An introduction to "North Far"

As it says in the header of my new “blog” my name is Stepan Zarin and I was born in 1906 in Belarus. Now wait a second. In ’06 there wasn’t a Belarus in the sense that countries exist, but the nation was there. I’m proof enough of that.

Mostly now we speak Russian, we Byelorussians. I speak Russian, and some Byelorussian, and I try to speak English. As I also said, my grandson is trying to help me put this blog together before I die, which could happen anytime. He is typing and working the computer parts and is making my English better at the same time. I’m forcing him to put these parts in because he says that he doesn’t want any credit – but no body is going to believe that I’m doing this on my own so we have to put this in.

It was my daughter Tanyuska’s idea to work on this blog. She thinks that me and young Stepan need to spend more time together and that this is a good way.

This is our first posting and I think that before we get involved I should say something about what we are setting out to do, as much so we can set our bearings straight as for you. OK, now these are my ideas, not Tanya’s:

I was born at the beginning of the 20^th Century and now the 20^th Century is over and my life is all but over too. I have seen this century from the tick-tick-tick of the face of the clock. I am an unspectacular person who has lived through a spectacular time and I am… unhappy with the state of the world as I am leaving it. I am not interested in saying anything about myself really. Really! It is awful to talk about yourself and maybe the only thing more awful is to suffer others talking about themselves. So I do not want to talk about myself like this.

I will talk about myself oppositely of how everyone talks about themselves. I am not important. My stories are not important due to the great significance of the storyteller subject. My stories are only valuable because I am very ordinary. I am as common as you can imagine and I have no illusions about this ordinariness of my life. This ordinariness itself is valuable. The stories of my life are the stories of life itself. They are the stories of the millions, common property for all. Mine has been a life indistinguished and indistinguishable from so many millions of others.

I will try to tell my stories in the same way that I have lived them, as an ordinary man. That way I hope to cast some light, and sweat, and flour, sawdust, and blood, on a history that suddenly seems so… past-tense. Maybe you will see that we are wading through history right now; especially we with our pant legs rolled up and our boots filling with mud.