title: Kaliningrad

text: The Youth Recreation Park is one of the most popular parks in the city. The park was established in the 1920s–1930s in the English style. It reopened its doors post-war and was popular among citizens in the 1980s–1990s with its boat house and tennis courts, as well as merry-go-rounds. The park had a massive reconstruction in 2004 adding a cafe, carting, and various modern entertainments. It is located in the quiet area of the city, in Leningradsky area, and is connected to the Lower Pond. Youth Recreation Park provides entertainment for all age groups. There is also Interpersonal Communications Development Central located in the park.


title: Kaliningrad

text: The Kaliningrad Zoo was opened as the Königsberg Zoo in 1896. The collection, which extends over 16.5 ha (40 acres), comprises 315 species with a total of 2,264 individual animals (). The Kaliningrad Zoo is also an arboretum.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Centrally located in the city is Lower Pond, an artificial lake. Lower Pond is surrounded by a promenade and is an area for recreation especially in summer. North of the Lower Pond is the larger Upper Pond in northern Kaliningrad.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Leonhard Euler's 1736 paper on the puzzle of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg was a seminal work in the fields of graph theory and topology. Only two of the structures from his era survive.


title: Kaliningrad

text: In 2018, the Kaliningrad Stadium, located on Oktyabrsky Island, near the embankment of the Staraya Pregolya River, was opened. The stadium has a seating capacity of 35,000.


title: Kaliningrad

text: The Kaliningrad Regional Museum of History and Arts is the oldest museum in Kaliningrad, founded in 1946. In addition to the main building, the museum has four branches in Kaliningrad (including "Blindage" and "Fort No. 5") and two elsewhere in the region.


title: Kaliningrad

text: In 1979, the Kaliningrad Regional Amber Museum was opened in the building of the Don, a former defensive tower. Initially, it was a branch of the Historical and Art Museum, but since 2004 it has operated independently.


title: Kaliningrad

text: The Kaliningrad State Art Gallery, which opened on November 24, 1988, is one of the youngest and fastest-growing museums in Russia, known both domestically and abroad. Up to 40 exhibitions of domestic and foreign art are held annually in eight exhibition halls with a total exhibition area of more than 3,000 square metres (¾ acre).


title: Kaliningrad

text: At the beginning of the 21st century, the Museum of the World Ocean, which was unique in Russia at the time, was gradually created, and now offers exhibitions and six museum vessels:


title: Kaliningrad

text: A museum of ancient archaeological finds has been created. It is located at the Friedland Gate, which itself is a monument of antiquity.


title: Kaliningrad

text: In 2009, the Museum of E. T. A. Hoffmann, a famous writer born in this city, was created. The museum is located in the building of the former Leningrad Cinema; now this building houses a regional music school named after Hoffman.


title: Kaliningrad

text: On 5 June 2016 the Einstein Museum of Entertaining Sciences was opened on the first floor of the Mega-Market shopping centre, which offers interactive exhibits that illustrate various fields of science and demonstrate the manifestation of their laws.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Kaliningrad's museums were visited by roughly 920,000 people in 2013. In terms of museum attendance, the region of Kaliningrad ranks seventh among the regions of Russia.


title: Kaliningrad

text: The musical life of the city is rich and diverse. Annual music festivals of various styles and trends are held throughout the year. Under the patronage of the Kaliningrad Regional Philharmonic Society, international festivals and competitions of classical, jazz, organ music (dedicated to Johann Sebastian Bach and Mikael Tariverdiev) are held. Since 2006, the Don Cento Jazz International Jazz Festival has been held in the summer. The city also hosts two major rock festivals: the Night Wolves bike show (July) and Kaliningrad In Rock (August). The Baltic Seasons art festival is held annually.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Also, there are 20 municipal city libraries in the city. As of 2015, more than 100 thousand residents of Kaliningrad regularly visit the city's libraries.


title: Kaliningrad

text: The modern city of Kaliningrad is home to the Kaliningrad Regional Philharmonic and Symphony Orchestra, the Lik male chamber choir and the Garmonika Russian music ensemble, as well as the Kaliningrad Chamber Orchestra.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Kaliningrad has its own vodka and beer brands, "Stari Königsberg" and "Ostmark" respectively. Since the early 1990s many new restaurants have opened in the city. These restaurants offer culinary specialities of former East Prussia, like Königsberger Klopse, and also fish and salad dishes, pizza and sushi. Königsberger Fleck, a bovine tripe soup and yet another culinary specialty from former Königsberg, no longer belongs to the culinary culture of Kaliningrad.


title: Kaliningrad

text: The people of Kaliningrad generally imported their respective culinary traditions to the region when they settled in the area after 1945. Borscht and okroshka may be served as in the rest of Russia. Many Italian and Asian restaurants (or fusions of both traditions) are in operation all over the city. Pizza and sushi are among the most popular dishes today. Fast food is widely available from various chains, including those of foreign origin. Shawarma is also gaining considerable prominence.


title: Kaliningrad

text: The Russian football club FC Baltika Kaliningrad is based in Kaliningrad and plays in the Russian Football National League. The home stadium is the Kaliningrad Stadium, built for the 2018 FIFA World Cup.


title: Kaliningrad

text: During 2006 to 2013, the Dynamo-Yantar men's volleyball club played in the Russian men's volleyball Championship. They played their home games at the Yantarny Sports Palace, which can accommodate over 7,000 spectators. From 2010, Yantarny had regularly hosted matches of the Russian men's national volleyball team in the FIVB Volleyball World League and the FIVB Volleyball World Grand Prix.


title: Kaliningrad

text: In the past, the city was also represented by the football clubs of West, Baltika-2 and FC Baltika-Tarko Kaliningrad, as well as the rugby club West Zvezda (winner of the 1994 Russian Cup, prize winner of the 1994 and 1995 Russian championships). The football club "Volna Kaliningrad" took part in the third tier of the 2000 Lithuanian championship, LF II Lyga, and won in the western zone (22 games: 20 wins, 2 draws, goal difference 101–9).


title: Kaliningrad

text: Since November 2013, the city has had an American football team called Amber Hawks. In 2015, the Amber Hawks reached the semifinals of the Polish League 8x8. In 2016, Amber Hawks took the silver medal of the prestigious Eastern League of American Football (VLAF).


title: Kaliningrad

text: In June 2014 the Kaliningrad Regional Hockey League (KRHL) was created. League competition is the official championship of the Kaliningrad region of hockey.


title: Kaliningrad

text: On 9 April 2018 the creation of a women's volleyball team, the "Lokomotiv Kaliningrad Region" was announced. At the end of the 2018–2019 season the club took the second place in the Russian Championship, losing one point to the leader team, the WVC Dynamo Moscow.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Kaliningrad is the administrative centre of the oblast. Within the framework of administrative divisions, it is incorporated as the city of oblast significance of Kaliningrad — an administrative unit with status equal to that of the districts. As a municipal division, the city of oblast significance of Kaliningrad is incorporated as Kaliningrad Urban Okrug.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Local self-government in the city is carried out on the basis of the Charter, which was adopted by the City Council of Deputies of Kaliningrad on July 12, 2007.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Bodies and officials of local self-government in the city (formally – in the city district) Kaliningrad are:


title: Kaliningrad

text: The City Council of Deputies consists of 28 deputies elected by city residents in municipal elections according to a mixed mandate distribution system for a period of 5 years. The chairman of the Council is elected by deputies from among its members. The current 6th convocation was elected on September 18, 2016. The Chairman of the Council is Andrey Kropotkin from United Russia.


title: Kaliningrad

text: The head of the city heads the administration of the city district. Elected by the City Council of Deputies from among the candidates presented by the Competition Commission based on the results of the competition, for the term of office of the City Council of Deputies. Since April 2018, the head of the city is Alexey Silanov.


title: Kaliningrad

text: The Kaliningrad administration and the Council of Deputies are located in the building of the mayor's office at the Victory Square.


title: Kaliningrad

text: From 1996 to 2007, the Charter of the City of Kaliningrad dated September 25, 1996 was in force in Kaliningrad, according to which the local self-government bodies were:


title: Kaliningrad

text: In 2007, due to the reform of local self-government, the functions of local self-government bodies were changed, and a new position was introduced – the head of the administration.


title: Kaliningrad

text: In 2008–2012, the local government body, carrying out executive and administrative functions, was the city district administration, headed by the head of the administration (city manager). The head of the administration was appointed to the post by the decision of the District Council of Deputies following a competition. On May 14, 2008, Felix Lapin was appointed to this position for a period of 2 years. On June 15, 2011, deputies of the Kaliningrad District Council approved Svetlana Mukhomor as head of the city administration (she is the first deputy head of the city administration).


title: Kaliningrad

text: In November 2016, the Kaliningrad Regional Duma adopted a law abolishing direct elections for the mayor of Kaliningrad. The elections were replaced by the selection procedure of candidates by a competition commission from which the city Council of Deputies selects one by secret ballot. In 2018, out of ten people who submitted documents for participation in the competition, only three were admitted to the competition.


title: Kaliningrad

text: All legislative, executive and judicial authorities of Kaliningrad Oblast are located in Kaliningrad. The Government of Kaliningrad Oblast and the Governor's Administration are located in the same building on Dmitry Donskoy Street, the Kaliningrad Regional Duma on Kirov Street, the Kaliningrad Regional Court on Sergeeva Street, and the Arbitration Court of Kaliningrad Oblast on Rokossovsky Street.


