Posted by Josefina
I suppose everyone already knows which country is the biggest in the world – Россия. But that’s the kind of second-hand knowledge one acquires from studying a map of the world. If you’re actually in Russia, and not on a train or on a plane traveling through it, but walking around in a big Russian city, you won’t believe that this country has the amount of space it (allegedly) has, because everywhere you go here it’s cramped or crowded. The Russian equivivalent of the English expression “It’s a small world” is «Мир тесен» [The world is very crowded/cramped], and uses the adjective «тесный» which translates into ‘crowded, cramped; tight, compact, close; fig. close, intimate; tight’. Surely, for the people of the world’s biggest country, the rest of the world might seem “cramped”, but then again – where else in the world were families forced to live in one room for the better part of the 20th century? Flipping through «Русский репортёр» this Saturday morning, as always thoroughly enjoying a new issue of the weekly magazine with the slogan «вдумчивое чтение для интеллигентного среднего класса» [thoughtful reading for the intellectual middle class] I came across the following article: «Мечта о миллионах домов: Первый указ Медведева хорош, но трудновыполним» [A dream about a million houses: The first decree of Medvedev is good, but hard to fulfill]. Though while walking through any city of Russia you’ll get the idea that they’re building as much as possible here, wherever and whenever feasible, the truth remains a bleak one: they’re building far from enough. And what they’re building is not what is needed the most, but what generates the most money – luxury apartments that the avarege Ivan can’t afford even with risking everything on a loan or high-end fashion malls where the average Tatiana can only dream of shopping. The larger part of the population can’t afford even a half-decent place to live. Today I was very happy to see the new president concerned with this very same problem, that has bothered me for quite some time now, too bad the cautious journalist who wrote the article is realistic enough not to get as optimistic as me and Димочка.
Looks spacious enough, now doesn’t it?
Read More »
Posted by Josefina
«То, чему мы учим, полезно каждому мужчине: Тренинг по соблазнению» [That, which we teach, is useful for every man: Training in seduction].
Today I woke up to find hundreds of posters just like this one taped up on the walls inside of the dormitory building where I live. Though the service adverticed by Tomas Life Coaching is clearly not directed at me (it is actually rather unclear as to whom it is directed, but I guess we shouldn’t get further into that) it caught my attention nevertheless. How? And why? The answer is simple – it’s attention-grabbing employing of three dative compositions in one tiny sentence. This awoke an old dream of mine to write a post about the six loveble cases of Russian language, and try to sort things out as much as possible (because there’s always some serious sorting out needed when it comes to the Russian cases, no matter if you’ve studied it for ten years or ten weeks). Let’s take the sentence above and work on it for a while like an example of ‘sorting out’: first up we’ve got the verb «учить» which when paired with a noun in dative form means “to teach” [«я учу тебя русскому языку» = I teach you Russian], but when paired with one in accusative form “to study, to learn” [«я учу русский язык» = I study Russian]. Next up is an impersonal construction using an adverb predicatively, in this case «полезно» (useful, healthy, good), which next to a noun in dative forms tells something about this noun, rather than the other way around [«ему полезно есть кашу по утрам» = it is healthy for him to eat porridge in the mornings]. The last so called (in my vocabulary) ‘dative composition’, includes the brand new word of «тренинг» (taken straight from the English word “training” and plainly Russified to fit the Russian language), and pairs it with the «предлог» [preposition] «по», which can be paired both with dative and accusative. What we’re focusing on in this case is, of course, what it means when with a noun in dative. «Тренинг по соблазнению» (do note that no stress falls on the preposition in this expression), is grammatically speaking the same as «тренинг по боксу» [training in boxing, box training] or «тренинг по плаванию» [training in swimming, swim training]. In this context the preposition in need of dative can be translated as “on (in the field of)”.
Read More »
Posted by Josefina
«(Только правдивые) Легенды и мифы о Путине»
The day after Victory Day I went to a local grocery store in my neighborhood where I saw this magazine with a cover picture from which I could simply not tear my eyes. It must have been the combination of buff arms with a hat on a gorgeous horse and that carefree facial expression that did me in – I never buy tabloids in any country, let alone in Russia (did they defeat the dictatorship of the proletariat so as to read brainless gossip and look at paparazzi pictures of the rich and famous half-naked on the beach?), but this time I forked up the 20 rubles because I couldn’t wait to gorge myself in useless information about the elite in Moscow, including everyone’s favorite Vovochka. I don’t know how it was back at the beginning of his ‘reign’, but it must have seemed very unlikely in 2000 to imagine the then new president Vladimir Vladimirovich in eight years time turning into – like it or not, but that’s what it looks like – a sex symbol. Back in November last year I did a review of magazines to read while in Russia, but for some reason I left out all of the tabloids, each and every one of them, though in Russia, like in any other country embracing Western cultural standards, tabloids outsell almost all other printed materials. This article was found in a magazine that proudly calls itself StarHit in English and translates that into Cyrillic on the main page as «СтарХит». Since it lacks an official website of any sort, I am forced to share the article with you here in pictures [one day I swear I’ll get a scanner and go crazy, but until then…], and with the first paragraph translated into English, so as to give you a general idea of the journalistic value to be found within it’s plenty flattering pictures of the ex-leader.
Read More »
Posted by Josefina
Since it is not yet the 9th of May, but still only the 8th, I’ll be the first one to say “Поздравляю Вас с днём победы!” [I congratule you with Victory Day!]. The day will be celebrated tomorrow in all of Russia with everyone getting the day off so as to be able to enjoy the spring sun with a beer in a park and watching the occasional military parade on Red Square. If you want to take a sneak peak already now of what it’s going to look like tomorrow in Moscow, I advice to check out EnglishRussia and these pictures The Parade Reharsal. It’s the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union that Victory Day will be celebrated with military tanks inside the Kremlin. Is this good or bad? I don’t know, all I know that it seems to be lacking of logic to celebrated the end of one war by showing off what kind of stuff you could pull out in case of another.
Every town in all of Russia, big city as well as tiny village, are decorated with signs such as this one everywhere weeks in advance. But the preparation for Victory Day May 9th goes even further than that - the country also gets a good, general cleaning of streets and buildings and that makes the day special for two reasons.
Posted by Josefina
Or, more correctly speaking, not we, and least of all I [being a legal alien with a mere «прописка» allowing for my stay in the country], but the Russian Federation has a new president. The bombastic inauguration ceremony was broadcasted live on TV from the heart of the Motherland, from the inner center of the Holy Capitol of Moscow, at noon (Moscow Time, of course), and contained very few surprises. It was disappointing to see both Владимир Владимирович Путин and Дмитрий Анатольевич Медведев driving through (empty!) streets up to the Kremlin in a black Mercedez each – is neither the new nor the old president patriotic enough to forgo comfort and safety in order to turn to the native car of Volga? Putin gave a stern farewell speech, being a master of stern speeches, and Medvedev happened to smile a tiny little bit while inspecting the armed forces at the end of the ceremony. Despite the presence of the patriarch at the ceremony, the new president was not blessed by him after saying his «присяга» [oath] and giving a confident speech full of expectancy, though I suppose there was no need for a second blessing (a second baptism is, after all, a sin also in the Orthodox Church) as he was already blessed by the patriarch last fall after Putin announced he was to be his heir, oh, sorry – successor.
The last frame from the ceremony kind of reminded me of…
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."
