Reading for Language Learning

I usually think of my time in Russian-speaking countries as a time to charge up my language batteries. Sure, I use Russian basically everyday, either for my research or because something interesting pops up on my Facebook feed. This tends to be a pretty narrow range of source material—academic articles and newspaper articles, basically. My conversational Russian tends to decline over the course of the academic year because I just don’t speak it very much. Being in a Russian-speaking country gives me the chance to practice speaking again and soak up as much Russian-language input as possible. Plus, it’s a lot more fun to work on learning a language if you have the chance to go out and put things into use every day.

I’d been wanting to do some reading over the summer, mostly short novels by postwar Soviet authors that I’m interested in. Unfortunately, after a long day of sitting at the archive and reading letters and bureaucratic documents in Russian, these books just weren’t getting me motivated. 

Browsing in Respublika, a cool chain of bookstores here, I picked up a couple of novels by contemporary Russian writers—Pokhoronite menia za plintusom (Bury Me Behind the Baseboards) by Pavel Sanaev and Shpionskii roman (Spy Novel) by Boris Akunin. I’ve always wanted to get into contemporary Russian fiction, and these books looked promising. I started with Bury Me Behind the Baseboards. Written in the ‘90s, the book was a cult classic for years until it suddenly became a huge bestseller in the 2000s. It is the story of a sickly eight-year-old boy who is being raised by an overbearing grandmother who curses him out practically on an hourly basis. It’s basically a charming tale of borderline child abuse. Suffice it to say, I got to page 76 and threw in the towel. It just wasn’t working for me.

It was at that point that I dipped my toe back in the waters of All Japanese All the Time for some inspiration. For the uninitiated, the website is written by Khazumoto, a guy who taught himself Japanese in a couple of years mostly through immersion and flashcards. His methods are unorthodox, his sense of humor is warped, but the site is addictive. I stumbled across his article “Why the Way We Read Sucks, and How to Fix It” and it seemed like it was written to solve my reader’s block.

In the article, Khazumoto’s basic point is that we should control our reading, and not let it control us. Тhe way we are taught to read in schools as beginner readers isn’t always the best strategy for reading for the rest of our lives.  

"The style of reading that is typically taught and/or encouraged in school is all about:

• Hitting every single word.
• No change of pace or shifting gears.
• No skipping unless teacher says so. Any self-directed skipping is “cheating”, and is to be punctuated by feelings of guilt and remorse (aren’t these, like, synonyms?).
• Zero or severely limited choice in terms of start time, stop time and duration.
• Zero or severely limited in terms of reading material, with no option to change after initial choice.
• The order in which the book is written and presented is the One, True and Only Correct Order. You have no right to permute it or ignore it. You earn the right to read page p+1 only after perfectly reading page p.

It’s no wonder that so many adults never pick up another real book once they leave school. If you’d never ever been allowed to set or change the channel on your TV, and never been taught that you even had the right or ability to make such a judgment call, then you’d probably hate TV, too — no matter how many “TV-worms” (think: bookworm) told you that TV was the shizzle and that there were tons of great channels and shows out there."

I realized this was the problem I was having with reading in Russian. I was like a person watching TV who wasn’t letting themselves change the channel until long after they were bored. While the strategy of hammering your way through a book come hell or high water may work if you absolutely have to read that specific book, if your goal is just to get more Russian text into your brain, then you have to be prepared to abandon reading material as soon as you notice that it is dragging you down. If you’re not having fun reading something, you’re not going to want to do it, and you’ll eventually sabotage your own language-learning project. So, I resolved to give myself permission to ditch Bury Me Behind the Baseboards. 

Luckily, this decision coincided with my discovery of the comics section at another great bookstore, Moskva. Comics, both locally-produced and imported, have just started catching on in Russia in the last few years. Previously, they were only available in bootleg translations (“scanlations”) on the internet (for example, this translation of Scott Pilgrim was a true labor of love). In another one of Khazumoto’s articles, “You Can't Afford Not to Buy Japanese Books,” he makes the point that buying books is an essential part of the language learning process. It’s not optional—it’s fuel for your fire. This conveniently helped me justify buying a bunch of different Russian comics (mostly translated, including Blue is the Warmest Color, Scott Pilgrim, and Adventure Time).

So now I’ve been working my way through a big stack of comics. My method—again borrowed from All Japanese All the Time—is to look up any words that look interesting, and then copy entire sentences into a flashcard program called Anki. I’m pretty picky with what sentences I decide to put in Anki because making the cards is time-consuming, but it really helps to learn vocabulary in context.