title: Kaliningrad

text: In 1996, Kaliningrad was designated a Special Economic Zone, referred to as FEZ Yantar. Manufacturers based there get tax and customs duty breaks on the goods they send to other parts of Russia. Although corruption was an early deterrent, that policy means the region is now a manufacturing hub. One in three televisions in Russia are made in Kaliningrad (including Ericsson brand by Telebalt Ltd. and Polar by an eponymous firm located in the city of Chernyakhovsk) and it is home to Cadillac and BMW related car plants (produced by Avtotor). Kaliningrad's major industries are manufacturing, shipping, fishing and amber products. In 2006, Moscow declared it would turn the region into "the Russian Hong Kong".


title: Kaliningrad

text: Today, there are 21 higher educational institutions in Kaliningrad (together with branches of universities in other cities), of which state-owned are:


title: Kaliningrad

text: Also in Kaliningrad there is a branch of the North-West Academy of Public Administration and National Economy, from secondary educational institutions – three gymnasiums, six lyceums and forty-seven secondary schools. There are educational institutions of secondary vocational education: Kaliningrad Regional College of Music. S. V. Rachmaninova, Kaliningrad State College of Urban Development, Kaliningrad Marine Fisheries College and others; to the IKBFU I. Kant included the Kaliningrad Technical College, the Communal Construction College. In addition, there is one cadet corps – KSH "Andrew the First-Called Cadet Naval Corps" (APKMK).


title: Kaliningrad

text: In August 2019, construction began on a branch of the Nakhimov Naval School. The opening is scheduled for September 1, 2020, the number of students will be over 560 people.


title: Kaliningrad

text: In December 2007, construction began on the Primorskoye Koltso highway, which connects Kaliningrad with Svetlogorsk, Pionersky, Zelenogradsk and Khrabrovo Airport. It is planned to continue construction at Baltiysk, Svetly.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Around the city (from the village of A. Kosmodemyansky to the traffic intersection with Moskovsky Prospekt) passes the route of the northern and southern bypasses of Kaliningrad. Until now, on the western side of the city of Kaliningrad, the "ring" of the road has not been closed due to the absence of a 7-kilometer (5 mile) crossing through the Vistula Lagoon.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Kaliningrad is home to the westernmost and the only non-freezing port of Russia and the Baltic states on the Baltic Sea. Freight and passenger ferry crossings connect the Port of Kaliningrad, and its outport, the Port of Baltiysk with Saint Petersburg, and the ports of Germany and Sweden.


title: Kaliningrad

text: As of April 2019, only a freight ferry operates on the Baltiysk–Ust-Luga route, and the passenger ferry has been cancelled.


title: Kaliningrad

text: The Kaliningrad Devau Airport, which opened in 1919, was one of the first civilian airports in the world, and the first in Germany. In 1922, the first planes of the Moscow-Riga-Königsberg, the first international airline of the Soviet Union, arrived in here for the first time. After World War II, the airport was used for local flights until the 1970s.


title: Kaliningrad

text: In the fifties, a new airport, the Khrabrovo Airport, was built on the base of a military airfield 24 kilometres (15 miles) from the city. Now it has international status. The Kaliningrad airline KD Aviation was based on Khrabrovo, which ceased operations in September 2009. The reconstruction of the airport has been completed in 2018. On 1 October 2022 the airport began allowing more flights from international destinations, including through operation by foreign airlines.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Kaliningrad is the most important hub of the railway network of the Kaliningrad Oblast. It is the site of the Kaliningrad Railway.


title: Kaliningrad

text: The main passenger railway station of the city is the Kaliningrad South railway station, which includes the main railway station of the city and the Oblast–Yuzhny station, it serves both commuter and long-distance trains following from Kaliningrad:


title: Kaliningrad

text: The Berlin-Kaliningrad direct train (via Poland) operated from 1993 to 2000, then was replaced by a non-stop carriage, which was part of the Kaliningrad-Gdynia train from December 2003 to December 2009 and in 2010–2013 (in the summer), with a re-trailer in the Polish city of Tczew. A platform with a European Standard Gauge track was specially equipped to receive these trains, allowing trains to run on this message without the interruption of a bogie exchange at some point on the journey.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Kaliningrad North railway station serves trains connecting Kaliningrad with the seaside resorts of the city, Svetlogorsk and Pionersky, as well as the city of Sovetsk. It is a major transport hub in the public transport system of Kaliningrad.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Regular bus routes connect Kaliningrad with Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany.


title: Kaliningrad

text: There are two bus stations in the city. The "old" bus station is located on Kalinin Square, next to the Kaliningrad-Passazhirskiy railway station and is used primarily for intra-regional transportation.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Due to the conflict with the station directorate, the Königavto road carrier stopped using this bus station and set up its own international bus station at the end of Moskovsky Prospekt. More than 90% of regular international bus services depart from it.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Public transport in Kaliningrad is represented by a bus, a trolleybus, a tram, a taxi, and the city's railway lines. On 21 March 2010 a new public transport scheme came into effect.


title: Kaliningrad

text: The tram network in Kaliningrad has been in existence since 1895 and is the oldest tram system in Russia. It has a track width of 1000 mm (3'3"). Until 2000, at least ten city tram routes operated in Kaliningrad, however, over the past twenty years, the route network has been significantly reduced. By the beginning of 2013, only two routes were operating in the city. In 2015, after changing the traffic pattern at the Kaliningrad South railway station, the last tram route No. 5 remained. In accordance with the newly adopted General Plan of Kaliningrad until 2035, the construction of a tram line with a separate traffic section in the Moskovsky District is envisaged.


title: Kaliningrad

text: The first trolleybuses appeared in Königsberg in 1943, but after the war they decided not to restore the trolleybus system. The modern trolleybus system of the city has been operating since 5 November 1975. During this time, the route network in Kaliningrad has repeatedly changed. After the repair of the overpass on Pobedy Avenue, carried out in the summer of 2018, route No. 6 was discontinued. As a result, three operating trolleybus lines remained in the city, although the new route scheme for public transport, adopted on 1 August 2016, provided for six routes. The general plan of the city until 2035 also provides for the development of the trolleybus network in Kaliningrad.


title: Kaliningrad

text: On 26 March 2014 the first line of the city rail bus was launched in Kaliningrad, serving the route from the Kievskaya platform in the Moskovsky district to the Kaliningrad North railway station. At the same time, a bus line was organised connecting Oleg Koshevoy Street with the Kievskaya platform. The opening of several more lines of the city railway has been announced, which should connect the center of Kaliningrad with the peripheral districts of the city.


title: Kaliningrad

text: In December 2016, the mayor of Kaliningrad, Alexander Yaroshuk, announced that from 1 January 2017 the city rail bus would be canceled due to its unprofitability. After that, Governor Anton Alikhanov made an operational decision to subsidize the rail bus from the regional budget.


title: Kaliningrad

text: In early January 2017, the press service of the Kaliningrad Railway announced that it was planned to extend the rail bus line to Chkalovsk.


title: Kaliningrad

text: On 9 January 2017 city trains were launched on the Kaliningrad-Guryevsk route, and on the Kaliningrad-Lesnoye Novoe route from 3 September 2018.


title: Kaliningrad

text: As of the end of 2018, rail buses serve four intra-city lines connecting peripheral sleeping areas and the satellite city of Guryevsk with the center of Kaliningrad. Kaliningrad North railway station is a major transport and interchange hub, where many public transport routes converge. Passengers are transported by rail buses of the RA1 and RA2 models, manufactured by Metrovagonmash. City trains run on weekdays during the morning and evening rush hours.


title: Kaliningrad

text: The branches of the Pregolya River divide the city into four parts. Majority of the city (Tsentralny Administrative District and Leningradsky Administrive District) is located north of the river, Moskovsky Administrative District is south of the river. Kant Island (Kneiphof) and Oktyabrsky Administrative District (Lomse) are located between the branches of the river.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Seven bridges existed in Königsberg in the 16th-20th centuries. The relative position of the bridges led to the mathematical problem of Seven Bridges of Königsberg, and prompted the mathematician Leonard Euler to speculate, which led to the emergence of graph theory.


title: Kaliningrad

text: The Kaliningrad television studio has existed since 1958 with its own frequency channel and daily 6–7-hour broadcasting, then it was called the Yantar TV and Radio Company. It has lost its channel and most of its airtime; it is a branch of the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company.


title: Kaliningrad

text: In 2004 Germany opened a consulate general in Kaliningrad. This consulate allows Kaliningrad residents to get Schengen visas without having to travel to Moscow. An agreement between Gerhard Schröder, Chancellor of Germany, and President of Russia Vladimir Putin established the consulate in light of Lithuania and Poland, which surround Kaliningrad, joining the EU. Russian concerns with Germany wanting the former Königsberg back had stifled earlier plans for a German consulate.


title: Kaliningrad

text: Poland and the Russian Federation have an agreement whereby residents of Kaliningrad and the Polish cities of Olsztyn, Elbląg and Gdańsk may obtain special cards permitting repeated travel between the two countries, crossing the Polish–Russian border. As of July 2013, Poland had issued 100,000 of the cards. That year, the influx of Russians visiting Poland to shop at the Biedronka and Lidl supermarkets was novel enough to be featured in songs by musical group Parovoz.


