My Troika of Russian Teachers

(Or, I Went to Moscow to Learn Something, After All)

A troika is a group of three, historically referring to the trio of horses pulling a Russian sleigh or carriage. For my classes in the Study Abroad program in Moscow, I had three fine instructors that summer of 1994. Since I would soon after inaugurate my first semester as a high school Russian language teacher, my experiences there would benefit both my linguistic and my pedagogical skills.

This essay might contain little more than photographs, alas. Other than a class schedule and a couple of writing assignments, little seems to have survived of my notes from class. But my primary goal here is to honor the three ladies who taught me the intricacies of their native language, and inspired me with their love of sharing knowledge across oceans and cultures.

Лазарева, Марина Евгеньевна

The photo shows me and two of my classmates with Marina Yevgenyevna Lazareva. She taught our classes in reading literature and newspapers. Marina Yevgenyevna also conducted the Wednesday “excursions,” educational tours to places of historic or other interest. Among these were Fili, the New Jerusalem Monastery, the Pushkin Institute, and Tolstoy’s Moscow cottage. All explanations were in Russian, of course, and if a student had difficulty understanding something, classmates were allowed only to use Russian in any further explanations. Total immersion, my droogs.

As yet I haven’t found any internet mention of Marina Yevgenyevna.

Корчагина, Елена Львовна

Yelena Lvovna Korchagina was in charge of our individualized instruction, usually involving in-class writing of either sentences or whole paragraphs (creative writing, not dictation), which she would then go over with corrections; it’s likely that she inspired my teaching habit of marking papers in green ink rather than red.

I got along very well with Yelena Lvovna, and I’m pleased to see that she is still on the Faculty of Philology at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, as well as co-author of several textbooks and an online tutor.

[And yes, all these photos were taken the same day, at the end of the summer semester, when I was clearly in need of a haircut.]

Маргарита («Рита»)

Our Phonetics instructor was Margarita, who asked that we call her “Rita.” Either I never wrote down her patronymic and family name, or I never learned it. She may have kept it that way for privacy or security reasons, not as a former Soviet citizen, but as a young woman in a large city anywhere. Her class focused on spoken Russian, with its sometimes complex (to English speakers) declensions and idiomatic expressions.

Not surprisingly, everyone wanted pictures of Rita on the last day. As she walked down the hall, cameras clicking around her, I remember her smiling and remarking, “Kak kinozvezda!” (“Like a movie star!”)

With only a first name, of course, I’m not able to find her in an internet search. For all I know, she is the author of this recently published text on Practical Phonetics of English.

I’ve had the good fortune to have been taught by many amazing teachers over the years, most of whom I’ll never be able to thank personally, let alone photograph. Whatever else is achieved in my life, I am proud to have shared a profession with some of the finest human beings I’ve ever known.

•Дополнении•

• The illustration at the top of this post is exactly what it looks like: a 20-piece jigsaw puzzle of a beautifully illustrated Cyrillic alphabet. No, it had nothing to do with the classes in Moscow; the alphabet was one of the first things I learned in Russian 101 back in 1979. I found this gem at a bookstore in Moscow called Dom knigi, and thought it might be a neat classroom decoration. Unlike most of the other things I purchased at that store, it fit very neatly in my suitcase for the trip home. More of my [ahem!] voluminous finds from Dom knigi will be featured in a later essay.

• For any of you who already read Russian, here’s the illustrator’s key to the images for each letter of the alphabet: