приветствие (welcome)
I have never gone by my full name. All my life, I’ve gone by some sort of catchy nickname and not once have I let anyone peek at the label embedded at the front of my progress report. I recall the horror I felt when I discovered that the school used my full name on the yearbooks instead of the familiar name my classmates knew me by.
Although my name belonged to me, I believed that I did not belong to my name.
~~~
Usually, when I tell people I’m Russian, they immediately associate me and my culture with communism, Vladimir Putin, bad driving, land mass, dancing bears, and/or vodka. They don’t consider for a second the fact that Russia is an incredibly racially and culturally diverse country with centuries of richly saturated literature, history, and tradition. Sure, society knows of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Crime and Punishment, but not without some Western perspective or influence. I feel as if schools here don’t shine enough light on the of what Russian culture and literature is and its benefits. I mean call me biased, but some of the greatest poets, writers, philosophers, playwrights, and actors were Russian.
Now, I admit: I haven’t discovered all the secrets and knowledge of Russian history, literature, and language. In all honesty, I’m just as lost as you. And so that brings me to the purpose of my blog. I plan to document my findings, and also create masterpieces inspired by Russian events in history, literature, and overall my experiences of accepting my origins and learning to love them. I think this will help the two of us get our heads out of these stereotypes and broaden our cultural and writing horizons.
Currently, I am in the process of writing a short story inspired by Imperial Russia and the romance, danger, controversy, and elegance interlaced in it. I want to tell the perspectives lost in the explosion of recent media broadcasting Russia to be this immoral, blood thirsty, dictatorship. I’m not saying it’s perfect, because it definitely isn’t, but I do want to shed light on the aspects of it that I find extraordinary and that is often left uncovered by North America.
I remember when I was a younger and constantly terrified of being judged due to my culture. Everyone had their own opinion on Russia different to my reality of it. I loved listening to the funny Russian folk tales my mom always told me and the Russian New Years that made me feel drunk on exhaustion and excitement, the curious clothes and candy my grandmother sent me, hearing my royal full name waltz off my mother’s lips.
That name. My dreaded full name.
No one could pronounce it. Everyone in my sixth grade class made fun of me for it. So I grew to hate it just like everything else about being Russian. And slowly, I began to lose my identity, as well as my mother tongue. Thankfully, I still know how to speak the language, and still recall fragments of how to read and write it.
As of now, I am a very satirical individual who enjoys to put smiles on people’s faces. But more than anything I love to learn, and educate others. I am a published writer, a passionate English, History, and Drama student, a wanna-be intellectual and film/theater director, a hungry reader, and a first generation immigrant from Russia.
And, to tell the truth, I’ve only just come to terms with my nationality, all because I actually sat down and listened and accepted. I stopped soaking in the headlines and blushing at the Soviet Union jokes my peers always cracked, and indulged in the beauty of Russian writers and poets, the fragrance of their words in my mouth.
I even ached for someone to say my name.
My real name.
Finally, I recognize the girl in the yearbook with the fancy, European name underneath her photo.
Finally,I understand what it means to be Russian, truly Russian, and it has become my mission to gain all the knowledge I lost from my overwhelming Western childhood: to gain peace with my ancestors and their stories.
Whether you call me Liza or Liz or whatever, I will always be Elizaveta.
And I’ll always be proud of it.
Feature gif:
The artist’s signature is written in the bottom right corner of the gif, however, I got it from this link: