Saturday, April 9, 2022

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Despite the war, and despite being defunded by state and federal governments, even this year the Total Dictation program, which was inaugurated at Novosibirsk State University in 2004 with the aim to promote literacy worldwide, succeeded in seeing the light of day today, Saturday, April 9, 2022. The Director of the Total Dictation Foundation, Olga Alexandrovna Rebkovets, must content herself with having involved 500 cities in Russia and 40 countries in the world — nothing comparable to the 6 continents and 76 countries that participated in 2019, before the pandemic. Yet, curiously enough, FIDE President Arkady Vladimirovich Dvorkovich also took part in the 2019 edition, and some still recall him breaking into a fresh laugh over the fact that the reader in charge of dictation is called “the dictator”.
As for this year’s edition, Marina Lvovna Stepnova was the featured writer and, reportedly, the dictation was about a nineteenth-century teenage boy waiting for his first love.

Vincent van Gogh, Letter From Vincent van Gogh to Willemien van Gogh with sketch of Woman Reading a Novel (verso), ca. November 12, 1888. Courtesy of Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

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