It's been more than a century since a member of the Mebagishvili family of Tbilisi, Georgia, grew up not speaking Russian. Like educated families all over the Russian Empire, the Mebagishvilis viewed the language of Pushkin and Tolstoy as essential for anyone who wanted to get ahead—or to be considered fully civilized. But 20-year-old Helen Mebagishvili, a philosophy and social-science student at Tbilisi's Ilia Chavchavadze University, has chosen English, not Russian, as her first foreign language. She's studying another, too: French. "I do not feel any attachment towards Russia," she says as she packs the shelves of a new university library with Penguin editions of Mark Twain, James Joyce and Charles Dickens. "Once, Russia introduced European ideas to Georgia—but now we have direct access to European ideas." More...
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