RBTH on Literature: Russian Bookshelf

I chop the onions and nod: the old ladies know better whether it’s time. What can you say to them? They’re strict. Who am I against them?...

It was the autumn of 1993. I ran out of the house to the barricades. Here there were poor people, and others not so poor, and the only slogan that everyone took up readily was: “The Soviet Union!”

I can’t remember how I ended up in the orphanage right before the war. My Godfather uncle Janek took me there. Or perhaps I was taken away from him. I don’t remember how the war began either. I remember that all of us little mites, as the adults called us, suddenly started playing at war.

The office was noisy with the snapping of typewriters and smelled of perfume, new parquet floors and, for some reason, of plums. The owner of the magazines was having a hasty cup of tea behind a half-open door with the sign “Department of Culture”...

I wish you were here, dear, I wish you were here. I wish you sat on the sofa and I sat near. the handkerchief could be yours, the tear could be mine, chin-bound. Though it could be, of course, the other way around.

In the Research Facility of... but it is better not to say which one. A quarter of a century ago this institution was top secret, and it can still easily make a lot of trouble for someone even in today’s free climate when we no longer have any technological secrets whatsoever and when, even if the government did decide to classify something as secret, no-one would be the least bit interested in it anyway. So, in a certain research facility, a Soviet woman worked as a draughtswoman and her name was Viktorina Tractor-Boots...

This year I was forty years. So, it appears that forty times I saw a Christmas tree. That's a lot! Well, the first three years of life I probably did not realize what a tree. I guess, my mother took out on the handles...

I was hitchhiking from point A to point B through the undetermined vastness of our boundless land, not alone but with the contemplated lad...

In the St. George Hall of the Great Kremlin Palace way back in the 1970s (those were the days) she had received a prestigious award from dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev himself along with one of the lingering kisses that were his trademark...

Have you ever travelled in an overcrowded bus? Rammed up against the window with your cheek squashed against the glass and the handrail bruising your ribs? No need to answer. Of course you have...

A healthy adolescence: football in the yard, picture books about pirates, puerile mucking about between lessons and the constant itch to get under a girl’s skirt and at her knickers – try and remember where exactly on this latter voyage of discovery my odyssey began...