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And yet.
Only in this eclectic, elusive, eternal country does everything feel unchanging yet uncertain. However reliably the vast Russian landscape can enthrall, or the conversation lurch from minutiae to Chekhovian contemplation of anything from death to a hiccup, there is a constant precarity to it all.
This summer, Lida, at 72, is contemplating leaving our village, despite her glorious garden and the many happy hours spent in her lovingly constructed wooden dacha. Five years after a stroke, she fears that she and her 75-year-old husband, Slava, can no longer cope alone. The state offers only material support, slight at that. Still, the land here exerts a pull that the prospect of life in a distant town nearer her daughter does not. “Fate will decide,” she concludes. “Only God knows.”
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There is nothing uniquely Russian, really, about all this. Across America and Europe, tens of millions of harried urbanites take off each summer for the simple attractions of a wilder world beyond their confectioned city enclaves.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet.
Only in this eclectic, elusive, eternal country does everything feel unchanging yet uncertain. However reliably the vast Russian landscape can enthrall, or the conversation lurch from minutiae to Chekhovian contemplation of anything from death to a hiccup, there is a constant precarity to it all.
This summer, Lida, at 72, is contemplating leaving our village, despite her glorious garden and the many happy hours spent in her lovingly constructed wooden dacha. Five years after a stroke, she fears that she and her 75-year-old husband, Slava, can no longer cope alone. The state offers only material support, slight at that. Still, the land here exerts a pull that the prospect of life in a distant town nearer her daughter does not. “Fate will decide,” she concludes. “Only God knows.”