Manic Bookstore Cafe

Last weekend I went to a wedding where the couple were getting married a second time, for the benefit of their American friends and relatives. They had first married in Israel in May, and the mother-of-the-bride got up to thank them for "bookending" with joy and love this summer, so filled with tragedy and sadness. Israel, Syria, Afghanistan, Russia and Ukraine, not to mention Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria,  -- this has indeed been a terrible summer. But I take solace in the peaceful international border crossings that continue to go on, and the excitement of the young (and old) who continue to travel and study foreign places. Some of my friends, in their early 70s, did not even consider canceling a train trip they took in August from Beijing to Moscow. A student stopped by looking for volunteering or work opportunities next summer in Russia. My own Russian friends continue to send love and news, despite the rhetoric of our leaders who are accusing each other of lie...

Bread line, Luhansk. Photo New York Times. "But to people standing in the bread and water lines that snake through the streets, life here is tough but far from catastrophic. In the predawn, the city comes alive with pedestrians carrying plastic water bottles, headed for the working fountains and grocery stores, on the assumption that fewer shells land early in the morning. One grocery had noodles, gum, sugar, eggs and vodka." ( NYT  14 August 2014) New York Times reporter Andrew Kramer seems surprised at the patience in Eastern Ukraine. One woman he interviewed commented: "I have everything I need but peace." Russians, and Ukrainians, are good at standing in line. Their patience is epic, legendary really. Some of the people standing in these lines were small children during World War II and lived through the Soviet experiment and its post-Soviet variant. They have come to understand better than most that the forces in the world are greater than the indi...

Seems like kismet that I am teaching Eugene Onegin  in the week that I was asked to review a newly translated novella by Eugenia Kononenko called A Russian Story (Glagoslav Publications, 2012). This novella strikes at the heart of Russian-Ukrainian relations and the complicated post-Soviet global lives of former Ukrainian citizens. Featuring a hero named "Eugene Samarsky" ("derived not from the Russian place-name Samara on the Volga, but from the name of a minor Ukrainian river, a tributary of the Dnipro," as he never tires of explaining), the book explores the travels and travails of the post-Soviet son of Ukraine as he inexorably and with a certain self-aware incredulity follows the path of Pushkin's hero: he inherits an country estate (or at least a house) from a distant uncle, meets sisters named Tatiana and Olga, accidentally kills Olga's fiance Vladimir and has to flee the country and wander through foreign lands... In the meantime, the narrator...

So I was talking with a friend today whose grandmother grew up in Russia ... or Ukraine. With Americans, you never really know which. The important thing is that her grandmother was extremely proud to have never eaten a raw vegetable. Ever. In her life. She ate cabbage, beets, potatoes, turnips, onions, even cucumbers -- but only in soup, or pickled, or in some way processed. This is a fascinating thing about Russian (and often Ukrainian) cooking. In some of the research I've been doing I have noticed a tendency to preserve everything. Tomato sauce, fresh salsa, jams and jellies -- and apple pie. I think it must be a genetic fear of the long, cold winter. And it's not limited to those living in the former tsarist lands. I felt it myself this autumn when I arrived back to my house from a half-year of sojourning through Europe and the east coast -- my shelves were empty, and I needed to fill them. So we canned about 12 quarts of tomato sauce, pints of raspberry and bl...

My stories of pay-to-play in Ukrainian academic circles are resonating with readers. Some react with surprise, others with their own stories. It seems to me that given the multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic nature of Ukraine, there are probably regional differences to the culture of corruption. My PhD story in the last post  was from Crimea, and my friend and colleague has just shared her own experience with corruption there. Pretty awesome. But before I go on, let me be clear: I really love Ukraine. I have even managed to get out of the Soviet-era habit of calling it The Ukraine in English, as if it were a region rather than a real country. And one of the reasons I know more about it than I might is that in the current era, it's a huge, expensive hassle to get a visa to Russia.  When I began to be invited to Russian-language conferences in Crimea -- in Yalta, for a Chekhov conference, in Alushta to commemorate Alexander Griboedov -- I realize one really great thing abou...

The NPR report   about Ukraine the other day focused on "Dr. Ironfist," the Ukrainian boxer Vitali Klitschko. This leader of the political party UDAR is inherently more trustworthy than most politicians, the journalist claimed, because the boxing champ made his money in sport, not business. I've been watching the events in Ukraine as closely as I can, and I am sending good wishes and energy in the direction of Euromaidan. (I wish I could send hot soup and blankets -- what a time of year to make a revolution!) If we really are watching the birth of a nation , I'll be the first to applaud. But what worries me is precisely the question of corruption, and this is where my experience of Ukraine becomes relevant. My Fulbright "minder" at the Studium Europy Wschodniej in Poland when I arrived January 30 was a young Ukrainian PhD student. In many ways Sasha made my transition to life in Poland easier than it might have been; there is a greater culture gap f...

When I think about 1987, I think of my first visit to the Soviet Union, to then Leningrad, where I met some of my best Russian friends and experienced firsthand what Mikhail Gorbachev, in the book we had to read for our classes at Leningrad State University, called "Novoe myshlenie," New Thinking. Glasnost', Perestroika, Demokratiia. Those were the catchwords of 1987. I've been revisiting those years lately for two reasons -- first, I'm teaching Soviet and post-Soviet literature and am trying to explain to my students what those years felt like and what it meant to have literature literally coming to life as the USSR headed to its demise. Secondly, my daughter is doing a graphic novel project for her 9th grade history class. She is supposed to do oral interviews with someone who experienced a big historical event -- and that someone is me. I was there as the Soviet Union began to unravel. I experienced lines and rationing and underground poetry readings that gr...