I was born in Toronto, Canada and, after a brief stint in Madison, Wisconsin, grew up mostly in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where my father worked as a theoretical physicist at the national laboratory — the same institution where the Manhattan Project was carried out during World War II. It was a unique environment in which to spend one's childhood; not only does the town supposedly have the highest concentration of PhDs anywhere in the U.S. (the vast majority of them in scientific fields) but northern New Mexico also boasts a spectacular and varied natural environment, alongside a rich interweaving of many cultures and a vibrant artistic and classical music scene. All of these became important influences on me; it was a strange but special place, and it was also where, as a teenager still, I met my two closest, life-long friends.

Following high school, I attended Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. There — thinking better of my initial plans to enter the field of physics — I minored in mathematics (a nod to my math- and science-inflected childhood) but gave in to my love of reading and writing and majored in English and American Literature.

I also made the momentous decision in my sophomore year of college to begin studying the Russian language. I had always loved learning languages (I had picked up smatterings of Dutch and Chinese through childhood friendships with exchange students, and I had studied German and Spanish in school and Latin in a summer program), and I had long loved the music of Mussorgsky, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev; Russian seemed to be calling to me. Indeed, I remember vividly how, on the first day of class, we students each chose a Russian name (mine was Anya) and learned to say “Меня зовут...” (“My name is...”). When I stated my new Russian name out loud in Russian, it was as if, through the new name and the new language, I had suddenly created myself anew and tapped into a whole new identity that was my true self, formerly unrecognized and inaccessible.

I finished college a semester early and, restless and eager to experience the living Russian language and culture, in January 1990, I embarked on my first trip to the Soviet Union. After a brief orientation in Helsinki (I was participating in a semester-long study program), where, as I recall, the sun never really rose, my small group set off on a lumbering, olive green train to Moscow that was like something out of an old movie. That night at around 1 a.m., waking on my sleeping bench when the lulling motions of the train suddenly ground to a halt, I peered out the window to see a quiet dark platform, snow falling gently and softly in the early morning hush, and people moving alongside the stopped train as if in a trance. My gaze was drawn to one pair in particular, a mother and her young daughter, both dressed in fur coats and hats and fur-topped boots. They were covered in a dusting of magical snow and appeared to me like beautiful apparitions... That was my first vision of Russia, and it was the moment when I truly fell in love with the place. Ever since then, Russia, the Russian language, Russian literature, and Russian culture have been at the center of my life.