Russia

In this chapter I shall have to “return” to the barracks, because from there comes the beginning of my musical life. I was about 5 when my parents, and also Grandmother and Grandfather who lived in the Moscow region and relatives in Moscow, applying incredible efforts, bought a piano and sent it to Kiev. I remember well how I met, by the barracks, a truck in whose body stood an enormous wooden crate…. Can I now describe what I felt then? Joy, excitement, happiness, shock?! ...

Still, why did I end up in the kitchen? Most likely because in the room the place of honour was occupied by my beloved piano — the most valuable possession of our family! I think, by the chronology of events, this was the second valuable, naturally scarce, acquisition still when we lived in the officers’ barracks. “First place” among valuable acquisitions was occupied by a carpet! Mama called it Festival, since it was bought in 1957 in Moscow after the first Moscow International Festival of Youth and Students. ...

With what incredible force they pull me into that “happy far-off.” Of course happy! There was nothing to compare with, only with that barracks in which my early childhood passed. How was I to know that somewhere someone nearby lived better than we. And yet there were such people! Next to our plant house there were also “departmental,” as they were then called, houses of the Council of Ministers and the Central Committee of the Communist Party. With improved layout: dining room, bedroom, children’s room… And I knew only “my kitchen, which only at night turned into my personal room.” ...

I talked today with my institute girlfriend. I say: “Come on, remember how we studied there at our cultural institute? Do you remember Elena Semyonovna Pozina?” — “She is unforgettable!” answered my friend. “She always had beautifully coloured lips, she wore a green suit, I remember I answered poorly at her exam and Elena Semyonovna said that it was precisely this material she had explained sequentially, and you, unfortunately, ‘did not listen, but only looked at me.’” Well, Elena Semyonovna was right, if my friend to this day remembers what colour her suit and lipstick were! ...

Every time, beginning to write a new chapter, I have to invent a heading. And that is hard for me. Well, all right. How right our Storm of the Revolution was, having said such words about a woman’s lot, which in the future could befall most of us! I remembered our class lady-curator Nadezhda Ivanovna. Of course, “Baba Nadya”! She spoke German perfectly, I think from the time of military operations, but she had a very simple appearance, for which she got a simple nickname. Once our group decided to organise an evening meeting with cadets of KVIRTU in an institute auditorium. ...

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. ...