THE WALLS WERE steaming, a band was blazing out The Bucks of Oranmore to a crowd of around 200 doing a massive Walls of Limerick dance. Perhaps it should have been the Walls of the Lubyanka, for I was in a large Moscow pub in the shadows of the old KGB headquarters and notorious prison.
I’d popped in after seeing a listing in a local paper, but my eyes almost popped at the massive céilí, without an Irish person in sight.
All-Russian band Slua Sí blasted out non-stop reels, jigs, polkas, and slides. Some dancers clearly graced in the art of ballet were flying around the floor like gazelles, with legs at obtuse angles I’d not seen at a Siege of Ennis before.
After a rousing version of The Men Behind the Wire (not about Stalin’s Gulag camps) the lead singer gave a flawless version of Óró Sé Do Bheatha Bhaile and the craic went on. No one spoke English, but a Celtic ballerina pulled me towards the singer Yuri Andreichuk. My amazement at the dancing was to pale into astonishment.
“Cén chaoi ina bhfuil tú?” arsa Yuri, inquiring of my form in a perfect Kerry blas, almost as clear as Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh in Croke
Park.
I’d once heard Bulgarian Black Sea shirt-sellers rattle a few sentences in Irish to entice Irish tourist custom, but any sense that Yuri had learned only a few stock-phrases disappeared with his endless flawless Gaeilge.
I was so stunned I had to sit down. What Gaeltacht had he lived in to develop such fantastic Irish, and a Kerry blas? His reply that he had never been to Ireland, left me almost on the floor with disbelief.
We talked on as Gaeilge, my own being far from fluent. Little did I expect that through Yuri, my facility in my native tongue would improve more rapidly in Moscow than my very limited Russian, our meetings always conducted mostly through Irish.
So what brings a Russian to speak Irish like a Kerryman? The love-affair began with music, when 20 years ago as a teenager, in the twilight of the Soviet Union, he was promoting American bluegrass music. Its roots in Irish music sent him searching for more.
“You could buy the Dubliners’ records in Soviet times – Luke Kelly was a communist. Later, some punks here were interested in the Pogues,” he says. Planxty were popular too, but a chance purchase of a recording of box-player Paddy O’Brien, guitarist Daithí Sproule and fiddler John Kelly set his interest on fire. (Their record is so popular among Russian folkniks that it became known just as “The Three Fellahs” in Russian – two of the three fellahs eventually visiting
Moscow at Yuri’s invitation last year to an ecstatic welcome.)
“My belief is that the Irish and the Russian people share a similar mentality from their history, a history of wars, hunger and hardship. Music and dancing was an escape from this. Our tradition in the villages is dying out, but many young people here need to be part of a living tradition, they are hungry for it. This amazing music is part of a tradition that’s alive today, not something in the past, and we Russians can learn from that.”
Irish was studied by linguists at the Moscow State University where Yuri was a student, and he immersed himself. “You need to know the language to understand the soul of a people and how they think,” he says. An Irish academic, Mark Ó Fionnáin, now in Poland, gave huge help. Yuri put in the hard graft himself too with text books, learning the grammar from the Caighdeán Oifigiúil [official standard] and improving his vocabulary.
Also a fluent Polish speaker, he says there are three stages to learning Irish. “You must learn the grammar. Then you must choose and learn your dialect, but the Caighdeán Oifigiúil, which many don’t like, means you can understand others or be understood so it’s very important. The third stage is reading, improving your vocabulary, and speaking more. That’s the stage I am getting into now,” he says.
Russian is difficult, but what about Irish? “The irregularity of some Irish grammar makes it difficult to develop a system. Russian nouns are harder but Irish has complicated verbs and some forms of plurals are difficult. But overall Irish verbs are harder than Russian,” he says. However, the languages, including the syntax and building sentences share strong similarities. “Irish is much more similar to Russian than
English.”
Yuri’s knowledge has deepened by meeting Irish speakers who’ve worked in Moscow, and with the internet too: he tunes into RTÉ, Raidio na Gaeltachta and TG4, loves the website www.beo.ie, but mourns the recent loss of the last Irish-language newspaper Foinse.
His enthusiasm has spread, and he now teaches Irish to Russians, keen to learn of a living folk-culture, and apply it to discovering their own.
“Some are attracted initially by just Guinness, Riverdance or stories about the IRA. I give them An Béal Bocht, by Myles na gCopaleen, translated into Russian by my great friend and Irish-speaker Anna Korostilova. If they get it, they come back and I teach them,” he says.
A journey which began through music reaches a major milestone on August 15th, when Yuri lands in Ireland for the first time, for the Scoil Éigse and the Fleadh Cheoil in Tullamore. He sees his trip as merely the next step in his own education, to learn more Irish and more Irish singing and songs.
The language has a bright future in Ireland he believes, but says the emphasis must shift. “Young people in Ireland don’t see it as a living language. You cannot learn it for a reason, be it history or exams. You have to believe it’s a living language, use it, and speak it socially. Speaking helps you understand it even more,” he says.
He says that Irish is in his soul, whereas English – which he never formally learned, but speaks – is like a tool or an instrument, which is useful for business, but no more. “I think of English as a shovel. I guess it’s a case of ‘don’t forget your shovel if you want to go to work’,” he laughs, as he heads for the Moscow Metro among thousands. “Ach tá an Ghaeilge níos fearr,” he says, in perfect Kerry Irish.