»The Kitchen Boy

I picked up this paperback from a pile on the sidewalk in Alphabet City, and thought its slender spine suitable for subway reading. It is a horrible, bland narrative, so unsuited to the rich historical and cultural setting of the Russian Revolution. The characters are thin, sketched as caricatures despite the author's desperate desire to make them sympathetic and beautiful. Despite being short (about 225 pages), it took me hours to finish it, because each page felt like a burden. I wanted to finish reading it for the narrative: I was curious about how the fabled "kitchen-boy" who escaped the murderous attack on the Romanovs (that part comes from the historical record) ended up with a lakefront estate near Chicago. The ending came as a surprise (to me, who thought I was so smart and could anticipate it), and the twist ending rewarded my reading through the preceding pages. This book also uses verst, marking three appearances of the word since I first saw it a few weeks ago.

I read aloud all of the romanized Russian in this novel, and really like the sound of the langauge with its sweeping yes (the e in Cyrillic) and the sibilant fricative (affricative?) of ц. For the first time, I realised that the consonant ш (sha, IPA /ʃ/ or /ʂ/) has the same voiceless palato-alveolar fricative sound as the Hebrew ש, shin, and the Arabic ﺷ , sheen (which looks prettier in the final form, ﺶ) and closely resembles the two, orthographically. Various non-authoritative online references suggest that the Cyrillic character derives from either the Greek Σ, sigma or from ש. Although my money would be on the language that Cyril and Methodius brought to the region, I wonder how the symbol entered their alphabet. My mind is spinning.

Between the Revolution and the Second Great War, many precious cultural and religions objects disappeared from Russia. Amongst them, The Amber Room strikes me as the most curious. An entire room from Catherine Palace, made of massive panels of amber backed with gold leaf, the Amber Room disappeared during the German looting of the city in 1945. A reconstructed room opened a few years ago.