Woman and man in winter coats
Click here to view it larger.
Since the weather here has taken a turn for the colder, I thought I’d post something a bit wintry. It rarely gets cold enough here in San Francisco for outfits like this, but I like these looks, so I thought I’d share it. I’m always intrigued by the choice to wear heavy outdoor clothing when posing in an indoor studio. This is a real photo post card with no markings to indicate date or place. There is writing on the back that might be helpful if I could decipher it. Here it is, if you’d like to have a go at it [click to enlarge}:
Pics of Then 
The writing is in Russian. I can make out some of it, but you might need a native speaker to parse out the rest:
На память (A keepsake)
Дорогому (To my dear)
Другу (Friend [male]) —— [I’m not sure about the friend’s name]
от вечной (from your eternal)
подруги (friend [female]) Н.Ч. [?]
The declensions indicate a woman writing to a man. One thing that strikes me immediately about the young couple in the photo is that their clothes would have been very expensive at the time (probably WWI or the revolutionary period 1917-1921). My guess would be that they were revolutionaries. But that’s just a wild guess.
Ah, excellent! Thank you for that. The funny thing is, I studied Russian for a bit in college, and it didn’t even occur to me here. Clearly I haven’t retained my Russian after all these decades. “вечной” looked enough like Brno that I thought maybe they were Czech, though I realized that was incorrect. So this suggests that the woman in the picture is writing to the man? And hey, sometimes the wild guesses are the right ones.
The handwriting was tricky! I recognized that it was Russian right away, but then struggled to make out the words. I’m not 100% sure about “Напамять,” which is normally written as “На память,” or about “вечной,” but both make sense in context.
If the photo was taken before the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917, then the young couple were relatively wealthy. After the October Revolution, only people connected to the new regime would have been able to take such photo, unless they were in an area controlled by anti-Bolshevik forces.
The woman could have been writing to the man in the photo or to another man. We have no way to know.
That’s cool that you studied Russian as well. I think a lot of people studied it in the 1980s and 90s because so much seemed to be changing there. And yet…
Yes, the handwriting didn’t even look like Cyrillic to me. Congrats for deciphering it at all. I took Russian for the equivalent of three semesters, partly inspired by the world at the time, but also inspired by some Russian ancestry. I began with an intensive beginning course (an entire semester’s worth crammed into one month) which seemed like a good idea at the time, but I think ultimately didn’t give me the solid basis I needed. I did, however, take seven years of German (including a semester abroad), and while it’s rusty after decades of non-use, I can still muddle through a bit. (I also took a semester of sign language, and don’t remember that at all. LOL)
I don’t think cramming a language ever works very well. You deserve credit for trying, though! I took three years of Russian in college and three semesters of German. The German didn’t stick with me. Studying two languages at a time is probably also a bad idea (haha).
Funny the overlap we had. I’d actually been studying German for several years before I tossed Russian into the mix, which I think helped the German, if not the Russian. And it’s not like those are the only subjects we took in college!