title: Kaliningrad

text: In February and March 2022, Norfolk, Virginia, suspended while Lithuanian, Polish and Dutch cities of Panevėžys, Białystok, Elbląg, Łódź, Gdańsk, Gdynia, Olsztyn, Racibórz, Toruń and Zwolle terminated their cooperation with Kaliningrad as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.


title: Kevin Feige

text: Kevin Feige ( ; born June 2, 1973) is an American film and television producer who has been the president of Marvel Studios and the primary producer of the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise since 2007. The films he has produced have a combined worldwide box office gross of over , making him the highest grossing producer of all time, with "" becoming the highest-grossing film at the time of its release.


title: Kevin Feige

text: Feige is a member of the Producers Guild of America. In 2018, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture for producing "Black Panther", the first superhero film to receive a Best Picture nomination and the first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to win an Academy Award. In October 2019, he became chief creative officer of Marvel Entertainment.


title: Kevin Feige

text: Feige was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Westfield, New Jersey, the son of Maralyn and Tim Feige. He moved to New Jersey at the age of eight and lived there until the age of eighteen. when he graduated from Westfield High School. His maternal grandfather, Robert E. Short, was a television producer in the 1950s, working on soap operas including "The Guiding Light" and "As the World Turns".


title: Kevin Feige

text: After high school, Feige applied to the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, the alma mater of his favorite directors: George Lucas, Ron Howard and Robert Zemeckis. His first five applications were rejected, but he was accepted on the sixth. He graduated in 1995 with a degree in film.


title: Kevin Feige

text: His early work includes being assistant to executive producer Lauren Shuler Donner on "Volcano" and "You've Got Mail."


title: Kevin Feige

text: In 2000, he was hired by Marvel as a producer. On the first "X-Men" film, Donner made Feige an associate producer, due to his knowledge of the Marvel Universe. Impressing Avi Arad, he was hired to work as his second-in-command at Marvel Studios that same year. In the mid-2000s, Feige realized that although Spider-Man and the X-Men had been licensed to Sony and 20th Century Fox, Marvel still owned the rights to the core members of the Avengers, and envisioned creating a shared universe just as creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had done with their comic books in the early 1960s.


title: Kevin Feige

text: Feige received the Motion Picture Showman of the Year award at the ICG Publicists Guild Awards on February 22, 2013.


title: Kevin Feige

text: For his work on "Black Panther", Feige received nominations for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Producers Guild of America Award.


title: Kevin Feige

text: Feige was awarded the David O. Selznick Achievement Award in Theatrical Motion Pictures by the Producers Guild of America in 2019. On September 26, 2019, it was reported that Feige was developing a "Star Wars" film for Lucasfilm.


title: Kevin Feige

text: In October 2019, Feige, in addition to being President of Marvel Studios, was named chief creative officer for Marvel Entertainment, Marvel Comics, Marvel Television and Marvel Animation.


title: Kevin Feige

text: Feige married Caitlin, a cardiothoracic nurse, around 2007. They have two children: a daughter born in 2009, and a son born in 2012.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: Whiplash is a 2014 American independent psychological drama film written and directed by Damien Chazelle, and starring Miles Teller, J. K. Simmons, Paul Reiser and Melissa Benoist. The film follows the ambitious music student and jazz drummer Andrew Neiman (Teller), who is pushed to his limit by his abusive instructor Terence Fletcher (Simmons) at the fictitious Shaffer Conservatory in New York City. The film was produced by Bold Films, Blumhouse Productions, and Right of Way Films. Sony Pictures acquired the worldwide distribution rights, releasing the film under its Sony Pictures Classics and Stage 6 Films banners for its North American and international releases respectively.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: Chazelle finished writing the script in 2013, drawing upon his experiences in a "very competitive" jazz band. Soon after, Right of Way Films and Blumhouse Productions helped Chazelle turn 15 pages of the script into an 18-minute short film, also titled "Whiplash". The short film received acclaim after debuting at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, which attracted investors to produce the complete version of the script. Filming took place in September 2013 throughout Los Angeles in the course of 17 days. The film explores concepts of perfectionism, dedication, success, and deconstructs the concept of ambition.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: "Whiplash" premiered in competition at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival on January 16, 2014, as the festival's opening film; it won the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize for drama. The film opened in limited release domestically in the United States and Canada on October 10, 2014, gradually expanding to over 500 screens and finally closing on March 26, 2015. The film received widespread critical acclaim for its screenplay, direction, film editing, sound mixing, and Teller's and Simmons' performances, and grossed $49 million on a $3.3 million budget, making it Chazelle's highest grossing feature until the release of "La La Land" (2016). The film received multiple awards and nominations, winning Academy Awards for Best Film Editing and Best Sound Mixing, and also being nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Simmons' portrayal of Fletcher won him the Academy, BAFTA, Critics' Choice, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards for Best Supporting Actor.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: Andrew Neiman is a first-year student and jazz drummer at the prestigious Shaffer Conservatory in New York City, hoping to one day to leave a legacy like that of his childhood idol, jazz drummer Buddy Rich. He is recruited by Terence Fletcher, the conductor of the Shaffer Conservatory Studio Band, to play in the Studio ensemble as an alternate for core drummer Carl Tanner. Andrew quickly discovers that Fletcher is relentlessly strict, emotionally manipulative, and violent to his students; he physically and verbally attacks Andrew when he fails to keep tempo during the ensemble's rehearsal of Hank Levy's titular piece, "Whiplash".


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: Determined to impress Fletcher, Andrew practices until his hands bleed. In a jazz competition, after their first set, Andrew misplaces Tanner's sheet music. Tanner tells Fletcher that he can't play without the sheets, but Andrew declares that he can. Before a later practice, Fletcher uncharacteristically holds back tears as he informs the class that Sean Casey, a former student whom he described as "a beautiful player", died in a car accident. After a successful performance of "Whiplash", Fletcher promotes Andrew to the core drummer for the Studio Band.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: Because of his single-mindedness toward music, Andrew's relationship with his family deteriorates and breaks up with his girlfriend, Nicole, after Fletcher brings in Ryan Connolly, a drummer from a lower-level ensemble within the conservatory, to take the core drummer spot. After a grueling five-hour practice session with Tanner and Connolly on "Caravan," Andrew earns back the core position.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: On the way to the next competition, the bus Andrew is riding breaks down. He rents a car but arrives late and realizes he left his sticks at the rental office. After convincing an impatient Fletcher to wait for him, Andrew races back and retrieves them, but his car is hit by a truck on the way back. Andrew crawls from the wreckage and runs to the theater, arriving just as the ensemble enters the stage. Heavily injured, he struggles to play "Caravan," and Fletcher halts the performance to dismiss him. Enraged, Andrew attacks Fletcher onstage but is pulled away by security and expelled from Shaffer.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: At his father's request, Andrew meets a lawyer representing the parents of Sean Casey, the student Fletcher claimed died in a car accident, and learns that Sean had actually committed suicide by hanging due to depression and anxiety caused by Fletcher's abuse. Casey's parents want Fletcher forbidden from teaching, and Andrew agrees to testify anonymously, leading Shaffer to terminate Fletcher.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: Andrew abandons drumming, but one night he visits a jazz club and encounters Fletcher playing piano. Over a drink, Fletcher explains that his harsh teching methods were solely intended to motivate promising students, referencing the popular story of how Charlie Parker rose to fame after being humiliated by Jo Jones. He invites Andrew to perform with his band at the JVC Jazz Festival, assuring him that the songs will be the same ones played by the Studio Band; Andrew hesitantly accepts. Andrew invites Nicole to the performance but finds out she is in a new relationship.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: Onstage at JVC, before the first piece, Fletcher reveals that he knows Andrew testified against him. As revenge, Fletcher leads the band into a song Andrew does not know and doesn't have the sheet music to. After a disastrous performance, Andrew walks offstage humiliated but returns and cuts off Fletcher's introduction to the next piece by playing the intro to "Caravan", cueing in the band himself. Initially angered, Fletcher resumes conducting and begins to notice Andrew's flawless performance along the ensemble. As the piece finishes, Andrew continues into an extended, unexpected solo. Impressed at Andrew's performance, Fletcher eventually nods in approval before cueing the finale.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: While attending Princeton High School, writer-director Damien Chazelle was in a "very competitive" jazz band and drew on the dread he felt in those years. He based the conductor, Terence Fletcher, on his former band instructor (who died in 2003) but "pushed it further", adding elements of Buddy Rich and other band leaders known for their harsh treatment. Chazelle said he wrote the film "initially in frustration" while trying to get his musical "La La Land" off the ground.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: Right of Way Films and Blumhouse Productions helped Chazelle turn 15 pages of his original screenplay into a short film starring Johnny Simmons as Neiman and J. K. Simmons (no relation) as Fletcher. The 18-minute short film received acclaim after debuting at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, winning the short film Jury Award for fiction, which attracted investors to produce the complete version of the script. The feature-length film was financed for $3.3 million by Bold Films.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: In August 2013, Miles Teller signed on to star in the role originated by Johnny Simmons; J. K. Simmons remained attached to his original role. Early on, Chazelle gave J. K. Simmons direction that "I want you to take it past what you think the normal limit would be," telling him: "I don't want to see a human being on-screen any more. I want to see a monster, a gargoyle, an animal." Many of the band members were real musicians or music students, and Chazelle tried to capture their expressions of fear and anxiety when they were pressed by Simmons. Chazelle said that between takes, Simmons was "as sweet as can be", which he credits for keeping "the shoot from being nightmarish".


