Common cultural currency -- the Russian-American immigrant version

[veritykindle]

I was going to post a long, self-indulgent post about my identity as a Jewish Russian-American who is not religious, but I got distracted reading the common cultural currency posts that coffeeandink collected, and I figured I'd do one of those instead

Comments

[veritykindle]

It really is impressive that you speak Russian! I know how hard it is to teach a kid Russian, when you are surrounded only by people who speak English! We couldn't manage it with either my nephew or my niece.

And some of those things, it's possible that you are actually lucky *not* to know. I almost deleted the Soviet-era questions, for example, because I'm not even sure how relevant they are anymore. I'm sort of glad I'm forgetting some of those things -- like, do I *really* need to know when Lenin's birthday is?! Then again, I also felt sort of bad that I couldn't think of better questions to ask. *g*

And I could answer at most one or two of the questions in those other posts coffeeandink linked to. I think this was a really cool idea, seeing all the many different cultures we have intersecting on LJ. :)

[pecunium]

1, 3, 4 (and the battle; but not the poem, which now feels a moral failure), 5; all parts, 6; I might have been precocious enough to recognise Tolstoy too. Certainly I should have, had I been Russian), 8, 9.

On the confesssional side, I studied Russian for a year at DLI, which is where I got the Lenin answers, and became acqainted with the poet. While thrre I had to write a paper on some significant event in Russian history and chose that battle {of which I already knew, and which was probably; because of the disputable nature, the most important battle of that war} as the subject.

It was not a trivial thing to write, and then present.

That's why not knowing of the poem seems a moral failure.

But I've read Lermontov, and met Yevtushenko; who is a pretty fine poet in his own right. Russian verse has given me really interesting insights to English verse, and how the terms of Greek poetry relate to Russian, and not English poetry.

[veritykindle]

It's great that you got so many! I am very impressed

[pecunium]

I haven't looked to find it yet; a pointer would be nice

[veritykindle]

Greek, however, has similar issues with rhyme and stress, so all the terms we use (trochee, anapests, etc.) all map to real structures in Russian poetry.

I thought that Greek verse wasn't supposed to rhyme. At least, that was what my Ancient Greek teacher taught me in High School. I've always thought, was the main difference between Greek poems and Russian ones -- that the rhyme scheme is an important part of Russian poems, but not Greek ones. Because otherwise, as you said, Russian and Greek are similar enough that there are a lot of similarities in the way their poems are structured, as well.

Then again that might reflect my, relative, steeping in the culture.

Heh. More likely, it reflects my own relative ignorance of Russian poetry. Poetry is a huge part of the culture that I grew up in, but I admit I don't know it as well as I should, so it seemed a bit hypocritical to include too many questions about it. *g*

Here is the full text of the poem in Russian (scroll down a bit to find it -- it's the second poem after 1837), and