From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 61-62:
On the night before I left for Spain, Dariya knocked and entered my room with her teaching notebook. She’d settled in comfortably as my language instructor. That night we continued our discussion of motion verbs: the differences between going one way to a destination or there and back; of general “wander-going” without destination; of moving between locations by foot or by motorized conveyance; of which word to use when any type of “hovering” was involved. Russian contained enough variations of the word “go” to fill the lessons of several days.
Dariya rummaged through the contents of my desk while she waited for me to conjugate the verb, “to go one way by ground conveyance.” She scanned several Peace Corps documents for passages she understood. Discouraged, she flipped over the novel I was reading. Her lips fluttered as she sounded out the letters of the title. Her eyes grew wide. She slapped at my shoulder to stop my writing and said, “I’ve read this!”
“What have you read?” screamed Dima from the living room. He entered quickly.
Dariya showed him the book. He nodded his head. “I approve of Pasternak.”
He took the chair from Dariya (she moved to the bed) and asked me what other Russian writers I knew. We listed names for the next few moments. Dima wanted to know which authors the typical American would know.
Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy.
“Of course,” said Dima. “The basis of modern intelli-gence.”
Pasternak. Gogol. Chekov.
“Brilliant men,” said Dima. “Poets.” Nabokov.
“I hear he is good,” said Dima.
Solzhenitsyn.
Dima shook his head. “No. We never read him.”
The family possessed a collection of antique books that they kept behind glass next to the fine china. But I’d never seen them read, even when the television was broken.
Far Outliers 