Word: russian
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...PETERSBURG—The gray Audi slowly pulled up next to me and two friends as we walked along the Moika Canal. The driver’s side window buzzed down and the middle-aged man called out in Russian, “Girls, get in. Don’t you want to get out of the rain?” (Large drops had just started falling out of the sky.) Faced with our polite, “No thank-you’s,” the car crawled alongside us for another minute and then, with a shrug...
...have discovered that in St. Petersburg, being propositioned for sex is routine for young Russian women, and even for tourists dressed in Puritanical flowered skirts and Birkenstocks. Sometimes a car will pull over and the driver will call out. Other times, men on the street approach you with the phrase “Skolko sto-it?” which means “How much?” One of my friends was sitting at a bus stop when a 60-year-old man wearing a “Fight AIDS” t-shirt came...
...presence of prostitution in St. Petersburg was a familiar concept to me when I first arrived here to study Russian for the summer. The St. Petersburg prostitutes grace the pages of many Russian writers’ greatest works. In the 19th century, Nikolai Gogol wrote about an enticingly innocent prostitute that patrolled Nevsky Prospect, St. Petersburg’s main thoroughfare. Dostoevsky presented his own romantic version of the St. Petersburg prostitute in Sonya Semyonovna, the teenage prostitute who saves the soul of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. More recently, I remember reading a statistic in high school that...
...emphatically warned to watch out for pickpockets, most of my female friends have found themselves defending more than their wallets from the wandering hands of male strangers. After one of my classmates was aggressively groped on her morning bus ride, my conversation class spent the lesson learning expressions in Russian from “Take your hands off!” to several versions of “Stop...
While we have decided to ward off harassment with our paltry broken-Russian expressions, Russian women seem to have accepted this objectification. The proliferation of tight flared pants, sky-high heels and barely-there shirts make the women on St. Petersburg’s streets look like a uniformed parade. Their stick-thin figures seem to have jumped directly out of the pages of the Russian fashion magazines that sit in the corner of my room. Left behind by my host mom’s daughters, the Russian Elles and Vogues display the same fashion spreads and give identical make...