“Reading the main books of Russian literature is like revising your biography. Life experience accumulated along with reading and thanks to it... We grow with books - they grow in us. And someday the time comes to rebel against the attitude towards the classics invested in childhood,” wrote Peter Weil and Alexander Genis in the preface to the very first edition of their “Native Speech” twenty years ago. Two journalists and writers who emigrated from the USSR created a book in a foreign land, which soon became a real, albeit slightly humorous, monument to the Soviet school literature textbook. We have not yet forgotten how successfully these textbooks forever discouraged schoolchildren from any taste for reading, instilling in them a persistent aversion to Russian classics. The authors of “Native Speech” tried to reawaken the unfortunate children (and their parents) interest in Russian fine literature. It looks like the attempt was a complete success. Weil and Genis’s witty and fascinating “anti-textbook” has been helping graduates and applicants successfully pass exams in Russian literature for many years.