feeling of being so, so, so blessed in life. The power of Shalamov has gathered a splendid group of dedicated people around, people who are devoted both to him as a writer and to each other as people. And when that is the case, you can really feel it in the atmosphere around these same people. This is not only academics – this is friendship. This is a relationship for life. I do really want nothing more than to pursue this path for the rest of my career. Shalamov is where my heart is, and that is also where I want my career to unfold.

On Monday morning I was back in Moscow and had a lot of things to do on my last day in the Russian capital – among other things, I finally bought myself a brand new handbag, was invited to dinner by a person who gave me the collected works of Shalamov for free [it is no longer possible to buy it in the stores], and grabbed a beer with a fellow Slavic scholar whom I got to know at Berkeley. I ran into him out of a coincidence at the conference and we decided to ‘catch up’. Early on Tuesday morning ‘the man from Vologda’ – let’s call him that for the time being – arrived in Moscow for work and I invited him over for breakfast. I met him at the metro station at 6.30 and he waved me goodbye at the airport express train four hours later. Then I got on the plane back to Yekaterinburg and here I am now: extremely tired and extremely happy.

Here is a video from Russian television about the conference.

“You will not always be at home…”

The communist leader and the blonde philologist on the photo above have very little to do with the text below.

“Bildung is concluded under the sign

of memory, of mémorie voluntaire, of the

rationalization of the accomplished journey.”

[from a book on genre]

“To live is to choose”: if you choose to position yourself in opposition – of whatever it may be – it is imperative to recognize this to also be something. Rejection of X does not relieve you of its alternative: Y. Contemporary culture – or, rather, contemporary mass unculture – is always a topical point of convergence for conversations among me and my friends. In Berkeley, Critical Companion and I had our own Friday Night Ritual – when I wasn’t out on a date with a man that is – after dinner we would frequent bookstores and ridicule various titles in world literature. Unfailingly, we were always on a treasure hunt for Sartre’s Disgust – the real English translation of which is Nausea – quite naturally, we would fail in finding it and exit with the conclusion: “There is X, Y or Z, but no disgust.” On Friday I decided to take a break from Shalamov and The Bad Bildungsroman, from Bakhtin and The Novel of Becoming, from 20^th Century Literature and The Death of The Novel, and instead spend some six hours in productive dialogue with the ever-inspiring K. After lunch we went to one of Yekat’s largest shopping malls – where I experienced dejection as H&M has finally come to town – and together we ridiculed contemporary Russian mass unculture. This is an easy task. Faced with Russian life and the multitude of discrepancies present in the reality it continuously produces, it is easy to be overcome with a kind of bewildered disgust. Many of my friends are teachers at the university and many with whom I studied here in the master’s program have gone on to become graduate students, thus also linking their personal fate with the public fate of higher education in Russia. In the Urals today, a graduate student receives approximately 1000 rubles [circa 40 dollars] a month; whereas a university teacher makes perhaps the double. On Thursday I went out with some friends, almost all of whom are teachers at Ural Federal. I spent about 1000 rubles on only my own food and two beers – i.e., on one evening out I managed to burn an entire Russian graduate student monthly ‘fellowship’. It is obvious that no one here can live on the money they make. This is not news to me; I knew it during all of the six years I lived here. Only this time my point of view experiences a shift: instead of being within this reality, I am now located outside. Even though I knew I could leave at any point while I was living here, that knowledge differs from the everpresent awareness of an imminent departure at the end of this month. This is no longer my life; this is Russian life. Yet it is impossible to teach one’s heart abstinence from compassion: every time I see an old woman counting her money in the store I want to put a 1000 ruble note in her hand and run as fast as I can. It is not that I didn’t feel compassion while this was my country, but the difficult decision I arrived at then was that one person cannot seal the infinite abyss of everyday existence. Compassion brings desperation to my intellect as well: who in today’s Russia dedicates her career to educating the next generation? Only those who didn’t have any other – read: better – option. This makes me frustrated, angry, and above all disappointed. Here and now, I realize that my own youth coincided with the youth of Russian Federation. When I moved here in 2004, the childhood of this country was already over. With my choice to move abroad, to enter the university, to choose how my life was to be lived – my childhood also ended. Here and now, I realize that both I and Russian Federation have left youth behind – completed our Bildung – we must thus find a way to be after becoming and learn how to exist once formation is completed.

