Yesterday, a group of friends and I went to visit Nikolay Alexeyevich Nekrasov's summer house. Nekrasov was a 19th-century poet, who was particularly famous for writing on the suffering of the peaseantry. He really focused on conveying the charm of peasant life in his work, often adapting folk songs and peasant poems, but he also acknowledged and gave a voice to those who suffered in society. My favourite poem from him is ‘Когда из мрака заблужденья...’ (‘When from the darkness of delusion...’), in which he tells the plight of a woman who’s driven to prostitution by extreme poverty. Although he's not exactly famous outside of Russia, he was one of the intellectuals that carried weight in the literary scene of 19th century, and not only as an author, but also as a critique and a publisher. Both Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy were published in his literary magazine Sovremennik, which was later suppressed as it became the voice of a certain political opposition. So you could imagine how excited I was to visit the place where he wrote many of his pieces. The summer house itself is located in Karabikha, a small town about 25/30 minutes away from Yaroslavl. The bus there was only 27 roubles and the weather was surprisingly pleasant. We had a guided tour (in Russian obviously) of the main house of the property and were told about Nekrasov's life and his family, which I won't go into details about here because you can just as easily read his wikipedia page. We then just had tea and decided to go for a walk in the woods behind the property. We sat on a bench and my friend's landlady started reciting 'Мне осталась одна забава...' by Sergei Yesenin (a quite random choice). As I listened to her, breathing in the smell of dying leaves and watching the already golden paysage, all I could think of was the extent of Russia's quality as a subject of poetry. Poetry itself seems to be an essential part of Russian culture. Children have to memorise dozens of poems throughout their education and people in general are very involved and proud of their classics. Our translation teacher Olga Baricovna often majestically recites parts of Pushkin's poems to illustrate grammar rules or set expressions she's teaching us. When I asked my friend Nikita, who is NOT someone who would typically be interested poetry (spends most of his time playing video games or watching basketball games, finds reading fictional literature boring and tedious...), why Russians liked poetry so much, he said this: 'Ну то что она самая крутая, самая эмоциональная! Затрагивает все проблемы! Актуальна по сей день!', and enthusiastically showed me this video of actor Alexander Petrov reciting 'Облако в штанах' by Vladimir Mayakovsky, his favourite poet. How unusual this would be in the UK! I personally think that their affection for poetry has to do with the fact that Russian is a 'великий и могучий' language to cite Ivan Turgenev (I highly recommend checking out his poem 'Русский Язык', which is, to put it simply, his love confession to the Russian language.). The effect of poetry depends on the combination of concision, imagery, grammatical parallelism, sound organisation, etc...without forgetting the poem's timelessness. I don't have to tell you how complex, intricate and rich the Russian language is. In Russian, we can express the durability, the frequency, even the intensity of an action with just a conjugated verb if we choose the aspect and possibly the prefix well. We can, thanks to cases, move around all the components of a sentence without impeding the reader's ability to understand its meaning, and I could go on and on. Hence, Russian poetry can be so extremely precise, melodious, meaningful and seem so effortless. As a result, in Russia poetry is not something only bookworms are interested in. It is an actual and vibrant part of Russian literature. Verses from famous poems can even be used in every day conversations as sayings. I will give you some examples, which you can go ahead and translate for yourself:
As for myself, I am trying to read as much Russian poetry as possible, and I recommend doing the same. It helps with pronunciation and you just get used to hearing Russian.
I hope you enjoyed reading this post. Let me know what you think about it. До свидания!
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Добрый день, Друзья! Today I'm going to tell you about our local hockey team: Локомотив! On the 13rd of September, I finally assisted to a hockey match for the first time in my life. Our local team, the Локомотив were playing against the Метталург of Магнитогорск (a city in the South West of Russia). I was impressed by the level of athleticism of the players, the complexity of the sport, but especially by the fervour of the fans, the sport culture and I genuinely just enjoyed the adrenaline pick and the level of excitement I experienced when the team scored. (But I have to admit that the best part had to be when the anthem started and all of us stood in unisson. The energy that ran through the room at that moment was just unbelievable.) Since then, I've been to two other matches and I'm already expecting the next match which is taking place in Yaroslavl in a week. Two of the guys in our group fell in love so hard that they bought the expensive jerseys the week following the first match and had all the chanting memorised in no time. One of the things that really struck me is that Lokomotiv is a huge part of Yaroslavl's sport life. Old and young are very proud of the team and if you happen to be wearing any of their goods after a match, it's not unusually for random people to ask you who won, who was playing, etc. This isn't only because Yaroslavl is a strong team which plays in the Kontinental Hockey League (Континентальная хоккейная лига (КХЛ)), the highest level of hockey in Russia, it's also because of a tragedy that hit the club on in 2011. The Lokomotiv club was then travelling to Minsk for the first game of the 2011-2012 KHL season when the airplane that was carrying the team crashed following a botched take-off from Tunoshna Airport. Of the 45 passengers and crew on board, only flight engineer Alexander Sizov survived the crash. People still gather on the 7th of September every year to unite in memory of the late team. A memorial was constructed after the crash and the pictures of the players are displayed inside and outside the arena with an over-head claiming 'наша команда, навсегда...' (Our team, forever...). The other thing that makes hockey interesting is the history of the sport itself in Russia and before that in the USSR. Hockey started to gain importance in the Soviet Union under Stalin. He was the one to appoint Anatoli Tarasov, 'the father of Russian ice hockey', to develop an elite hockey programme. Tarasov looked at hockey in a very different way, focusing more on team play, on combinations, on the precision and the finesse of passing, and his training reflected that. For the team to reach his expectations, the players had to live and train together the whole year long. This led the USSR to dominate hockey in international competitions especially in the 60s and 70s, during which they won 4 straight gold medals in the Olympics. The specificities of Russian hockey faded considerably after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when sport was not as much of a soft power element aimed to prove the superiority of an ideology and a societal model (or at the very least not closely as much as during the Cold War). A documentary was released in 2014 about the Soviet national ice hockey team. You might find it interesting. I hope you enjoyed reading this post!
До свидания и удачи на всё! |
AuthorThird year student at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Studies Russian, German and International Relations. Loves traveling. Loves languages. Loves to share. Hence, this BLOG! Archives
January 2018
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