Immigrants and Russian culture

[Tatyana Buzina]

Well, it's fun while you're at it, and in order to pass, you must really know and remember bits and pieces from all over the place, from Pushkin to hockey to all kinds of proverbials to typical communist speak from before 1990s to the Soviet and post-Soviet/Russian pop. It gets a little tedious as it drags on, and the joke wears kind of thin, and in the end, what they bill as "a test of your Russianness" they actually mean as a test of your "sovkovost'". I barely pulled through the last stages (there's a question where you have to match communist secretaries general to their respective countries, and I mixed them up my mercilessly), and got labeled an "istinny sovok" for my pains :). That left me actually a little stumped since I don't quite see how Pushkin, and Voloshin, and Bulgakov, and Eldar Ryazanov, and Mark Zakharov, and Leonid Gaidai (all feature in the test) fit under the category of "sovok," but what do I know? :) Ah, it was fun anyway. 



>This is a humorous test from "Kommersant" on "what immigrants should know about Russian culture". Anyone wants to try?
>
>http://www.kommersant.ru/k-vlast/vlast-test.asp 
>
>e.g.
>
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-- 
Tatyana V. Buzina,
Associate Professor, Chair,
Dpt. of European Languages,
Institute for Linguistics,
Russian State U for the Humanities

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