Russia Culture & Language

Russian high culture emerged remarkably fast — most of what the world knows was produced in a single century — and sits on a much older Orthodox and folk foundation.

The novel

Between about 1830 and 1900, Pushkin effectively created the modern literary language and Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov produced a body of fiction that changed the form internationally. Russians still read them, quote them, and treat poets as public figures in a way few countries do.

Ballet

The Bolshoi in Moscow and the Mariinsky in Saint Petersburg have set the standard for classical ballet for a hundred and fifty years, and the Imperial school’s training method is used worldwide. Tchaikovsky wrote for these companies, and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes took the form to Paris and remade twentieth-century art around it.

Music and icons

Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky and Shostakovich; and behind them the Orthodox choral tradition, sung unaccompanied, and the icon painting of Rublev and Theophanes.

The table

Zakuski, the spread of small dishes that precedes a meal; black bread, pickles, smoked fish, soups — borscht, shchi, solyanka — and pelmeni. Vodka is drunk in toasts rather than sipped, and a toast is expected to say something.

Cinema and the space programme as culture

Eisenstein’s montage theory shaped how films are cut everywhere, and Tarkovsky’s long takes did the opposite with equal influence. Alongside it, the space programme occupies a place in the national imagination closer to art than to engineering — Gagarin’s flight is commemorated annually, and the Cosmonautics museum in Moscow is treated with something like reverence.

Folk and craft

Matryoshka dolls, Khokhloma and Gzhel painting, Palekh lacquer miniatures, and the wooden architecture of the north, of which the churches at Kizhi — built without nails — are the best surviving example.

Russian is the official language, written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Learning to read it is worth an hour or two — it is phonetic and regular, and a surprising number of words turn out to be recognisable once decoded, particularly on menus and street signs.

Around a hundred other languages are spoken across the federation, several with official status in their republics — Tatar, Bashkir, Chechen, Buryat, Sakha and others.

English is not widely spoken outside the tourist and business districts of Moscow and Saint Petersburg and among younger people. This is the main practical difficulty of independent travel here, and translation apps are essential — download the offline Russian pack, since app stores may be inaccessible.

A few words help: zdravstvuyte for hello formally, spasibo for thank you, pozhaluysta for please, and skolko stoit for how much.