Евгения Горн (Genie Furnace)

Jevgenija Gorn (or Yevgeniya Gorn, hereafter Jevgenija, YeG, or Genie Furnace) is the only Russian person I’ve told about my blog. I guess it’s because, as much as I’ve liked people here, she’s the only one I feel like I can trust to be totally honest with me at this stage, and therefore the one person with whom I can be unself-consciously honest. And there are a few good reasons for that: One is that she’s been nice to me over the past few weeks, but a better reason is that she wasn’t that nice when she met me. She’s one of the few people who didn’t act over the moon to meet me on the day I was first introduced to everyone in the Foreign Languages Cathedra (Кафедра Иностранных Языков, called InYaz for short). When I first saw YeG, she was animatedly discussing some scheduling problem with Natal’ja Mikhajlovna Grishina, the head of InYaz. She had a harassed expression on her face, which I’ve seen a lot since then.

Natal’ja Mikhajlovna had invited me into her office, and she stopped Yevgeniya to start proposing a tentative schedule to me and another faculty member in English. Although YeG was in on this discussion, she never looked at me, and only used Russian when asked for her input. The expression on her face just got more exasperated. After that conversation, I went out into an adjoining room and was getting ready to leave, and YeG came out and introduced herself in very good English. She said we would need to discuss preparations for class, and she would need to meet with me to talk about it, so we agreed on a time and place. She said sorry for being rude (I waved it away) and told me she was normally a nice person but had a lot of reasons to be stressed, and I said it was OK because she seemed stressed. I said some of this in Russian, and she approved of my accent, which made me proud.

I was worried that it was a little shady to be setting up meetings deliberately in the absence of the department head, but when we did meet, she clarified for me that she was going to share/supervise my teaching for one of the subjects that had been assigned to me. And this time she was a lot nicer, not that I’d been too fazed the first time I met her. I figured it was good to know I’d met someone who would be candid if she had something bugging her. It’s understandable, too. Yevgeniya is only 24 (that’s just a year older than me! My God, I’m old) and in her last year as a junior teacher which, as I gather, is a pretty stressful thing to be in Russia. You basically make about enough to pay for transportation between home and work, feed yourself if you’re lucky… and that’s about it. And they’re usually completing a thesis at the same time to become senior teachers. Plus you have senior teachers delegating tasks to you left and right, which may have to do with their classes, or their research… Basically, I think Yevgeniya is pretty pleased that this is the last year she will have to take all this crap.

As planned, we’ve been sharing teaching duties for the “Listening” groups of second-year students going for an extra qualification as translators. To get this qualification, they need supplemental classes in each area of language skill (I think the division is speaking, listening, writing, and reading). It’s been going pretty well. Yevgeniya is a good source of moral and professional support. She’s gradually having me teach one of the groups more and more on my own, and offering advice to help me improve. And it is genuinely helpful advice, not the busybody variety which is so common here. The one drawback is that it’s very tempting to speak English with her, as her English is better than my Russian. It usually isn’t a problem if I start the conversation in Russian, because she’s very patient while I’m groping for words, so I’ll just have to be stricter with myself.

“Gorn” is a German name. The nice thing about German surnames in Russian is they don’t change by gender and they don’t decline. In Russian it means “furnace”, but it’s probably derived from another language, because it’s just like horno (“oven”) in Spanish, and that’s too close to be a coincidence. So maybe if “gorn” were a Slavic word, Yevgeniya might be Gornov, but since she’s not, I don’t have to worry about case when I’m talking about her in Russian. Another plus.