The Under the Sky of Friendship national cultures festival has opened at the Institute of Humanities (IH) of Altai State University. For the fourth year in a row, it has brought together students from around the world studying at the classical university through a competitive program.
Traditionally, this large-scale project opened with the "Russian Classics" literary and poetry competition, in which international students from the Institute of Humanities competed to deliver the best readings of works or excerpts from Russian classics in Russian.
This year, the number of participants in the competition increased significantly, and its geographic scope expanded accordingly. Students from Zambia, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Vietnam, Guinea-Bissau, Yemen, China, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, and Bangladesh prepared a wide variety of works for performance: from Pushkin's famous Winter Morning to Larisa Rubalskaya's poem It Happens.
"I would like to thank all the participants in our festival's first competition for their perseverance, creative approach, and courage in reading poems in Russian to a large audience. The students who study Russian at our institute always surprise and delight us at this competition with their emotionality and their desire to learn Russian classics. This year was no exception, and we are, of course, very pleased," noted Galina Zvorygina, director of the national cultures festival, Deputy Director for Creative Work at the Institute of Humanities at ASU and Director of the Living Word theater studio.
Summarizing the contestants' performances, Galina Dmitrievna noted that the numbers that particularly impressed the jury will be featured on April 29th as part of the festival's final gala concert.
The next stage of the IH International FEST 2024 – an exhibition of national artworks (photographs, paintings, and decorative arts) and a presentation of the festival participants' concert programs, featuring a video introduction of their country and concert numbers of various genres – is scheduled for April 17.