Victory Day

In March 2025 your former Novgorod village correspondent began keeping a journal that was checked for grammatical and orthographical errors by Irina as part of a short-lived attempt to improve our caveman Russian. The following text is our best attempt at a word-for-word translation of a journal entry written on May 11, 2025.

On May 9 I went to the village social club with Katya, Tanya, and Vera Mikhailovna. The party soon turned into farce. Within 10 minutes, everyone was drunk, yelling “Hooray!”, and taking pictures near the eternal flame (a light bulb). Then Sergei Petrovich, who was already drunk, fell in love with Tanya.

“She’s so beautiful. Does she have a husband?” — he asked. [Tanya was half his age and married with children, which he knew perfectly well.]

Then when everyone was really drunk and still yelling “Hooray”, an elderly woman arrived. I forget her name. She was the one that sold the house to Katya. In autumn, her son had died in Ukraine.

She gave a speech: “Yes, you can celebrate today, but there is still work to be done. There is still fascism in Ukraine. We have to defeat the vipers! If I were young I would go fight!” — she said to the roomful of drunk people.

The club got quiet. The drunk men had nothing to say. Then they ran up to her with a glass of cognac and invited her to drink.

Can you imagine? Her son died in a ditch in Kherson for nothing, and she wants others to do the same. Nobody in that room wanted to die in a trench in Ukraine. But everyone pretended that dying in a dirty hole in Ukraine was noble and honorable.

After that the woman left and everyone drank more.

Look! This is your Victory Day!