medical wisdom

Five days before leaving Ekaterinburg I caught the tail end of a flu epidemic that, some weeks ago, led to several school closings due to quarantine. Fortunately, I’m done with all the archives, and all the most important library stuff – although I was planning to comb the card catalog for the last stray memoirs. [...]

tanks

This one is for Chris.
A cool thing about wandering all alone around a museum, with not a curator in sight, is that you can touch things. Now, I’m a sensible and law-abiding person and wouldn’t touch paper or fabric or really old things or anything under glass, so one can safely let me wander around [...]

I’ll write up some of my dissertation-y musings, but for now I bring you news from the Uralmash girls’ dormitories, 1959:
“Even in dormitory #2, which is very cultured, there are these festering sores. Take, for example, the retired auntie Shura Perunova, who lives in a separate little room in this dormitory, the supervisors’ room. The [...]

archives, a scattershot overview of the week

I found the architecture commission stuff, in the most obvious place. Feel like an idiot. When in doubt, check the guide…
I will be sorely tempted to get a research assistant to type in all the stats I’m finding.
Missing: a few hundred pages of questionnaires. I hope they at least went to a [...]

Sverdlovsk news circa 1949

Mr Rempel, DSc, gave a lecture on “Atomic energy and its uses” in the Sverdlovsk psychiatric hospital, to a 62-person audience.
Countless Komsomol membership cards were stolen in trams. One, however, was “cut up into little pieces by [the bearer's] younger brother while [the bearer] was in the next room,” one burned in a house fire, [...]

chirpy-chirp

in which the name of this blog is justified

on fishes and horses

I’ve had great luck in the archives – the last two days have been incredible, by my standards. There were more than 200 pages of stuff worth photocopying on Wednesday, and about 60 really good pages today (which are a better read)
As always, there are lovely little snippets that I cannot use, so:
From a letter [...]

On the flight to Russia and during my first days here I finished Mark Helperin’s Freddy and Fredericka. It’s a wonderful book about the absurdities of royalty, media, and politics – and because it’s Mark Helperin, about duty, honor, and the joy and dignity of doing things well, no matter what these things are. It’s [...]

the birthplace of Russian rock?

More archival trivia for you, also from 1946. I’m writing a post on what my regular archive work is like, but these little tidbits are so charming – and, really, so useless – that I want to pass them along to someone for the sake of preservation. Nobody has read the file whence it came [...]

some things don’t change

“Many graduate students are overburdened with teaching and scientific work unrelated to their dissertations… As a result, the majority of them do not follow their individual study plans and do not finish their dissertations on time.”
- from the report on preparation of scientific and pedagogical cadres in graduate schools, Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg), 1946