To be Russian

When I tell you I’m Russian, what crosses your mind?

Vodka? War and Peace? Crime and Punishment? Putin? Gorbachev? Perestroika? Russian hackers and maybe even Trump? Russian Soviet-era ice hockey? Russian accent? Russian athletes? Sharapova? Kurnikova? Alexei Sorokin on Medium?

Ok, maybe not the latter, not yet. But one day…

Let me share what shapes my Russian identity. Now I’m a “fake” Russian. Recently I was having dinner with a friend whose wife is Japanese. My friend is South African but spent his youth in England for education (just like I did — boarding school) so when I asked him about his identity he described it as “complicated”. His wife then referred to herself as “fake” Japanese — she went to college in the US and lived in the US in her adult life. I immediately picked up on that idea and called myself fake Russian — I spent half of my life away from Russia, especially for education.

But I am Russian, no doubt. The “fakeness” refers to the question of how representative I am of my home country.

So some observations:

Accent

The Russian accent is strong indeed and it’s pretty ugly. I’m not a linguist, but I think we just speak a lot faster, so even the actual mispronounced sounds aside, the overall pace and tone of speech are what adds to the Russian way of speaking. We don’t prolong words. When I say the words “bad” or “cat” I have to make quite an effort to speak out these words very distinctly to make the “a” in these…