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: Principal photography began in September 2013, with filming taking place throughout Los Angeles, including the Hotel Barclay, Palace Theater, and the Orpheum Theatre, with a few exterior shots filmed in New York City to create the setting. The film was shot in 17 days, with a schedule of 14 hours of filming per day. Chazelle was involved in a serious car accident in the third week of shooting and was hospitalized with possible concussion, but he returned to set the next day to finish the film on time.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: The soundtrack album was released on October 7, 2014, via Varèse Sarabande label. The soundtrack consists of 24 tracks divided in three different parts: original jazz pieces written for the film, original underscore parts written for the film, and classic jazz standards written by Stan Getz, Duke Ellington, and other musicians. The actual drummer was Bernie Dresel.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: On March 27, 2020, an expanded deluxe edition was released on double CD and 2-LP gatefold sleeve vinyl with new cover art, and featured original music by Justin Hurwitz, plus bonus track and remixes by Timo Garcia, Opiuo, Murray A. Lightburn and more.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: In North America, the film opened in a limited release on October 10, 2014, in 6 theaters, grossing $135,388 ($22,565 per theater) and finishing 34th at the box office. It expanded to 88 locations, then 419 locations. After three months on release it had earned $7 million, and finally expanded nationwide to 1000 locations to capitalize on receiving five Academy Awards nominations. "Whiplash" grossed $13.1 million in the U.S. and Canada and $35.9 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $49 million against a budget of $3.3 million.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: On the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes the film has a score of 94% based on 303 reviews, with an average rating of 8.60/10. The site's critical consensus states, "Intense, inspiring, and well-acted, "Whiplash" is a brilliant sophomore effort from director Damien Chazelle and a riveting vehicle for stars J. K. Simmons and Miles Teller." On Metacritic the film has a score of 88 out of 100, based on reviews from 49 critics, indicating "universal acclaim." Simmons received wide praise for his performance and won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: Peter Debruge, in his review for "Variety", said that the film "demolishes the cliches of the musical-prodigy genre, investing the traditionally polite stages and rehearsal studios of a topnotch conservatory with all the psychological intensity of a battlefield or sports arena." Todd McCarthy of "The Hollywood Reporter" praised the performances of Teller and Simmons, writing: "Teller, who greatly impressed in last year's Sundance entry "The Spectacular Now", does so again in a performance that is more often simmering than volatile ... Simmons has the great good fortune for a character actor to have here found a co-lead part he can really run with, which is what he excitingly does with a man who is profane, way out of bounds and, like many a good villain, utterly compelling." "Whiplash" also won the 87th Academy Award for Best Sound Mixing and the 87th Academy Award for Best Film Editing.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: Amber Wilkinson of "The Daily Telegraph" praised the direction and editing, writing: "Chazelle's film has a sharp and gripping rhythm, with shots, beautifully edited by Tom Cross... often cutting to the crash of Andrew's drums." James Rocchi of Indiewire gave a positive review and said, ""Whiplash" is ... full of bravado and swagger, uncompromising where it needs to be, informed by great performances and patient with both its characters and the things that matter to them." Henry Barnes of "The Guardian" gave the film a positive review, calling it a rare film "about music that professes its love for the music and its characters equally."


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: Forrest Wickman of "Slate" said the film distorted jazz history and promoted a misleading idea of genius, adding that "In all likelihood, Fletcher isn’t making a Charlie Parker. He's making the kind of musician that would throw a cymbal at him." In "The New Yorker", Richard Brody said ""Whiplash" honors neither jazz nor cinema."


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: The film appeared on many critics’ end of year lists. Metacritic collected lists published by major film critics and publications, and in their analysis recorded that Whiplash appeared on 57 lists and in 1st place on 5 of those lists. Overall the film was ranked in 5th place for the year by Metacritic.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: The film received the top audience and grand jury awards in the U.S. dramatic competition at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival; Chazelle's short film of the same name took home the jury award in the U.S. fiction category one year prior. The film also took the grand prize and the audience award for favorite film at the 40th Deauville American Film Festival.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: "Whiplash" was originally planned to compete for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, but on January 6, 2015, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) announced that the film would instead be competing in the Adapted Screenplay category to the surprise of many including Chazelle, due to the short film premiering at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival (one year prior to the feature film's release), despite the fact that the feature film's script was written first and the short was made to attract investors into producing the feature-length film. Although the Writers Guild of America categorized the screenplay as original, AMPAS classed it as an adaptation of the 2013 short version.


title: Whiplash (2014 film)

text: At the 87th Academy Awards, J. K. Simmons received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance, Tom Cross won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing and Craig Mann, Ben Wilkins and Thomas Curley won the Academy Award for Best Sound Mixing. In December 2015, the score received a Grammy nomination, and the film was nominated for the NME Award for Best Film.


title: Lolita

text: Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a middle-aged literature professor under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, whom he kidnaps and sexually abuses after becoming her stepfather. "Lolita", the Spanish nickname for Dolores, is what he calls her privately. The novel was originally written in English and first published in Paris in 1955 by Olympia Press.


title: Lolita

text: The novel has been twice adapted into film: first by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and later by Adrian Lyne in 1997. It has also been adapted several times for the stage and has been the subject of two operas, two ballets, and an acclaimed, but commercially unsuccessful, Broadway musical. It has been included in many lists of best books, such as " Time" List of the 100 Best Novels, " Le Monde" 100 Books of the Century, Bokklubben World Library, Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, and The Big Read.


title: Lolita

text: The novel is prefaced by a fictitious foreword by one John Ray Jr., an editor of psychology books. Ray states that he is presenting a memoir written by a man using the pseudonym "Humbert Humbert", who had recently died of heart disease while awaiting a murder trial in jail. The memoir, which addresses the audience as his jury, begins with Humbert's birth in Paris in 1910 to an English mother and Swiss father. He spends his childhood on the French Riviera, where he falls in love with his friend Annabel Leigh. This youthful and physically unfulfilled love is interrupted by Annabel's premature death from typhus, which causes Humbert to become sexually obsessed with a specific type of girl, aged 9 to 14, whom he refers to as "nymphets".


title: Lolita

text: After graduation, Humbert works as a teacher of French literature and begins editing an academic literary textbook, making passing references to repeated stays in mental institutions at this time. Before the outbreak of World War II, Humbert emigrates to America. In 1947, he moves to Ramsdale, a small town in New England, where he can calmly continue working on his book. The house that he intends to live in is destroyed in a fire. In his search for a new home, he meets the widow Charlotte Haze, who is looking for a tenant. Humbert visits Charlotte's residence out of politeness and initially intends to decline her offer. However, Charlotte leads Humbert to her garden, where her 12-year-old daughter Dolores (also variably known as Dolly, Lo, and Lola) is sunbathing. Humbert sees in Dolores the perfect nymphet, the embodiment of his old love Annabel, and quickly decides to move in.


title: Lolita

text: The impassioned Humbert constantly searches for discreet forms of fulfilling his sexual urges, usually via the smallest physical contact with Dolores. When she is sent to summer camp, Humbert receives a letter from Charlotte, who confesses her love for him and gives him an ultimatum—he is to either marry her or move out immediately. Initially terrified, Humbert then begins to see the charm in the situation of being Dolores' stepfather, and so marries Charlotte for instrumental reasons. Charlotte later discovers his diary, in which she learns of his desire for her daughter and the disgust he feels towards Charlotte. Shocked and humiliated, Charlotte decides to flee and writes letters addressed to her friends warning them of Humbert. Disbelieving his false assurance that the diary is only a sketch for a future novel, Charlotte runs out of the house to send the letters but is hit and killed by a swerving car.


title: Lolita

text: Humbert destroys the letters and retrieves Dolores from camp, claiming that her mother has fallen seriously ill and has been hospitalized. He then takes her to a high-end hotel that Charlotte had earlier recommended. Humbert knows he will feel guilty having sex with Dolores while she is conscious so tricks her into taking a sedative by saying it is a vitamin. As he waits for the pill to take effect, he wanders through the hotel and meets a mysterious man who seems to be aware of Humbert's plan for Dolores. Humbert excuses himself from the conversation and returns to the hotel room. There, he discovers that he had been fobbed with a milder drug, as Dolores is merely drowsy and wakes up frequently, drifting in and out of sleep. He dares not initiate sexual contact with her that night.


title: Lolita

text: In the morning, Dolores reveals to Humbert that she engaged in sexual activity with an older boy at a different camp a year previously. A sexual relationship begins between the two when Lolita seduces Humbert. After leaving the hotel, Humbert reveals to Dolores that her mother is dead. The news is devasting to Lolita and she cries often in the coming days. The two travel across the country, driving all day and staying in motels. Humbert desperately tries to maintain Dolores' interest in travel—and himself, and increasingly bribes her in exchange for sexual favors. They finally settle in Beardsley, a small New England town. Humbert adopts the role of Dolores' father and enrolls her in a local private school for girls.


title: Lolita

text: Humbert jealously and strictly controls all of Dolores' social gatherings and forbids her from dating and attending parties. It is only at the instigation of the school headmaster, who regards Humbert as a strict and conservative European parent, that he agrees to Dolores' participation in the school play, the title of which is the same as the hotel in which Humbert met the mysterious man. The day before the premiere of the performance, Dolores runs out of the house following an argument with Humbert. He chases after her and finds her in a nearby drug store drinking an ice cream soda. She then tells him she wants to leave town for another road trip. Humbert is initially delighted, but as they travel, he becomes increasingly suspicious. He feels that he is being followed by someone Dolores is familiar with.


