And this is me in the central street of Kharkiv back in 1995:
I’m standing in front of the really great Repertory Theater of Kharkiv. They had some really brilliant productions there that I attended. After Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the Ukrainian theater of the great Ukrainian theater director Les’ Kurbas of the 1920s-1930s was revived here. Kurbas had been executed by Stalin back in 1937 together with every Ukrainian artist of note. Stalin did not kill any Russian-language artists except for the rare cases when they insulted him personally (like the Jewish poet Osip Mandelshtam did.) But he exterminated every Ukrainian of note he could find.
What is really funny is that I considered myself to be hugely fat at that time and was massively tortured by my imagined girth. God, it sucks to be young, seriously. Today, I’m both much plumper and much happier.
Clarissa's Blog 
You look much more Ukrainian there, and fit right in.
OT, but re the Forsyte Saga: it strikes me that that novel and many 19th century novels offer object lessons in the inconvenience of marriages of convenience. This goes directly against much current advice on how it is friendship and cooperation not amour-passion that leads to happiness in romance. That is an idea to develop, everyone thinks love is this unrealistic thing like (some readings of) the Tristan/Iseult passion but SO much modern literature is about how dry calculation, “working on the relationship,” bourgeois resignation and convenience lead to no good end.
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This is an interesting reading. But it’s true, the novel shows how even a marriage built on the basis of friendship,,respect and mutual kindness (Fleur and Michael) makes both miserable and stunts both their lives.
This is a great reading. Time to hold another debate with my husband on the novel. 🙂
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Young Jolyon leaves his first marriage, of convenience for love and has a happy second marriage. Widowed, he marries for love a second time and has happy marriage #2. In both of these happy marriages there are difficult financial (#1) and emotional contexts (#1 and #2) but the passion — that current advice gurus would say is the ephemeral, superficial thing — is what carries them through. Similarly, Winifred and Monty: he behaves terribly and she knows it, but there is something between them which is more than can be said for many of the unions in these books.
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I’m seriously excited about this reading. You’ve got to be a professor of literature or something. 🙂 🙂
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It can of course be argued that the reason this was a topic in 19th century literature especially was that this was when the reasons for marriage were changing and narrowing, becoming more private. So they would of course now be promoting love. Still I think these authors are onto something the current common sense is not.
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It’s similar to how the only female Bildungsromane to discuss work as an important venue of female fulfillment that is crucial to a woman’s growth were XIX century novels. Late XX century ones, on the other hand, didn’t even touch on work as something female characters could pursue in a positive way.
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This all has to do perhaps with the Marshall Berman thesis, that people see things most sharply at moments of change. XIX century was angel in the house era but also era in which many women, at least middle class ones, were also getting educations and professions. All my women relatives born in late XIX century did this and were serious about it (except aunt Valeska, did not get to go to college but still had big career and was big shot, enough so to have been interviewed for oral history project on social projects of federal government, i.e. an expert and piece of history, so she counts as well).
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Loved both the photo and Z’s take on the novel. I read only the first half of the F Saga, may be I should read the second now. 🙂
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I adore your coat!
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Yes. The coat is awesome!
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It was a nice coat. 🙂
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I considered myself to be hugely fat at that time and was massively tortured by my imagined girth
LOL! Same here.
I see my old photos and see I was effing gorgeous and not fat in the least.
I wish someone had told me that then.
I wonder if it would have made a difference in some of the crappy dating decisions I made then, because I sure felt fat and ugly and unworthy of male interest.
You look beautiful, btw!
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