With the passing of youth perception of the present changes: instead of reviewing it in the light of the future – the possibility of what is to come; maturity allows for the present to be seen in the shadow of the past – the inevitability of what was. There is no coincidence that I find myself preoccupied with researching the Bildungsroman during the summer of 2011. As that highly influential literary genre represented a time on the edge between two different times, so the summer of 2011 embodies a break between two different periods in my life. Perhaps some might argue that the ‘natural’ border should have occured already a year ago – during the summer of 2010 when I moved between two countries, between two universities, between two modes of education – and yet ‘real historical time’ and ‘experienced personal time’ seldom coincide. The latter is not connected to a place, even though I do agree with Bakhtin in that it can never be separated from it [see his convenient term ‘chronotop’] – rather we need to attach a specific time to a specific location in order to see time. Internal time, on the contrary, cannot be seen. Internal time does not conform to any rigid measurement of it in seconds, hours, days, years. Internal time is not felt until it is over. It is no more possible for us to experience being in time than it is to experience being who we are. Only upon the completition of a period of internal time – likewise a finished period of individual history [i.e., “you know, back when I wore plaid miniskirts with polosweaters”] – can we acknowledge its previous presence as valid, real, actually experienced. The first step to the concluding of Bildung is to understand that you will always not be who you are now; the second step is to comprehend that you have always not been who you are now. The unification of inconsistencies experienced in youth – as if nothing has ever come before or happened yet but everything touches you first and only then for the very first time – is no longer the center of internal time and individual history: in maturity, rather, it is replaced by a focus on the juxtaposition of similar discrepancies. Contrary to popular belief, growing up is not equal to a dismissal of all uncertainties. To grow up is not to liquidate the unsettling and to cherish the consisting; the process of ‘growing up’ realizes itself in choice. Youth makes no choices. For choice to become choice it needs to be conscious of its inherent exclusion and inclusion – for choice is always both: we cannot exclude something without simultanously including something else and viceversa – or else it is not a choice. To mature is to become aware of one’s own choices; to recognize what one has excluded and included. With maturity comes knowledge of the road not traveled, the journey not made: completed Bildung evaluates the past not only through the end it led to, but also through the multitude of ends it did not lead to.

Now you might run into a former boy – the man he became – whom you had the possibility to love in your youth; had you taken the opportunity then, had you turned around when he called your name and walked that path instead, both of yours lives would’ve become differently. Yet the former girl made another choice. Now when you see that he is alone, perhaps it is because he still chose that path on which you were destined to join him – yet the woman you became will never turn up?

To live is to choose.

Perhaps I also find myself fascinated with the Bildungsroman as form/content because of the irreversible mark it has left on the subsequent culture of modernity; not only on the life and the death of the novel, but on the Western conceptualization of what it means to live. In its traditional role of a literary genre dedicated to youth, it informs every aspect of our current view on what human existence is: from youth as the most important – as it is formative – period in human life, to the only permissible period in every human being’s life. We have created for ourseleves a culture that refuses to grow up. A world of children for children. Contemporary mass unculture is terrified of choice – and unable to evaluate that which is in the shadow of what was. Yet it does not seem to me that our culture today is solely concentrated on the possibility of an unknown future – perhaps this was more the disease of the 20^th century – rather, the 21^st century is only capable of consuming the present. It seems as if all other perspectives have been eliminated. Once maturity was abolished as unnecessary – for it is not necessary to conceieve of the road not traveled within a frame of mind detached from all kinds of responsibility – what remained was perpetual incompletion of Bildung. It is no coincidence that the larger part of the Western world currently engages in eternal education: for a culture which focuses on the present as the only measurement of its time, there can be no graduation. Internal time and individual history has lost their value in a culture which promotes the blissful innocence of youth, the convergence of all youthful diversities. Instead, we have established ‘individual time’ and ‘internal history’ for a youth which is forever ignorant and eternal happy in its avoidance of what the truly human conceptualization of the world is: exclusion and conclusion. In the constant repetition of one and the same ‘today’ over and over again – in the constant buzz of delightful statuses in real time on Facebook or pleasant comments on the pleasures of current life on Twitter – there is no room for reflection, no space to practice contemplation, no way to look neither back nor forward. All times must be now and now must be happy. It cannot be anything else; anything else demands a choice.

