Anybody speak Russian or Bulgarian?

Well, in the movie it is said that Krakhosia is bordering Russia, and Maldrogovich (sp? -the russian guy) lived close to the border.

It's like this.. Danish people understand swedish, for the most part, but it is two seperate countries. Even norwegian is rather easily read and understood.

So even if they're two seperate countries, the languages will have an effect on one another when they're that close.

Thinking about my previous example.. I actually understand swedish better than some danish dialects, haha. Oh yeah, I'm danish.

So. I'm Russian. I watched the movie dubbed at first and thought this scene was unrealistic but now I'm watching the original and I can say this scene is actually very well done :))) Bulgarian and Russian are, indeed, only partially intelligible between the speakers of the languages but it was really enough in that particular situation. Navorski and Milodragovic didn't understand every single word of what the other one was saying, but they still got the message across so they could understand each other in general and Navorski was able to translate because it was simple enough. It would have been the same if any other Russian and any Bulgarian had this conversation and made an effort to understand each other. They got it right during the rehearsals.

I'm not the only one, though, who didn't understand Milodragovic, indeed played by a Russian actor, in the dubbed version but it's the dubbing company's fault because the sound of the dubbed lines was - and usually is - very different from the sound in the movie as a whole and it's hard to switch. Also, Milodragovic is not a Russian surname, it looks Serbian to me, but that's a small detail. A Russian can have a Serbian surname, after all :)

elly_l is correct. We can assume that Viktor in the film is at least in his 40's. Most people that come from Bulgaria (Krakozhia as they made it out to be in the film) learned mandatory Russian in school from a very early age when Bulgaria was still a People's Republic (Communist) during the Iron Curtain. In fact, it was like this everywhere in Eastern Europe where communism prevailed at the time. So a man Viktor's age hailing from Bulgaria would probably be able to understand Russian, although the Russian man would not have understood Bulgarian, which was what Viktor spoke to him. The two languages are Slavic and share similarities, and perhaps the Russian man deduced what Viktor was trying to ask him. I'm a younger generation Bulgarian and never learned Russian, but I can pick up enough words here and there to maybe understand the gist of a sentence or conversation. So the conversation they had is plausible.

Bulgarian and Russian are pretty close.


If you know one, you'll understand much of the other.


Your feeble skills are no match for the power of kittens.

They could. My grand-father was a Russian émigré who had no problem talking with Bulgarians and Serbs and understanding each other. The Slavic languages of the Byzantine sphere are very close, rooted in the Cyrillic Bible.
The Western/Latin Slavs (Polish, Czechs, Croatians, Slovens, etc.) have been more influenced by Latin and German.
You could compare Russian and Bulgarian to Spanish and Portuguese for example, or French, Catalan and Romanian.

Good point! Great difference.

My mother was Russian and my father was Bulgarian. They had no problems understanding each other. In fact they could hold long conversations easily.