America has more people populating it, but Russia exceeds it in the size of its territory by a factor of 2:1. Yet Americans tend to guard their private space with much greater zeal. Those interested in the circumstantial confirmation of this assertion are invited to compare their experiences of a rush-hour subway ride in New York and in Moscow.

In fact, there is no direct equivalent for the American expression private space in Russian.

Many more Russians know English than there are Americans who can read or speak Russian.

There are seven more letters in the Cyrillic alphabet, used by the Russians, than there are in the English one. The average Russian's glottal area, thus, is inured to producing a greater variety of phonemes than that of the average American. Roughly the same-minuscule--number of Russians and Americans know the meaning of the word phoneme.

Russians are much more interested in America, on average, than Americans are in Russia. Americans are inclined to believe this is so because America is so much more interesting than Russia could ever be. Russians are of the opinion that they are just possessed of a much livelier curiosity about the rest of the world than the majority of Americans are. Both points of view are essentially correct.

America is modern world's success story. Russia provides a horror narrative, a cautionary tale.

America is never too far from the ever-changing epicenter of the average Russian's thoughts. There has never been a time in that hypothetical average Russian's life when America would not be domiciled in his mind. Does one remember the first time one saw the full moon? No. Does one remember the time before one had seen the full moon for the very first time? No. It's the same with America.

Russians still, in a carry-over of a Soviet-era bromide, like to think of themselves as a nation of the world's most avid readers. The American bookstores, however, are infinitely more numerous and well-stocked.

Most Russians read pure, unadulterated trash. So do most Americans.

Russians are much poorer than Americans. Many more people, percentage-wise, are poor in Russia. The Russian and American respective definitions of poverty are vastly dissimilar.

America is more diverse, less homogeneous than Russia. There are many more mini-America's in America than there are mini-Russia's in Russia, if you will. Americans, en masse, are quirkier than Russians, because they can afford to be. Many more of them do not have to worry what they and their children are going to eat for breakfast every morning: they have more spare time on their hands. They are much freer, therefore, to spend their spare time arranging their personal, private space in accordance with their personal ideas of what their lives are all about.

There are, indeed, many America's in America. Sometimes one wonders what it is, exactly, that holds them all together, except the commonality of geography and language--and, to a lesser extent, that of the shared but differently interpreted idea of personal freedom. The twangy country singer who rhymes Bin Laden and forgotten in his televised performance at the Pentagon represents one America, Harold Bloom discussing Hamlet on the Charlie Rose Show on PBS--quite a different one.

Americans, one might suggest, are an entity of people living in one place, speaking roughly the same language and bounded by an unspoken agreement to consider themselves an entity of people called Americans.

Americans, on average, are more overtly friendly than the Russians are. This is understandable: they live, by and large, in much greater comfort. America, simply put, is a more comfortable place to inhabit. It is a more sunlit kind of place. Why, pray tell, would a comfortable and frequently-sunlit individual be unfriendly?

Still, regrettably, there are very many unfriendly, mean-spirited assholes, pardon our French, in America also.

There are many more deeply religious, genuinely God-fearing people in America than there are in Russia. This, too, is easy to explain: an excess of spare time in one's life inevitably leads one to start searching for the overall meaning of one's existence--and it is only in very rare instances (only when one, fortunately for him, happens to be a person of great intellectual autonomy) that such a search can be conducted without one's constant appellations to the forces of the supernatural.

The average American is shallow and woefully self-involved. So is the average Russian. So, likely, are you. So am I, I'm afraid.

