The intimate diary of a Russian woman
The intimate diary of a Russian woman
Table of Contents
Moscow-Munich-Moscow or My First Trip to the West as a Free Person
Divorce
Come, Guests, to My Party ,
Who Are the Real Feminists?
A Job’s a Job
Let’s Sit Down, Friends, Before a Long Voyage
More Miscellany
On the Kaluga Wave
Every Psycho Has a Program
To America, to America!
Epilogue
The intimate diary of a Russian woman
Elena Sukhorukikh Romine
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THE
I N T I M H T E
□ I R R Y □
R U
5 I R N W O M R N
, t
Translated by Antonina W. Bouis
With the advent of glasnost, the opportunities for new freedoms have been opened to the people of the former Soviet Union, but the economic crisis of their country has curbed access to a new life by placing strict limitations of its own. In The Intimate Diary of a Russian Woman , educated, middle-class Elena Romine exposes, through the details of her daily life, the problems, frustrations, and hopes of the everyday that wear down the Russian people, morally and physically. The year is 1988 and Elena writes candidly of her achievements and failures, her family, her lost sense of purpose, her joys, her love life, her work, her travels, and her friends. She struggles between the promise of a life in the West, which she experienced on a trip to Munich, and her deep nationalism and sense of family, which bind her to her homeland. Written with pain and a soft, bitter humor, Elena gives tribute to her generation of Russians and their emotional struggles in a time that may now seem only to have changed for the worse.
BOSTON
PUBLIC
LIBRARY
THE
INTIMATE DIARY OF A RUSSIAN WOMAN
Dedicated to my parents and to my husband, Joe
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/intimatediaryofrOOromi
Foreword
Everything in this diary is true, but it is the truth as seen through my eyes. Some facts from my life and the lives of my friends and acquaintances have been combined or shifted in time out of ethical considerations. Many names have been changed. The one episode that is related with complete documentary accuracy is the meeting with Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov.
My diary would not have appeared without the friends with whom we were fortunate to have lived until we could write about our lives openly. I am sorry that my father did not live to see it happen.
I want to thank all those who helped and supported the creation of this book: my husband, Joe, Della van Heyst, Yuri Sorokin, and Robert Baensch.
Contents
/ » •
FOREWORD 7
1. Something Confused, but Which I Find
Interesting 13
2. Moscow-Munich-Moscow, or My First Trip
to the West as a Free Person 26
3. Divorce 38
4. Come, Guests, to My Party 53
5. Who Are the Real Feminists? 75
6. A Job’s a Job 98
7. Let’s Sit Down, Friends, Before a Long Voyage 121
8. More Miscellany 146
9. On the Kaluga Wave 170
10. Every Psycho Has a Program 193
11. To America, to America 214
236
EPILOGUE
THE
INTIMATE DIARY OF A RUSSIAN WOMAN
Something Confused, but Which I Find Interesting
JUNE 1, 1 988 . The desired but inaccessible Munich and the provincial Kaluga, now in the past. Two different worlds, connected in a real way by my life. Now, as I sit in the kitchen of my Moscow apartment, I could get a phone call both from Kaluga or from Munich, although Munich is more likely.
Kaluga—my childhood at my grandparents’ house—represents the time connecting me to the past, a time dear to my father. Now my father is gone, and I am the only one who would want to or, for that matter, be able to write about it.
That past is inseparable from me. I feel its presence always, that special sensation of objects, smells, light, and shadow—that is, the things that are hard to describe. But I will try nevertheless.
In my lifetime I’ve had several apartments, but none can compare with Kaluga. The other apartments didn’t have hidden corners, special odors, or a clutter of old things that lived their own lives. I don’t even remember how the furniture was placed in the later apartments. But I don’t need any effort to recall the Kaluga apartment; I could walk through it with my eyes shut.
The magic of that house began far outside its big, heavy gates. The name of the street—Pushkinskaya—spoke with its soft sounds of another century, which was recollected on every
intersection of Kaluga. The house did not sit at the corner; it was set back from it near Store No. 6, a completely modern store since its shelves were almost always bare. The building “stretched out” to the city park and the Suburban Garden. The long street, which changed its name several times, led to three memorable spots: the city park, the Stone Bridge, and the ravine. The windows of my great-grandfather’s study opened onto the park. He was chief of the Kaluga section of the railroad. Those windows were like an ellipsis at the beginning of Grandfather’s stories about his travels with his father in a separate railroad car that was like an apartment. You could come back to our building across the Stone Bridge. It spanned a large ravine, which, I believe, held a chapel over a sacred spring. People said that the ravine was dangerous, that robbers capable of murder hid in the thick bushes, but I was attracted by it. I wanted to look down into the bushes despite the danger.
The road was uneven—with hills and bumps. On one rise stood a private house with large wrought-iron lampposts at the entrance, a nobleman’s house. Fate had turned it into a regional studies museum. Farther down, three streets met. One led to our house, another looped around sharply down to the Oka River, and the third ended at St. George’s Church, where we all had been baptized and which we attended on holidays. Around the corner from the church was the house where my grandfather had been born, a house that reminded him of his mother’s early death and of his capricious and egotistical stepmother. It was called the Goncharov house by St. George’s. Apparently its original owners were the Goncharovs.