Oh Kiev...

This blog is turning very hard-core Slavic... It's quite natural since I nowadays don't have much time for anything else. I visited Kiev during the last week together with a friend. Since going to Russia is such a hassle, and since a friend from Russia wanted to meet up in Kiev, we decided to go there for a couple of days. I fell quite in love with the city, which has an absolutely fantastic monastery area and a huge book market! I was hoping to find an OCS dictionary (preferably Старославянский Словарь by Цейтлин) but... no, it's Russian apparently and even though they had tons of other books related to OCS, the place wasn't exactly drowning in dictionaries. I did find one single (full) dictionary, but it was outside of my price range. I got myself several grammar books though, both in Russian and Ukrainian, several decorative items for my study (I may end up looking like I'm highly religious!) and an old book in old church Slavonic (that one wasn't expensive!). I'll leave you to the pictures.

This and the two following are photos from inside the Lavra, the monastery area in Kiev. This area was built by Yaroslav the Wise's sons in the 11th century and includes caves where monks lie "buried". The old man's tomb, however, is found in the Saint Sophia Cathedral (where, unfortunately, you aren't allowed to take photos).

Books bought at the book market at Petrovka metro station. My pile is the one to the left.

This one I bought in a store with... random old stuff! I don't really know how old it is, if it is really very old or not, but it wasn't expensive and it's fun to have something that feels authentic.

Part of my new interior decoration ;)

Potpurri.

This is a post about many things. First of all, I don't really feel I can write anything without saying something about the massacre that took place here recently. Everyone knows everything about it already, so I thought I would just mention the spontaneous march of roses that took place the day before yesterday. I think it is what most people would prefer to remember from this week, and it was truly impressive. Some guy started a Facebook event, encouraging people to join in a march in honor of the victims. When I signed up, the same day the event was started, we were 37,000. The next day at six, 150,000+ people showed up. Oslo has 500,000 inhabitants. Shops, even grocery stores, closed so that the staff could participate. Of course, there could be no march, because the entire city was jammed with people, so there was no space to actually march on. I don't know how long it took us to even get from the City Hall to the Cathedral (usually a five-minute walk or so), where a great collection of flowers had been started day before. When we got there, we had to spend perhaps 10 minutes trying to get to the front row in order to put our roses down (that someone had given to us at the City Hall since we did not have any of our own). People also had sunflowers, orchids, lilies - there were no more roses to be found in the city. Flowers were put everywhere around the city, on police cars, on statues, along the roadblocks put up around the bombed area, etc. You should really have a look at the pictures presented here ("A City of Love"), it's quite impressive. I wonder who's going to clean it up. Especially the sea of flowers at the cathedral makes me wonder (Check out no 25). I will just add one pictured here.


UPDATE: This is the link you really want to go to! 360 degrees panorama of the sea of roses in front of the Cathedral of Oslo (there's actually a trafficated road there!).

Now - other things.

Rita and Zhenja, the second generation of the series.

I finally finished И всё-таки я люблю. In the beginning, I thought this was going to be a cheerful, cute kind of series. How wrong one can be. If something sums this series up, it's "shit happens, life goes on and then you die". Somewhere around episode seven everything started going to hell, and continued to do so until episode 25, with some brief periods of hope in between. I always thought things would just fix themselves, but quite obviously Russia is not Hollywood, and things do not necessarily end happily. Still, I'm quite impressed with this series. The actors got better and better, the setting is extremely well done, and you really get drawn in, more so than by many other series I've seen and enjoyed. The story is very complex and so are the characters. A lot of them are frighteningly unsympathetic, and then all of sudden show some sort of humanity - and you start liking them. The main characters (on whose side you are) also have moments of... "weakness". In the first part, which deals with Vera, I actually started thinking about Justine (which I still haven't finished!). Again and again she is fooled into something, deceived by people she trusts, driving her deeper and deeper into misery. I'm really happy I'm finished with this series now, cause it was a bitch to watch and kept me up too late some evenings, but I'm also very glad I got to see it. I regained some respect for Russian TV and I got lots of listening practice. And I fell completely in love with Zhenja.

So how about Tadoku and old church Slavonic? Well, I haven't been reading a lot the last couple of days, and since finishing my last Russian book, I have somewhat lost motivation for the competition. After trying a couple of different books I am now finally reading Раковый Корпус (Solzhenitsyn). Most of all I want to read something in Norwegian or English, but I guess that has to wait a couple days. After seeing the new version of Jane Eyre yesterday (I really liked it!) I want to read some more Brontë, because there are actually a couple of books I haven't read yet. Staying Russian/German is veeeery difficult right now.

The reason I haven't been posting a lot is that I'm constantly busy working (I never seem to have time off, and when I do, I have to go somewhere or do something). More and more Russians have been coming to Oslo, meaning I get to speak more Russian at work, and when I get home I have to try to analyze some sentences for the university project. I'm really hoping I will benefit from it when I start my old church Slavonic class, because I don't really feel like I have any time to actually study the language now.


The second Russian book I read for the competition was Реки by Гришковец. It's more like novella, and it didn't take very long to read. I can't really say it has touched me greatly, even though it has some stylistic things I like. I was sometimes annoyed by the narrator's narrowmindedness, his failure to relate to things as long as they touched upon another reality than his. He did have some interesting remarks on identification and group mentality.



I've also been listening to some Russian music lately. I find Anna German very soothing and somehow uplifting.

Busy times ahead.

I promised Vera I would show some photos of my notes from my Slavic language history class. The exam is in a month, so I had better start learning all these rules. I'm not at all worried about the part where we have to read a text in old Slavic, but memorizing rules... not my favorite thing to do, unfortunately. Posting may become somewhat sparse here in the time to come since I have to write two more essays (one includes reading quite a lot), prepare for this exam and the translation exam, pass a smaller literature exam in eight days and somehow try to read some fiction. I have now missed two 1-book-a-week books :S

This is the most recent text I've been reading, on how Oleg took Kiev in 882. Doesn't it look pretty?

