As for the Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian languages, they don't fall into the West branch of the chart even though they still belong to a bigger Indo-European language family, noting that Estonian (being close to Finish) completely differs from Lithuanian and Latvian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_states

Great choices of the Russian authors! 

Have you read the poets, Сергей Есенин / Sergey Yesenin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Yesenin) and Владимир Маяковский / Vladimir Mayakovsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Mayakovsky)? They were prominent Soviet poets in the 1920-30s. Both had tragically ended their lives. 

Yesenin's poetry (in Russian/English): http://samlib.ru/w/wagapow_a/yesen.shtml

Mayakovsky's poetry (in English): http://allpoetry.com/Vladimir-Mayakovsky

This is one of my favorite by Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 23 (Pletnev - great Russian pianist): 

Here is another favorite, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBx-tr1FDvY

Спасибо!

Наташа 

in answer to your questions, well let's see;

1.  interesting facts about (the) Russian (language?); for an anglophone it allows the experience of using the mouth in radically different ways.  Several sounds are challenging to detect and to reproduce.  Then there is the wonderful way of reading a word and hearing it spoken in a completely different way (I'm thinking of endings here in particular).  Then there is that wonderful ability to place words in a sentence in (almost) any order and for it to still make sense(to a native speaker).

2.  the Russian diaspora is wide

3.  Hmm, favourite Russian authors; well we might have to consider sovyet authors as they then were; eg Bulgakov - Ukrainian by birth but lived and worked in Russia.  So many others were also born from the diverse cultural groups living within the rodina but arguably were still Russian.  Dostoyevsky of course for existentialist writings.  Non Fiction / memoir 'writers' such as Zhukov and Chuikov from a historical perspective.  Lukyanenko and Vasilyev for contemporary mass market SF.  The problem of translation is irresolvable and thus I find that the english versions are shallow compared with texts I spoken about with native Russians.  Poetry has again the problem of translation although lyrics by groups such as Piknik, Spleen and Maiden seem to have some clarity.

4.  music would be a whole different world from Termen (inventor of the theramin) to some of the folk music research conducted by Pyatnitsky in the early part of last century.  Then there are the interesting contemporary groups following a European trend to combine traditional and 'rock' influenced sounds.  Diverse isn't the word!:)

5.  re the linguistic chart above, I wonder what language group the Varangians belonged to?  Also, what, if any, remnants of their language still exists in Russian today?

Pakka,  michael