title: Lolita

text: The man following them is Clare Quilty—a famous playwright who wrote the play that Dolores was to participate in. In the Colorado mountains, Dolores falls ill. Humbert checks her into a local hospital, from where she is discharged one night by her "uncle". Humbert knows she has no living relatives, and he immediately embarks on a frantic search to find Dolores and her abductor, but initially fails. For the next two years, Humbert barely sustains himself in a moderately functional relationship with a young alcoholic named Rita.


title: Lolita

text: Deeply depressed, Humbert unexpectedly receives a letter from a 17-year-old Dolores, telling him that she is married, pregnant, and in desperate need of money. Humbert, armed with a pistol, tracks down her address against her wishes. At Dolores' request, he pretends to be her estranged father and does not mention the details of their past relation to her husband, Richard. Dolores reveals to Humbert that Quilty took her from the hospital: she was in love with Quilty, but he rejected her when she refused to star in one of his pornographic films. Humbert claims to the reader that at this moment, he realized that he was in love with Dolores all along. Humbert implores her to leave with him, but she refuses. Accepting her decision, Humbert gives her the money she is owed from her inheritance. Humbert then goes to the drug-addled Quilty's mansion and shoots him several times.


title: Lolita

text: Shortly afterward, Humbert is arrested, and in his closing thoughts, he reaffirms his love for Dolores and asks for his memoir to be withheld from public release until after her death. Dolores dies in childbirth on Christmas Day in 1952, disappointing Humbert's prediction that "Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years."


title: Lolita

text: "Lolita" is frequently described as an "erotic novel", not only by some critics but also in a standard reference work on literature, "Facts on File: Companion to the American Short Story". "The Great Soviet Encyclopedia" called "Lolita" "an experiment in combining an erotic novel with an instructive novel of manners." The same description of the novel is found in Desmond Morris's reference work "The Book of Ages". A survey of books for Women's Studies courses describes it as a "tongue-in-cheek erotic novel". Books focused on the history of erotic literature such as Michael Perkins' "The Secret Record: Modern Erotic Literature" also so classify "Lolita". More cautious classifications have included a "novel with erotic motifs" or one of "a number of works of classical erotic literature and art, and to novels that contain elements of eroticism, such as "Ulysses" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover"."


title: Lolita

text: This classification has been disputed. Malcolm Bradbury writes "at first famous as an erotic novel, "Lolita" soon won its way as a literary one—a late modernist distillation of the whole crucial mythology." Samuel Schuman says that Nabokov "is a surrealist, linked to Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka. "Lolita" is characterized by irony and sarcasm; it is not an erotic novel."


title: Lolita

text: Lance Olsen writes: "The first 13 chapters of the text, culminating with the oft-cited scene of Lo unwittingly stretching her legs across Humbert's excited lap ... are the only chapters suggestive of the erotic." Nabokov himself observes in the novel's afterword that a few readers were "misled [by the opening of the book] ... into assuming this was going to be a lewd book ... [expecting] the rising succession of erotic scenes; when these stopped, the readers stopped, too, and felt bored."


title: Lolita

text: The novel is narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with word play and his wry observations of American culture. The novel's flamboyant style is characterized by double entendres, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as "nymphet", a word that has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries, and the lesser-used "faunlet". Most writers see Humbert as an unreliable narrator and credit Nabokov's powers as an ironist. For Richard Rorty, in his interpretation of "Lolita" in "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity", Humbert is a "monster of incuriosity". Nabokov himself described Humbert as "a vain and cruel wretch" and "a hateful person".


title: Lolita

text: Critics have further noted that, since the novel is a first person narrative by Humbert, the novel gives very little information about what Lolita is like as a person, that in effect she has been silenced by not being the book's narrator. Nomi Tamir-Ghez writes: "Not only is Lolita's voice silenced, her point of view, the way she sees the situation and feels about it, is rarely mentioned and can be only surmised by the reader ... since it is Humbert who tells the story ... throughout most of the novel, the reader is absorbed in Humbert's feelings." Similarly Mica Howe and Sarah Appleton Aguiar write that the novel silences and objectifies Lolita. Christine Clegg notes that this is a recurring theme in criticism of the novel in the 1990s. Actor Brian Cox, who played Humbert in a 2009 one-man stage monologue based on the novel, stated that the novel is "not about Lolita as a flesh and blood entity. It's Lolita as a memory." He concluded that a stage monologue would be truer to the book than any film could possibly be. Elizabeth Janeway, writing in "The New York Times Book Review", holds: "Humbert is every man who is driven by desire, wanting his Lolita so badly that it never occurs to him to consider her as a human being, or as anything but a dream-figment made flesh."


title: Lolita

text: Clegg sees the novel's non-disclosure of Lolita's feelings as directly linked to the fact that her real name is Dolores and only Humbert refers to her as Lolita. Humbert also states he has effectively "solipsized" Lolita early in the novel. Eric Lemay writes:


title: Lolita

text: In 2003, Iranian expatriate Azar Nafisi published the memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran" about a covert women's reading group. In an NPR interview, Nafisi contrasts the sorrowful and seductive sides of Dolores/Lolita's character. She notes: "Because her name is not Lolita, her real name is Dolores which as you know in Latin means dolour, so her real name is associated with sorrow and with anguish and with innocence, while Lolita becomes a sort of light-headed, seductive, and airy name. The Lolita of our novel is both of these at the same time and in our culture here today we only associate it with one aspect of that little girl and the crassest interpretation of her." Following Nafisi's comments, the NPR interviewer, Madeleine Brand, lists as embodiments of the latter side of Lolita "the Long Island Lolita, Britney Spears, the Olsen twins, and Sue Lyon in Stanley Kubrick's "Lolita"."


title: Lolita

text: For Nafisi, the essence of the novel is Humbert's solipsism and his erasure of Lolita's independent identity. She writes: "Lolita was given to us as Humbert's creature ... To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own ... Yet she does have a past. Despite Humbert's attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history, that past is still given to us in glimpses."


title: Lolita

text: One of the novel's early champions, Lionel Trilling, warned in 1958 of the moral difficulty in interpreting a book with so eloquent and so self-deceived a narrator: "we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents ... we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting."


title: Lolita

text: In 1958, Dorothy Parker described the novel as "the engrossing, anguished story of a man, a man of taste and culture, who can love only little girls" and Lolita as "a dreadful little creature, selfish, hard, vulgar, and foul-tempered." In 1959, novelist Robertson Davies wrote that the theme of "Lolita" is "not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child. This is no pretty theme, but it is one with which social workers, magistrates and psychiatrists are familiar."


title: Lolita

text: In his essay on Stalinism "Koba the Dread", Martin Amis proposes that "Lolita" is an elaborate metaphor for the totalitarianism that destroyed the Russia of Nabokov's childhood (though Nabokov states in his afterword that he "[detests] symbols and allegories"). Amis interprets it as a story of tyranny told from the point of view of the tyrant. "Nabokov, in all his fiction, writes with incomparable penetration about delusion and coercion, about cruelty and lies," he says. "Even "Lolita", especially "Lolita", is a study in tyranny."


title: Lolita

text: The term "Lolita" has been assimilated into popular culture as a description of a young girl who is "precociously seductive ... without connotations of victimization."


title: Lolita

text: Nabokov finished "Lolita" on 6 December 1953, five years after starting it. Because of its subject matter, Nabokov intended to publish it pseudonymously (although the anagrammatic character Vivian Darkbloom would tip off the alert reader). The manuscript was turned down, with more or less regret, by Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday. After these refusals and warnings, he finally resorted to publication in France. Via his translator Doussia Ergaz, it reached Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, "three-quarters of [whose] list was pornographic trash." Underinformed about Olympia, overlooking hints of Girodias's approval of the conduct of a protagonist Girodias presumed was based on the author, and despite warnings from Morris Bishop, his friend at Cornell, Nabokov signed a contract with Olympia Press for publication of the book, to come out under his own name.


title: Lolita

text: "Lolita" was published in September 1955, as a pair of green paperbacks "swarming with typographical errors". Although the first printing of 5,000 copies sold out, there were no substantial reviews. Eventually, at the very end of 1955, Graham Greene, in the London "Sunday Times", called it one of the three best books of 1955. This statement provoked a response from the London "Sunday Express", whose editor John Gordon called it "the filthiest book I have ever read" and "sheer unrestrained pornography". British Customs officers were then instructed by the Home Office to seize all copies entering the United Kingdom. In December 1956, France followed suit, and the Minister of the Interior banned "Lolita"; the ban lasted for two years. Its eventual British publication by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in London in 1959 was controversial enough to contribute to the end of the political career of the Conservative member of parliament Nigel Nicolson, one of the company's partners.


title: Lolita

text: The novel then appeared in Danish and Dutch translations. Two editions of a Swedish translation were withdrawn at the author's request.


title: Lolita

text: Despite initial trepidation, there was no official response in the U.S., and the first American edition was issued by G. P. Putnam's Sons in August 1958. The book was into a third printing within days and became the first since "Gone with the Wind" to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks. Orville Prescott, the influential book reviewer of the "New York Times", greatly disliked the book, describing it as "dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion." This review failed to influence the book's sales.


