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# Ilf and Petrov on the Russian Molokans of San Francisco in 1936
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/a-vot-i-russkaia-gorka-skazal-nash-moguchii-draiver-perevodia-rychag-na-vtoruiu-skorost/
- Published: 2023-10-09T07:31:26.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:34:36.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Faith, Books, Mores, Ethnography

"And here is Russian Hill," said our mighty driver, shifting the lever into second gear. The car whirred and began to clamber up the cobbled roadway.

No, nothing here recalled San Francisco! This little street looked more like the outskirts of old Tula or Kaluga.

We stopped beside a small house with a porch and went inside. There were bearded, elderly men in spectacles. There were younger ones too, in jackets from under which Russian shirts peeped out. Just such clothes were put on by Russian workmen before the Revolution on a holiday.

But the strongest impression was made by the women. One even wanted to pass a hand across one's eyes, to make sure that such women could exist in the year nineteen thirty-six, and not somewhere in the backwoods of old Russia, but in petrol-and-electric San Francisco, at the other end of the world. Among them we saw Russian peasant women, white-faced and rosy-cheeked, in fine holiday blouses with puffed sleeves and wide skirts, the cut of which had once been brought out of Russia and had stayed frozen in San Francisco without any change; we saw tall old women with prophetic eyes. The old women wore little chintz kerchiefs. That would have been nothing. But where had the chintz come from, in the very genuine Tsindel polka dots! The women spoke softly and roundly, in singing voices with the northern "o", and, as is the custom, offered their hands held flat like little spades. Many of them could not speak English at all, although they had lived in San Francisco almost all their lives. The gathering resembled an old village wedding: when everyone has already arrived, but the merrymaking has not yet begun.

Almost all the men were tall and broad-shouldered, like the first one, who had called for us. They had enormous hands, the hands of stevedores.

Below was a fairly spacious basement room. In it stood a long, narrow table laden with pies, salted cucumbers, sweet bread and apples.

Tea was served in glasses, and suddenly the biggest of the Molokans, a rather elderly man in steel-rimmed spectacles with a greying beard, drew a deep breath and sang in an extraordinarily loud voice; at first it even seemed that he was not singing but shouting:  
Grief has worn me out,  
The snake beneath the log.  
Burn down, my little splinter,  
I shall burn down with you.

The song was taken up by all the men and women. They sang as the leader did, at the top of their voices. There were no nuances in this singing. They sang fortissimo, only fortissimo, with all their might, trying to outshout one another. The singing, strange and a little unpleasant at first, grew more and more harmonious. The ear quickly got used to it. Despite its loudness, there was something sad in it. Especially fine were the women's voices, frenziedly pouring out the high notes. Just such piercing, mournful voices used to drift somewhere over the fields, into the dusk after haymaking, ringing tirelessly, slowly dying away and mingling at last with the chirring of crickets. People sang this song on the Volga, then among the Kurds and Armenians, near Kars. Now they sing it in San Francisco, in the state of California. If they were driven to Australia, to Patagonia, to the Fiji Islands, they would sing this song there too.

*Literal translation*

The song is all that is left to them of Russia.

*Ilf and Petrov, "Little Golden America" \[Odnoetazhnaya Amerika\], Chapter 33, "Russian Hill"*