“Learn, girls, foreign languages!”

I will leave for a time that hard period of restoring English in my “clogged and atrophied from post-Soviet life brain” and return to the period of my happy student youth. I studied at the library faculty of the Kiev Institute of Culture from 1973–1977. I will try to pull from memory some interesting moments of my life then.

I did not “just so” title this part of the narrative in Ukrainian, because it can be called a quotation. I think in the last year we had such a subject in our specialty as “Bibliography of a foreign language.” The subject was taught by Lyubov Zavadskaya. …So it was precisely Zavadskaya who more than once stressed to us how important it is to study foreign languages. I think she was a very educated person (in youth I did not think much about this). Much later I came across the book “Myths of Ancient Greece” with a wonderful translation by Lyubov Zavadskaya into Ukrainian. And since I have remembered her now, I want to say that there were people in Soviet times who made no small contribution to the development of Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian language.

And all subjects at the Institute of Culture were taught in Ukrainian, except Russian and Soviet literature. I remember exactly the period of Russian Soviet literature was taught by Maria Ivanovna Chernushchenko. Marivanna was the kindest and “shukher-est” person in the world! Students’ lateness to lectures was strictly punished in the dean’s office. So, when Marivanna was the duty teacher in the morning, meeting late students, she did not make lists and did not report to the dean’s office, but only conspiratorially repeated “girls, girls, quickly, quickly to the auditoriums!” She wore a “high hairstyle,” which our girls nicknamed the Personal Nest!……. at this point I am crying with laughter, where does this brain of mine “remember everything”?!

It was obligatory to read several volumes of A. M. Gorky’s book “Klim Samgin.” Marivanna warned us at every lecture. I remember only that I did not even open that book. And Marivanna warned us that the work was difficult and long and by the exam it had to be read in good time. And when on someone’s desk, during a lecture, she noticed this book, she would come up, take it like a treasure and say with feeling: “There! Klim Samgin! Read Klim Samgin!”

I also remember the teacher of history of the Soviet period. Unfortunately only the nickname “Storm of the Revolution.” Why did we call her that? During her lecture she walked with a sweeping gait between the rows of our cramped auditorium, at the same time emotionally telling how the “storm” of “not one” revolution seized the whole country! And I also remembered her woman’s advice to all the students: “so then, girls, use the opportunity to go now to theatres, cinemas, museums! For such a time may come when you, at the end of the day, will not be able to remember ‘Did I wash my face today?’”