Russian Total Dictation On 13 April 2019, the annual Russian literacy test - Russian Total Dictation - was held all around the globe.
The text of the dictation was composed by popular writer Pavel Bassinsky. Commenting on the four parts of the dictation, the author stated, "I chose the play Mozart and Salieri by Alexander Pushkin for the first fragment, Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol for the second and At the Bottom by Maxim Gorky for the third. And the fourth text could not do without Leo Tolstoy, this is the closest writer to me".
According to the estimates, the dictation was written by 250 thousand people. Outside of Russia, 26 thousand people from 80 countries took part in the test as foreign nationals. Germany, USA, China, and Kazakhstan took the lead drawing the greatest number of participants.
This year the capital of the Russian Total Dictation was voted to be Tallinn - the only foreign city on the list of 14 contenders.
In Syktyvkar, the total of 466 people joined the test at 3 different venues. 25 most literate participants showed excellent results and scored a five out of five.
The National Library of the Komi Republic hosted the dictation for the fifth time in a row gathering 70 people.
This year, the honour of reading the text of the dictation in the library was awarded to Olga Rodovich, the leading actress of the Viktor Savin Drama Theater, a laureate of the Komi Republic Government Award. According to the survey, 76 per cent of the participants are aged 15-45; 20 per cent – 46 and older. The remaining 4 per cent are younger than 14.
58 per cent have a professional background whereas 34 per cent are college students and pupils.
60 per cent of the participants reported that it was the first time they had taken part in the test in the National Library of Komi; for 22 per cent it was the second time; 11 per cent had written the test for the third time.
Those who had joined the dictation at the library for the fourth and fifth time received library e-cards. | 
