Who opened the Russian language to the world?

The image of Vitaly Kostomarov (1930–2020) does not fit the stereotypical portrait of a great scholar. He had a sly smile, a love of motorcycles and fast driving, a touch of dreaminess and preferred philological puzzles to boring science.

His childhood fell during World War II. “My Russian language and literature teacher, whom I studied with during the difficult war years, played a major role in determining my future. She read poetry to us and the cold classroom somehow became warmer,” he fondly recalled.

Back then, he already developed a great interest in languages and, after school, he would run to Sanskrit classes! Later, he graduated from two faculties of Moscow University at once: Philology and Foreign Languages, with a degree in translation.

The young scientist dreamed of teaching the whole world to speak Russian. And, in 1960, he proposed a methodology for teaching Russian as a foreign language.

Helped the whole planet to speak Russian

In 1966, thanks to Kostomarov’s efforts, a scientific and methodological center for the study of the Russian language opened at Moscow State University. Seven years later, it grew into the State Pushkin Russian Language Institute. A year after that, Kostomarov, together with his mentor, Academician Viktor Vinogradov, founded the International Association of Teachers of Russian Language and Literature, uniting Russian language specialists from around the world. Later, he also launched the international Pushkin Competition for foreign teachers of Russian.

“The Russian language is a little unlucky, because it is very tied to political sentiments. If something unpleasant happens, people stop studying Russian. If something very good happens, everyone starts learning Russian,” Kostomarov once said, noting that, paradoxically, the overall trend is upward.

He sincerely believed that the world needed the Russian language and traveled with lectures to almost every country on the planet.

His textbook ‘Russian for Everyone’ is still a bible for Russian language teachers all over the world today. And the Pushkin State Russian Language Institute has become the leading institution for teaching and studying Russian as a foreign language. Over its more than half-century of existence, more than half a million people from 150 countries have graduated from it.

If you want to learn more about this great scholar, watch the documentary ‘A Star Named Kostomarov’, produced by the TV and radio company ‘Russkiy Mir’ (‘Russian World’) with support from the Presidential Grants Fund and the ‘Russkiy Mir’ Foundation. The film is available in Russian, English, Chinese, French and Serbian.