Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 17:02:54 -0800 (PST) From: Mikhail Entov To: Leonid Ryzhik Subject: English version Anya Pogossiants' Birthday Parties. Anya's parents asked me to write something about Anya's birthday parties (I used to go to those parties when Anya and I were classmates in High School #57 in Moscow). It's hard to write something specifically about the birthday parties - 10 years have passed since then and in my vague memories Anya's birthdays are now mixed up with the musical evenings at Pogossiants' place. What follows are just a few of my recollections (maybe not quite accurate or chronologically correct) from those days. *** On Saturday, after classes, we all together (10-15 of our classmates, our tutor Sasha Shen' and sometimes other tutors as well) went from the school to Anya's place: we had to take the subway ("metro") from "Kropotkinskaya" to "Universitet" and then it used to take forever to get from the subway station to Vinnitskaya street in a fully packed bus #661. *** When entering the apartment we gave Anya her birthday presents, which were mostly books - giving her an LP (the second most common type of birthday presents) would be like giving Windows95 to Bill Gates. The incredible number of records the Pogossiantses had was one of my strongest impressions when I first visited them. *** There were three rooms in the apartment, although it was not big by Moscow standards. All the rooms were crowded with people: besides Anya's school friends there were also other friends of her as well as friends of her parents and relatives (who helped with the cooking for the horde). In the living room there were a big table and a long bench formed by a large wooden desk laid over a few chairs and people had to sit around the table as close to each other as possible. *** Sometimes the table was put in a smaller (Anya's) room - then the living room was used as dancing hall. (That was a feature of only the first few parties - we were in 7th or 8th grade at that time, i.e. it was about 1983-84). We all danced terribly. The music we danced to was always the same record by Paul Mauriat (each Soviet family used to have that LP) or (then fashionable) Italian pop. *** For those who preferred culture to "stupid dances" there was an alternative: since all the necessary ingredients for a musical performance were present (Anya, Shen', piano and usually a guitar as well), sooner or later the singing had to be started. It would begin with Schubert and other classics and then slowly transform to modern Russian bards like Okudzhava, Gorodnitskiy and Novella Matveyeva. *** Some time after the tea the literary part of the evening would start. Seryozha Shats, a friend of Anya's parents, read his stories. The stories were very unusual and mysterious. Now they are somehow associated with E.T.A.Hoffmann for me. *** The talk on those parties went primarily around the usual subjects: the school, the teachers, entrance exams at Moscow University and other institutes like Fiztekh (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology), antisemitism, army draft, math, physics, programming, recollections of past hiking trips and plans for future ones. *** Now it seems that all those things happened in some other, previous, life. Michael Entov.