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Published: July 22nd 2013
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Patrice Lumumba Street I’ve studied Russian for the past 3 years, taking lessons at the St. Petersburg State Forestry Academy, where I found inexpensive classes and a Soviet-style institution. My teacher for most of my time there was Galina Aleksandrovna. I had assumed that she was middle-aged but looked older; it turned out that she is way past pensionable age – about 75 – but continues working as she enjoys it. We got on well most of the time; I overlooked the archaic textbooks and old-fashioned teaching style in favour of the cultural experience, intelligent conversation, small groups (I was often the only student) and Galina Aleksandrovna’s fascinating anecdotes. In the midst of one discussion she absentmindedly started a sentence with ‘Here in the Soviet Union…’. I felt as though a dream had come true.
Before I left Russia I wanted to pass an exam to have something to show for the many hours I’ve invested in learning Russian. Several months ago I passed the second certificate level (the exam that foreign students have to pass before entering a Russian university) without too much problem, so I decided to try for the third certificate. For this quite tricky exam I decided to take
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Jetty on the Volga some individual lessons with a more modern teacher. We got on well; I made a good impression and after a month or so of quite intensive study I got an excellent mark in the exam. Although she’s younger than me, I still can’t bring myself to call Olga Vladimirovna by any other name. In one of my last lessons I described the road trip I was planning to take and Olga Vladimirovna invited me to stay in Kazan, where her parents live and she often spends her summers.
Kazan is the capital of the Tartar Republic, another ‘semi-autonomous’ republic, though with a more distinctive (Islamic) local culture, a stronger economy (thanks to oil and agriculture) and a more active language than Chuvashia. Recently it’s received a lot of attention (and investment) due to hosting the 2013 Universiade, an Olympic games for young people.
Olga Vladimirovna kindly put me up in a friend’s flat. When I arrived on Patrice Lumumba street yesterday I felt I was really in the Russian provinces. The building looked like it’d been put together in a hurry in the 1960s. We climbed the stairs to the 5
th floor (no lift), passing the wooden chests
on each landing where residents store potatoes for the winter. The flat itself had the same furniture and fittings as so many other flats I’ve visited in Russia, so it felt familiar. Being summer, there was no hot water.
Just as the flat had a hint of the absurd, so did my company. Olga Vladimirovna and her Tartar friend Nadia looked after me very well, showing me the town and the many recent improvements (such as a new metro system) made for the recent Universiade. These two women, both younger than me, joyfully took on the task (admittedly to my enjoyment) of mocking my every gesture, making fun of everything about me from my accent to my shoes and referring to me as
Angliskiy Lord. Russian women have a special way of infantilizing men, taking charge of anything domestic and treating their husbands (or any other men) as though they were invalids. Anyway, I didn’t protest and we had a fun couple of days.
Yesterday we took a day trip to the island of Sviyazhsk, a gentle boat trip up the Volga. Passengers singing in Tartar and faded wooden buildings made the trip feel a little
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Church on Sviyazhsk Island like time travel. The island has some historical significance which I can’t remember, but the sights were disappointing. We walked around for a couple of hours then settled to discussing language teaching methodology while we waited for the return boat. Actually, the most dramatic thing to happen was that on the way there in the morning a woman had some sort of seizure, fell on the deck and broke her nose. Her boyfriend and I helped to stem the bleeding, prevent any more injury and bring her back to consciousness, lying in a surprisingly wide pool of blood on the deck. Touchingly, he came to the dock before the return boat left to find me and thank me. Of course, Olga Vladimirovna made fun of me, telling me again I had a ‘batman complex’. The evening was warm and we had a barbecue on the beach, except that the beach was a sand quarry in an industrial zone next to the river. As we sat on the sand eating slightly charred meat in semi-darkness, watching the barges come and go and discussing literature as though it were all a perfectly natural combination, I felt the pleasurable sensation of incongruity that draws me to Russia.
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