Maxim_V

Hi! My name is Maxim. I'm from Belarus. I'm playing the violin. I like listening to music. I like all music, I don't have some favoirite groups or singers. I'm interested in programming.
I'll like all your postcards, but if you want some ideas, here are they:
-your country's/city's sights/national dishes etc.
-nature
-animals
-sunrise/sunshine/sunset
-musical instruments

Could you please write if it is necessary to learn by heart pieces from literary works at school in your country?
In Belarus, for example, one of the pieces to learn in the 10th grade is the following from War and Peace by L. N. Tolstoy (in Russian, here is the translation from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2600/2600-h/2600-h.htm#link2HCH0266):
“Yes, here in this forest was that oak with which I agreed,” thought Prince Andrew. “But where is it?” he again wondered, gazing at the left side of the road, and without recognizing it he looked with admiration at the very oak he sought. The old oak, quite transfigured, spreading out a canopy of sappy dark-green foliage, stood rapt and slightly trembling in the rays of the evening sun. Neither gnarled fingers nor old scars nor old doubts and sorrows were any of them in evidence now. Through the hard century-old bark, even where there were no twigs, leaves had sprouted such as one could hardly believe the old veteran could have produced.

“Yes, it is the same oak,” thought Prince Andrew, and all at once he was seized by an unreasoning springtime feeling of joy and renewal. All the best moments of his life suddenly rose to his memory. Austerlitz with the lofty heavens, his wife’s dead reproachful face, Pierre at the ferry, that girl thrilled by the beauty of the night, and that night itself and the moon, and... all this rushed suddenly to his mind.

“No, life is not over at thirty-one!” Prince Andrew suddenly decided finally and decisively. “It is not enough for me to know what I have in me—everyone must know it: Pierre, and that young girl who wanted to fly away into the sky, everyone must know me, so that my life may not be lived for myself alone while others live so apart from it, but so that it may be reflected in them all, and they and I may live in harmony!”