Victor Brombert at the Hudson Review:
Friends called her Anna Vassilievna, according to the Russian custom of having the patronym follow the given name. As evening fell, I often lay in my child’s pyjamas, on the living room sofa, close to my grandmother, my Babushka. The sofa stood in our living room in the Leipzig apartment, close to the large window. Some light came from the outside.
Babushka would recite Russian poetry. She made me repeat the names of Pushkin and Lermontov, and sang to me snatches from the opera Eugene Onegin. “Why don’t you dance, Lenski, why don’t you kiss the ladies’ hands?” Onegin asks his close friend whom he will soon kill in a duel. I heard the story many times, as it appears in Pushkin’s verse novel and in Tchaikovsky’s operatic version.
more here.