🥞 Maslenitsa (this year from February 24th to March 2nd) is a week prior to Orthodox Lent. Other names for it are Shrovetide and Butter Week.
When fasting is ahead, people often overeat. The traditional meals are bliny (blins, pancakes) and meat dishes. Folk festivals and fairs culminate with the burning of a scarecrow symbolizing winter.

In his short story “About Frailty” Anton Chekhov lashed obesity and the unthinking pursuit of pleasure during Maslenitsa. He viewed the problem from the medical angle, just as he viewed the New Year visits and unrestrained fun at Christmas.

Pushkin was less critical of Maslenitsa, mentioning it in Eugene Onegin as a mark of “dear old days”:

They kept in peaceful life some customs
Of dear old days; it means:
They were at Shrove-day accustomed
To have the fattest Russian blins;
...

Maslenitsa in Russia is a peculiar tradition that bewilders and delights foreigners, almost as bullfighting in Spain. At least there is something crazy and spectacular about both.

Christ has risen! - Indeed He has!, is the Easter greeting in Russia.
Easter is the main religious holiday in Russia. Unlike the Catholic Church that puts a special emphasis on the Birth of Christ (Christmas), i.e. His coming to the world of mortal people, the Orthodox Church celebrates His Resurrection, i.e. the victory of immortality over death, 🌅 more generally, the triumph of good over evil.
Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Cossack” is about the everyday choice we make between good and evil.
The story’s moral is, doing good to others makes you happy, failing to do good makes you feel bad.
Just as simple as that.

⭐️May 1st is the Day of Labor in Russia and other countries. And labor – i.e. our job and everyday work – plays a big part in our lives.

It is exciting to read occupational novels: to follow the characters truly devoted to their professions and striving to achieve a great goal. Most of us orient ourselves only in one field of expertise. So it is interesting to discover the fields we are not familiar with, to look at them from the inside.

The heroes of the Russian 19th-century writers had their professions, too: in Alexander Kuprin’s “Moloch”, the hero is an engineer at an industrial plant; in Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit”, the hero is, obviously, a doctor.
But the professions were merely the background until the actual advent of the occupational novel in the early Soviet literature.

⚙️ Having proclaimed the creation of a state of workers and peasants, the Soviet leadership began to build an ideology focused on the man/woman of labor, a dedicated professional who strove to work better and better because he/she knew: the fruit of the labor would not be taken away by a wealthy industrialist, but would return to him/her in forms of fair pay, low prices, free education and medical care, paid vacation, etc.

👉In 1934, Maxim Gorky spoke at the First convention of Soviet writers, “We must choose labor as the main character of our books, that is, a person who is organized by the processes of labor, (...) and a person who, in turn, organizes labor easier and more productive, elevating it to the degree of art.”

🚜 🌾 And so, the Soviet writers wrote about the representatives of practically any profession: steel founders, tractor drivers, grain growers, etc. In such occupational novels, the professions were no longer a means to make ends meet, but a new optimistic view of life, the way to unlock a person’s potential, and to contribute to the country’s overall progress. And the progress had been quick and visible – until Nazi Germany invaded the USSR and made millions of people forget about their potential and education and become soldiers fighting for the survival of their Motherland.

🏗 After the War, the victorious Soviet people got to the enormous work of reconstruction and building cities anew from ruins. Novels reflected the process, as well as the subsequent scientific and technical revolution, the beginning of space research. 🚀

Gradually, the genre degraded – along with the Soviet state. The time of major achievements passed, and stagnation began. Then came the Perestroika and the collapse of the USSR.
Today, occupational novels are difficult to find on the Russian literary landscape.

The example of the genre is still the 1932 novel “Time, forward!” by Valentin Katayev.

☝️ The 1965 adaptation of Valentin Katayev’s “Time, forward!” is famous in Russia for its soundtrack. The composition “Time, forward!” by Sviridov , with its dynamics and passion, was like a hymn to the Soviet industrial breakthroughs.
Notably, a fragment of the music piece was used as the opening theme for the main 9 p.m. news program in the 1980s.

Valentin Katayev’s “Son of the Regiment” is one of the best-known Russian novels that shows the Great Patriotic War through the fate of a 12-year-old boy, Vanya Solntsev. All his family had died at the hands of the Nazi invaders, and Vanya wandered, homeless and alone, in the forests hoping to come across “ours”, i.e. Soviet soldiers. And one day Soviet scouts came across him, gave him shelter and provided care. Instead of evacuating to safe areas, Vanya preferred to stay with his rescuers and become a scout himself...
Here is a summary.

January 25 is Tatiana Day in Russia, also known as Russian Students’ Day. By this date, the winter exams finish, and the students’ winter break begins. After the break, the Spring semester begins.
St. Tatiana was declared the patron saint of students in the 18th century. Here is the brief story:

In 1755, Empress Elizabeth Petrovna signed a decree for the establishment of the first university in Moscow. Now known as the Moscow State University (MSU), it is one of the most prestigious institutions of higher education in the country. The Empress’ signature was obtained on the day the Orthodox Church commemorated Tatiana the Martyr. This laid the foundation for an official Students’ Day associated with the saint. In 1791 the Church of St. Tatiana was built on the MSU campus, and Tatiana was officially across the country.

