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Speak, Nabokov
By James Marson
Nina Khrushcheva's new book urges Russians to learn from the West by reading Nabokov. James Marson reports."
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Modern Art on Tour
By Marina Kamenev
French art collector Pierre Brochet is taking his exhibition around Russia to show audiences the works and to teach them about collecting..
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Modern City Collage
By John Freedman
"Little Russian Songs" is an intriguing puzzle of images and sounds describing contemporary Moscow.
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Image
By Marina Kamenev
A retrospective of Dmitry Prigov's work will open at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.
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Wanted
By Kevin O'Flynn
This pyramid is useful in solving the problem of disposing radioactive and dangerous chemical and biological waste.
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Salon
By Victor Sonkin
Older bloggers provide the missing details from daily Soviet life.
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In The Spotlight
By Anna Malpas
Luckily, there's always room in the traffic police for an emotionally disturbed, trigger-happy loner with a grudge.
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Salon
Older bloggers provide the missing details from daily Soviet life.
By Victor Sonkin
Published: May 8, 2008
For most Russians, blogging is synonymous with LiveJournal.com. And for many people, blogs today are the most convenient form of mass media, a place where they can receive (and create) all kinds of new content.
The sub genre of literature blogs seem especially interesting. One blog consists of short memoirs of not very distant times, which are now becoming increasingly "retro." Before reading the website I thought that most mundane details of everyday life escaped attention, were forgotten and eventually lost. How, for example, did one pay the fare for a Moscow streetcar in 1979?
Today the most intricate details of daily life are recorded, by technology but before it was very difficult. Nobody thought that these mundane quirks were worthy of attention, nobody thought that future moviemakers and historians would be interested. As a result, the same blogging community now swarms with very young people who sincerely think that the three-hour lines for chicken or sausage in the 1980's is an anti-Soviet myth.
A handful of middle-aged LiveJournal users combat this injustice by writing short stories about life as it was two or three decades ago. The user Inphuzoria, for example, writes about her youth in Leningrad, about the famous Saigon CafÎ, where the Bohemians of the late Khrushchev era loved to congregate -- and about other, less known places which have since disappeared (there's a McDonald's on the spot where another cult Leningrad cafeteria used to be).
The user Clear-Text is a legend in his own right. His real name is Denis Dragunsky, and he is the son of Viktor Dragunsky, the famous children's author and the eponymous hero of the latter's Deniska's Stories. A published author and journalist, Dragunsky, writes short memoirs on his LiveJournal blog. They are sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious and sometimes tinged with sweet nostalgia.
One of these is a story about a Leningrad taxi driver who drives a typical Georgian around the city for two hours, hoping to milk the rich but na've stranger, but the Georgian gives him the minimum fare, saying with a smile "I've lived in Leningrad for 30 years and never even saw such side streets!"
This is, perhaps, all that the past decades will yield: a collection of anecdotes on the Internet, a love letter, a chance picture from a family album. Better than nothing, though.
Copyright © 2008 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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May 8 - 15, 2008 
