Everything is Wonderful (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

In 1993, Sigrid Rausing, a young student working on a PhD in Anthropology, went to spend a year living in Estonia, a remote Baltic State that had just gained independence from the recently collapsed Soviet Union. Armed with a notebook, rudimentary Estonian, and a clunky laptop, she arrived in the peninsula of Noarootsi, on Estonia's north-western tip, and made her way to the village of Pürksi, the place that would be her home for the next twelve months. Pürksi was the site of the Lenin Collective Farm, a now dilapidated reminder of the total control of the USSR had enjoyed just two years previously.

In her year on the former collective farm, Rausing documented the lives of the ordinary people there—from Ruth, a Seventh Day Adventist who in 1952 saw a vision of Stalin lying in a grave and became intensely religious (Stalin died a year later), to Astrid, who once taught Rausing how to milk a cow and produced a feast of a dinner for her, to the cynical alcoholic Toivu and his wife Ina, who owned the apartment where Rausing rented a small room. Rausing’s conversations with the locals touched on many subjects: the economic privations of post-Soviet existence, the bewildering influx of Western products, and the Swedish background of many of the locals, which was the focus of Rausing’s anthropological study. Rausing was profoundly affected by the beauty and isolation of the forests, the rocky coastline that marked the border with the West and was off limits during the Soviet period, and the trials of a people who enjoyed just nineteen years of independence in four centuries. In Everything Is Wonderful, she reflects in impressive prose upon her time in a country that for the first time was beginning to carve out its own place in a new, post-Soviet Europe.