A new installment of our “Emigrant Questionnaire” series! Our first questionnaire was completed by Monetochka, who lives in Vilnius, and the second by Elmira Drau, a 32-year-old English teacher in Yerevan. This time, journalist Vladimir Raevsky tells us about life in London.
Meduza’s Emigrant Questionnaires
- Life in exile: Russian singer Monetochka thought Vilnius would be a stopover. Four years later, she says she may stay forever.
- How do you start over in a foreign country with $500, no job, and a cat to feed? Elmira Drau, a Russian émigré who teaches English, tells the story of her flight to Armenia and the life she built.
What’s your name?
Vladimir Raevsky.
Where do you live, and how long have you lived there?
I’ve been living in London for three years now.
What do you love most about your new country?
Do you know why British writers so often come up with worlds within worlds? Like in “Harry Potter,” for example, or “The Chronicles of Narnia.” I think it has something to do with Britain being a world of its own within the wider world. And once you find yourself in it, it’s exactly where you want to be.
London and I are a perfect match. We’re compatible in every way. Nothing here pisses me off, I like everything, I find everything fascinating. And I can never quite figure it all out.
The first time I went down into the Tube, I looked around: two dudes in turbans sitting here, some Africans over there, Slavic women with foot-and-a-half-long nails over here. And right then I knew I was where I belonged. This is exactly the kind of society I want to live in — with lots of different people, all sharing a sense of friendliness, openness, curiosity about one another, and a rejection of violence.
No one here has ever tutted when I’ve bumped into them (which I do constantly) or rushed me when I’ve tried to tap my door key instead of my card on the Tube (it’s happened more than once). I feel completely at home here.
What was hardest to get used to in your new country?
I always always laugh it off and say my biggest complaint is that you need an adapter to plug a European plug into the outlets here. Or that cell reception is bad indoors. That British people have loudspeakers implanted in their throats as children and don’t realize it. That’s about the level of my beef with London. There’s nothing here I really dislike.
That said, London is an expensive, difficult city. You can’t say life here is easy. There are cities where all you have to do is show up and live: find a comfortable balance between work and the rest of your life, live in a way that makes you happy and comfortable. London is demanding. It makes you stand up straight and get moving.
It’s very hard to survive here if you’re just tired and doing nothing. You can’t afford to be tired here. You have to keep moving and working. You have to be focused, active, involved, willing to take the initiative. Sociable, extroverted. I think that makes things somewhat difficult. It’s a bit like the gym. Would someone in their right mind walk up and lift some heavy damn thing? Well, probably not. But you have to do it. And it’s the same here.
What’s your favorite place in your new city?
The British Museum — admission is free. I love popping in for 15 minutes to remind myself why the Parthenon Marbles should stay here forever.
What’s your favorite local food?
Boiled eel, pork cracklings, overripe cucumbers (I’m joking, of course — it’s all inedible, but someone has to give that answer, right?).
Have you taken up any new hobbies since moving abroad?
Tramping through mud in rubber boots among thickets of thistles, looking around and exclaiming, “It’s so beautiful!”
My wife and I have friends here who gave up drinking completely about three years ago. The way they tell it, it used to go like this: you’d go to the pub on Friday, get up to all kinds of trouble, have a hangover the next morning — the whole weekend revolved around drinking. Then they stopped drinking and had nothing to do. So they started going on little hikes every single weekend — literally every weekend, except when they were on vacation or sick. Just because they had nothing to do. And it turned out to be a great replacement for hanging out at the pub.
There’s a group chat where they organize these little hikes. Usually you get on a train at one of London’s stations, and an hour or an hour and a half later you’re somewhere amazing. You walk along the coast, or over some hills, or up to a castle. And you’re out there for two to four hours.
