Goodbye megapolis and hello summer cottage!

This is the usual Friday dilemma of what I love more – the cool air-conditioned rooms of the city with the scent of cappuccino and intellectual conversations, or that kind of universal silence when you are alone in the evening with the stars to the sound of radio waves, and the brilliance of sunny lawns the next morning.

Every Friday evening I think with horror why we need this summer cottage and why go there, but on Sunday evening I am tormented by the question of how to make sure that I do not leave the country house, and I do not believe that some time after arrival I will again adapt to Moscow and I will forget about the dacha as a kind of some nightmare. During my stay at the dacha, I merge in such ecstasy with the inviolability of nature and with the quiet simple rules of life in an old log house that those intervals of time when for some reason I’m not there seem to be some kind of annoying and unforgivable mistake.

From the car window I see all these pictures, imbued with golden sunset light, so reminiscent of all the highways of our our European travels.
Here I am in the country.
As usual every step on the floor, every sound of a slammed door is thundering in all the house.
Unlike the times of my childhood, nowadays in the air you can sometimes hear the bell ringing of the restored old church, which inevitably immerses you in the timeless reality of a Russian village or county town.
Sometimes, through the thickness of air, one can hear the noise of a speeding bullet train in the Riga direction with cute neat white curtains with a blue pattern, which we sometimes watched while standing on the platform waiting for our regional train.

The slow soaring of the elastic brace head of a badminton shuttlecock against a dizzying picture of a bright blue sky with the outlines of pines is the eternal magic of this game. This is no less an eye-catcher picture than, for example, the intense search for mushroom caps hiding against the background of forest soil dotted with needles or covered with moss, search that is still continuing even after you close your eyes for the night.
The presence or absence of wind, with unpredictable frequency creating air currents is an uncontrollable factor, which may be so necessary if you are going to go on a field to start a kite, but at the same time it may create certain difficulties when you are trying on to hit the shuttlecock.

Late at night, the frogs’ croaking from the swamp was heard especially clearly in the quiet air … As a child, I was friends with a girl who knew everything about frogs, since her summer cottage was located near the pond in the outskirts. We built sandy cities together with her, and then we put frogs there, watching how they would try to find their way from these labyrinths to the pond so dear to their hearts, and in the process we were creating more and more new additional obstacles in their path. Preciously decorated dragonflies swirled over the pond, the contemplation of the flight path of which could drive one crazy, and I also opened up the world of water striders jumping on the pond surface …

In the forest, my young mentor told me the secret of the edibility of the friendly looking light green shamrocks of oxalis stricta, and from that time on I used to recognize happily these leaves as my good friends, from time to time checking them to taste to make sure that they were still all the same delightfully sour. And the sour forest strawberry was a degenerated wild brother of the garden strawberry.

I still remember the year when we once went to the forest for mushrooms and practically didn’t find them – our mushroom buddies always protected sacredly the secrets of the forest mycelium location – but as a consolation we managed to gather a lot of forest nuts, covered with a not yet hardened light green shell, which, after lying down for some time on the floor, turned into a hazelnut so familiar to us, which are sold in the vegetable departments of food stores ….. Needless to say, that all the following years, when we went to the forest for nuts, nut bushes disappointed us with their absolute and hopeless futility.

This forest surroundiing our summer cottage became for me a kind of the archetypal concept of “forest” in general and concealed in itself many secrets and even fears, the embodiment of which was, for example, the story “The Pantry of the Sun” by Mikhail Prishvin, in which the boy was almost dragged to the bottom by insidious quagmire of a forest swamp.

And what is the smell of freshly cut grass, invigorating the nostrils! Actually, the whole history of our long-term existence in the country side is a struggle with too quickly growing grass and a struggle for the availability of water.

Feeling touched by all descriptions of the garden, overgrown with weeds, ever read by me – the idiomatic expression “everything was overgrown by the past” was on the tip of my tongue – I found myself following obediently the recently read instruction from Voltaire’s “Candide” – “one need to cultivate his garden” … But then I felt my hands were apparently irrigated with a layer of sweat interspersed with the juice of overgrown weeds, and this, so to speak, “infernal mixture” attracted unkindly buzzing insects.

The habit of walks along the country side with admiration of the views revealed and examining at the plants along the way – this is a good and long-standing tradition of summer holidays. Marcel Proust devoted many pages of his book “Towards Swann” to describing such a pastime, and even this name of the book comes from such kind of walks.

