How do American philology students differ from Russians? What was it like to study ancient Russian literature “without Orthodoxy” in the Soviet years? Is it worth translating the service into modern language? These and other questions from Pravmir were answered by Doctor of Philology, head of the sector of the history of the Russian literary language of the Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, specialist in the history of Russian culture, Viktor Markovich Zhivov. Viktor Markovich Zhivov is a Russian philologist, specialist in the history of the Russian language, literature and culture. Doctor of Philology, Professor at Moscow State University (until 2001) and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California at Berkeley (since 1995), Deputy Director of the Russian Language Institute. V. V. Vinogradov RAS, head of the sector of the history of the Russian literary language.