Here in Moscow, who you are is where you live. The city is so big that when you tell someone where you live, you give them an area rather than an address. No one seems really to know what street they live on, and it wouldn't really matter if they did, because there are so many streets, and the street signs are usually in such an advanced state of disrepair, that a street address wouldn't be recognized anyway. I seem to live on Ул. Черногрязская, "Chernograskaya Street," but I wouldn't bother telling anybody that. It wouldn't mean much.
No, Moscow is parsed by its subway system, the famous Moscow Metro. The Metro forms a sort of grid over the city, and since millions of Muscovites -- and ex-pats, and visitors -- use the Metro every day, its map has become a standard frame of reference. Your Metro station defines where you live. "Where's the nearest Metro?" is a routine question here, whether you're talking about getting to someone's apartment, or to an office, a store, a park, a restaurant, a theater, a concert or a crime scene. I teach a class of children every Saturday. It's "Take the purple line to the ring line, get off at Octoberskaya, turn right where you see the big statue of Lenin (which faces Burger King), and go around the corner." It's the way we do things here.
So wouldn't you know it ... "My" Metro station, the one I use to tell people where I live, would have to be the one that's the biggest mouthful? Yeah. "My" Metro station has the longest name of any station in the city. And I had to memorize it, with my piss-poor Russian, no less.
I live about ten minutes' walk from the Metro station which is located on the street which commemorates the 1905 revolution in Russia. Yes, I know everyone identifies 1917 with the Russian revolution, but a dozen years earlier there was a dress-rehearsal for it which, if you want to know the details, go to Wikipedia. I studied 20th-century Russian history when I was a college student and I still don't understand the details of the 1905 revolution. But the Soviets thought it was a big enough deal to put up a statue and name a street after it. Both are still there, the statue and the street. And now, in addition, there's me.
Okay. So "My" Metro station is Ул. 1905 Года. In English that's "Year 1905 Street." Doesn't sound too bad, does it?
Try it in Russian.
The problem is the "gnarliness" of counting in Russian. Most Russian numbers between ten ("desat') and one hundred ("sto") are polysyllabic. "Eighteen," for example, is "vosemnadsat." English:two syllables; Russian: four. "Fifty-four" is pyatdesat'-chetiri. English: three syllables; Russian: six. And from there it just piles up. To say "Nineteen-o-five" sounds simple enough. But in Russian "Nineteen-o-five" is t'isicha devatsot pyat. The Russian word for "street" is ulitsa, and the word for year is god (pronounced "gode.") Now, once you have tacked on the word endings which the Russian language's case system requires to account for concepts such as "of" and "for," the Metro station's official name is Ultisa t'isicha devatsot pyatovo goda. That's fourteen syllables, folks, longer than a line in a sonnet. Try saying it a few times. Believe me, it takes practice.
And you have to learn it. Because everyone on earth counts in their first language. That's a law of nature. If you want to find out what someone's first language is, ask them to add up a column of numbers. Asked to do simple arithmetic, a person will always revert to the language in which he or she is most comfortable. I'll give you an illustration: years ago my Russian friend Anya came to visit me at my then-home in Germany. It was my birthday, and she was putting candles on my birthday cake. I listened as she counted under her breath: "Raz, dva, tri, chet'iri, pyat, shest, sem..." and so on. She speaks excellent English, but when it was time to count, she did it in Russian, her native tongue or "L1," as we call it in the teaching-English-as-a-second-language business.
My point is, there's no point in saying "Nineteen-o-five" to most Russians. Unless their English is very good, they'll look at you like you just got off the interplanetary space bus from the Planet Mongo.
So I've had to learn how to say Ulitsati'sichadevatsotpyatovogoda, and make it come trippingly off the tongue, like Shakespeare.
It's actually not that hard. Just don't try it after two or three shots of vodka.
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| Home sweet home. |
No, Moscow is parsed by its subway system, the famous Moscow Metro. The Metro forms a sort of grid over the city, and since millions of Muscovites -- and ex-pats, and visitors -- use the Metro every day, its map has become a standard frame of reference. Your Metro station defines where you live. "Where's the nearest Metro?" is a routine question here, whether you're talking about getting to someone's apartment, or to an office, a store, a park, a restaurant, a theater, a concert or a crime scene. I teach a class of children every Saturday. It's "Take the purple line to the ring line, get off at Octoberskaya, turn right where you see the big statue of Lenin (which faces Burger King), and go around the corner." It's the way we do things here.
So wouldn't you know it ... "My" Metro station, the one I use to tell people where I live, would have to be the one that's the biggest mouthful? Yeah. "My" Metro station has the longest name of any station in the city. And I had to memorize it, with my piss-poor Russian, no less.
I live about ten minutes' walk from the Metro station which is located on the street which commemorates the 1905 revolution in Russia. Yes, I know everyone identifies 1917 with the Russian revolution, but a dozen years earlier there was a dress-rehearsal for it which, if you want to know the details, go to Wikipedia. I studied 20th-century Russian history when I was a college student and I still don't understand the details of the 1905 revolution. But the Soviets thought it was a big enough deal to put up a statue and name a street after it. Both are still there, the statue and the street. And now, in addition, there's me.
Okay. So "My" Metro station is Ул. 1905 Года. In English that's "Year 1905 Street." Doesn't sound too bad, does it?
Try it in Russian.
 |
| Cleaning up the neighborhood statue, which by the way helps you find the Metro station: "Which side of the statue do you want to come in on?" |
And you have to learn it. Because everyone on earth counts in their first language. That's a law of nature. If you want to find out what someone's first language is, ask them to add up a column of numbers. Asked to do simple arithmetic, a person will always revert to the language in which he or she is most comfortable. I'll give you an illustration: years ago my Russian friend Anya came to visit me at my then-home in Germany. It was my birthday, and she was putting candles on my birthday cake. I listened as she counted under her breath: "Raz, dva, tri, chet'iri, pyat, shest, sem..." and so on. She speaks excellent English, but when it was time to count, she did it in Russian, her native tongue or "L1," as we call it in the teaching-English-as-a-second-language business.
My point is, there's no point in saying "Nineteen-o-five" to most Russians. Unless their English is very good, they'll look at you like you just got off the interplanetary space bus from the Planet Mongo.
So I've had to learn how to say Ulitsati'sichadevatsotpyatovogoda, and make it come trippingly off the tongue, like Shakespeare.
It's actually not that hard. Just don't try it after two or three shots of vodka.
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