Great Russian
1
9.9
- noun
- Archaic
:
gran ruso
- As a proud Great Russian, she shared stories of her family's history and their connection to the land.
Examples
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I wonder if the great Russian could have imagined someone reading The Brothers Karamazov in such a place.
Academic text (2010) -
And it is this dimension of his movies that strongly links him to the great Russian writers of the past.
Academic text (1992) -
And here comes the great Russian, Koba.
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"Today we say goodbye to a great Russian, a lover of peace, yet a man forged...
Fiction book (1992) -
Chebichev is the other great Russian probabilist of the time, and he gets his his inequality.
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Konstantin Stanislavski, the great Russian producer of stage plays who created method acting, rightly proclaimed: "A character should be a new human being."
Academic text (2009) -
The ranks of the high clergy were almost exclusively limited to Great Russians who received an elite education and who controlled the administration and the curriculum of the seminaries.
Academic text (1998) -
He would later discover the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century, Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov, who seemed to understand the serfs and often made them better than their masters.
Fiction book (1990) -
Many famous Great Russians, such as Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, have made significant contributions to literature.
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The festival celebrated the culture and heritage of the Great Russians, showcasing traditional music and dance.
Synonyms
A person who comes from Russia
Surface Forms
Morphology
The historical/ethnographic sense ‘a member of the chief ethnic group’ cannot be derived from the literal meanings of 'great' (commonly interpreted as 'excellent' or 'large') + 'Russian'. A B1 learner who knows both words would most likely read it as an evaluative phrase ('an excellent Russian') rather than the specialized, archaic ethnonym, so the usage is unpredictable and language-specific.
Etymology
Great Russian comes from old maps and official names that called the largest part of the country Great Russia to show it was the main region, not to mean 'very good'. So Great Russian came to mean a person from that main part of European Russia.