Posted by Josefina
Or maybe I wouldn’t call it a “note”, since it is just a few tiny bits of conversations that I’ve picked up from people around me. The longer I live in Russia, the more Russian people surprise me. I thought it would be the other way around. I thought that I would grow to understand Russia and Russians more and more the longer I lived here. That this country would seem comprehensible and sensible to me after a couple of years. But no. It is still surprising. And I was rather surprised when I arrived here. Not to say shocked. I was almost shocked, as a matter of fact, but I thought it would pass with time. I was wrong – the astonishment I feel toward this country and its people has continued and will, most likely, never come to an end.
Read More »
Posted by Josefina
Watching the evening news in Russia can be an adventure all in itself – try to imagine a 30 minute sum-up of what has happened on one sixth of our planet – and you will easily be fooled into thinking that there are mafia bosses in black Armani suits, starving orphans and bombs going off just around the block from your house. When I switch on the TV in the country where I have willingly spent the past three and a half years of my life, I tell myself: “I’m such a bad person; I deserve to be living in Russia.” In order to protect oneself from the reality of life in an illogical country of strange and mysterious chaos any given individual will sooner or later form a deep inner sense of indifference. It’s not just me – the Russian language is full of constructions from which it is obvious that there is a long tradition of not caring here, all the way from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.
The most polite way of saying that you don’t care is to say: мне всё равно, which literally translates into “it’s all the same to me”. And it is just as courteous to tell a fellow Ivan (Иван), or if you’re already Vanya (Ваня) with him doesn’t matter, that: мне нет дела до этого, which could roughly be interpreted into “to me this is no matter”, since дело means “matter, affair, business, deed, act, cause, or case”.
Read More »
)
I was just commenting on the fact that the term itself is a problematic one, in the context of what I said about Jews reading the Christian Bible. Sorry if I was unclear."
