/lit/ - Literature

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Anonymous Mon May 2 10:24:31 2022 No.20311063 [Reply] [Original]

When I was a teenager living in a deprived part of rural Russia, a friend and I decided to start our own gentleman's club. Not from scratch, we were given a two story dacha by a departing resident, on condition we clean and take care of it, but without any money we wanted to turn it into a kind of classy, English style hideaway, doubtlessly influenced by the adventure books we were reading.
It was tastefully built: old wood, traditional decoration with a Russian stove in the middle as well as various ‘borrowed’, and as we thought, tasteful, furniture from the abandoned villages next door. Over the next few month’s we had hulled so many bookshelves and chairs and even one time a couch, that people noticed and, in good humor, begun donating to our little project.

What we didn't have was books. There was no library, except, we were told, in the next town over. Ones a steelworks, long closed and the neighborhood so dilapidated ,with only two tower blocks receiving heat and electricity, that we didn’t expect to find anything, but went anyway, and ,shock of all socks, the rumors turned out to be true. In the palace of culture, while someone had bothered to steal the wooden furniture and rip out all the copper wires, the old books had been left, crumbling and dusty, but untouched. We took multiple boxes worth of Russian classics and soviet translations of approved literature and now had what was beginning look reasonably like a study.

Here I read through the entirety of Russian translated Wodehouse, Kipling, Hemingway and Lawrence Durrell. Later I read Hesse and thought how he was the only writer who understood poor, poor 15 yearold me. I tried learning Italian and later French and my friend, who was from a Jewish family, taught me Yiddish and what Hebrew he was learning for his bar mitzvah. The ‘study’ was often too dark, but be had garden and with no electricity I remember unironically reading Turgenev by candlelight. We had set up beds and would sometimes stay there overnight – how I manged that with my asthma I still dont know – with our folks trusting us to take care of our selves.

We would have gone further except that 2 years later a turf war broke out and the kids from the next town over burned down the house. The cops caught them, but they were young – 14 or thereabouts – and the matter was dropped.

Things didn't much improve afterwords; my friends parents were quite ill, mentally as well as physically, and didint let him to finish schooling – though there is a requirement for that in Russia. Hew grew up, clever but technologically illiterate and I remember trying to show him, at 18, how to use a web browser and realizing it was hopeless. He had read Schopenhauer but couldn't use a smartphone. He later joined the army, and today I found out he died. Probably in Ukraine. Hence this blog, which I hope is lit enough to stay.

RIP Sasha. I miss you so much man.

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