When I stepped out of Facebook last year, I did it because I found my person unable to be a part of it without becoming fragmented. To play a complete part of contemporary culture, one must fragment one’s personality – divide it, slize it, shape it into various categories – and everything because the point of view has shifted from the internal to the external. My life is no longer to be lived because I am; my life is to be lived and recorded and circumscribed because it is presented to the other. Too long have I lived myself life on stage in front of an audience filled with others; now I leave permanent youth and stop consumption of a perpetual ‘happy today’. Instead, I step out and I rebel and I choose: my choice is for Bildung to be over.

It appears to me that we have unlearned what we once knew; we are not afraid of maturity because youth is more ‘fun’ – youth is only more familiar. As what is unknown is a priori frightening, so the road not taken will always remain ambigious, obscure and blurred. Yet such also seemed the road to have been taken – speaking from a temporal frame of mind which fuses all times – before departure, before the journey, before the choice that also I will not always be at home.

«Пичалька» and other useful expressions

I stand outside of Ural Federal University reading up on the first ‘real’ concentration camp in Soviet Union – located in the northern Urals on the river Vishera – and «испытываю уважение» [“experience respect”].

Marina teaches the useful difference between the Swedish words “kort” and “kontant”. In other words, «препод Мариночка жжёт» [the meaning here is, as the common expression goes, lost in translation].

Finally – or, simply, once again all over again – I’m drinking my beloved «вишнёвенькая пивка» [a very diminutive form of ‘cherry beer’].

One thing that is great about being in Russia is that you get to speak a lot of Russian. And if you’re lucky enough to already be fluent in this language – i.e., the assorted collection of various cases no longer leave you puzzled, amazed, sometimes perhaps even frustrated and a little bit disgusted – you can play along with the natives and further your own person via the variety of new amusing expressions that has appeared while you were gone. In the Urals these days, people no longer say «печально», but «пичалька» which I’m guessing has thus become a noun and is not merely an adverb anymore. Also I have realized that Russia is «самое сильное лекарство от желания выйти замуж» [‘the strongest medicine against the wish to get married (for a woman)’]. After one week in this country, the shere thought of taking on a man in my life seems like nothing else but a great burden to carry along this road of life. Men make women my age look a lot older; as a matter of fact, many people here are surprised to find out that I will soon turn twenty-six: “But you look like you’re 20!” What is my secret? I didn’t get married when I was twenty-two, like I was supposed to, I don’t have to come home every evening and cook, clean, wash, etc, etc for someone else. But I promised myself a week ago that I would never say a bad word about this country, because this country has given me too much for me not to be grateful until the end of my days. Russia educated me. Yet, some things I can allow myself to say. And I will say this: in this country, I feel blessed to be single.

“Here Short Stories Apply to Rebels”

Here is my sixth article in Göteborgs-Posten this year, published on June 4^th under the Swedish title “Här är det noveller som gäller för rebeller” [not mine this time either, but that’s okay because the title I came up with was bad] and under my Swedish [I guess it could be regarded as such by now] pseudonym ‘Linnéa J Lundblad’. As always, I’m grateful to my homegirl Annie for scanning it and sending it to me today – the reason why it wasn’t posted here on the blog earlier was because I didn’t get the scan until now. In this month’s journalistic effort, I explore the difference between “novel” and “short story” [yes, I’m all about the genre these days] in literature as well in life, pay homage to my favorite Russian author Ivan Bunin, and give a somewhat disorted summary of what dating C. was like. When I wrote it, I didn’t like it and even regarded it as one of my ‘poorer texts’ during 2011. Now that I’ve read it in print, I am of a different opinion. I think it turned out alright. Click on the picture to read a larger version of it.

smygstart på nationaldagsfirandet

Today Marina and I gathered a group of students of Swedish at Ural State – sorry, I mean Ural Federal – in Парк пионеров [“Park of Pioneers”] for an early celebration of Sweden’s National Day, which is tomorrow June 6.

Here we are: a group of assorted young folks in love with Sweden.

