My particular pain is that the world of Jewishness that I identify with – the extremely assimilated, educated European and Russian Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries – is lost, and is not mourned enough.
Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.
In school, I was playing old men and women, babies, Russian people, and all sorts of weird parts – a lot of comedy – and that’s sort of like home to me.
Russian is a really hard language – but I’ve got my own personal teacher. He’s been really patient.
The chief fruit of the First World War was the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism as a national power.
I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.
Russian machine never breaks.
I don’t hate. I love the Russian people. I love the Belarusan people… I love Ukraine very much.
We study, as Americans, the extreme aspects of repression under the Stalinist era. We’re focused on them. The vast majority of Russian citizens, it was a much softer type of being disconcerted.
At Oxford University, I studied languages so I could read the great novels as they were originally written. I took what in the United States would be a double major in Russian and French, but I have to admit that the pressure of getting through so many books spoiled reading for me.
I’m involved in everything from highly progressive lighting systems to airline interiors. In the field of transportation I can go from the micro to the macro: architecture, transportation, industrial product design, right across the board. It’s Russian dollism, because they all interrelate: one goes into the other.
Living freely means being able to freely communicate in your native language and to be guided by the 10th article of the constitution, which defines Ukrainian as the only state language and guarantees the unhindered development of Russian and all the other languages.
‘The Gambler’ by Dostoevsky. It was the first time I realised that it was possible to have good and evil in one person. It led me to read a lot of Russian literature.
One of the problems in the Ukrainian crisis is that very few Westerners know their history, or if they know it, what they learn is what we call the Russian version of history.
Of all the games I’ve done, the only time I’ve ever lost my voice was on ‘Call Of Duty 2,’ playing a rasping Russian captain on the Stalingrad level.
My parents were attached to Russian culture by a thousand ineradicable ties. But they did not cut me off from American society, nor could they have. I assimilated wholeheartedly, found my parents in many ways embarrassing, and allowed my Russian to decline through neglect.
I’m not superstitious at all. I’m not a Russian.
I dropped out of Oxford, and now I only speak Russian with the woman who gives me a bikini-wax. See what Hollywood does to you?
I’m eternally grateful to fate and the citizens of Russia that they’ve trusted me to be the head of the Russian government.
I’m young, Russian, I come from money, and I date a very well-known person.
The language is the hardest thing. My technical Russian is much better than my conversational Russian, and it has to be good enough to explain problems to them in their technical control center.
I’m most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.
I’ve always had Russian coaches.
Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.
I don’t have many Russian friends. My childhood friends are dead – either from bad health, or they died in perestroika.
There is nobody I know by name who is concerned with collecting information for the Russian authorities. There are people whom I know by sight whom I trusted with my life.
To be in conflict with the authorities is one thing. We Russian writers have got used to that. But to be in conflict with your own people – that is truly terrible.
I’m very much involved in art. I started buying art a few years ago and really like the work of T.C. Cannon, who is a native American artist. Then I was introduced to Soviet-era Russian impressionism and started collecting that, especially Gely Korzhev.
There are few words in Russian for the Western concept of ‘law,’ but there are legions of words for connections, helping people from one’s neck of the woods.
He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor’s office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head.
I tend to latch on to things pretty obsessively for awhile. I listened to Russian pop music exclusively for almost five years. It’s weird.
My dad’s Russian. My mother’s English. I would say my bottom half is Russian.
I actually speak fluent English and Spanish and… I dabble in a couple of languages, but I’m not fluent in German, Russian and Arabic.
This is how the Russians have operated for years – they get the goods on people and then they can get you to do what they want. This is how someone like Donald Trump could be turned into a Russian asset.
In terms of weapons, the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy. We have been taking down the Russian warheads, turning it into electricity. 10 percent of American electricity comes from decommissioned warheads.
After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian influence collapsed, and Moscow came to bitterly resent the Western interventions that destroyed Mr. Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi.
The Russian government doesn’t like me; Vladimir Putin doesn’t like me.
I don’t want my work to be heavy. The challenge is to make it interesting and engaging, keeping in mind the need for method acting. This is what I have learnt from Bharat Muni’s ‘Natya Shastra’ and from the Russian theatre legend Stanislavsky.
It’s a film called ‘Kursk’, which is a true story about a submarine disaster. There was an accident on board a Russian submarine in the year 2000, and it stranded a large number of sailors. That’s next.
I love Russian faces. The only difference between them is beautiful and more beautiful.
