Yevgeny Vodolazkin, 51, author of «Lavr», St. Petersburg. «I think than any normal person loves his family and his homeland. So many different concepts are included in the word ‘patriot’, that first off one needs to define what one means by the term. I am a patriot because I love my homeland. If it is a question of what I am a patriot of, I am a patriot of culture. A culture that is infinitely beautiful. As my teacher Dmitry Likhachev said, ‘If anything justifies the existence of a people, then it is the culture it has created.’ I don’t have any particular pride for the things which others normally proud of – the immensity of our country, or something like that. These are all things that have been given to us by God. That which we do ourselves is what we call culture.»