When I lived in the Netherlands, my supply of literature in Russian was limited to books brought from Russia or purchased on the Internet. For other stuff, I used to go to two shops just a block my office. Since The Hague, where I worked, is a cosmopolitan place, many of the books there were in English and the prices were usually quite good. During a recent trip across Western Europe, I revisited the city and was happy to discover that both shops were still there. At one of them I bought a case of hardcovers for 50 euros.

The Dutch read a lot. Most new bestsellers are promptly translated, even though most Dutch can read English. The climate for the literati is so good that John Irving, perhaps the most prominent figure in mainstream U.S. fiction, just published his new novel, "Until I Find You," at an Amsterdam publishing house simultaneously with the U.S. and British editions.

The Russian community in the Netherlands remains rather silent in terms of press and literature. There are some newspapers like Novosti Beniluksa (The Benelux News), but nothing close to critical mass. It turned out that a Russian shop in the beach district of Scheveningen -- which had once sold items such as matryoshkas, buckwheat, caviar, Alla Pugachyova CDs and Darya Dontsova books -- had closed down.

Not so in Germany. When I first visited Germany, the first words I heard on getting out of the car were in Russian. This time, I visited some friends in Hannover, who are musicians, and got the impression that the essence of higher musical education in Germany is the struggle between the German school and the Russian school. My host in Berlin, an old schoolmate of my mother's, told me that "Russian Germans" -- those descended from the German migration of Peter the Great's era and now "repatriated" to their ethnic homeland, although Russian is still their native tongue -- have literary unions in all the major cities. They discuss their work, they fiercely argue for a major place in the history of Russian literature and they swamp newspapers and magazines with their manuscripts. Young people who arrive from Russia without any plans for their future often end up studying creative writing.

On my journey I happened to reread "Asya," Ivan Turgenev's classic novella from 1858, set in a small German town on the Rhine. What surprised me on this rereading was the degree to which the Russian narrator and his subjects, also Russians, are separated from the culture of their hosts. My impression was that until efforts are made to bridge this gap, Russian literature will limit itself to being provincial.