They say that teachers learn from their students just as students learn from their teachers, and it’s true. A year ago, on 1 December, I had a Zoom class with a group of first-year students, and a girl from Ust-Ilimsk, a city in the Irkutsk Region in Siberia, told a story about the ‘rabbit rabbit rabbit’ superstition, which I’d never heard of. It exists in Britain and America and consists in the belief that on waking up on the first day of the month you should say ‘rabbit’, or ‘white rabbit’ (once or repeatedly, in the singular or plural) in order to ensure good luck for the rest of the month. Later I found out that even President Franklin D. Roosevelt apparently used to follow the ritual. In general, rabbits seem to feature prominently in English-speaking culture – there’s Easter bunny, there’s Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with the White Rabbit and the March Hare, there’s Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, and more. The animal has even made it to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which, in my opinion, is one of the greatest albums of all time.
Hares occasionally appear in Russian history too. There’s a well-known story about a hare which might have prevented Pushkin from going to Saint-Petersburg and joining his friends in the Decembrist Revolt in December 1825. The animal crossed the path of his carriage as he was leaving his Mikhailovskoye estate, and, considering it a bad omen, the poet apparently decided against the trip. They also say a hare rushed at the feet of Napoleon’s horse before his army crossing the Neman at the beginning of the unsuccessful Russian Campaign in June 1812. Speaking of the Russian territory, when I was on a business trip to the Baikal last June, I mentioned my first-year student to a colleague from Irkutsk. On hearing she is from Ust-Ilimsk, he said she is a local – and Ust-Ilimsk is about 900 kilometres north of Irkutsk. They seem to have a different perception of distance in Siberia, as well as bigger plants and trees (and, possibly, rabbits).
03/12/2021
/Picture of Peter Rabbit taken from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/PeterRabbit8.jpg/