Some of the associations conjured up in the average Russian's mind at the mentioning of the word America tend to include: Indians (in a well-known Chekhov story, two teenage Russian boys are planning an escape to America in order to fight on the side of the Red Indians); Mark Twain and Jack London (two all-time favorites of many generations of young Russian readers); cowboys, popcorn, Coca-Cola, Madonna, Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson, Shaq Attack; baseball; arrogant superpower; they only respect brute strength and people and nations that can stand up to them; pitiable nation of hamburger-eating, flag-waving meatheads; Brighton Beach (the notorious Russian enclave in Brooklyn, a time warp on a par with the Galapagos Islands), Russian mafia (Russians can be touching in their belief that our Russian mafia can outmafia all comers hands down); John Reed (free-lance journalist, Communist, author of Ten Days That Shook the World; known to the American movie-going audiences as the central character in Warren Beatty's award-winning 1981 epic, Reds) and Dean Reade (boyishly good-looking country-pop singer from Colorado, K-Mart cross between Elvis and John Denver, extraordinarily popular in the Soviet Union in the sixties and seventies; claimed having been stripped of the US citizenship for demonstratively washing the US flag in dirty soap water in front of the US Embassy in Santiago, Chile; wrote and subsequently published in the ubiquitous Soviet weekly Ogonyok (Little Flame) an open letter to Alexandre Solzhenitsyn, castigating the latter for his anti-communist stance; lived in the Soviet Union for a while, later on moved to East Germany, where he went on to forge a lackluster Spaghetti-Western career and eventually was found dead, floating face-down, in a shallow lake not far from Berlin); Faulkner, Dreiser, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Salinger, Charles Bukowski (plus, as of recently, Pynchon, Roth and Burroughs; contemporary American literature is pretty darn great, no argument there--still and all, the great 19-century Russian literature was much, much greater!); arrant imperialism, shameless chauvinism, how many little American flags can one stick in one's beat-up car?; it's those with nothing to show in the way of the Great American Dream who are the most patriotic, or jingoistic, of course; Yankee, Go Home!; why do you think there're so many more American flags on proud display in a trailer park than on Park Avenue!; deep down, they're just like us; they're well-off, autonomously well-regulated to the point of being able to have elected as their leader not the sharpest knife in the drawer, not the smartest man among them, to put it charitably; they like to talk about themselves too much, the self-infatuated creeps; they smile too much, they show their teeth an awful lot; they are ludicrously obsessed with their health, such hubris, why are they so bent on prolonging their boring lives by a few more years?; even their dead are probably happier than our living; anti-depressants galore, virtually in every family, whereas in Russia no one ever gets depressed, apparently, by dint of keeping oneself either drunk or hungover for most of the time; whiskey is a lot more treacherous drink than vodka, and that sums up the American national character, come to think of it; they can't drink jack; single-cell organisms, that's who they are, with absolutely no psychological depth to them!; their women are no match for ours, willfully sexless and coldly aggressive, they're apt to slap you with a lawsuit if you as much as cast a flirtatious glance at them, is it any wonder then that their poor underappreciated unattractive men keep coming over to Russia in droves to marry our beautiful feminine docile Russian women… the gullible fools; they think they're all that; they talk about the most personal of their problems with total strangers, they have no shame; they don't understand the true meaning of the word friendship; oh, they're wonderful, moral, hardworking people; effing puritans, bible-thumpers, self-righteous creeps, almost hounded a perfectly good president out of office for a lousy measly blowjob; they have such excellent teeth!; what do they know about real suffering, they're rich rich rich rich rich rich rich…

About America, the average Russian knows everything--and nothing.

The Russians pronounce their letter 'k' (and they do have one; its corresponding character is called kah) in a harder fashion than Americans do theirs, they (the Russians) put more mustard on it. (Toby Keith, the Ford Truck-hawking, never-compromisin', super-tough author of the famous Angry American's song--"This big dog will fight / When you rattle his cage / And you'll be sorry that you messed with / The U.S. of A. / 'Cause we'll put a boot in your ass / It's the American way!"--may think he's plenty tough indeed, but the puniest of Russian pussies pronounces his last name in a much tougher way than he ever could: K-k-kif!) When the Russians say America, they pronounce it like this: Amerika.

The Russian alphabet character 'c' corresponds with the Latin 's.' Therefore, when the native speaker of Russian sees the word America written in Latin characters, in his non-dormant immediate mind--one unencumbered, as it were, by layers of cognitive sophistication--it sounds like this: Amerisa.

Amerisa? It doesn't make any sense.

Amerika, then. With a 'k.' The Russianized America. The America that does not require a later-knowledge-based translation into Russian. What can one say about it? That was the question posed to the authors in this volume: What do you think of when you hear the word Amerika?

Everything--and nothing.

Amerika.