Julia meets all kinds of people on the shores of the Black Sea to practice speaking Russian with.

Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1891 and died inMoscow, Russia in 1940. He died from a kidney disease inherited from his father. He was only 48 years old. He was a physician but decided to devote his time to writing. He wrote a lot about the horrors of the Russian civil war (November, 1917 to October 1922). He is famous for writing ‘A Dog’s Heart’ , 'The White Guard' and ‘The Master and Margarita’which was published after he died.

The Red Crown takes place during the Russian civil war. Approximately 10 million people were killed, most of them civilians. It is a dramatic story about a man who went in search of his younger brother at the behest of hismother. He found his brother who was on his way into battle. The man waited for his brother to return. When he did, the man’s life and his mind were devastated forever.

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri and died in Connecticut in 1910. In 1909 Mark Twain made this comment “I came in with Halley's Comet, It is coming again next year. The Almighty has said, no doubt, 'Now there are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together. '” He died on April 21, 1910—one day after the comet had once again reached its perihelion. He is best known for his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).

In 1883, Mark Twain, the American writer, humorist and essayist wrote an autobiography entitled Life on the Mississippi. This is an excerpt from that book called Two Ways of seeing a River. It is about the difference in our perspective from seeing something for the first time that captivates and enchants us to losing that charming view of it due to familiarity and a deeper understanding of its essence. He asks the question do you gain or lose by this insight?