Once, we spotted a great route in an Instagram reel. It looked so beautiful: along the coast, over hills, through thickets. We went there in November or February — some pretty horrible month. All the plants were bare, and everything squelched underfoot. We ended up getting lost and finding ourselves in these hellish thorn bushes that clung to us from every side. It felt like we’d wandered into some forest out of “Harry Potter” that was attacking us and stabbing us with thorns. We finally came out with our clothes torn and thorns all over us. Our shoes were caked in mud. We looked at each other and said, “God, this is wonderful.”
That evening, we’d been invited to a housewarming party in a big, very beautiful house. And we showed up in these clodhoppers, covered in mud, and said, “We’ve been on a hike.” And everyone understood.
Have you managed to make new friends? How?
Most of our social circle here speaks Russian. They’re people from different countries: Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus. And we have some English-speaking friends. Or, if not friends, then just people we enjoy meeting up and spending time with.
For example, once before Christmas, we went to the pub for a beer with friends of friends. One of them was my friend’s husband, Chris. A couple of months later, he invited me to Burns Night — a party celebrating Robert Burns’ birthday, where we ate haggis and sang Scottish songs.
At one point I asked if I could say something and told them that, surprising as it might seem, Robert Burns was very popular in Russia — thanks to a man who loved his work and translated a lot of it, brilliantly. That was Samuil Marshak. I told them a little about Marshak and said, “Let me recite a Burns poem in Russian, and someone here can do it in English.” And I recited “My Heart’s in the Highlands,” which every Russian knows from school. It made quite an impression. It was exotic: as if people in, say, Albania loved Lermontov, or people in Cameroon read Yesenin.
Do you have enough money to live in your new country? How do you deal with financial problems?
I think the only people in London with “enough” money are the ones who made it under Queen Victoria.
So you have to deal with financial problems by earning money. You have to hustle a lot. But I moved here from Israel, so I was already somewhat prepared for life in an expensive country. Though in Tel Aviv, it’s impossible to understand what you’re paying all that crazy money for.
Here, on the whole, you can live on any budget. Okay, you won’t shop at some expensive supermarket — but the cheaper one won’t be unpleasant, and you won’t feel excluded. Or, say, if you have plenty of money, you buy theater tickets in, let’s say, the fifth row of the orchestra. If you don’t, you get early-bird tickets, or enter ticket lotteries, or go to free classical concerts at churches, or figure something else out.
You really can live here even if you don’t have much money — and not feel like you’re somehow less than everyone else because of it.
What do you do to learn the new language?
I make reels in English and try to be funny in them… And I try to do everything I do in my native language: make friends, talk to people in the pub, write things, comment on people’s Instagram posts.
You constantly have to work on your English — especially here. On the one hand, it’s a universal language, and you feel like you can read, write, conduct interviews, do anything in English. But in London the bar immediately goes up: people here have been speaking this language for centuries, writing books and poetry in it, picking up on all sorts of nuances. So however well you know the language, you still feel you have to keep learning.
But of course, it’s paradise compared with living in a country where you don’t know the language. You can read anything. You can go on any website. You can talk to anyone. You have no trouble reading anything at an exhibition or in a newspaper. That’s an enormous privilege.
If you have children, would you want them to become locals?
They’ll have Hobson’s choice (google it).
How do you cope with intense homesickness? Do you get homesick at all?
What I miss most is snow, but last winter it snowed in Scotland, and I walked around in it to my heart’s content. And somewhere deep down, I was glad it wasn’t going to last five months.
Do you feel you’re losing touch with your home country? Is it possible to keep that connection?
We’re in touch…
First, I have friends and other people close to me in Russia — we’re literally in touch. We can message each other, send reels or memes, talk on the phone. Fortunately, that connection hasn’t been broken.
And second, there are things happening in Russia that worry me enormously. Everyone has an issue that’s personal to them — for me, it’s political prisoners. I have several friends who are in prison. And I stay in touch with them, their loved ones, their lawyers.
I think this is a good moment to remind people that you can write to Russian political prisoners. And don’t let the fact that they’re there and you’re somewhere else stop you. They’ll be happy to get a letter from anywhere.
Are you happy living abroad?
Very!
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