📍Tatiana is a notable name in the Russian literature.

1️⃣ Of course, the first Tatiana that comes to mind is Tatiana Larina from «Eugene Onegin». The bold girl who confesses her love but gets turned down. The tragic noble character. The passionate heart that Onegin appreciates only when it is too late.

Tatiana (Russian in her soul,
Herself she didn’t know why)
With all her cooling beauty lone
Did like the Russian winter fine:
The rime on frosty days yet sunlit;
And sledges; and before the sunset
The snow’s rose shining charm;
On Christmas evenings hazy calm.

2️⃣ Tatiana from Ivan Turgenev’s «MuMu» is our second mention.
She is the love interest of poor Gerasim. A peasant girl, meek, miserable, yet lovely. The deaf-mute yard-keeper feels sorry for her and admires her. He proposes, but the whim of the tyrannic landlady, who has the fates of her serfs in her hands, is to make Tatiana marry another man.
So, this is another tragic Tatiana.

☝️3️⃣ The third mention is Tatiana from The Malachite Box by Pavel Bazhov. The book published in 1939 is a collection of tales of the Ural region. The tales are about stonemasons and gold prospectors, the beauties and riches of the Ural mountains, the life of local serfs in the bonds of injustice.

Tanya is the daughter of a stonemason who strives for perfection in his work: his ambition is to make a flower out of stone that would look real. The mythological Mistress of the Mountain recognises his talent, trains him personally and sends him back home with a malachite jewel-box full of jewellery. He accomplishes the stone flower, but loses sanity in obsessive perfectionism.

Tanya gets the jewel-box as her dowry. And, remarkably, she is the only person in the world who is able to wear the jewellery: other women try the earrings, necklaces and bracelets on, wishing to buy them from the stonemason’s family, but, mystically, the items feel too cold or too heavy on them, becoming impossible for the women to wear.

⛰🦎🐍🦌💎Pavel Bazhov, Russian writer and folklorist, was born on 27 January 1879.

He is best known for his collection of folk tales, The Malachite Box.

Why is the book remarkable? 1️⃣ It offers a different side of the Russian folklore - one without «bogatyrs», «Baba Yaga», «the Immortal Koschei», or the customary pictures of nature typical of the European part of Russia. Here, in The Malachite Box, the magic creatures are original: the Mistress of the Copper Mountain (a magic Tsarina who lives deep inside a mountain and patronises stonemasons and miners; all the precious stones and metals in the Urals belong to her, and she has the power to hide or reveal them); the Little Blue Snake (it appears to indicate a deposit of precious stones); the Great Snake (it crawls and leaves a trace under which gold can be found); the Silver Hoof (a deer that strikes precious stones out of nowhere with its hoof), etc.
The nature in the tales is all about mountains, cliffs, caves - quite unlike the endless fields and woods where the heroes of more traditional Russian folklore travel.

2️⃣ The language. Bazhov stylised the tales as a first-person narrative of a peasant who «reminisces» on interesting incidents from the past; his speech is vernacular, with local slang, yet quite understandable.

3️⃣ Bazhov’s every tale pictures a strong national character: patience, resilience, courage, mutual help, clemency.

In many of the stories, the wealthy owners of the mines and goldfields are shown greedy and merciless, while the workers (the Ural serfs) are generous, fair-minded and strong-willed, despite the bonds of injustice. The workers are main heroes of the tales.

Interestingly, the evil is represented not by the magic creatures but by people without any magic powers - the serf-owners, their pitiless field bosses, their gold-loving wives.

The workers (miners, stonemasons, gold prospectors) «make miracles»: dig for ore, extract gems, carve masterpieces out of stone - for the rich and powerful to use. The workers themselves are poor and rightless. But they don’t lose heart, they support each other, they fight for justice when they can.

Perhaps it was for this depiction of the strong national character that The Malachite Box won its author the Stalin Prize for literature in 1942, in the midst of the War, when several western regions of the USSR were occupied by Nazis who either murdered the local population or turned them into rightless slaves. It was a time when Russians remembered what it was like to be unfree, to be under the heel of a conqueror.

The book inspired the people who were fighting for their Motherland, reiterated how strong and resilient they were, instilled optimism.

The Malachite Box has won millions of readers’ hearts since its publication. It is unusual, authentic, entertaining, and somehow very Russian.

The last decades of the 19th century were the period of industrial development in Russia, as in many other countries. Coal-mining for the new railway transport, gold-mining, extraction of ore gems were on the rise.

☝️The folk tales about miners and stonemasons from the previous post spring from that period (Pavel Bazhov collected and adapted the tales for publication in the 1930s).

A wealthy Russian merchant, industrialist and philanthropist of the period, Savva Morozov commissioned great Russian artist Vassily Vasnetsov to paint a canvas for his office. In 1879-1881 Vasnetsov painted "Three Tsarinas of the Underground Kingdom".