Finding the comics has actually become an adventure all its own. I was surprised to discover that Moscow has multiple comic book stores. I checked out two: Chuk i gik and Rocket Comics. Both are pretty bare bones compared to your usual packed-to-the-gills comic book store in the states, but the staff was really nice and ready to offer suggestions. Ultimately, I think the only way to keep improving your language skills is to find a hobby that you can do in your second language. When you have a hobby, language learning doesn’t feel like work. Moreover, it helps you find other people with similar interests, which in turn makes you feel more at home in a foreign country. (Example: after chatting with the comic book store guy at Rocket Comics and expressing an interest in local Russian comics, he gave me a whole stack of them for free!) Overall, I think an ounce of creativity in designing your own personal language-learning project goes a lot farther than a pound of discipline. 

Well, Volume One of Scott Pilgrim (color edition!) is calling my name, so I think it’s time to wrap this up!

Moscow on the Fourth of July

After a very satisfying dinner of burgers, fries and onion rings at the American-style restaurant Corner Burger, I came home to my dorm room and was struck with a sudden desire to listen to a song by DDT, a Russian rock band. 

This impulse is unlikely to surprise any of my Russian-speaking friends, as I make no secret of the fact that I basically think that DDT's lovable lead singer Yurii Shevchuk walks on water. DDT came out of the ‘80s Leningrad rock scene, which also gave birth to other legendary russkii rok bands as Kino and Akvarium. Their first hit, “Ne streliai” (“Don’t Shoot”), was a protest against the Afghan War, and they have been writing hummable anthems—political and personal—ever since.

The song I wanted to listen to was one of DDT's most popular songs: “Rodina,” which translates as “homeland” or “motherland.” It came out in 1992, when Russian morale and prestige was at a nadir. The Soviet Union had collapsed. The public conversation about the legacy of Stalinism that had simmered since the late 1950s had come to a rolling boil after glasnost’ freed the press from censorship. “Rodina” is an effort to find something worth singing about after the long process of coming to terms with the political violence of the twentieth century. This is salvage patriotism.

Yurii Shevchuk sings "Rodina" at Bolotnaia Square.

(Dmitrii Bykov is having way too much fun in the background here.)

The singer starts off with a wail:

God, how many years have I been walking without making a single step?  

God, how many days have I searched for that which was always with me?

The next stanza evokes the victims of the Great Terror of 1937, when the dreaded “Black Marias” visited people during “restless nights.”

Black headlights at the neighbor’s gate.

Trap doors, handcuffs, a torn mouth.

How many times did my head roll

From the overflowing executioner’s block?

Against this background, Shevchuk launches into the chorus:

My native land—  

I’m homeward bound. 

Let them cry that she’s a freak, 

We still like her! 

Even though she’s not a beauty, 

And puts her faith in scumbags…

Having affirmed his love for his homeland despite the horrors of the past, he turns his gaze from the victims to the remorseless perpetrators.

God, how much truth is in the eyes of the state’s whores! 

God, how much faith is in the hands of the retired executioners! 

Don’t let them roll up their sleeves again, 

Don’t let them roll up their sleeves again!

Shevchuk makes it clear that it isn’t easy to love his native land, to navigate the narrow waters between despair and cheap patriotism. He looks long and hard at the past and asks people to make a different choice.

I had never made this connection before, but on the Fourth of July the message of that song reminded me of nothing so much as the mission of one of my favorite bands, the Drive-By Truckers. For those of you unfamiliar with them, the Drive-By Truckers are a band from Alabama with grungy guitars and amazing songwriting. Their concept album Southern Rock Opera is a series of interconnected songs about the state of Alabama. Throughout the album, but especially in the series of songs “Birmingham,” “The Southern Thing,” “Three Great Alabama Icons,” and “Wallace,” songwriter Patterson Hood dissects Alabama’s history of racism and tries to forge a new form of Southern pride based on a different set of values than the ones espoused by Alabama governor George Wallace during the era of segregation. It’s hard to sum up a series of songs that concludes with Wallace meeting the Devil in Hell (apparently, the Devil’s a southerner—and drives a Cadillac), but this quotation from “The Southern Thing” comes close:

You think I'm dumb, maybe not too bright 

You wonder how I sleep at night 

Proud of the glory, stare down the shame 

The duality of the southern thing 

In the spoken-word piece “Three Great Alabama Icons,” Hood explains that it was only when he left Alabama did he realize the dire need to address this topic:

“…and you know, race was only an issue on TV in the house that I grew up in. Wallace was viewed as a man from another time and place, but when I first ventured out of the south I was shocked at how strongly Wallace was associated with Alabama and its people. Racism is a worldwide problem, and it's been like that since the beginning of recorded history, and it ain't just white and black, but thanks to George Wallace, it's always a little more convenient to play it with a southern accent.”

In the end, Hood envisions a future where "no man should ever have to feel that he don't belong in Birmingham," the epicenter of Wallace's segregationist south. You can agree or disagree with Patterson Hood’s raw and uncensored attempts to redefine Alabama identity in his lyrics, but I have to say that I find what he and Yurii Shevchuk are trying to do a lot more compelling than the two usual reactions that we often see when confronted with the ugly side of our native land: vigorous, flag-waving denial or the “screw it, I’m moving to Canada” brand of despair.