Closing my eyelids before falling asleep, I trustfully surrender myself to the welcoming darkness of a room with a window opened to meet the freshness of the night air, shadows of foliage from the garden and echoes of distant trains, with tightly drawn curtains, which, I am sure, will save me from the annoying sunbeams of the coming morning …

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Russian summer merry war game

The space is lurking somewhere around being imbued with the presence of the enemy, that is with something, that turns into an indefinite, infinitely hostile and dangerous atmosphere, revealing itself only at the moment when, reveling in its observational ingenuity, it opens fire, and takes on a personified appearance from time to time in a form of those faceless camouflage figures which are moving in short runs from one shelter to another or are sticking out the barrel of a rattling rifle from their temporary refuge, trying not to stick their heads out.
With rapture and confidence, as if you have already done this dozens of times, you are inhaling the adrenaline dissolved in the air, when, feeling a keen sense of danger pounding in your temples, you are runnimg up the stairs to the second floor of a wooden building, without receiving a single shot from the enemy, who probably have been waiting for you for a long time, prudently lying in ambush and keeping the place of lifting at gunpoint. And then in such a happy symbiosis between your legs and head, when neither of them slows down the other, you are moving in short runs from one inner corner of the building to another, keeping in your mind the way the perspective is changing and from what points of the suddenly opened space you may unexpectedly meet a stone-cold gunfire directed at you. At the very moment when the player in you is turning the next corner, the space is revealing a kind of mystery of the perspective to you, and while quickly grasping intuitively this secret of each next fragment of topography unfolding in front of you, you are outlining the safest places from the shelling point of view, while the most promising points for observing and setting future targets are the most vulnerable at the same time.
Oh, but why can’t the space at this moment, at your desire, bend and, exactly from your side, get out of control of the laws of physics, sending the enemy’s killing balls somewhere deliberately past the target?
Your ears should remain sensitive enough all the time to pick up the sound of someone else’s creeping steps, since after another careful glancing for the corner you can find there the similar figure as yourself, that will retreat instantly behind the shelter of the previous corner and rattle with his rifle threateningly to you, and then, suppressing in a hurry the overwhelming feeling of superiority since you will read this semblance of your own reflection like an open book, you will do all the same, directing your own killing balls to his arm with a rifle sticked out, bringing you death and disappearance.

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Features of Russian national tourism

Perhaps, I will again change the topic of today’s post a little, and write not about adventure books, but about tourism.
Of course, I love to travel like most of you. But now I’d like rather to dwell on the fact that for me, as well as for many other Russians, tourism is generally something more than just staying in a hotel, swimming in the pool and the evening opportunity to have fun at discos.
In Russian culture, and more percisely – in the Russian verbal space, there is such a well-known phrase (we would nowadays call it something like “meme”): “A poet in Russia is more than a poet”. These words were said by our poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (who lived and lectured his last years in Tulsa, Oklahoma), who was continuing with this phrase the Russian tradition of reasoning about the proper place of a poet in society – for example, the Russian classical writer Nikolai Nekrasov discussed this in his poem “Citizen and Poet”. And now I will paraphrase this statement of Yevtushenko and say this way: “Tourism in Russia is more than tourism.”
Several months ago, I re-read Orhan Pamuk’s “Black Book”, and while learning the details of the life of Turkish inhabitants of the middle of the 20th century, I discovered a lot in common with the life of the Soviet people of the same period. For many years, we, the Soviet people, lived with the feeling that all the most interesting was happening somewhere out there, behind the border of our tremendous country, and we lived in a kind of backyard of civilization. Judge for yourself: Soviet people understood that the furniture of domestic production was not so fashionable, and the plumbing was not so modern as abroad, and there were much fewer types of sausages in the grocery store, and only those pop stars used to come on tour to Russia whose popularity had long been on the decline, and censorship in our country was raging, meticulously inspecting too bold masterpieces of western cinema and literature.
When, finally, the Iron Curtain was destroyed in 1991, the Russian tourists flooded overseas countries, which we learned before only from books and from films about the “sweet life” of the local bohemia, in which we, for example, might see some offspring of a rich family or a stylish beauty sipping casually some next drink from a fashionable glass on the edge of the pool, with a boring look talking about something very different from the values ​​of the era of developed socialism …

At this very point, I will take this opportunity to post my own photo by the pool, taken in Turkey:)

But still, in order to fully understand the driving force of Russian tourism, you need to take into account another point. In Russia, for example, some architectural styles are missing that are widely represented on the streets of European cities. And, perhaps, even in the most ancient cities of Russia there are no streets associated with such an ancient, and most importantly, with such famous and popular historical facts as there are in Europe.. And well educated Russians are very susceptible to this interest in history.
Here is what one of the heroes of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Teenager” novel, published in 1875, says about this (in this case, I will not dwell on the fact that the hero eloquently contrasts Russia, full of spirituality and suffering for the whole world, and frivolous Europe, leaning into atheism):
“For a Russian, Europe is as precious as Russia: every stone in it is dear. Europe was our fatherland just like Russia. Oh, even more! It is impossible to love Russia more than I love her, but I have never reproached myself for the fact that Venice, Rome, Paris, the treasures of their sciences and arts, their whole history is dearer to me than Russia. Oh, these old strange stones, these miracles of the old world of God, these fragments of holy miracles are so dear to the Russians; and this is even dearer to us than to themselves! They now have other thoughts and other feelings, and they stopped cherishing old stones … “

Perhaps, Russian tourists have a special inclination to visiting Italy with its majestic cities filled with history. And all this fascination, this kind of pleasant intoxication may even not be completely understandable to the locals, who are simply parasitizing the tourism … What I suggest you see in this seven-minute fragment of a Russian-Italian film from 1993 …
If you are lucky enough to know Russian or Italian, then you can even make out what exactly the characters are talking about in this fragment. 🙂 Well, otherwise, you can just enjoy the beautiful views of Venice and let your imagination run wild. 🙂

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