January 13, 2022

Grinches, GPS Art, and Gordon Ramsay


Grinches, GPS Art, and Gordon Ramsay
In Odder News

In this week's Odder News: the best winter neighbor, the best Olympic hockey team, and the worst gifts.

  • According to a poll, one-fifth of Russians were dissatisfied with their New Year's gifts. The top three lumps of coal were candy, tea sets, and pajamas/sweaters with New Year's themes. The majority of the 1,600 grinches who responded to the survey noted that they would have preferred cash. While Americans might bristle at a cash gift – except maybe from parents to adult children – it may be your best bet for your Russian friends and colleagues.
  • With the best hockey league in the world, the NHL, disallowing its players from taking an Olympic break and playing for their respective national teams, sportscasters are predicting that Team Russia will win in Beijing. Russia is the primary home, after all, of the second-best hockey league in the world, the KHL. The controversial move by the NHL will likely even place Team Germany over Team Canada – the ancestral home of the sport.
  • British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay recently told The Kelly Clarkson Show that he cooked for President Putin when Ramsay was invited to meet with former prime minister Tony Blair. Ramsay said, "I almost died of fear," and that he was more worried about the quality of the food than usual. He joked that it was weird to talk about asparagus with such important people as Putin and Blair.
  • A couple from Irkutsk just celebrated an underwater wedding in Lake Baikal. The bride wore a blue sundress over her wetsuit and a white veil; the groom just wore his wetsuit. She is a champion freediver and he a professional breaststroker and freediver. They met at a master class on underwater hunting. The underwater ceremony included a group of witnesses swimming in a circle around the couple. They all retired to the banya for the reception, naturally.
  • What a neighbor! Yekaterinburg resident Leonid Valitov wakes up at 4 or 5 am in the winter to "draw" lovely pictures for his neighbors in the snow with a shovel. His work is both beautiful and humorous. Valitov also practices "GPS art," in which he moves over a frozen lake in a recognizable pattern, such as that of a dolphin or other animal, and posts his resulting artwork online. Don't miss his works of shovel art, here.

You Might Also Like

Conqueror of the Cold
  • November 01, 2021

Conqueror of the Cold

Oleg Rezanov claims to have overcome aging and pain by embracing the cold. Let’s look into this a bit more closely.
New Life Breathed into the Museum of Hockey
  • February 28, 2021

New Life Breathed into the Museum of Hockey

Moscow's stunning Museum of Hockey and Hockey Hall of Fame is a hidden gem with new investors ready to keep it going – hopefully for a long time to come.
KHL Victor Crowned
  • May 23, 2021

KHL Victor Crowned

Omsk Avangard clinches Russian hockey's Gagarin Cup with some famous NHL faces.
Get Your Freeze On
  • December 04, 2021

Get Your Freeze On

Winter is here, and ice swimmers are diving in across Russia.
Like this post? Get a weekly email digest + member-only deals

Some of Our Books

Davai! The Russians and Their Vodka

Davai! The Russians and Their Vodka

In this comprehensive, quixotic and addictive book, Edwin Trommelen explores all facets of the Russian obsession with vodka. Peering chiefly through the lenses of history and literature, Trommelen offers up an appropriately complex, rich and bittersweet portrait, based on great respect for Russian culture.
Moscow and Muscovites

Moscow and Muscovites

Vladimir Gilyarovsky's classic portrait of the Russian capital is one of Russians’ most beloved books. Yet it has never before been translated into English. Until now! It is a spectactular verbal pastiche: conversation, from gutter gibberish to the drawing room; oratory, from illiterates to aristocrats; prose, from boilerplate to Tolstoy; poetry, from earthy humor to Pushkin. 
The Little Golden Calf

The Little Golden Calf

Our edition of The Little Golden Calf, one of the greatest Russian satires ever, is the first new translation of this classic novel in nearly fifty years. It is also the first unabridged, uncensored English translation ever, and is 100% true to the original 1931 serial publication in the Russian journal 30 Dnei. Anne O. Fisher’s translation is copiously annotated, and includes an introduction by Alexandra Ilf, the daughter of one of the book’s two co-authors.
Woe From Wit (bilingual)

Woe From Wit (bilingual)

One of the most famous works of Russian literature, the four-act comedy in verse Woe from Wit skewers staid, nineteenth century Russian society, and it positively teems with “winged phrases” that are essential colloquialisms for students of Russian and Russian culture.
Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Bilingual series of short, lesser known, but highly significant works that show the traditional view of Dostoyevsky as a dour, intense, philosophical writer to be unnecessarily one-sided. 
Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Stargorod is a mid-sized provincial city that exists only in Russian metaphorical space. It has its roots in Gogol, and Ilf and Petrov, and is a place far from Moscow, but close to Russian hearts. It is a place of mystery and normality, of provincial innocence and Black Earth wisdom. Strange, inexplicable things happen in Stargorod. So do good things. And bad things. A lot like life everywhere, one might say. Only with a heavy dose of vodka, longing and mystery.
Marooned in Moscow

Marooned in Moscow

This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
The Moscow Eccentric

The Moscow Eccentric

Advance reviewers are calling this new translation "a coup" and "a remarkable achievement." This rediscovered gem of a novel by one of Russia's finest writers explores some of the thorniest issues of the early twentieth century.
Turgenev Bilingual

Turgenev Bilingual

A sampling of Ivan Turgenev's masterful short stories, plays, novellas and novels. Bilingual, with English and accented Russian texts running side by side on adjoining pages.
Fish: A History of One Migration

Fish: A History of One Migration

This mesmerizing novel from one of Russia’s most important modern authors traces the life journey of a selfless Russian everywoman. In the wake of the Soviet breakup, inexorable forces drag Vera across the breadth of the Russian empire. Facing a relentless onslaught of human and social trials, she swims against the current of life, countering adversity and pain with compassion and hope, in many ways personifying Mother Russia’s torment and resilience amid the Soviet disintegration.

About Us

Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.

Latest Posts

Our Contacts

Russian Life
73 Main Street, Suite 402
Montpelier VT 05602

802-223-4955