Gorko!
Russia, I’m often told by other Russians, is a European country.
Russia, I’m often told by other Russians, is a European country.
“Europe is everything between Calais and the Ural mountains,” they add, with the kind of confidence that comes when you cite propaganda.
(An American classmate of mine once called them the Oral Mountains and assumed everyone was laughing because they were too far away.)
But the clearest way to see that Russia is an Eastern, and genuinely weird, country is to look at its wedding traditions.
I grew up watching a black VHS cassette labelled MAXIM AND SVETLANA’S WEDDING, shot by my grandfather and edited like an Adam Curtis documentary: no talking heads, no narration, just raw footage stitched together.
Glued to the telly, from the ages of four to ten, I’d watch my nineteen-year-old father climb a concrete staircase, behind him graffiti on the walls, the colour I can only describe as shame, followed by an assortment of family males, as if storming the tower of a Soviet Disney princess.
On every floor up to the sixth, where my mother lived, there was a trivia quiz about the bride.
What’s Svetlana’s shoe size?
The footage shows my father, the age of someone I wouldn’t trust to pick a restaurant today, thinking hard. “Thirty-six?”
Correct!
What’s Svetlana’s favourite dish?
“Buckwheat!”
What colour are her eyes?
A pause, and my father’s face shifts. “Shit,” he says, laughing at himself.
If you fail a question, you pay money. I remember watching my father, this boy wearing a suit two sizes too large, reach into a wallet stuffed with thousand-rouble notes, and think: how do you not know the colour of my mother’s eyes?
