One reason is cultural. Russian communication often values directness and sincerity more than polished social cushioning. Comparative studies of Russian and English speech note that English speakers tend to use more indirect forms in requests and everyday politeness, while Russian speech often permits more direct wording without it automatically sounding rude. Recent cultural guides make the same point more simply: Russian communication is often expected to be clear, direct and honest, though not necessarily tactless.

So a Russian conversation may skip the soft landing.
Instead of:
"Lovely weather, isn’t it?"

you may hear:
Ты почему тако́й уста́вший?
[ty pachimú takóy ustávshiy]
"Why do you look so tired?"
This is not an attack. Sometimes it is an invitation to speak properly.

Russian conversation also has an old domestic stage: the kitchen table. Tea, late evening, half an orange, someone smoking on the balcony, and suddenly the topic has moved from rent prices to the meaning of human freedom. The cliché exists because the situation exists. Conversation is not only exchange, it is diagnosis, confession, analysis, performance.
That is where literature enters.
Russian classical literature is not just "high culture" stored in museums and school programmes. It is a shared reference system. Writers such as Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov or Goncharov created characters who became cultural shorthand: ways of naming behaviour, weakness, absurdity, moral collapse or social type. Some contemporary commentary even describes Russian literature as a kind of cultural operating system - a set of stories and figures through which everyday situations are interpreted.

That is why a Russian may not say, "You are being passive".
They may say:
Ну ты и Обло́мов.
[nu ty i Ablómav]
"You are such an Oblomov"
This refers to Ilya Oblomov, the hero of Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 novel Oblomov. The character became so culturally powerful that обло́мовщина — [ablómavshchina] — entered Russian as a word for apathy, inertia, laziness and lack of will. It is not just an insult. It is a whole diagnosis in one literary name.

Other figures work in a similar way.
A suspicious moral tormentor may be called almost Dostoevskian.
A tiny official crushed by the system may recall Gogol.
A person who speaks too delicately while avoiding the main issue may feel Chekhovian.
A grand family conflict can suddenly become "almost Tolstoy".

Russian conversation likes comparison. Not because everyone is trying to sound educated, but because stories help classify reality. A book, a film, a Soviet cartoon, a line from a poem - all these become tools. They allow people to say: this situation has happened before; this type of person exists, this drama has a genre.
This is also why storytelling matters. A Russian answer to "How are you?" may become a plot. Not always, of course as people are busy, tired, modern, and fully capable of saying норма́льно — [narmál’na], "fine". But culturally, there is room for the expanded version: who said what, who betrayed whom, who behaved like a fool, what it means, and why it proves something about life.
Russian conversation often asks if we can we get to the point?
And sometimes the point is the weather.

But sometimes, ten minutes later, the weather has become fate, fate has become Dostoevsky, and someone is explaining that the real problem began not yesterday, but in childhood.