Dedushka – a grandfather or old man – walking along a path, with snow up to his shoulders. Building a snowman in front of the neighbor's house. Babushka collapsing into her chair in front of the TV with Swanlake on: "but we haven't got any winter clothes. There's going to be war, what will we eat?".
These are some of Natalia's earliest memories. It was 1991, she was 3, her parents had brought her to her grandparents' village in May, to spend the summer there. In August the coup attempt happened, and Natalia stayed in the village until winter, for there was fear of war. Her memories got a bit mixed up, but her love for the village remains, and now she shares it with the world (but more on that later).
This village, on the border with Belarus, is where Natalia’s maternal grandmother and great grandmother came from. Her great grandmother remembers living under a pomeschik (land owner), and remembers those as better times compared to the Soviet period, when she was forced to give everything she had to the state. Even when her cow didn’t give any milk, she had to go to the shop to buy butter, which she could then give to the authorities – they didn’t seem to understand that a cow doesn’t give milk all the time.
Natalia at work, watched over by her ancestors...
Natalia’s great grandfather was the only one in his family to have received an education (in villages a family would often send just one kid to study), and was therefore elected the head of a kolkhoz. He narrowly avoided getting arrested, however, just like his father avoided being labeled a kulak and losing everything by distributing his possessions among his children so that he could say he only owned one cow.
It was the food from that village that sustained Natalia’s family in the 1990s, when there was almost no food available in St. Petersburg. They would bring to the city apples in homemade wooden boxes, jars of salted meat, home-made tvorog, cheese and butter, as well as pickles. Natalia’s dad still salts and dries meat, and Natalia would still be making tvorog herself, like her grandmother taught her, if only there was real milk available in Saint Petersburg.
Having grown up between central St. Petersburg and the village, where she spent her summers, Natalia knows Russia better than many St. Petersburgers or Muscovites. She traveled across Russia building sports centers with a charity organization, and saw what life is like for people all across the country, something not many get to see or learn. She also lived abroad – in Egypt and the UAE, where she met lots of people who seemed to have very little understanding of what Russia is.
“I had no idea we had such tresh (trash has long been used in Russian to describe something horrible) going on in Russia” - a friend told Natalia after seeing her Instagram posts.
“I want to show the real Russia," Natalia says, "it’s not all wonderful or all horrible. It’s a little bit of both.”
Still Life: Natalya and pechka.
She shared her memories of rye and wheat bread, turnips, porridge, and potatoes cooked in a real Russian pechka (wood-fired oven in the center of a village house), and apples eaten off a tree. In her blog, she also shows things like an abandoned railroad line that used to connect Russia to Belarus, where Natalia’s ancestors came from, closed schools, and the disappearing forest. Her love for Russia and her heartache for its problems are both clearly evident.
When we were speaking, Natalia was in her kitchen in St. Petersburg. She was a bit tired after a sleepless night – her daughter had just lost a baby tooth, and also from having attended protests in support of Navalny and freedom, where she had to flee from the police. Like her ancestors, she narrowly avoided getting arrested, and is here to tell the story (and so she continues her family tradition of feeding others tvorog and outsmarting the government).
This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
Every language has concepts, ideas, words and idioms that are nearly impossible to translate into another language. This book looks at nearly 100 such Russian words and offers paths to their understanding and translation by way of examples from literature and everyday life. Difficult to translate words and concepts are introduced with dictionary definitions, then elucidated with citations from literature, speech and prose, helping the student of Russian comprehend the word/concept in context.
This wonderful novella by Alexander Kuprin tells the story of the wrestler Arbuzov and his battle against a renowned American wrestler. Rich in detail and characterization, At the Circus brims with excitement and life. You can smell the sawdust in the big top, see the vivid and colorful characters, sense the tension build as Arbuzov readies to face off against the American.
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Survival Russian is an intensely practical guide to conversational, colloquial and culture-rich Russian. It uses humor, current events and thematically-driven essays to deepen readers’ understanding of Russian language and culture. This enlarged Second Edition of Survival Russian includes over 90 essays and illuminates over 2000 invaluable Russian phrases and words.
The definitive modern cookbook on Russian cuisine has been totally updated and redesigned in a 30th Anniversary Edition. Layering superbly researched recipes with informative essays on the dishes' rich historical and cultural context, A Taste of Russia includes over 200 recipes on everything from borshch to blini, from Salmon Coulibiac to Beef Stew with Rum, from Marinated Mushrooms to Walnut-honey Filled Pies. A Taste of Russia shows off the best that Russian cooking has to offer. Full of great quotes from Russian literature about Russian food and designed in a convenient wide format that stays open during use.
A book that dares to explore the humanity of priests and pilgrims, saints and sinners, Faith & Humor has been both a runaway bestseller in Russia and the focus of heated controversy – as often happens when a thoughtful writer takes on sacred cows. The stories, aphorisms, anecdotes, dialogues and adventures in this volume comprise an encyclopedia of modern Russian Orthodoxy, and thereby of Russian life.
Vladimir Gilyarovsky's classic portrait of the Russian capital is one of Russians’ most beloved books. Yet it has never before been translated into English. Until now! It is a spectactular verbal pastiche: conversation, from gutter gibberish to the drawing room; oratory, from illiterates to aristocrats; prose, from boilerplate to Tolstoy; poetry, from earthy humor to Pushkin.
The fables of Ivan Krylov are rich fonts of Russian cultural wisdom and experience – reading and understanding them is vital to grasping the Russian worldview. This new edition of 62 of Krylov’s tales presents them side-by-side in English and Russian. The wonderfully lyrical translations by Lydia Razran Stone are accompanied by original, whimsical color illustrations by Katya Korobkina.
The murder of a poet is always more than a murder. When a famous writer is brutally stabbed on the campus of Moscow’s Lumumba University, the son of a recently deposed African president confesses, and the case assumes political implications that no one wants any part of.
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