And happy news! I got my Bible from the Ukraine a couple days ago. Once again, I love eBay. When exams are over I'm going to have some fun with this one and the old church Slavonic textbook I read through.


I never post photos of my cats anymore. Let's change that.


Also, I kind of have a problem with Blogger. Every time I use the non-HTML version of the text editor, the text changes into some Indian script every time I press space. Anyone know why that is?

More on my new infatuation.

(No, it's not the iPad.)

As I mentioned earlier, I have had an iPad2 at my disposal during the last week. Since I am already the owner of a Kindle, I have always had some trouble imagining what I would use an iPad for. Halfway through the week, I realized what they were made for: reading language related PFDs. OF COURSE! The Kindle is no good for this; it can read PDFs, but the screen is too small and you have to flip it over, and each PDF page is then cut up into three Kindle pages. Not ideal when you are dealing with documents containing tables and pictures.

But just look at this...

Incidentally, in this photo you can glimpse a new cultural magazine that is being published in Norway. Yay! The country is not dead yet!

Now I'm sad about having to return this thing :-(

The document displayed on it is a new Old Church Slavonic tutorial that I found. It's meant for people who want to read prayers and such in OCS (cause it's heresy to translate these texts :P), but it seems very thorough and I am just reading through it right now, currently at page 70 or something like that. There are lots of exercises but I'm not doing them now, because it would only get me stuck somewhere and I would most likely not finish reading the actual text. It's a good book though, and the exercises look good, so I will try to do them later.

Delightfully sinister, don't you think?

In order to make preparing for exams somewhat less painful, I have also dug up my old bloc notes from France and done some fiches de révision. These things shouldn't be underestimated - provided you actually look at them after making them. And they kind of make me feel like an actual student again!



I would also like to go ahead and recommend a book that was recommended to me some years ago, К истокам слова.


This is a great book on etymology, for a non-specialized audience. Something that amazes me with many Russian nonfiction books is how easy they are to read. The authors actually go to the trouble of writing complete sentences and of not leaving out a lot of information, supposing you will get it yourself. I don't know how many of the examples presented in this book I will actually remember, but it's fun to read and you get a general picture of how words can be formed and change over time. I have only read half this book, but I hope to finish it before my Slavic language history exam ;)

Hiatus.

This blog has been somewhat silent recently. One could say I went on a holiday called "writing ridiculous amounts of essays". Soon I will go on another holiday called "start working full time and prepare for exams", while naturally neglecting all my languages.

The good news are that my class on Slavic language history got me interested in taking things a little bit further and learning Old Church Slavonic. In this class we are reading snippets in OCS, but I wouldn't say we are actually learning it. I thought it would be fun to do so, so I'm currently doing my best to get an overview of the verbal system. It feels incredibly weird to have different past tenses all of a sudden, and to have past tenses that change according to person and not just according to gender.

Luckily, it is quite easy to find material for Old Church Slavonic as long as you understand Russian. One of my teachers at University also provided me with some very useful links.

Old Church Slavonic dictionary, parts 1 2 3

The Laurentian Codex.

Different versions of Повесть временных лет.

Some English translations of the texts.

And a Russian/old church Slavonic bilingual version here.

Even though I have been very busy, I haven't missed one single book for the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge. I must say this was an excellent idea, and it doesn't matter that much that I may not be reading the longest books around... right now I'm halfway through Knut Hamsun's Sult (Hunger), which I'm enjoying very much. Unfortunately, the main character is something of a moron (I just can't stand people who cannot plan ahead) but it's brilliantly written. It's not the fastest thing I've ever read though, since the language is neither Norwegian, Danish or Swedish, but rather yet another variant of the three.

I thought I would say a couple words about the other books I have read so far.
Magda Szabó's The Deer - absolutely brilliant, just like The Door. Magic.

Maskeblomstfamilien by Lars Saabye Christensen - Also proves that there is a great amount of excellent literature in Norway. A very dark story about... gender I guess. There's even a Wikipedia page about this book, with the following description "The novel is about a troubled boy and his voyage to a total and certain downfall after his father dies young, and his mother consequently becomes mentally ill. The book is written in the author's highly poetic style, and is distinctive in its enigmatic issues and obscure messages."

Ирина Муравьёва's Любовь Фрау Клейст - GAAH. The only reason I actually finished this book was that it was in Russian, and if it hadn't been in Russian, I think I would've thrown against the wall a long time ago. The language kind of put up a barrier between me and the poor prose. Simply a very unbelievable story, written in what I suppose is supposed to be an innovative manner. It's not innovative, it's stupid and messy. And almost nothing that happens in the book is even slightly believable. I'm losing faith in modern Russian literature. Seriously.
La fête interdite by André-Marcel Adamek - This had so much potential! And by saying that, I think I've said it all. I love Carnival stories, stories about freaks, stories about this kind of environment with small mountain villages (which very much made me think of Le Roi Sans Divertissement by Jean Giono), but it took the author more than half the book to get it started. Only then did I actually get involved. Such a shame.

Sofi Oksanen's Stalin's Cows - Now... why is it Purge that gets all the attention when this book is so much better? I wasn't actually sure I wanted to read another Oksanen book straightaway since the first one I read was quite... heavy. Then I found this book on sale (a classic, I know) and started reading it immediately since I think I may be able to use it in one of my never-ending essays. And it's brilliant. It should be read.

Other than that I could just continue with my old habit of posting a picture of my recently purchased books। Six books for something like €12. Exactly, you can't say no. And how freakishly appropriate isn't the Deforges book?