Four Generations Later
2026
In 1947, ethnographers Irina Yakimovitsh and Olga Mzhelskaya travelled to the eastern bank of the Narva River to document the local dialect. Without audio recording technology, they preserved people’s speech in writing. Among those they interviewed were my great-great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother, whose family name became Kapajeva after the abolition of serfdom.
I asked my nephew Zakhar and niece Alyona to read aloud the words of our ancestors. In the video, written records from almost eighty years ago come alive through their voices. You also can hear them struggling with the pronunciation and meaning of words, discussing how to read them. The language of this region, even within my own family, has changed profoundly over time. Through this act of reading, I bring the voices of different generations together while making audible the distance that separates them.