Not any living language. The text is a translation of an excerpt from the book "How the Steel Was Tempered" by Nikolai Ostrovsky. I constructed the translation on the basis of Old-Church-Slavic, and by consulting translations into the following Slavic languages: Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Bulgarian Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, High and Low Sorbian, Czech, Slovak, and Polish (from "Introduction to the phonological history of the Slavic languages" by Terence Carlton).

The purpose of this exercise was to show that it is possible to construct texts that are intelligible to all Slavic speakers. Languages that fuse elements from a number of related languages are called interlinguas.