11/20/2023 0 Comments Frodo meme mordor![]() So I told him, ‘Papa, please bring me back this book, I only want this book.’ He promised, ‘I’ll get it,’ and he left. Then suddenly papa had to go to Moscow on a business trip! Well, papa could do anything. Trying to find this book literally drove me crazy. My mom also began to look, my friends too. I asked, where’s the next part? No one knew. ![]() For instance, one Soviet woman who read “Fellowship” in 1983 as a 10-year-old told Sergienko this not unusual story: “I checked it out at the library, someone had recommended it, and I read it all in one night. Sergienko, seeking to plumb the depths of modern Russia’s passion for “Lord of the Rings,” interviewed different generations of Tolkien fans and found that those born in the 1960s and 1970s often had traumatic memories of going years without knowing the hobbits’ fate. Or if TV’s your thing, imagine an eight-year hiatus between seasons one and two of “The Sopranos” or “Breaking Bad.” The plot suspense has reached a nearly unbearable intensity, and then, silence…įor Soviets yearning to know Frodo’s fate, the uncertainty was agony. Imagine having to wait eight years between publication of the first two Harry Potter books. And those who read “Fellowship” in their old age… well, some of them probably didn’t live to encounter Treebeard or witness the battle of Helm’s Deep, or to read of Saruman’s demise in the “Ring” trilogy’s final book, “The Return of the King.” Those who read the first book in college were young parents when the second book appeared in stores. Soviet students who read the “Fellowship” in middle-school were in college by the time “Two Towers” was published. “An entire generation of people were left alone with that terrible knowledge,” Russian literary critic Galina Yuzefovich recalled last year in a podcast for the website Meduza. For all the Russians knew, Gandalf was dead. ![]() For years, Soviet readers were left hanging on a cliff: they knew only that Boromir had tried to seize the ring, that Frodo and Sam were on their way to Mordor, and that the other members of the fellowship were desperately searching for them. Thanks to the repressive Communist Party leadership, eight years elapsed between the formal appearance of “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1982 and its sequel, “The Two Towers” in 1990. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” into Russian surely tested the patience of even those Soviet comrades accustomed to standing in lines in the dirty snow of Moscow winters. For the right to immigrate.īut the maddeningly protracted translation of J.R.R. They put their names on waiting lists for cars, for apartments, for televisions. Sometimes they reportedly didn’t even know what they were waiting for: they simply saw a line outside a store and joined it. Soviets stood in line for bread, for sausage, for cheese. It was a truism of Soviet Communism’s command economy that citizens had to wait to get the things they wanted. ![]() Anyone old enough to remember the Soviet Union, or anyone who’s studied the history of that mercifully defunct nation, knows that one of the character traits of its unfortunate citizens was their heroic patience. ![]()
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