Over forty years of watching ships from a dacha window and their changing names

Alla Demidova on Ships and Their Names:.

For more than forty years now I have watched this picture from my dacha window, as the ships sail past. We had a game: who could make out a name first. Little by little I grasped a certain regularity: the two-deckers were given the names of poets, “Akhmatova”, “Yesenin”, “Blok”. The three-deckers were writers, “Lev Tolstoy”, “Maxim Gorky”... Once a four-decker came by, called “14th Party Conference”... Years went by... “Blok”, as is well known, became for a time a restaurant near the “Udarnik”, “Akhmatova” stood for a long while moored not far from us, and then she was sawn up and carted away. The names of the ships changed... Recently I looked out and recognised the “14th Party Conference” sailing by, took out my spyglass (my eyes have grown worse) and read "Lenin"... Something changes, something doesn't...