Member Feature: Lyubov Medvedkova

To celebrate our wonderful, unique and diverse membership, IWAP is profiling one member each month. We’re asking members the same questions that will hopefully let us – and you – get to know them better. Each month we will profile a different member, selected at random, with the answers they provided along with their photo. Lyubov Medvedkova is March’s selection.

Where are you from?

I am from Kazakhstan. I am ethnic Russian. I was born in Kazakhstan. Almost all my life I lived in Kazakhstan and several years in Russia.

What brought you to Prague?

I came to Prague with my son’s family. I have lived in Prague more than 7 years.

What are your hobbies and interests?

I am interested in theater, opera and ballet. I also like reading. I was born in 1945. Stalin was still alive and he was known to be a great lover of opera. At that time all houses had small radio sets which were never switched off. They always aired some pieces of Russian operas and some Western ones like “La Traviata” or “Carmen”. The glory of opera singers in Russia of that time was equal to that of nowadays pop singers. In Moscow, there were fighting rival groups of fangirls for two tenors from Bolshoi: Sergei Lemeshev versus Ivan Kozlovsky.

Our generation though preferred reading books and dramatic theater. In Prague, I go to Narodni Divadlo and Estate Theater to watch mostly classic operas and ballets. I am not a connoisseur, nothing of the kind. I just like to hear nice tunes, see perfect bodies of ballet dancers and watch a well-dressed audience many of them are old-aged as me. I do not imagine Christmas and New Year without “Nutcracker”. Of course, I attended all Russian operas staged in Prague – “Boris Godunov”, “Iolanta” and “Nightingale”. As for drama – I go to Czech-language plays though I practically do not know Czech. I choose Russian plays which I know very well from school. The last were Chekhov’s – “Three sisters” at Narodni and “Cherry Orchard” at V Celetne. Also, I attend Shakespearian plays which were very popular in the Soviet Union.

As for reading, my preferences have been changing during my life. Now I prefer classic Russian authors like Chekhov and Tolstoy. Also I like women authors: Lyudmila Ulitskaya and Uzbekistan-born Israeli living Dina Rubina. People relation, humor, philosophy – here is all in their books that I can read and reread. In English, I also read and reread Agatha Cristie and Harry Potter. I do not avoid reading some fancies of foreign authors about Russian life.

What are your favorite things to do in Prague? What surprised you the most about Prague?

My favorite thing is to watch Prague’s houses through the windows of a tram. Good work of public transport surprised me most. As a matter of fact, I love trams and always prefer to make a part of my way by tram rather than change lines in the underground. The trams that I use are # 9 that cuts from Wenceslas Square and Andel and # 10 from Andel to Dablice to pick up my grandson from school. No doubt it is a very long way, I could have made it shorter by changing from line B to line C. But then I would not see a gorgeous panorama of Vltava River and the Castle and abundant decorations on the houses on the way. But I like not only decoration and outstanding architecture of Prague. As a matter of fact, I prefer city to country and accept all the diversity of city life on my way. For instance, on the way to Palmovka underground station, I feel a kind of nostalgia seeing a light blue log cabin with a toilet in the yard which resembles a Russia summer hut called “dacha”. Or a permanent fruit bazaar resembling Central Asian markets at Kobylisy station.