title: Lolita

text: "Lolita" was later translated into Russian by Nabokov himself and published in New York City in 1967 by Phaedra Publishers.


title: Lolita

text: The novel continues to generate controversy today as modern society has become increasingly aware of the lasting damage created by child sexual abuse. In 2008, an entire book was published on the best ways to teach the novel in a college classroom given that "its particular mix of narrative strategies, ornate allusive prose, and troublesome subject matter complicates its presentation to students." In this book, one author urges teachers to note that Dolores' suffering is noted in the book even if the main focus is on Humbert.


title: Lolita

text: Many critics describe Humbert as a rapist, notably Azar Nafisi in her best-selling "Reading Lolita in Tehran", though in a survey of critics David Larmour notes that other interpreters of the novel have been reluctant to use that term, despite its accuracy. Near the end of the novel, Humbert admits to himself, as noted in the above plot synopsis, that he has committed statutory rape, which his actions were according to the law at the time of publishing. Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd denies that it was rape "in any ordinary sense", on the grounds that "it is she who suggests that they try out the naughty trick" which she has already learned at summer camp; however, consent laws for adults cannot be applied to children. This perspective is vigorously disputed by Peter Rabinowitz in his essay "Lolita: Solipsized or Sodomized?" In 2020, a podcast hosted by Jamie Loftus set out to examine the cultural legacy of the novel, and argued that depictions and adaptations have "twisted" Nabokov's original intention of condemning Humbert in "Lolita".


title: Lolita

text: In 1928 Nabokov wrote a poem named "Lilith" (Лилит), depicting a sexually attractive underage girl who seduces the male protagonist just to leave him humiliated in public. In 1939 he wrote a novella, "Volshebnik" (Волшебник), that was published only posthumously in 1986 in English translation as "The Enchanter". It bears many similarities to "Lolita", but also has significant differences: it takes place in Central Europe, and the protagonist is unable to consummate his passion with his stepdaughter, leading to his suicide. The theme of hebephilia was already touched on by Nabokov in his short story "A Nursery Tale", written in 1926. Also, in the 1932 "Laughter in the Dark", Margot Peters is 16 and had already had an affair when middle-aged Albinus becomes attracted to her.


title: Lolita

text: In chapter three of the novel "The Gift" (written in Russian in 1935–37) the similar gist of "Lolita"s first chapter is outlined to the protagonist, Fyodor Cherdyntsev, by his landlord Shchyogolev as an idea of a novel he would write "if I only had the time": a man marries a widow only to gain access to her young daughter, who resists all his passes. Shchyogolev says it happened "in reality" to a friend of his; it is made clear to the reader that it concerns himself and his stepdaughter Zina (15 at the time of Shchyogolev's marriage to her mother) who becomes the love of Fyodor's life.


title: Lolita

text: In April 1947, Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson: "I am writing ... a short novel about a man who liked little girls—and it's going to be called "The Kingdom by the Sea"." The work expanded into "Lolita" during the next eight years. Nabokov used the title "A Kingdom by the Sea" in his 1974 pseudo-autobiographical novel "Look at the Harlequins!" for a "Lolita"-like book written by the narrator who, in addition, travels with his teenage daughter Bel from motel to motel after the death of her mother; later, his fourth wife is Bel's look-alike and shares her birthday.


title: Lolita

text: In Nabokov's 1962 novel "Pale Fire", the titular poem by fictional John Shade mentions Hurricane Lolita coming up the American east coast in 1958, and narrator Charles Kinbote (in the commentary later in the book) notes it, questioning why anyone would have chosen an obscure Spanish nickname for a hurricane. There were no hurricanes named Lolita that year, but that is the year that "Lolita" the novel was published in North America.


title: Lolita

text: The unfinished novel "The Original of Laura", published posthumously, features the character Hubert H. Hubert, an older man preying upon then-child protagonist, Flora. Unlike those of Humbert Humbert in "Lolita", Hubert's advances are unsuccessful.


title: Lolita

text: The novel abounds in allusions to classical and modern literature. Virtually all of them have been noted in "The Annotated Lolita", edited and annotated by Alfred Appel Jr. Many are references to Humbert's own favorite poet, Edgar Allan Poe.


title: Lolita

text: Humbert's first love, Annabel Leigh, is named after the "maiden" in the poem "Annabel Lee" by Poe; this poem is alluded to many times in the novel, and its lines are borrowed to describe Humbert's love. A passage in chapter 11 reuses Poe's phrase "...by the side of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride". In the opening of the novel, the phrase "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied," is a pastiche of two passages of the poem, the "winged seraphs of heaven" (line 11), and "The angels, not half so happy in heaven, went envying her and me" (lines 21–2). Nabokov originally intended Lolita to be called "The Kingdom by the Sea", drawing on the rhyme with Annabel Lee that was used in the first verse of Poe's work. A variant of this line is reprised in the opening of chapter one, which reads "...had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea".


title: Lolita

text: Humbert Humbert's double name recalls Poe's "William Wilson", a tale in which the main character is haunted by his doppelgänger, paralleling to the presence of Humbert's own doppelgänger, Clare Quilty. Humbert is not, however, his real name, but a chosen pseudonym. The theme of the doppelgänger also occurs in Nabokov's earlier novel, "Despair".


title: Lolita

text: Humbert's field of expertise is French literature (one of his jobs is writing a series of educational works that compare French writers to English writers), and as such there are several references to French literature, including the authors Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, François Rabelais, Charles Baudelaire, Prosper Mérimée, Remy Belleau, Honoré de Balzac, and Pierre de Ronsard.


title: Lolita

text: Nabokov was fond of the works of Lewis Carroll, and had translated "Alice in Wonderland" into Russian. He even called Carroll the "first Humbert Humbert". "Lolita" contains a few brief allusions in the text to the "Alice" books, though overall Nabokov avoided direct allusions to Carroll. In her book, "Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin", Joyce Milton claims that a major inspiration for the novel was Charlie Chaplin's relationship with his second wife, Lita Grey, whose real name was Lillita and is often misstated as Lolita. Graham Vickers in his book "Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again" argues that the two major real-world predecessors of Humbert are Lewis Carroll and Charlie Chaplin. Although Appel's comprehensive "Annotated Lolita" contains no references to Charlie Chaplin, others have picked up several oblique references to Chaplin's life in Nabokov's book. Bill Delaney notes that at the end Lolita and her husband move to the fictional Alaskan town of "Gray Star" while Chaplin's "The Gold Rush", set in Alaska, was originally set to star Lita Grey. Lolita's first sexual encounter was with a boy named Charlie Holmes, whom Humbert describes as "the silent ... but indefatigable Charlie." Chaplin had an artist paint Lita Grey in imitation of Joshua Reynolds's painting "The Age of Innocence". When Humbert visits Lolita in a class at her school, he notes a print of the same painting in the classroom. Delaney's article notes many other parallels as well.


title: Lolita

text: The foreword refers to "the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933 by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken book"—that is, the decision in the case "United States v. One Book Called Ulysses", in which Woolsey ruled that Joyce's "Ulysses" was not obscene and could be sold in the United States.


title: Lolita

text: In chapter 29 of Part Two, Humbert comments that Lolita looks "like Botticelli's russet Venus—the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty," referencing Sandro Botticelli's depiction of Venus in, perhaps, "The Birth of Venus" or "Venus and Mars".


title: Lolita

text: In chapter 35 of Part Two, Humbert's "death sentence" on Quilty parodies the rhythm and use of anaphora in T. S. Eliot's poem "Ash Wednesday."


title: Lolita

text: Many other references to classical and Romantic literature abound, including references to Lord Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" and to the poetry of Laurence Sterne.


title: Lolita

text: In addition to the possible prototypes of Lewis Carroll and Charlie Chaplin, Alexander Dolinin suggests that the prototype of Lolita was 11-year-old Florence Horner, kidnapped in 1948 by 50-year-old mechanic Frank La Salle, who had caught her stealing a five-cent notebook. La Salle traveled with her over various states for 21 months and is believed to have raped her. He claimed that he was an FBI agent and threatened to "turn her in" for the theft and to send her to "a place for girls like you." The Horner case was not widely reported, but Dolinin notes various similarities in events and descriptions.


title: Lolita

text: While Nabokov had already used the same basic idea—that of a child molester and his victim booking into a hotel as father and daughter—in his then-unpublished 1939 work "The Enchanter" ("Волшебник"), he mentions the Horner case explicitly in Chapter 33 of Part II of "Lolita": "Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?".


title: Lolita

text: German academic Michael Maar's book "The Two Lolitas" describes his discovery of a 1916 German short story titled "Lolita" whose middle-aged narrator describes travelling abroad as a student. He takes a room as a lodger and instantly becomes obsessed with the preteen girl (also named Lolita) who lives in the same house. Maar has speculated that Nabokov may have had cryptomnesia ("hidden memory") while he was composing "Lolita" during the 1950s. Maar says that until 1937 Nabokov lived in the same section of Berlin as the author, Heinz von Eschwege (pen name: Heinz von Lichberg), and was most likely familiar with his work, which was widely available in Germany during Nabokov's time there. "The Philadelphia Inquirer", in the article ""Lolita" at 50: Did Nabokov take literary liberties?" says that, according to Maar, accusations of plagiarism should not apply and quotes him as saying: "Literature has always been a huge crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast... Nothing of what we admire in "Lolita" is already to be found in the tale; the former is in no way deducible from the latter." See also Jonathan Lethem's essay "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism" in "Harper's Magazine" on this story.


