IT was fascinating to read the letter (February 2) from Olga Gordon and Nicholas Birkett anent their father, the one-time head of Russian at Glasgow University, G A Birkett.
Their sister Kupava, (who used to stay a few doors down from where I live), taught me in evening classes eons ago, before I became a teacher of Latin and Greek.
I was seconded to study Russian full-time in the mid1960s, when the hope was Russian would become the second language in schools, after French. Then Khrushchev famously said: "Optimists learn Russian, pessimists learn Chinese". He was as calamitously wrong in this prediction, as he was in the boast that he would personally present the last priest in Russia on national television. Ichabod indeed; it is Marxism-Leninism that has become the obsolete relic, not Christianity, and the Orthodox Church flourishes in Russia. And the world is rushing to learn English - or rather American.
Dr Alexander Yakovenko and Sir Malcolm Rifkind are of course entirely correct, as are the Birketts. It is a disaster that the study of a major pillar of European and world culture has been unthinkingly abandoned in our schools. The language of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekov and Pasternak will be as incomprehensible to future generations in Scotland as the cackling of geese. What a loss.
This is not only educationally a disaster. It is an immeasurable personal loss to those who are condemned to live deprived forever of the unique character, insight and beauty of the Russian language.
Brian Quail,
2 Hyndland Avenue, Glasgow.
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