“Any truth told without love is a lie,” Yuri Shevchuk reminded the crowd at Bolotnaia Square at the protest for clean elections in Moscow on February 4, 2012, after singing “Rodina.” 

“We will be human beings,” he told them. “We will try.”

Reading on the Moscow Metro

Likbez-era poster

The Soviet Union prided itself on being “the most well-read nation” on earth. The Soviet obsession with books and reading might not have been particularly well-known during the Cold War, but it’s quite predictable when you think about it. The Bolsheviks, after all, were the radical red-headed stepchildren of the intelligentsia of the Russian Empire, so it’s not too surprising that when they came to power they sought to bring culture to the masses. That meant everything from ballet to good table manners, but especially literacy. All corners of the Soviet Union were drawn into the campaign to liquidate illiteracy (likbez) throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The old Russian classics (some of them, at least) were published in great quantities alongside the new classics of Socialist Realism. Joseph Stalin considered writers “engineers of human souls;” he considered himself literary-critic-in-chief. His critical opinions, of course, could be matters of life and death. As the political atmosphere became less poisonous over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, literature and literary criticism became one of the main venues for discussing the country’s past, present, and future. Literary works like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in the literary journal Novyi mir in 1962, became lightning rods for debates over de-Stalinization. Books were cheap, but works by the most popular authors were often hard to get your hands on. If you wanted something special, like a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s cult classic Master and Margarita, then there was always the black market. Reading was a very popular activity through the last decades of the Soviet Union. Starting in the mid-1980s, it became even more important when glasnost’  opened up a plethora of previously-banned topics and works of literature for public discussion. Circulation of literary journals went through the roof; the revelations between the covers of journals and books caused many to experience a perelom soznaniia, a profound break in their consciousness. 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was considerable anxiety over Russia’s continued status as a well-read nation. A chorus of voices lamented “Deti ne chitaiut!” (“Children don’t read!”) According to one expert on Russian children’s literature with whom I have spoken, however, the concerns were overblown. In fact, deti chitaiut. (Children read.) Although I can’t claim that my methodology is at all scientific, I will say that the tradition of reading seems to be alive and well in Moscow—on the metro at least. Although I often see people reading on buses and the T in Boston, my impression is that reading while commuting is more popular here.

Suggested listening. I think the Alkaline Trio cover is better,

but this video takes the cake.

One of the nicest suprises I had after arriving here was the realization that I could read my Kindle on public transportation without looking the least bit strange. E-readers have caught on in Russia in a big way, and any metro car is likely to hold at least a couple of people with e-readers and tablets. While many use their phones to play games and use social networking sites, my observations from surreptitiously (shamelessly?) looking over people’s shoulders suggest that many people also read on their phones. I see many older people using e-readers, although they seem more popular among the younger generations.

It’s hard to know what people are reading on their e-readers, but luckily for us nosy bookworms, paper books are popular as well. I once saw a woman in high heels reading a biography of Churchill, a punky-looking guy reading Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, and another young woman reading Jane Austen all in the same night. Ray Bradbury seems to be quite popular, which is not surprising considering the popularity of science fiction in the former socialist bloc. Newspapers, sold in machines in the stations, are another popular choice.

My commute

A number of factors (besides the aforementioned national pride) probably contribute to the prevalence of reading on the metro. First of all, many people commute long distances in Moscow, which after all is quite a massive city. Metro rides in excess of 30 minutes are completely routine, and even a full hour seems to be common. Second, the metro is often loud—attempting to talk or listen to podcasts can be pointless on some routes. Reading is simply the most obvious choice of distraction. 

The eternal escalators

Some people take their reading game to a whole other level on the metro. I’ve seen certain pros manage to read more or less continuously throughout station transfers. As the Moscow metro is quite crowded, especially at rush hour, this is no mean feat. There are usually bottlenecks around the escalators, where people trudge zombie-like to get on the escalators. I’ve seen people read all the way through the escalator crush. As anyone who has visited the former Soviet Union likely knows, metro stations are located quite far underground. The top three deepest metro stations in the world are all located in the former Soviet Union. That means that the escalator rides are rather long, so people read on them too. On top of that, I’ve seen more walking-while-reading here than probably in my entire life up to this point—and I go to Harvard.

I’ve been taking advantage of my 45-minute (one-way) commute to catch up on my pleasure reading. After a year of sad deprivation (thanks, general exam!), it’s been fun to actually use my Kindle again. So far I’ve read Seveneves by sci-fi master Neal Stephenson, The Masque of the Black Tulip, a Regency-era romance/mystery by Lauren Willig, a former Harvard history grad student, and The White Ship by Soviet Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov. I have to make two transfers on my commute, which means I’ve been keeping it light and simple so that I don’t lose the thread of the plots even when reading the books in bits and pieces. My current book is Metro 2033, a post-apocalyptic horror novel set in…wait for it…the Moscow Metro. I’ve still got 62% left to read, but expect a full review coming soon!