For a 2 day period from the 4th of June, Terengganu – one of the northern states in Malaysia – played host to a festival known as International Russian Language Day, which coincides with the birth anniversary of the Great Russian poet A.S. Pushkin. Terengganu is known as the “oil heart” of the country as it is rich in petroleum. Since 2009 the state annually sends its scholars to Russia to study medicine.

Thanks to an active collaboration with the Russian Centre of Science and Culture, a faculty for pre-university preparations entitled “Russia-medicine” had existed in the Terengganu Advanced Technical Institute University College (TATiUC) since 2010. This year’s festival coincides with the start of semester (4th of June) for 70 entrants to Russian universities. These applicants from Terengganu form a solid part of the general draft of Malaysian youths who travel yearly to Russia to pursue tertiary education (600-700 in total).

The RCSC had set-up at TATiUC informative stands and exhibitions on the Russian language and its leading representatives in literature, first and foremost, on A.S. Pushkin. The festival’s participants demonstrated many multimedia presentations. The director of the RCSC M.Y. Popov gave a lecture on the development of the Russian language and Pushkin’s oeuvre.

In the course of the festival the entrants recited excerpts from Pushkin’s poems in Russian and Bahasa Malaysia, sang Russians songs, and paraded with Russian national costumes. They were to treated to a demonstration of classical Russian movies, among which were film adaptations of A.S. Pushkin’s stories.