09 Dec Life is a Work of Art
“Educator.” Painting by Russian painter Mikhail Vatutin (1892). Photo from: http://elise.com.ua/?p=183813
A Work of Art is Life
Russian popular wisdom equated true love with beating and drunkedness with normality.
Like the saying goes “love like your soul, shake like a tree.” (In Russian it’s a pear tree because it rhymes with soul.)
Not much changed in centuries. In the 1970’s in Kiev, in the capital of Ukraine, not some backward village, the mother-in-law of my husband’s boss warned him to start beating up his wife, her daughter, or she would leave him.
I barely paid attention to drunks chugging from a bottle in a store in the morning, weaving between people in the street, falling off their seats in buses, or sleeping on park benches. One would just step over them or push them off the bench if one wanted to sit down. We were so shocked not seeing the familiar stumbling figures in Chicago even during holidays! It felt that something from missing from the picture.
The paintings in the link below speak for themselves but the Google-translated descriptions may need clarification. Contact me if they do.
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&u=http://elise.com.ua/%3Fp%3D183813&prev=search.
The original: http://elise.com.ua/?p=183813.
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