title: Lolita

text: In 1956, Nabokov wrote an afterword to "Lolita" ("On a Book Entitled "Lolita""), that first appeared in the first U.S. edition and has appeared thereafter.


title: Lolita

text: One of the first things Nabokov makes a point of saying is that, despite John Ray Jr.'s claim in the Foreword, there is no moral to the story.


title: Lolita

text: Nabokov adds that "the initial shiver of inspiration" for "Lolita" "was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." Neither the article nor the drawing has been recovered.


title: Lolita

text: In response to an American critic who characterized "Lolita" as the record of Nabokov's "love affair with the romantic novel", Nabokov writes that "the substitution of 'English language' for 'romantic novel' would make this elegant formula more correct."


title: Lolita

text: Nabokov concludes the afterword with a reference to his beloved first language, which he abandoned as a writer once he moved to the United States in 1940: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian language for a second-rate brand of English."


title: Lolita

text: In the same year, in an interview with "Life", Nabokov was asked which of his writings had most pleased him. He answered:


title: Lolita

text: The Russian translation includes a "Postscriptum" in which Nabokov reconsiders his relationship with his native language. Referring to the afterword in the English edition, Nabokov states that only "the scientific scrupulousness led me to preserve the last paragraph of the American afterword in the Russian text..." He further explains that the "story of this translation is the story of a disappointment. Alas, that 'wonderful Russian language' which, I imagined, still awaits me somewhere, which blooms like a faithful spring behind the locked gate to which I, after so many years, still possess the key, turned out to be non-existent, and there is nothing beyond that gate, except for some burned out stumps and hopeless autumnal emptiness, and the key in my hand looks rather like a lock pick."


title: Lolita

text: "Lolita" has been adapted as two films, a musical, four stage-plays, one completed opera, and two ballets. There is also Nabokov's unfilmed (and re-edited) screenplay, an uncompleted opera based on the work, and an "imagined opera" which combines elements of opera and dance.


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: Hannah Waddingham (born 28 July 1974) is a British actress and singer. She is best known for playing Jane in "Not Going Out" and Rebecca Welton in the comedy series "Ted Lasso" (2020–present), for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2021 and the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2021 and 2022. She has also appeared in a number of West End shows, including the production of "Spamalot", the 2010 Regent's Park revival of "Into the Woods", and "The Wizard of Oz" as the Wicked Witch of the West; and has received three Olivier Award nominations for her work.


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: Her other work includes appearing as an ensemble member in the 2012 film adaptation of "Les Misérables", and joining the cast of the fifth season of the HBO series "Game of Thrones" as Septa Unella in 2015. She co-starred in the 2018 British psychological thriller "Winter Ridge", and has had a supporting role on the series "Sex Education" since 2019.


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: Waddingham was born in Wandsworth in London. Her mother, Melodie Kelly, was an opera singer as were both her maternal grandparents. Her mother joined the English National Opera when Waddingham was eight years old, and she grew up around the theatre.


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: Waddingham is a graduate of the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts. She has a four octave vocal range. She started out in dinner theatre, performing in the interactive comedy "Joni and Gina's Wedding".


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: Waddingham has been a stage actress on both London's West End and New York's Broadway. She performed as Starbird in "Space Family Robinson" (Julian & Stephen Butler, 2002) and Suzanne Valadon in "Lautrec".


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: Waddingham portrayed the Lady of the Lake in "Spamalot", both in the London production and then on Broadway. She received an Olivier Award nomination for the role. She received outstanding reviews for her portrayal of Desirée Armfeldt in Trevor Nunn's revival of "A Little Night Music", including being described by one critic as the "Joanna Lumley of musical theatre". Waddingham subsequently received a further Olivier Award nomination in 2010 for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance in "Night Music".


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: In mid-2010, Waddingham played the Witch in the production of "Into the Woods" at London's Open Air Theatre. She originated the role of The Wicked Witch of the West in the West End production of "The Wizard of Oz", which opened on 1 March 2011 at the London Palladium and was the first to perform the new Lloyd Webber and Rice song "Red Shoes Blues". She left the production on 4 September 2011. Waddingham won the whatsonstage.com Theatergoers Choice Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical for her performance.


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: Waddingham appeared in the concert premiere of Styles and Drew's Soho Cinders at the Queens Theatre, London in 2011, and was replaced by Jenna Russell for the show's first fully staged production in 2012.


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: In 2012, Waddingham starred in Chichester Festival Theatre's revival of "Kiss Me, Kate". The show transferred to the Old Vic Theatre on London's South Bank in November 2012.


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: In 2011, Waddingham appeared in Season 4, Episode 3 of the hit BBC sitcom, "Not Going Out". She played the role of Jane, an actress in an adult film being recorded in the show.


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: She had a small role in the 2012 film "Les Misérables", and in 2014, starred on the ITV comedy "Benidorm".


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: Waddingham portrayed the "Shame Nun", Septa Unella, in season 5 and 6 of "Game of Thrones". She started filming nine weeks after giving birth to her daughter, and did her own stunts for a scene in which she is waterboarded. She was given the role's iconic "shame bell" as a parting gift. She also has a recurring role on the Netflix series "Sex Education" as Jackson's overbearing mother, Sophia Marchetti.


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: Since 2020, Waddingham has portrayed Rebecca Welton, the owner of AFC Richmond on the Apple TV+ series "Ted Lasso". The show has been praised for its "refreshing" portrayal of a supportive female friendship between Rebecca and Juno Temple's character, Keeley. She does her own singing in the season one episode "Make Rebecca Great Again" and the season two episodes "Carol of the Bells" and "No Weddings and a Funeral". In 2021, she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for the role.


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: Waddingham also appears as the character Mother Witch in "Hocus Pocus 2", Disney's sequel to "Hocus Pocus" released on Disney+ on September 30, 2022. The actor's time on screen has been described as an "Oscar-worthy performance" and "[F]rom the moment she enters, she commands the screen with unquestionable authority."


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: She will portray Lady Bellaston in the ITV drama miniseries "Tom Jones", based on Henry Fielding's 1749 novel.


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: Billed simply as Hannah, Waddingham placed "Our Kind of Love" in the UK Singles Chart in October 2000, where it peaked at No. 41.


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: She later sang the role of Starbird on the soundtrack recording of "Space Family Robinson" (composers: Julian Butler & Stephen Butler), released by Pop! Records in May 2002, coinciding with the stage production (also featuring Waddingham as Starbird) which ran for three weeks at London's Pleasance Theatre.


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: She played the role of Christine in the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton musical "The Beautiful Game" in London's West End, and sings the role in the cast recording.


title: Hannah Waddingham

text: Waddingham was in a relationship with Italian businessman Gianluca Cugnetto. Their daughter (born 2014) has an autoimmune disease, Henoch–Schönlein purpura. She keeps her Emmy award in her daughter's bedroom to remind her that "mummy will only ever be away when it's for a really, blooming good reason."


title: Russian language

text: Russian (, ) is an East Slavic language mainly spoken in Russia. It is the native language of the Russians, and belongs to the Indo-European language family. It is one of four living East Slavic languages, and is also a part of the larger Balto-Slavic languages. Besides Russia itself, Russian is an official language in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, and is used widely as a lingua franca throughout Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and to some extent in the Baltic states. It was the "de facto" language of the former Soviet Union, and continues to be used in public life with varying proficiency in all of the post-Soviet states.


title: Russian language

text: Russian has over 258 million total speakers worldwide. It is the most spoken Slavic language, and the most spoken native language in Europe, as well as the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia. It is the world's seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers, and the world's eighth-most spoken language by total number of speakers. Russian is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station, as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations.


title: Russian language

text: Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without—the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds. Almost every consonant has a hard or soft counterpart, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Stress, which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically, though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress – such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. [' – a 'lock'] and [' – a 'castle']), or to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names.


title: Russian language

text: Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family. It is a descendant of Old East Slavic, a language used in Kievan Rus', which was a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid 13th centuries. From the point of view of spoken language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn, the other three languages in the East Slavic branch. In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixtures such as Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although it vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Also, Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. In the 19th century (in Russia until 1917), the language was often called "Great Russian" to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called "White Russian" and Ukrainian, then called "Little Russian".


title: Russian language

text: The vocabulary (mainly abstract and literary words), principles of word formations, and, to some extent, inflections and literary style of Russian have been also influenced by Church Slavonic, a developed and partly Russified form of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic language used by the Russian Orthodox Church. However, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with many different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language.


title: Russian language

text: Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Latin, Polish, Dutch, German, French, Italian, and English, and to a lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic, Turkic, Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew.


title: Russian language

text: According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency. It is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a "hard target" language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in U.S. world policy.


title: Russian language

text: Feudal divisions and conflicts between rival polities created obstacles to the exchange of goods and ideas between the early medieval Rus' principalities before and especially during Mongol rule. This strengthened dialectal differences and for centuries prevented the establishment of any standardized "national" language. The gradual but steady emergence of the Grand Principality of Moscow (1263–1547) – later the Tsardom of Russia from 1547 – as the dominant and ever-expanding polity of the Rus', necessitated the earliest attempts at standardization of the East Slavic language based on the Moscow dialect. Since then the trend of language policy in Russia has been standardization in both the restricted sense of reducing dialectical barriers between ethnic Russians, and the broader sense of expanding the use of Russian alongside or in favour of other languages that exist within the borders of the Russian Empire, and the later Soviet Union and Russian Federation.