Last night I finally made it to the infamous ‘orgrasm scene’ in Goncharov’s Oblomov – believe it or not, but this is the first time I’m reading this Russian classic – and felt more accomplished as a scholar of this literature. Throughout the almost two years that I dated my former more handsome half M., he was always reading Oblomov and never managed to make it all the way to the end. When I told this to Critical Companion a while ago, she wondered: “And he didn’t understand the irony of this?” I guess not, for I assume he has yet to finish reading it… Tomorrow my first work week in Russia begins, and I both dread and look forward to the reality of having to sit down – where I will actually find a calm place to work in my university is still a mystery to me but these things tend to work themselves out somehow and also I’m lucky to have an advisor with two offices so I’m thinking I’ll just steal one of his and make it my own while I’m here – and start doing research for my presentation at the International Shalamov Conference in Moscow, which is only ten days away now. I’ve already collected an assorted assembly of secondary sources, some of which I have already aquiented myself with – I borrowed Lukács’ Theory of the Novel at Gothenburg’s university library and Moretti’s The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture at Berkeley’s university library and have slowly been making my way through both of them during the past month – but as always there is much more to be read and a lot more to be said. I’ve decided that this summer I am going to be way more productive than I was last summer; then I was so exhausted from defending my master’s dissertation and moving between Russia and the US via Sweden and had hardly any strength left but to lie in the sun reading the entire Millenium trilogy… Inspired by my professor M. in Sweden, I suggested to the publication Baltic Worlds that I write an excellent report from the conference in Moscow. Yesterday I also composed a mail with pure praise for the new Egoboost Magazine – my generation has waited too long for something similar and I am of the opinion that we’ve earned its presence among us – in which I offered the publication my services in the form of academic advice for other young women wanting to get the most out of their higher education. Also, while I was in Sweden I proposed to my editor in Gothenburg that I write two articles for them about my return to Russia to be published during the month of July. In addition to all of this, I want to write a really good, really interesting piece about Shalamov and offer it to some big newspaper or other kind of respectable publication in Sweden. It is not that I’m sensing any financial desperation coming up soon, but it would be nice if my trip to Russia could be rewarding in more than just the most obvious, personal, way.

Among other news of interest my cousin gave birth to her first child – a son – on June 3^rd. Congratulations! I can’t wait to see him.

somebody still loves you Boris Yeltsin

The world’s first monument to Russia’s first president – a phallic symbol worthy both of eccentric respect and bewildered envy – was recently erected in Yekaterinburg.

I don’t know if I told you, comrades, but my Russian Alma Mater, the university from which I graduated a year ago with a Masters in Philology – Ural State University named in honor of Maxim Gorky – does not exist any longer. In May it was united with Ural Polytechincal University and together they became Ural Federal University named in honor of Boris Yeltsin. On Boris Yeltsin Street – a street which was practically empty and literally deserted when I moved to Yekat in 2006 but now has several impressive government buildings on it as well as a luxurious Hyatt hotel, all buildings of which are rather extravagantly covered in glass and steel – now stands a monument to the city’s ‘great son’; the man who once upon a time went to Ural Polytechinal University and grew up to bless Russian Federation with its first president as well as to endow many languages of the world with the colorful expression “drunk like Boris Yeltsin”. Since K. says the slogan of the Russian Facebook nowadays – and perhaps this is even truer for the International Facebook – is «Если ты пофоткался, выкладывай, не таи» [“If you had your picture taken, upload it, don’t hide it”] I cannot but share this amazing photograph of me and Yeltsin with the rest of the world.

Russian life.

Today I met up with my former more handsome half M. for dinner at ‘our usual place’ – that infamous pizza place on Belinsky Street – where we ordered exactly the same dishes as we always used to order when we went there back when we were a couple. We used to go there a lot in the evenings after he was done working and I was done teaching. Even though we broke up in January 2009 – after almost two years together – we are still close friends and get along extremely well. After dinner, we went on a long walk and talked about the things we always talked about: life, politics, love. Just like back in the days, we don’t see eye to eye on a lot of topics, but instead of fighting about our different opinions we now tend to listen and try to understand each other’s viewpoint. It is nice to be able to have such a great friendship with the man I once thought I was going to marry and spend the rest of my life with. Every time I see him, I am constantly reminded of how young we were when we were together – somehow it seems almost a youthful folly to believe I was but 22 and he 19 that summer when we got engaged [and had someone at the time told me that engagement may lead to marriage, I’m not certain I would have said да] – and of how young we still are. We have both come a long way since, and yet for the most part we remain the same people we were back then. A little bit older, a lot wiser, and also more relaxed about life and at peace with ourselves. It is fun to talk with your ex on such topics as other men/women in our lives, to compare experiences and to laugh about it all. I feel certain that come what may in our separate lives, we will always have each other. It is exactly like he put it: when you spend two years of your personal life on another person, you don’t let them walk out of it just like that. We might have had our trials and tribulations throughout the years, but to me he will always be that same beautiful boy from a small town in the northern Urals whom I met when he was but 18 years old. And that summer of 2007 we spent together in his parents’ summer house in that tiny village outside of his native town – Nizhny Tagil – will always remain in my memory as the perfect ideal for a relationship between a man and a woman. I will never forget the dog that we took care of together that summer. Nor will I forget all the times we walked along the railroad tracks for hours as the sun seemed never to want to set in the evenings while making our way to the nearest grocery store where we would buy wine and condoms… One may disagree and want to paint one’s past in all kinds of lovely colors, but one thing always stays the same: youth becomes all the more blissful, joyful, outright marvelous the further away from it one travels in time.

