Gerald Turner

"'Gerry, if you go there, you'll have to learn Czech because you won't understand a thing otherwise.' Dick Richter was his name, a very nice man, I remember well. I came to Czechia with the intention of learning Czech. Of course, even with my Russian - I already had a good command of Russian - when I turned on the radio in that horrible Recreation House, I couldn't tell what language it was. Just awful. To me, Russian next to that was a picturesque, beautiful language, beautiful in sound. Our Russian teacher would play us Chekhov and Pushkin. I loved Russian poetry, and suddenly there was this language that was ugly to me. I was looking at the front page of Rudé právo, trying to find what was Slavic in it. At first glance, I found that was quite a task to overcome that little bit of initial resistance to the language. Luckily, during the first few months, I was stopped by a young man in Pařížská Street and I was a little bit worried if he was some kind of a baksheesh again, because at every turn there was a baksheesh in those days, 'Change money, change money', but not this one. He wanted a conversation in English. 'All right, I'll teach you English, you teach me Czech.'"

"I started studying Russian in the last two years of my high school, I came to Moscow at the age of sixteen or seventeen when I had already completed a year of Russian. And it really burst the illusion completely at that point. That was terrible, really terrible. What was terrible? Well, the Soviet reality, I had never seen it. Could you describe specifically what shattered that illusion for you? Well, in general, the quality of life for Russians at that time was so terribly low. Just going to the public toilets was like a nightmare. The rudeness in general, the rude people and the behavior, the rude behaviour. Buildings that were unfinished beyond compare. Of course there were those crazy buildings in Moscow, the universities and so on, but elsewhere, it was a mess. Gross. That was probably the first burst of those illusions for me."