If you would like to know more about your future bride’s culture (which Slavic women love in guys who court them), here is a quick cheat sheet for you about classical works of literature to read. Impress your Russian girlfriend with your knowledge of her country’s best writers!
According to 2019 WCIOM survey, Pushkin and Tolstoy remain the most popular of all Russian classical authors people study at school.
Famous books from school: How much do Russians remember years later?
The All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center (WCIOM.ru) presented its survey data about classic literature recollections among those who finished school years ago.
Which writers and works of classical literature can people still remember?
Researchers were also interested to see which works of famous authors were the best known among Russians.
Memorable authors
The results showed that most interviewees quickly think of Pushkin (28%) and Tolstoy (27%) when asked whose books they have read since school.
18% of respondents answered that they reread Dostoevsky’s works. 13% of survey takers mentioned Lermontov, and 9% told about Gogol.
In addition to the above mentioned authors, the list of most re-readable writers included Chekhov (11%), Bulgakov (9%), Turgenev (7%) and Yesenin (7%).
A slice of those who confessed in indifference to classics dropped from 62% in 2009 to this year’s 29% figure. Have people in Russia started to read more?
Favorite poems
48% of respondents have favorite verses, and a share of Pushkin’s verses among them comes only to 17%. The other 8% of verse lovers prefer Esenin, 6% enjoy Lermontov’s works, the rest are fond of poetry of Akhmatova, Blok, Mayakovsky, Nekrasov, Tsvetaeva, Tyutchev and Dementiev. About a quarter (26%) of interviewees revealed their disinterest in poems.
Memorable works
According to the survey, the most memorable of all the Pushkin works was “The Tale of Tsar Saltan”: 85% of respondents remember it from school, and 34% of them reread it at a more mature age.
As for the famous poem “Eugene Onegin” by Pushkin, 84% of respondents had read it during their school years, and 22% harked back to it later.
Pushkin’s poem “Ruslan and Lyudmila” was remembered and reread by 84% and 19% of participants respectively.
Pushkin’s novel “The Captain’s Daughter” had been read by 84% of survey takers at school, and 14% of them came back to it again later.
The novel “The Queen of Spades” by Pushkin appeared less popular among interviewees: Only 49% of participants got acquainted with it during their school days while 17% of participants returned to it later life. Every third participant (35%) admitted that they had missed it entirely.
Whose book is this?
There are some books that everybody have head about but may struggle to remember who authored them. This is a fun question to see how Russians fare in the department of attribution.
The respondents were asked a question about the authorship of “War and Peace”: 83% of them answered correctly (L. N. Tolstoy).
Similar results participants showed responding the question about “Ruslan and Lyudmila” and “Eugene Onegin”: About 75% of participants gave the right answer (A. S. Pushkin).
71% of interviewees knew that Gogol was the author of “Dead Souls”, and 71% of them were correct answering the question about the authorship of “The Auditor” (Gogol).
School books “Auditor”, “Captain’s Daughter”, and “Hero of Our Time” weren’t that memorable, apparently: Only 1 in 2 respondents managed to name the correct creator.
Data: WCIOM
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Honestly all of the works of Russian classic authors are worth re-reading because when you are a pupil sometimes you are too young to understand all the ideas and messages. For example, Dostievsky is great but his most famous works, let’s say “Crime and Punishment” are too complicated and maybe depressing even for high-school students.
Russian literature is amazing but children in primary school will not understand some poems and will definitely hate Dostoyevskyi if they read “Idiot” at 10 years old. So, all works mentioned above are totally worth reading taking into consideration the age of a person.