тебя так не хватало

Постарайтесь, товарищи – найдите на этой фотке шведку!

After almost a lifetime with bangs I have decided to let them go. What do you think, a good decision or not? When I told K. – we went on a three hour walk today around town and yet we did not manage to talk about everything we wanted or could have talked about – I’m also thinking about cutting my hair drastically shorter – though no shorter than to my shoulders – she said «...а тебе же идет!»

Tomorrow [June 4^th 2011] Göteborgs Posten will publish my sixth article this year as ‘California Girl’ under the title “Ännu en love story” [“Yet Another Love Story”], but my true love story is, has always been and will always be with Russian food. Today in Yekaterinburg I walked more than I did during an entire year in Berkeley, and made up for the calories I burned by having a настоящий праздник рта. This is a shot of my lovely dinner: Russian wonderful salad, followed by [vegetarian] delicious borsh’ and juicy black bread and sweet компот – everything was so tasty – and in the evening we had several cocktails and I ate a сметанник and thus life can begin anew again.

Today I went back to Ural State for the first time in a year and met so many people from my previous life here and all of them experienced approximately the same reaction when they first saw me: they looked once and a perplexed look of curiosity and doubt appeared on their faces, then they looked again and realized it is really Josefina and gave me warm, long hugs. I think the best recognition today happened in the university столовая when the woman behind the counter – who knows my taste in food as well as my mother does because I used to come there at least once every day and order almost the same thing for lunh and sometimes even twice a day and order the same thing also for dinner during four years – recognized me and was overcome with joy. It was a splendid moment. Both Marina and K. were like даже в столовой тебя узнают! to which I said ну конечно же. I wasn’t really sure how people here would react to seeing me again, and to be honest I didn’t even think that much about all the people I know here and how many of them I must meet up with again and have Det Goda Samtalet with but I guess that when you spend such a large part of your life somewhere, you’re bound to leave a consirerable chunk of close connections behind… I don’t think I can even count all the amazing people in this town with whom I have a special kind of relationship, with whom I must meet and talk and spend time and… the list goes on and on! Right now, all I can think of is how many things I loved in this country – especially all the things I loved to eat! – and I cannot even consider the thought that I will be here for less than a month. It seems to me that even an entire lifetime spent in Russia can never be enough. And I already feel myself much more inspired, much more prepared to work hard – one conversation with my old advisor about our plans for this time together reminded me of how hard I used to work here and how much it gave me and how obviously I am prepared to do the same all over again – all because of the specific Russian air surrounding me. Or, to be more specific, the Ural air surrounding me. In a way, it does make me sad to think that I will never be able to get back to my old everyday existence here, but that eventually I must leave – probably only to come back again and again – for here I was truly in love with my life. Maybe I was also in love with the person I was here, with the Russian Josefina. The Russian Josefina – and today I remembered her, finally – is also constantly approached by men and flirted with [so strange it seems to me now that I managed to forget all about the male attention I used to get also in this country, but being in the states – where the male attention also flourishes in my direction – I somehow forgot], but almost automatically I told all the men today, just like I always used to do: А вам только мечтать об этом! In this country, I feel whole. I feel complete. I feel like I don’t need anyone. After the Swedish class tonight, one of my old students asked me if I had any affairs with the opposite sex while in California. All I answered was: Было, и было интересно. Of course, I wouldn’t say no if opportunity arises but I doubt I will get into any serious dating in this country. Here, Russia is the only partner I need. In a way, coming back to Russia is like coming back to a relationship. To a husband of sorts. Sometimes it does feel like my brain has some sort of deficiency – or like K. said какое-то отклонение – for here, I cannot stop smiling. I’m just a very, very positive person.

While I was in California, Marina started thinking ecologically. In the Urals, however, much is left to desire when it comes to recycling…