Epress.am News from Armenia
People in Armenia know Russian, but a new generation has grown up in the country which makes use of new information sources, said RA Ministry of Culture Hasmik Poghosyan in an interview with Russian-language news portal Evrasia (“Eurasia”).
According to her, many families traditionally pass on love for the Russian language to their children so that the vastness of Russian culture is available to them.
“The distribution of reading [i.e. what people read] is the same in Armenia as everywhere else. Both bestsellers and translations of educational literature can be read extensively; there are also consumers of elite literature… I can say something paradoxical: there are bookstores in Yerevan where most of the books are those published in the Russian-language.
“There are several literary magazines that publish Russian literature. We love to read Alexei Varlamov. This is largely due to the fact that he was here 10 years ago, when he was not yet a popular writer. But he managed to make warm remarks about the Armenian people, as a result of which Armenians began to closely follow his work.
“Andrei Bitov’s name is sacred in Armenia — he is quoted everywhere. To keep the tradition alive, writers have to be in contact with our country — to the Armenians this is very important. That, shall we say, helps the perception of a literary person,” she said.