[OldPossum]

I will never forget a conversation that I had with a gentleman on a flight back from Russia to the USA after a vacation there. He told me that he was fluent in several languages, including French, Italian, and German.

He then said that he continued to work on acquiring fluency in Russian but was not sure whether he would ever be fluent in it. He said that Russian is an extremely difficult and complex language. He then went on to wonder how such a primitive people (and the early Russians were that) could have ever come up with such a language, one that is so elegant and capable of so many nuances that one can express almost anything in it.

Perhaps the great novels of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and others may be explained by the tool (Russian) that they had available.

[tetuhe1898]

I doubt if the early Russians were more primitive than the early Germans or Britons. And - yes, Russian is a very difficult language.

[instantgratification]

I disagree about the primitivism. Read about Kyiv Rus’. Visit St. Sophia (built in the 9th century) or the Lavra Monastary in Kyiv as evidence of the “primitivism” of this society.