Russian Culture

What is Russian culture? Icons, ballet, and Leo Tolstoy? Yes, but not only that. After all, there would be no icons without the Orthodox Church, Alexander Pushkin without the reforms of Peter the Great, "War and Peace" without disputes about the Russian people, ballets and symbolists without businessmen and producers of the Silver Age. Cultures were created not only by artists and poets, but by everyone: from rulers with their ideology to ordinary people with their habits and needs.

It is impossible to imagine a conversation about Russian culture without mentioning the Russian language. Russian is the main asset of Russian culture. The language reflects the history and mentality of an entire nation. We will talk about all these broad cultural phenomena.

Russian Language

Russian is an Eastern Slavonic language closely related to Ukrainian and Belorussian with about 277 million speakers in Russia and 30 other countries.

The Russian alphabet uses the Cyrillic script, which is named after the Byzantine scholar and monk, Cyril (827-869 AD). The earliest form of the Cyrillic Alphabet was based on Greek script. It was introduced by Cyril’s pupils who named it after their teacher. Variations of the Cyrillic Alphabet are used by a variety of Slavic languages – Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian.

The phonological structure of the Russian language is characterized by a system of consonants and a system of vowels. The accent in the Russian language is dynamic and mobile. Russian orthography (i.e., the rules of how the letters represent the sounds of a language) is more transparent than English. That means, it is quite easy to predict the pronunciation of a word based on how it is written.

Russian an inflected language where grammatical relations are mostly conveyed by use of affixes rather than word order (which is relatively free). Word formation in Russian is very rich and includes usage of different prefixes and suffixes conveying many different shades of meaning.