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While the ticks were out there somewhere, carnivorously grinning and rubbing their little legs, scouting for a gullible linguist to sink their teeth into, Nastya’s urge to merge with nature struck again with all its usual ferocity. With the utmost seriousness, my beloved declared that we had to spend at least a full day outdoors. There wasn’t a single chance I could weasel out of it — and here’s why: we had decided to squeeze every last drop (and a bit more) out of the May holidays. Not just to join the country in its collective springtime revelry, but to stretch the celebration by another full week using vacation days. And yet, in all that glorious idleness, my restless wife kept feeling like we were being far too slow, far too still — while life, cold and indifferent, was just passing us by. A trip to friends near Voronezh? Not enough. A house party steeped in wine and rum? Still not cutting it. Nothing could fill the gaping pit of her desire to become one with nature. To be fair, t...

This year, it was my fate to venture to the Peninsula of Freedom solo. Pasha decided to tie the knot and, as is often the case, didn’t read the fine print. So, when the time came to buy tickets, he faltered and, with a trembling voice, said he wouldn’t be going. Just like in those endless jokes about happily married men: “We don’t like football!” Yeah, right. There was definitely a touch of cosmic irony to the whole situation. It was Pasha—the very one who’d first lured me into this madness a year ago, eyes blazing as he raved about Kubana—who now couldn’t go himself, choosing instead to build a brand-new unit of society. Well, compadre… hasta luego! I’m off. Kubana 2013 marked the festival’s fifth anniversary, and the organizers went all out with a full seven days of non-stop mayhem. Artists were summoned from practically every corner of the planet—not to mention the bonus activities scattered across the festival grounds. The first surprise, and not exactly a pleasant one, was that ...

One of the trickiest and most baffling questions for me has always been: “What kind of music do you listen to?” Back in my barefoot youth, you could—under certain circumstances—catch a punch to the face for the “wrong” answer, but that’s not the point. Even at a pretty tender age, choosing just one musical genre felt like an artificial limitation. Rammstein lured me in with their mysterious language. Bomfunk MC’s dropped a video for “Freestyler” so cool it made you want to buy massive baggy pants, get dreads, and wander the streets shouting: “Freestyla! Raka maka fo!” And then there were those special emotional strings tugged by Ruki Vverh! — when they ask some random girl where she managed to get legs that were designed in such an exceptionally attractive way. After getting out of the army, I desperately wanted a break from all the uniforms, emergency drills, and endless marching drills. So when Pasha suggested a week-long escape to Krasnodar Krai to party hard under the soundtrack...

Renovation… so much meaning packed into that one word! So many sleepless nights, so many arguments, so much screaming, twitching eyelids, and nervous stammering triggered by quotes and material costs. If the backbone of Russian poetry, a.k.a. good ol’ Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin himself, ever sat down to write a piercing passage about some hapless hacienda undergoing renovations in "Eugene Onegin," he probably took one look at what he wrote, recoiled in horror, and thought, "Nah, better just mention Moscow or something less hellish." When Nastya said, in passing, that it “might be nice” to freshen up the bathroom and toilet, I assumed she meant sometime in the distant future. The full depth of my tragic misconception crashed down upon my poor, sorrowful head a few days later — when we found ourselves applying for political asylum at my mother's house and packing up our belongings. Once upon a time, in the vast wilderness of the Internet, I stumbled across a mi...