My grandmother is ninety-seven years old, and she tells me now, as an adult, when I listen carefully, when I know the history, and can compare the facts.

My grandmother is ninety-seven years old, and she tells me now, as an adult, when I listen carefully, when I know the history, and can compare the facts.

She came here with her parents. They are country people. This is remote Zaonezhye, east of Karelia, a hundred kilometers to the Arkhangelsk region.They came first to Pryazha.  Then to Petrozavodsk. Then my grandfather was transferred here, and my grandmother came here too, after the war.

I know all this, and that’s why I say that we are newcomers.

My grandmother was an elementary school teacher, an intelligent person, but she was from the countryside. Her mom could not read and write. But daddy worked in typography, and he was also intelligent.

 These are rustic things, a Karelian spinning wheel, with remnants of Karelian painting. Karelian painting is very peculiar, and gloomy. These are flowers, and berries. This is a blue color. Very expensive colors, expensive paintings –  they are not found in nature, they are purchased paints. Ochre could be made from berries, other colors – from grasses, from roots, and from moss. But red and blue are the most expensive colors.  

The splint basket, – I think everybody had one, so popular it was. So it traveled and traveled and ended up here.

My second grandmother is from Zaonezhye, only a little closer to Petrozavodsk, from Velikaya Guba, where Kizhi Island is. My mother’s kin is also from Zaonezhye. My parents met in Petrozavodsk, although it turns out they are from the same neighborhood. My father was born and grew up in Sortavala, and my mother left the village for the big city, Petrozavodsk. And it turned out that their family came from the same place, if we trace our roots back to the Middle Ages.

It’s impossible to find out that history. I was able to reconstruct the tree on my father’s line up to the seventeenth century. 
But my grandmother insists that she is Russian. I say: Grandma, you are definitely a Karelian. But she says: No, I’m Russian! She doesn’t want to be a Karelian. There was a Soviet period when being a Karelian was not a good thing.
The name is even here: Aniya. In her birth certificate, which is a scrap of paper that is scary to breathe on, from the twenty-seventh year, it says Aniya. And when the passport was issued, what kind of Aniya was it? Anya, that’s all. So she forgot about it, and we started to sort through old documents, and I said: “Grandma, your name is not Anya”. And she said, “Oh, what nonsense. And in the village they called me Nurka”. 

Nataliya