When Our Teacher Was Seventeen: Diary of an Orthodox girl

Борис Гречин Realistic Urban

"What is this novel, finally? It is a love story, but not a romance. It is a Bildungsroman, but the self being formed is a soul, not a personality. It is a work of theological fiction, but its theology is entirely dramatic, embodied in conversations and meals and quarrels, never abstracted into sermons. It is, perhaps most of all, a book about the possibility of spiritual education in a world that has forgotten what spiritual education is for—a world in which schools, even religious schools, have become machines for producing conformity, in which the Church too often offers not the living water of the Gospel but the grey asphalt of rules, in which the very idea of a teacher who takes an individual soul seriously enough to craft a curriculum just for her seems like a fairy tale. And yet here it is, in these pages: the fairy tale made real, the Prince and the Fox walking together through the forest, the music of Stravinsky cracking open the shell of a frightened girl’s heart, the Desert Fathers standing alongside Plato and Kierkegaard and a Lebanese pop star, all of them witnesses to the one thing that matters.
At the centre of it all, there is a voice—Daria’s voice, which is by turns naive and profound, funny and devastating, self-deprecating and utterly fearless. She is one of the great creations of contemporary Russian literature: a heroine who manages to be both an ordinary village girl with a nose like a potato and a soul of astonishing depth, a girl who can joke about her own “blissful idiocy” and in the next sentence articulate a vision of the spiritual life that would shame a theologian. To spend forty days in her company is to be reminded of what the novel, at its best, can do: it can take you inside another person’s mind with such intimacy that you begin to see the world through their eyes, and when you emerge, the world looks different—stranger, holier, more alive." (c) A Friend from Afar

Unfold