This textbook is designed for students who have had at least one year of Russian; it is appropriate for the 3rd, 4th, or 5th semester and can be covered in one or two semesters. It is the middle course of the series of Russian textbooks produced by the Upstate New York writing team from Cornell and Colgate Universities (Beginning Russian and Advanced Russian are the others), but it can be used in any other sequence of texts.

The main part of this book consists of 18 lessons, all having the same tripartite structure: texts, dialogs, and exercises. The texts constitute a coherent, smooth-flowing abridgement of the classic novel by Il'f and Petrov. The dialogs are designed to develop fluency in the spoken style of literary Russian. The exercises are divided into four groups: text exercises, dialog exercises, grammar exercises, and a translation. The texts and the dialogs are accompanied by extensive comments on Russian grammar, style, and culture.

The text exercises are designed to develop the art of paraphrasing and the dialog exercises offer practice in using familiar cliches and conversational gambits. The grammar exercises are based primarily on the section of the book that follows the 18 lessons, the Overview of Russian Conjugation by Alexander Nakhimovsky. This section contains a detailed analysis of the verb system: the prefixes, suffixes, and the types of roots that play a role in Russian word formation. Although there is considerable overlap between the three main parts of each lesson in terms of grammar and vocabulary, it is possible to use them independently and to skip one or another of them.

Information on the inflection of Russian words is given in the 12-page section entitled Russian Endings at the end of the book. This concise review of the rules for adding endings onto stems also contains extensive illustrative paradigms of nouns, adjectives, and verbs. The rules given in this section are essentially the rules of Beginning Russian, but some of them are more detailed. This section also serves as a guide for using the exhaustive Russian-English glossary, which contains all of the content words of the book along with their morphological characteristics (stress patterns, irregular forms, aspect partners, etc.). This inflectional information is based on the Grammaticheskii slovar' russkogo iazyka by A. A. Zaliznjak. There is also a complete English-Russian word index.

Each lesson has additional readings in the form of a dialog between two students; this provides vocabulary for discussing courses, teachers, textbooks, impressions and thoughts about fictional characters, etc. Short displays of Russian roots are interspersed among the lessons. The book is beautifully illustrated with reproductions of the original Kukryniksy drawings. Audio tape recordings, software and video cassette excerpts from the movie The Twelve Chairs are available for use with this book. Many of the exercises have been adapted to a computer-assisted intructional format for use with personal computers. For information on the tapes and cassettes write to: Language Laboratory, Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Morrill Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. 14853. For information on the software, write to S. Paperno, DMLL, Morrill Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14853.