I will survive, yes. But how?

I hated the place where I lived for 22 years.

Sounds ambiguous? What I mean is that I've lived there for 22 years & hated it all this time, not that I hated it for 22 years & then one enchanted evening came to love it, oh no...

Hated. Quite a word (as a side note: I've considered 'fear of pearls' or 'against pearls' as this blog's name but it was too negative, so now that I give this idea of being a sofisticated lady who doesn't suffer or gets hurt but just gets slightly bored at times, in a good old cynical way - now I can tell you how it really went).

22 years. At times you get less than this for a 1st degree murder (or 2nd? and to think I wanted to be a lawyer!!!) So what did I do to deserve this?

Well, now I know it was a good thing. A true learning experience. Rough but meaningful.

What saves you or, less dramatically speaking, helps you to get through tough times?

Maybe not realizing that what surrounds you is not pretty or fighting this surrounding yourself with beautiful things.

We didn't have grand museums where I used to live, but at my house we had this huge black album (kind of a coffee-table book bigger than a coffee-table and taller than me at that time) - the St. Petersburg Hermitage Collection. I would leaf through it non-stop. Even now every time I see a painting and feel a triple special emotion and a faster than usual recognition it means that it comes from my childhood days, from that huge album, may it rest in peace wherever it is now...

Madonna Litta, for example, attributed to Leonardo: a girl who posed for him had the habit of biting her nails, and Leonardo (even though I doubt it was him who painted her) faithfully reproduced this detail. It was an incredible emotion to meet her in person in the Hermitage in 1995.

Well, great Masters or less great pupils, originals & copies. The photos that you see are from my first trip to Moscow, the Moscow Fine Arts Museum. Circa 1985. Me & my Mom next to the copies of the Great Masters' statues. I'd see the originals years later in Venice & Florence.

Black & white nostalgia giving way to colorful, cheerful recognition.