man i have really been noticing lately that people continue to write ilya as speaking pretty caricatured english even after a decade+ in north america, mostly as a source of comic relief or endearment. i gotta say—a. woof, b. the books and the show depict him as an enormously perceptive, competitive, hardworking person with a serious hangup about controlling how people see him + consistent early frustration about being unable to communicate “without sounding like a cartoon villain,” c. he famously! works on his english (wow! genetic), and d. if you actually check the voice/dialogue throughout, he loses almost all of the stock or obvious slav-speaking-english speech markers pretty early on. like, ep 2.
yes, there are famous russians in the nhl (ovechkin, malkin) who either don’t bother assimilating to native/typical english conventions or who pretend to be much less fluent in public because it’s funny and it gets them out of press. but it’s a very strange choice to me to write this cosmopolitan, sly, ambitious man as if he weren’t explicitly and deeply bothered by his language limitations early on, and also weren’t the type to solve that problem for himself as soon as possible.
on the flip side, i am so dazzled when a writer has a keen ear for Ilya’s fluent but idiosyncratic cadence; he doesn’t lose his accent and keeps some technically correct but subtly distinctive tells (fewer than i thought when i checked my sources!). the ability to make that sing on the page is just really compelling/impressive. (it seems like it’s usually more a question of syntax than diction, though not always—am curious about people’s thoughts.)
and it’s such a loaded tool for character depth! he *does* deftly use his russian-ness for deflection and humor, for arch superiority or skepticism, for irony or wily flirting (“want to come in Boston?”). it *does* inflect how he comes across, particularly in how he swings between slavic brusqueness and tenderness or wraps the one in the other. and it isn’t always effortless—though he wants it to seem effortless—which is such a good sticky revealing piece of tension to play with. basically i wish we’d stop leaving so much rich characterization on the table in favor of the woobifying/comedic payoff of russian ESL caricature—it seems at best to be a waste and a misread and at worst a lil politically dicy
