Įmblem of the Ministry of Culture of Russia. Finnish scholars collected comparable tales from multiple locales and analyzed their similarities and differences, hoping to trace these epic stories' migration paths. The Finnish school was concerned with connections amongst related legends of various Eastern European regions. Formalism focused on the artistic form of ancient byliny and faerie tales, specifically their use of distinctive structures and poetic devices. There were two primary trends of folklore study during the decade: the formalist and Finnish schools. The struggling new government, which had to focus its efforts on establishing a new administrative system and building up the nation's backwards economy, could not be bothered with attempting to control literature, so studies of folklore thrived. Some Russian poets, including Pyotr Yershov and Leonid Filatov, created a number of well-known poetical interpretations of classical Russian fairy tales, and in some cases, like that of Alexander Pushkin, also created fully original fairy tale poems that became very popular.įolklorists today consider the 1920s the Soviet Union's golden age of folklore. Many Russian fairy tales and bylinas were adapted for Russian animations, or for feature movies by famous directors like Aleksandr Ptushko ( Ilya Muromets, Sadko) and Aleksandr Rou ( Morozko, Vasilisa the Beautiful). The language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also applied as a means of coding and storage of universal knowledge-60–70% of all world information is published in the English and Russian languages. Over a quarter of the world's scientific literature is published in Russian. Written examples of Old East Slavic ( Old Russian) are attested from the 10th century onwards. Russian belongs to the Indo-European language family and is one of the living members of the East Slavic languages the others being Belarusian and Ukrainian (and possibly Rusyn). Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken Slavic language. Despite its wide dispersal, the Russian language is homogeneous throughout Russia. Russian is the only official state language, but the Constitution gives the individual republics the right to make their native language co-official next to Russian. According to the 2002 census, 142.6 million people speak Russian, followed by Tatar with 5.3 million and Ukrainian with 1.8 million speakers. Russia's 160 ethnic groups speak some 100 languages. Page of a Russian illuminated manuscript 1485–1490