How Long?

Generally speaking, each issue of Russian Life contains about 30,000 words, or around 20-30% of a slim novel. Actually, this issue, our spell-check software tells me, has exactly 32,702 words. Of those, 6,748 are unique words (granted, a somewhat inflated figure, since some of these are not “words,” per se, but simply discrete, word-like units – e.g. numbers – that our computer calls words).

The word “war” appears 176 times in this issue. Which is a lot (in our last issue, it appeared just 87 times).

But does that mean we have adequately commemorated the 60th anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War in this issue? What do numbers tell us?

What does 20 million war dead (the number generally cited for combined Soviet military and civilian deaths during WWII) mean when we know from personal experience how tragic and painful just one death can be in or near our own lives? How can we get our minds around a number like that?

We can’t.

And maybe that is a good thing.

But if the numbers are so huge, there is the danger that we will push them off to the side, or ignore them for being data outside the norm.

I was speaking with someone about this issue of the magazine, talking about how we would be devoting much of the issue to the anniversary of May 9, 1945. “That’s good,” the person said, “because Americans just don’t have a sense of how this war is remembered over there [in Russia]. We are already forgetting.”

We can’t.

We present in this issue just three short stories – some 8,263 words – about the beginning (page 24), middle (page 30) and end (page 38) of World War II in Russia. And while they are all very fine stories, they are simply tiny snapshots of a vast, tragic, important, horrific, heroic, sad, shattering chapter in our history. It is one we dare not forget without forfeiting a large part of our humanity.

*     *     *

Just a few days before this issue when to press, on April 3, the New York Times published a hateful, juvenile column by “wordsmith” William Safire. Under the guise of writing about the last name “Putin” and problems of transcription from non-Latin alphabets, Safire served up a vitriolic stew that was an insult to his own significant intelligence.

I mention this, first, to point out that, even (especially?) among the American intelligentsia, cardboard cutout images of Russia persist. Second, Safire’s column reminded me that I have never indicated to readers what our transcription “system” is. Why do we write Plushenko when Plyushchenko could be seen to be more correct, or why Bolshoi when we talk about the theater, but bolshoy when we talk about other “big” things?

Our system is rather straightforward, actually. Our guiding principles are simplicity (no diacritic marks), readability (use familiar forms when possible, and employ spellings that, when read by an English reader, come as close as possible to actual pronunciation), and, of course, consistency.

For more detail on our transcription principles, check our website, where we have also posted a riveting explanation of how we deal with that other knotty Russian problem: dates prior to 1918.

Meanwhile, enjoy the issue, which, in addition to stories on the war that ended 60 years ago this month, includes a wonderful piece on a little-known people – the Evenks, plus another that interviews three of Russia’s female pop/rock philosophers.