Letters to the Editor

To the Editors:

Thank you for the yellow Russian learning section in the back of your March/April 2009 publication. What a great idea! It gave me a chance to practice my reading and grammar skills and it was fun. I hope you will include this section in every Russian Life Magazine from now on.

George Artemoff

Ukiah, CA

Dear George:

This section, sponsored by the Russkiy Mir Foundation, will be in at least all 2009 issues.

– The Editors

To the Editors,

As a Russophile and re-subscriber to Russian Life, I eagerly anticipate new issues of your magazine. I was particularly interested in the March-April issue because of the article Kaliningrad: Baltic Outpost. As a philosophy major at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I remembered that city as Königsberg, the home of Immanuel Kant. So I scanned the article for the name of Kant and was dismayed to find that out of seven references to Kant, five of them were misspelled as Kart. Please do not rely on computer spellcheckers — pay a proofreader!

Sincerely,

Charles R. Crawley

Cedar Rapids, Iowa

To the Editors:

Although I was born in Canada to Ukrainian immigrant parents, I happily subscribe to Russian Life because it is an excellent publication, and also because I understand and appreciate the fact that Russians and Ukrainians are racially, culturally, linguistically and historically closely related peoples. Let’s keep in mind that the histories of Russia and Ukraine both began in Kiev, Ukraine. As a student and writer of history, I am also aware of the fact that Ukrainians, during the time of the Romanov czars, were described as “Little Russians.” But if Ukrainians can be described as “Little Russians” on one hand, then perhaps Russians can be called “Little Ukrainians” on the other hand. Ukrainians, by the way, according to anthropologists, are among the tallest people in Europe, so calling them “little” may be confusing to some people. 

Your otherwise excellent articles on Gogol are seriously flawed by the fact that not once do the authors mention the fact that Gogol was an ethnic Ukrainian. But go to Google, as you suggest in your editorial on Gogol, and almost every source mentions that he was a Ukrainian. Experts on particular topics, such as Yuri Mann on Gogol, sometime forget that many of their readers will not know the meaning of terms such as “Little Russian.“ It might have helped if Mann had written a detailed description of Gogol’s childhood  and upbringing. How did he, an ethnic Ukrainian, get to be perhaps the greatest Russian writer, and probably the most influential Russian writer of all time?    

Mann does briefly quote Alexander Pushkin with regard to Gogol’s early life and origin. Gogol’s Evenings on A Farm Near Dikanka, Pushkin observed, somewhat haughtily, delighted everyone by the “lively description of a tribe that sang and did folk dances, by these fresh pictures of life in Little Russia.” A tribe? The Little Russians were a tribe? Or were they just country bumpkins who had to become Russians in order to succeed in literature, music and other professions, in much the same way that many Canadians become Americans in order to be successful.  

In future, when you publish more interesting stories about “Russian greats,” don’t forget to mention that Gogol was a Ukrainian, that the painter Repin was a Ukrainian, that the writer Dostoevsky’s father was a Ukrainian and his mother a Russian, that the works of Tchaikovsky are packed with Ukrainian melodies, and that many other Ukrainians contributed greatly to Russian life and culture.

Michael Czuboka

Winnipeg, Manitoba

To the Editors:

Ms. Tamara Eidelman in “Deconstructing Dashkova” (March/ April 2009) is certainly free to disparage Dashkova for her personal life and lack of physical beauty.  But Dashkova’s tenure at the two Academies and editorship of several influential journals are a matter of record.  As I have shown in my biography (Dashkova:  A Life of Influence and Exile, American Philosophical Society:  Philadelphia, 2008), she strove to institute reforms, to adapt and applying ideas of the Enlightenment, and to establish new approaches to the education of Russia’s youth.  It is unfortunate that Ms. Eidelman chose to minimize Dashkova’s significant and long-lasting influence on the development of Russian culture.

Sincerely,

A. Woronzoff-Dashkoff

Professor of Russian

Language and Literature

Smith College