Native Speech

“Reading the main books of Russian literature is like revisiting your own biography. Life experience has been accumulated alongside reading and thanks to it... We grow together with books — they grow within us. And when the time comes for... rebellion against the attitude towards classics instilled in childhood,” wrote Petr Vail and Alexander Genis in the preface to the very first edition of their “Native Speech”. The authors, who emigrated from the USSR, created a book in a foreign land that soon became a true, albeit somewhat humorous, monument to the Soviet school literature textbook. We have not yet forgotten how these textbooks forever instilled in students a distaste for reading, cultivating a strong aversion to Russian classics. The authors of “Native Speech” tried to awaken the interest in domestic elegant literature among the unfortunate children (and their parents) once again. It seems that the attempt was completely successful. The witty and engaging “anti-textbook” by Vail and Genis has been helping graduates and applicants pass exams in Russian literature for many years now.