The heroines represent the Tsarinas of Gold, of Precious Stones, and of Stone-Coal, against sunset and rocks. The appearances of the Tsarinas represent common people’s ideas of the mysterious subsoil riches.

The painting is now at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, along with Vasnetsov's other paintings, like "Bogatyrs", "Ivan Tsarevich riding the Gray Wolf".

🥂29 January 1860 is the birthday of Anton Chekhov. Let us commemorate it by watching «Uncle Vanya» - a screen adaptation of the play, unhurried, thorough, masterful. Chekhov shows a collection of «radiant» persons - «radiant to no one».

Despite being contemporaries and compatriots, Theodore Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy never met each other personally.

They certainly knew about each other, read each other’s works and expressed opinions on them - but never got to actually meet and have a conversation. There were periods when they lived within the same part of Saint Petersburg, had mutual acquaintances, and yet…

When it was too late - when Dostoyevsky died in 1881, Tolstoy wrote:

"I had never seen the man or had direct contacts with him, and suddenly, as he died, I realised he had been the closest, dearest person and the one I had needed most."

⭐️On this day, 83 years ago, the Battle of Stalingrad ended with the victory of the Soviet Army. It was one of the largest urban battles in world’s military history, and a turning point of the Great Patriotic War.

Nazi Germans and their allies had invaded as deep into the Soviet territory as Stalingrad on the Volga (today Volgograd) by the Summer of 1942. And in winter 1943 they were turned around to be finally pushed out of the country in 1944.

The Hot Snow (1969) is a novel by Yuri Bondarev - a Soviet writer and War veteran. The novel is a «raw» picture of the Battle of Stalingrad, its winter months, when the snow was «hot» from the blood of soldiers and officers.

🫡 Bondarev represented the post-War «lieutenants’ prose», along with Vassil Bykov, Vladimir Bogomolov, etc.

It’s just a famous meme with Hollywood actor Orlando Bloom reading Dostoyevsky. Never fails to make me smile 😀

Dostoyevsky was not a wealthy man. Unlike Tolstoy or Turgenev, he had to live by his pen. Dostoyevsky aggravated his circumstances by gambling. He sometimes borrowed money from wealthy acquaintances, then lost money at the gambling table, and avoided his creditors until the necessary sum could be accumulated.

⁉️When asked if he was envious of Leo Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky once replied that he was, in fact, envious, but not of Tolstoy’s literary talent but of his financial standing and station in life. Dostoyevsky regretted having to write hurriedly, with no time to think twice or amend his work, because of the constant urgency to deliver a manuscript and collect the fee.

🖋Tolstoy and Turgenev could write at leisure, having the opportunity to write a draft, then let it «lie up», return to it, make changes, improve the quality of the text… ⏱ Dostoyevsky could not afford to do so. He had to ask for advance payments from his publisher, then struggle to meet deadlines.

💔Dostoyevsky was often unsatisfied with his own published works and wished he had been able to think twice and amend them.

❤️‍🔥Nevertheless, readers across the globe still enjoy and admire Dostoyevsky’s works, and can only wonder at his self-criticism and self-chastising.

🛸✨Sergei Lukyanenko is the best-known and bestselling contemporary Russian Sci-Fi author.

He was born in Kazakhstan in 1968. A fan of the Strugatsky brothers, Lukyanenko “took up the torch” of the Russian humanistic science fiction from them.

His works have been published since the 1980s, and thanks to Lukyanenko, the genre survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and the turbulent decades that followed. In fact, science fiction and political journalism were the only genres on the rise in the 1990s in Russia.

Lukyanenko creates parallel worlds, writes about far away planets, about distant and not-too-distant future. The common theme in all his works is how to remain human in any circumstances. The plots are dynamic and thrilling.

His science fiction follows in the footsteps not only of the Strugatsky brothers, but also of Bradbury, Heinlein, Lem.

The Night Watch is one of Sergei Lukyanenko’s most famous novels. Notably, it is closer to fantasy than science fiction, and it gained international attention thanks to its 2004 movie adaptation.

❤️‍🩹 Today is the day to commemorate Alexander Pushkin: he died on 10 February 1837 after the duel with D’Anthès.
In the world of literature, Pushkin is immortal, especially for Russians. His literary legacy is large, and includes works of every genre.

♠️This time it is «The Queen of Spades» - a short story of a desperate gambler who believes a rumour that an old countess knows certain «three cards» that always win. The man finds a way to get to the countess and elicit the information from her, but from that night on, he is doomed…

The story served as basis for Tchaikovsky's opera of the same name.

🎩 Although Russian writer Alexander Kuprin (1870-1938) came from a nobleman’s family, he had to earn his own living. In the beginning, he served in the military (army was one the subjects in his later literary works), then resigned and changed many jobs before establishing himself as a writer.

🎭 One of Kuprin’s occupations was at a theatre. His experience as an actor and stage worker was expressed in his several short stories. Among them are “Towards Glory”, “How I Was An Actor”, “Hamlet”.

Kuprin showed the backstage life of a troupe, revealed the misery of people behind the alluring scene. The writer used the subject of theatre to illustrate different nuances of human character and relationships, and proved himself a true master of psychological realism.