When the author and podcaster Viv Groskop first visited Ukraine, she travelled there from Moscow, on a long train that ran eventually beside a field of sunflowers. They were, she recalls in her lovely and modestly scaled memoir, like a ‘blast of sunshine screaming: “Welcome to Ukraine! You are no longer in Russia!”’
The year was 1994, and Groskop had been in the former USSR for a little under a year. A modern languages undergraduate at Cambridge, she had decided to take her year abroad in St Petersburg. Until she got there, she had barely thought of Ukraine. It was one of a bunch of newly independent states; it hadn’t come up on her course. But then she fell in love with a Ukrainian guitarist visiting St Petersburg for a gig, and found herself burning to visit that young country of sunflowers.
The book recounts the year or so leading up to her trip to Ukraine, in which Groskop mainly mooches around St Petersburg, smoking, drinking beer and teaching the odd English class to locals. In a way, nothing much happens. She meets her lover in a murky club. The intensity of his beauty nearly makes her laugh out loud. Then she finds his name funnier still: Bogdan Bogdanovich, meaning Gift of God, son of Gift of God. She is so smitten she is impatient for him to reject her; get it over with. But he doesn’t, and they fall into a relationship powered by her obsessive love.
As Bogdan travels to and from St Petersburg, Groskop soaks up the city, its language and new-minted customs. Today, we tend to remember the mid-1990s in Russia with awed regret: all that potential squandered; all those riches stolen. On the streets, in this recollection, there are dark mutterings about the ‘bandity’ – the black marketeers, politicians and businessmen making a killing – but mostly people are preoccupied with getting by. Outside metro stations, babushki sell ‘pathetic, random items on upturned cardboard boxes: a saucepan, a cup, a biro’. Most people spend an hour queueing each day to get basic items. Groskop is constantly asked by strangers and friends alike if she can get them Levi’s jeans, or give them dollars, or describe what Bounty bars are really like to eat (‘Is it really the taste of paradise?’).
The book’s title promises a ‘coming of age’ story, and of course it is. Our heroine learns that, no matter how much she tries to master the lingo, she will never be accepted as a local; she discovers that a relationship can only succeed if both parties make the effort, however vague, to sustain it. But the charm of the book isn’t to be found in Groskop’s journey from A to B. Instead it’s in the book’s openness and lightness of touch, its relaxed willingness to capture the unimportant: the clothes her adult students wear (kipper ties and corduroy jackets), the cold sore she has when she first meets Bogdan, which means they have to kiss on one side of their lips.
The book is also frequently funny. Misha, a Ukrainian friend, starts berating her for smiling, as it’s a sure-fire way of looking like a ‘yoghurt’ – the word he has coined for westerners, given their tendency to look happy enough to be in a yoghurt commercial. ‘Look,’ Misha nudges her on the street, whenever they pass a foreigner. ‘One of your yoghurt comrades.’
Later, we learn that Bogdan’s band, whose members sing in English to increase their chances of overseas success, don’t understand their lyrics, for the good reason that they don’t speak English. Even so, Groskop is expected by the band to translate the words back into Russian, and be impressed by their poetry and profundity. This is tricky, because they don’t make sense (sample: ‘I’ve got bell-bottomed trousers / I walk through pimply mouthers / They look at me, they talk about me / They suck their stinking crosiers.’) In the end, she signs the lyrics off as inspired, telling the boys loyally: Molodtsi. Well done.
And though the relationship at the heart of the book doesn’t turn out to have legs – that much is clear from the start – Groskop tenderly captures moments when it is perfect. That sideways kiss. The hug she and Bogdan share when she finally makes it to Ukraine. The night she wants to ask him whether he actually likes her, but has to use the awkward Russian formulation, ‘Am I indeed pleasing to you?’ And he replies: ‘Chuchelo, obidno. You idiot scarecrow. You are insulting me. Of course you are indeed pleasing to me.’
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