title: Russian language

text: The current standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the "modern Russian literary language" ( – "sovremenny russky literaturny yazyk"). It arose in the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state under the rule of Peter the Great and developed from the Moscow (Middle or Central Russian) dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancery language. This occurred in spite of the fact that Saint Petersburg, the Western-oriented capital created by the "Westernizing" Tsar Peter the Great, being the capital of the Russian Empire for over 200 years.


title: Russian language

text: Mikhail Lomonosov compiled the first book of Russian grammar aimed at standardization in 1755. The Russian Academy's first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared in 1783. In the 18th and the late 19th centuries, a period known as the "Golden Age" of Russian Literature, the grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation of the Russian language in a standardized literary form emerged.


title: Russian language

text: Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, the spoken form of the Russian language was that of the nobility and the urban bourgeoise. Russian peasants, the great majority of the population, continued to speak in their own dialects. However, the peasants' speech was never systematically studied, as it was generally regarded by philologists as simply a source of folklore and an object of curiosity. This was acknowledged by the noted Russian dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky (1873–1935), who toward the end of his life wrote: “Scholars of Russian dialects mostly studied phonetics and morphology. Some scholars and collectors compiled local dictionaries... We have almost no studies of lexical material or the syntax of Russian dialects.”


title: Russian language

text: After 1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past that was not worthy of scholarly attention. Nakhimovsky quotes the Soviet academicians A.M Ivanov and L.P Yakubinsky, writing in 1930:


title: Russian language

text: The language of peasants has a motley diversity inherited from feudalism... On its way to becoming proletariat peasantry brings to the factory and the industrial plant their local peasant dialects with their phonetics, grammar and vocabulary... the very process of recruiting workers from peasants and the mobility of worker population generate another process: the liquidation of peasant inheritance by way of leveling the particulars of local dialects. On the ruins of peasant multilingua, in the context of developing heavy industry, a qualitatively new entity can be said to emerge—the general language of the working class... capitalism has the tendency of creating the general urban language of a given society.


title: Russian language

text: By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the compulsory education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features (such as fricative in Southern Russian dialects) are still observed in colloquial speech.


title: Russian language

text: In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world: in Russia – 137.5 million, in the CIS and Baltic countries – 93.7 million, in Eastern Europe – 12.9 million, Western Europe – 7.3 million, Asia – 2.7 million, Middle East and North Africa – 1.3 million, Sub-Saharan Africa – 0.1 million, Latin America – 0.2 million, U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand – 4.1 million speakers. Therefore, the Russian language is the seventh-largest in the world by number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi-Urdu, Spanish, French, Arabic and Portuguese.


title: Russian language

text: Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for both Russian as a second language (RSL) and native speakers in Russia, and in many former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics.


title: Russian language

text: In Belarus, Russian is a second state language alongside Belarusian per the Constitution of Belarus. 77% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 67% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work.


title: Russian language

text: In Estonia, Russian is spoken by 29.6% of the population according to a 2011 estimate from the World Factbook, and is officially considered a foreign language. School education in the Russian language is a very contentious point in Estonian politics, but as of 2019 promises have been given that such schools will remain open in the near future.


title: Russian language

text: In Latvia, Russian is officially considered a foreign language. 55% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 26% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On February 18, 2012, Latvia held a constitutional referendum on whether to adopt Russian as a second official language. According to the Central Election Commission, 74.8% voted against, 24.9% voted for and the voter turnout was 71.1%. Starting in 2019, instruction in Russian will be gradually discontinued in private colleges and universities in Latvia, and in general instruction in Latvian public high schools.


title: Russian language

text: In Lithuania, Russian has no official or any legal status, but the use of the language has some presence in certain areas. A large part of the population, especially the older generations, can speak Russian as a foreign language. However, English has replaced Russian as "lingua franca" in Lithuania and around 80% of young people speak English as the first foreign language. In contrast to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania has a relatively small Russian-speaking minority (5.0% as of 2008).


title: Russian language

text: In Moldova, Russian is considered to be the language of inter-ethnic communication under a Soviet-era law. 50% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 19% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work.


title: Russian language

text: According to the 2010 census in Russia, Russian language skills were indicated by 138 million people (99.4% of the respondents), while according to the 2002 census – 142.6 million people (99.2% of the respondents).


title: Russian language

text: In Ukraine, Russian is a significant minority language. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 14,400,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 29 million active speakers. 65% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 38% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On September 5, 2017, Ukraine's Parliament passed a new education law which bars primary education to all students in any language but Ukrainian. The law faced criticism from officials in Russia.


title: Russian language

text: In the 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. According to the Eurobarometer 2005 survey, fluency in Russian remains fairly high (20–40%) in some countries, in particular those where the people speak a Slavic language and thereby have an edge in learning Russian (namely, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Bulgaria).


title: Russian language

text: Significant Russian-speaking groups also exist in Western Europe. These have been fed by several waves of immigrants since the beginning of the 20th century, each with its own flavor of language. The United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Norway, and Austria have significant Russian-speaking communities.


title: Russian language

text: In Armenia, Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. 30% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work.


title: Russian language

text: In Azerbaijan, Russian has no official status, but is a "lingua franca" of the country. 26% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 5% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work.


title: Russian language

text: In China, Russian has no official status, but it is spoken by the small Russian communities in the northeastern Heilongjiang and the northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.


title: Russian language

text: In Georgia, Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. Russian is the language of 9% of the population according to the World Factbook. Ethnologue cites Russian as the country's de facto working language.


title: Russian language

text: In Kazakhstan, Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration. The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of the population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, and understand the spoken language.


title: Russian language

text: In Kyrgyzstan, Russian is a co-official language per article 5 of the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan. The 2009 census states that 482,200 people speak Russian as a native language, or 8.99% of the population. Additionally, 1,854,700 residents of Kyrgyzstan aged 15 and above fluently speak Russian as a second language, or 49.6% of the population in the age group.


title: Russian language

text: In Tajikistan, Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication under the Constitution of Tajikistan and is permitted in official documentation. 28% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 7% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. The World Factbook notes that Russian is widely used in government and business.


title: Russian language

text: In Turkmenistan, Russian lost its status as the official "lingua franca" in 1996. Among 12% of the population who grew up in the Soviet era can speak Russian, other generations of citizens that do not have any knowledge of Russian. Primary and secondary education by Russian is almost non-existent. Nevertheless, the Turkmen state press and newspaper Neytralny Turkmenistan regularly publish material version in Russian-language, and there are schools like Joint Turkmen-Russian Secondary School.


title: Russian language

text: In Uzbekistan, Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication. It has some official roles, being permitted in official documentation and is the "lingua franca" of the country and the language of the elite. Russian is spoken by 14.2% of the population according to an undated estimate from the World Factbook.


title: Russian language

text: In 2005, Russian was the most widely taught foreign language in Mongolia, and was compulsory in Year 7 onward as a second foreign language in 2006.


title: Russian language

text: Russian is also spoken in Israel. The number of native Russian-speaking Israelis numbers around 1.5 million Israelis, 15% of the population. The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there are Russian newspapers, television stations, schools, and social media outlets based in the country. There is an Israeli TV channel mainly broadcasting in Russian with Israel Plus. See also Russian language in Israel.


title: Russian language

text: In Vietnam, Russian has been added in the elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese and were named as "first foreign languages" for Vietnamese students to learn, on equal footing with English.


title: Russian language

text: The language was first introduced in North America when Russian explorers voyaged into Alaska and claimed it for Russia during the 18th century. Although most Russian colonists left after the United States bought the land in 1867, a handful stayed and preserved the Russian language in this region to this day, although only a few elderly speakers of this unique dialect are left. In Nikolaevsk, Alaska, Russian is more spoken than English. Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada, such as New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Nashville, San Francisco, Seattle, Spokane, Toronto, Calgary, Baltimore, Miami, Chicago, Denver, and Cleveland. In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially the generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s). Only about 25% of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterward, the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat, with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians immigrating along with some more Russian Jews and Central Asians. According to the United States Census, in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States.


title: Russian language

text: In the second half of the 20th century, Russian was the most popular foreign language in Cuba. Besides being taught at universities and schools, there were also educational programs on the radio and TV. However, starting January 2019 Cuban television opened an educational program devoted to the Russian language. This project is fully entitled to be called an anticipated one, because the Russian – Cuban collaboration is a strategic direction actively developed as more and more young people are interested in the Russian language, the Education navigator informs. The Havana State University has started a bachelor's specialization called the Russian Language and the Second Foreign Language. There is also the Russian language department, where students can scrutinize e-books without internet connection. Additional courses on the Russian language are open at two schools of the Cuban capital city. An estimated 200,000 people speak the Russian language in Cuba, on the account that more than 23,000 Cubans who took higher studies in the former Soviet Union and later in Russia, and another important group of people who studied at military schools and technologists, plus the nearly 2,000 Russians residing in Cuba and their descendants.


title: Russian language

text: Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the following:


title: Russian language

text: The Russian language is also one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station – NASA astronauts who serve alongside Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses. This practice goes back to the Apollo–Soyuz mission, which first flew in 1975.