With Alexander Pushkin's framed visage on the wall and creased editions of fellow Russian literary giants on dusty shelves, Natela Chokhonelidze's office recalls a very different era at Georgia's state university.
"We once had a staff of 50, and now there are five, because there aren't many students," said the 70-year-old professor emeritus at the university's institute of Russian studies. "Russian language is fading out," she quipped, "with me!"
Chokhonelidze is on the losing side of a deliberate shift in the former Soviet republic as its pro-western leadership tries to supplant Russian with English as the default second language of 21st-century Georgia.
Last month hundreds of native English speakers joined the first day of school as teaching assistants under an ambitious programme to have every child aged five to 16 speak English. English is now compulsory and Russian optional.
The aim appears pragmatic in a globalised world where English dominates and Georgia's investment-driven economy is seeking partners in Turkey and the European Union.
It fits neatly too, however, with President Mikheil Saakashvili's policy of dragging the Caucasus country of 4.5 million people out from Russia's orbit, two years after war shattered already fragile ties between the neighbours.
"We're a free and independent country and our people are free and independent. It's their choice which language to learn," said education minister Dmitry Shashkin, an ethnic Russian, in English.
The government plans to recruit 1,000 native-English speakers by the end of the year on $272 per month, eventually building up to one per school.
English "opens many doors", said Shashkin. "Georgia doesn't have oil, Georgia doesn't have natural gas. The resource we have is our people, the intellectual potential of our country."
On the streets of Georgia's capital Tbilisi, where blue European Union flags flutter outside the parliament building, all Georgians over the age of 40 speak Russian fluently. Shopkeepers are happy to converse in Russian. The younger, educated generation, however, prefer English, and can even bridle if you attempt to talk to them in the language of Georgia's powerful northern neighbour and adversary.
Much of this is generational. Students entering university now were born after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The influence of western pop culture and the internet is strong.
So too is the fallout from the deterioration in political relations with Russia since Georgia's 2003 Rose Revolution swept aside the ex-Soviet old guard and brought Saakashvili and his team of English-speaking ministers to power.
He set Georgian sights on joining Nato, to the anger of Russia. Political ties collapsed with the 2008 war, when Russia crushed an assault by Georgia's US-trained military on the rebel pro-Russian region of South Ossetia.
Trade links are minimal. Visa requirements and torturous travel routes have strained ties between family and friends.
"Taken in the wider context ... it seems there is a political element behind this," said Shorena Shaverdashvili, editor of Georgian weekly Liberali.
English should be taught, she said, but "Why replace one [language] with the other? This is our neighbourhood and the common language with our neighbours is Russian."
Georgia is now leading the retreat of Russian language in the post-Soviet Union. But Russian remains the lingua franca across much of the former Soviet empire. It is still understood and spoken from Moldova in the west to Kazakhstan and Tajikistan in what was once Soviet central Asia. In the cafes and bars of Dushanbe, Tajikistan's pleasant capital, middle-class Tajiks are more likely to talk to each other in Russian than in Tajik.
In communist times, Russian was taught in Soviet schools as the "language of communication between nationalities". For any ambitious student, especially in more far-flung parts of the Soviet Union, Russian was an essential springboard to a good university education and professional career.
Critics question the wisdom of relegating Russian to a third tier, pointing out that the quality of English teaching in Georgia and other independent post-Soviet countries is often very poor.
At the university, Chokhonelidze laments the passing of an era, and the generations brought up on reading Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. "I fear in a few years when those grandfathers and grandmothers aren't around, nobody will bother."
The answer, said 20-year-old mathematics student Nugzar Barbakadze, is simple: "I can read Russian books in Georgian."
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