Reading Russian Authors in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 61-62: On the night before I left for Spain, Dariya knocked and entered my room with her teaching notebook. She’d settled in comfortably as my language instructor. That night we continued our discussion of motion verbs: the differences between going one way to a destination or there and back; of general “wander-going” without destination; of moving between locations by foot or by motorized conveyance; of which word to use when any type of “hovering” was involved. Russian contained enough variations of the word “go” to fill the lessons of several days. Dariya rummaged through the contents of my desk while she waited for me to conjugate the verb, “to go one way by ground conveyance.” She scanned several Peace Corps documents for passages she understood. Discouraged, she flipped over the novel I was reading. Her lips fluttered as she sounded out the letters of the title. Her eyes grew wide. She…