"Reading and Healing" short stories?

[Elena Gapova]

Gleb Uspensky's story  "Vypryamila" (if I am not mistaken). The main
character
 is a village school teacher Tiapushkin, who sees Venus de Milos in Louvre.
"Dusha ego raspryamilas', kak smyataya perchatka". Before, he had been
unhappy
with everyday trifles and humiliations, i.e. mockeries of the village
starosta bringing
fire wood for the school stove; bad food, disrespect of the rich villagers.
But there,
in front of Venus, Tiapushkin saw his humble life differently. He was
thinking of
vast meadows, fields, rural women as they were bleaching canvas etc.

Also:
Some chapters from excellent memoirs by Natalia Il'ina "Dorogi i sud'by"
(actually,
there are two editions, "Dorogi" was the first, and then she added some
sud'by), both
published in Moscow in the late 1980-ies.
A daughter of Russian emigrants, she grew up in Harbin and then Shanghai
(there, later,
she befriended Vertinsky);
after her parents separated, her mother, suppporting two girls and every day
having to
bow, as a school teacher, to the portrait of the Japanese Emperor, works
extremely
hard to rent a separate room (a room of her own) where she can resort to
extensive
reading (not romance, but very intellectual philosophical and political
titles) and live a
life of the mind.

Il'ina also described her repatriating to the USSR in the late 1940-s and
everyday life
in provincial Kazan' and then Moscow (she eventually became a famous
journalist and
an essayist) - this may be useful for "everyday life" course (though I am
not sure
about the pathologies).

Elena Gapova

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