I'm cheating on my first love with Russian

I’ve been learning French for several years, and I adore the language. I’ve grown to really like my classmates and a number of us have now been through four or five terms together. We’ve fallen into a happy routine of taking turns to bring the wine each week and laughing over it as we confess our latest vocabulary faux pas. It’s possible I may even have developed a leetle, tiny girl-crush on my teacher, a beautiful and charming lass of French Indochine heritage and strange musical tastes. She once played us the Jacques Brel song Ne me quitte pas and was perplexed that we thought it a cheesy old load of nonsense with weird stalkerish undertones.

But this term, I’m cheating on my first love because I’ve finally found a night class in Russian. I’ve had a strange yearning to learn Russian for years. Recently, it became almost overwhelming as a result of watching this fascinating BBC series, in which Jonathan Dimbleby spends 18 weeks travelling from Murmansk to Vladivostok. I know very little about Russia, apart from the corners of its history I traversed in the course of an undergraduate paper on the Napoleonic Wars. Also, some odds and ends about Catherine the Great, although I never fell for the story that she was crushed to death while trying to have sex with a stallion (this is one of those scurrilous myths that often get attached to powerful women, and despite all evidence to the contrary, never seem to die).

I imagine all Russians to be like Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises, all smouldering gangland staunchness and chewy Russian consonants. Either that, or like the icily elegant socialites Dimbleby meets in St Petersburg, who dismiss Western democracy and American consumer culture with a disdainful wrinkling of their White Russian noses. I’ve never been to Russia but a visit to the Hermitage Museum is definitely on my list of things to do before I die. That, and swilling French champagne in the Baroque dining room of some decaying St Petersburg hotel that’s seen better days.

Oy. I just had a look at the Hermitage website. The Cyrillic script is utterly mystifying. At least with French, you’re on somewhat familiar territory, even if the particular letter combinations and the accents create different spoken sounds from English. It’s just occurred to me how much of a challenge it’s going to be to learn this entirely new alphabet - like learning to read all over again!

Image: The almost impossibly fairytale-like Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood in St Petersburg (eat your heart out, Walt Disney). Apparently, it got this rather gruesome moniker care of being the site of Tsar Alexander II’s assassination.