Russian Blog

Do not be afraid, and do try not to be confused, if some Russian tells you that March 1st is the first day of spring in Russia. It may be hard to believe if you take a look around; especially with below zero temperatures lingering in many parts of the country and most of it still covered in thick blankets of snow. But since winter has been a gloomy and frosty reality for over four months already here it is easy to understand why one would want to rush the arrival of spring. Usually the traditional Slavic holiday of Масленица [derives from the word масло, meaning ’butter, oil’ and is usually translated into English as “Pancake Week”, “Cheese fare Week” or “Butter week”] is celebrated in February, but this year due to Orthodox Easter falling on the end of April, a month later than Easter in Catholic and Lutheran countries, it is celebrated when spring has already ‘officially’ arrived. Though to jump to conclusions and assume that Масленица is a Christian tradition would be making a mistake – it may have been well adapted to new rules and regulations when good old Русь [Rus'] took on Christianity, but it is still as pagan as can be.

Everybody knows how to say I love you. «Я люблю тебя» is as much a given as vodka and borsch – and just as much of a cliché. But what about saying “I like you” instead? Not as romantic perhaps, and perhaps not as thrilling, either. Perhaps I find Russians expressions of liking and disliking rather meager only because I was brought up in a country that was afraid to hail its own flag whereas Russians tend to wear white, red and blue whenever the occasion doesn’t forbid them. The new learner will know how to express boundless love for everything from his motherland and his parents to coffee and soccer long before even thinking about emotions a little less heated. The verb to love, «любить», is a wonderful verb not only because of its simplicity and clarity, but also for how it interacts with those dreaded six cases. It has the logical subject in nominative and the logical object in accusative, and to illustrate this I present to you a translation of what the beginner above could express after Russian 101: «Я люблю свою родину, я люблю своих родителей, я люблю кофе и я люблю футбол».

The 8th of March is International Women’s Day, which in Russian translates into Междонародный женский день, or, even better – выходной день [public holiday]. Since the 8th of March this year falls on a Saturday, the Russian Federation has decided to solve this situation in two ways – one way for those not working or studying on Saturdays, and another for those working or studying on Saturdays (for those to whom this is news – yes, a six days a week schedule is the harsh reality for most students and schoolchildren in Russia). For those not working nor studying on Saturday, thus having the day already be a выходной, Monday is the day off instead. Those who study or work on Saturday get that day off and instead they have to show up to work or to university/school on Monday. And on Monday they’ll have to study according to Saturday’s schedule. This means that the выходной wasn’t really a выходной at all, but you merely get to rest in order to pay it back later. This was one of the most difficult things for me to handle when I first arrived in Russia. However, today’s subject is not “difficult things to handle when first arriving in Russia” but the holiday that celebrates the smarter, oh, sorry, the fairer sex – с праздником!

In May three years ago I tried to get on a bus in Omsk [Siberia] but was refused entrance by the conductor with the words: «Нет местов!» It was the first time I had ever heard a Russian make a mistake when speaking their native language and that may have been the reason as to why I was not frustrated with being forced to wait for the next bus. Instead I felt a strange sense of superiority – already after eight months of studying Russian in Russia I knew very well that the word «место» [place; seat] in genitive plural is «мест» and therefore the correct way of saying that there are no seats available would be «нет мест». Of course I had heard from my teachers at Омский государственный педагогический университет [Omsk State Pedagogical University] that Russians, like all other people, make mistakes in their own language, and some far more serious than saying местов or проблемов, but until I heard it with my own ears I hadn’t been able to believe it to be true. One of my teachers in Omsk, with whom I constantly fought on the issue of whether it is correct to say «в Украине» [in Ukraine] or «на Украине» [in the Ukraine] after the Orange Revolution of 2004, gave me a link to an excellent webpage constructed to help Russians speak better Russian: www.gramma.ru/ But don’t let that scare you if you feel your Russian is barely beyond the stage of reading the Cyrillic alphabet – it’s motto «Говорим и пишем правильно: культура письменной речи» [we speak and write correctly: the culture of written speech] clearly shows it's for anyone who should feel inclined to so-called «ботаничество в области русского языка» [nerdiness in the area of Russian language].

Today one of my Russian friends sent me this link http://nexilo.ru/index.php?name=News&op=article&sid=42 and immediatly after looking at it I felt obligated to share it with you. Though I was skeptic at first, it turned out to be a lot more (fun!) than these words claim on the site: "Большая коллекция фотографий с интересными моментами из жизни В.В. Путина, посвещёная его уходу с поста президента России" [Big collection of photographs with interesting moments from the life of V. V. Putin, dedicated to his leaving the post as president of Russia.]

Always the faithful reader of «Русский репортёр» [Russian reporter], I came across a rather fascinating article in the latest number (Nr. 9, 13-20 March 2008) under the headline of «Сколько языков знает Россия?» The article focuses on the 150 small languages being spoken by different nationalities in Russia, and their fate in the future of globalization, since some of them are currently in desperate danger of extinction. Yes, it’s sometimes far too easy to forget that Russia is in fact not really ‘Russian’ at all, but a dynamic merge of many peoples, cultures, traditions and languages. The article, which was written in the light of the year 2008 being the year of languages, as decided by UN, is interesting not just because it contains information about languages you’re not likely to hear about anywhere else, but because it explains why any language that ‘dies’ is a tragedy. «Изчесновение малых языков России – настоящая трагедия: гибнет не просто набор слов и грамматических правил – умирает целый космос», the article says, and further explains how it is not the way we look at the world that's reflected in our language, but that what is reflected in our language determines how we look at the world.

It is a well-known fact among students of any given language that it’s not when you understand what people say or even when you can answer them in a correct enough way for them to understand you that you have mastered the language. You can not say that you truly know a language until you not only know how to use phraseology, but also do in everyday speech. The phraseology for every language is highly specific, and in many cases sentences using the same imagery may not correspond to the same meaning as in another language. And, of course, vise versa. One of the best ways to start learning, or at least getting acquainted with, phraseology, is taking it bit by bit, step by step, not by meaning but by imagery. That’s why I have decided to divide this series of mine [I promise that I’m going to post at least one post on the subject a week, and also constantly be on the look-out for phraseology used in common speech in Russia, in books, movies, music and magazines] into different parts according to what part of the body is used in the expression. Because Russian, as most languages do, has a vast spectrum filled with remarkable idioms that involve different body parts.The first post, as you might have guessed already, will be about expressions using the word голова [head]. Вы готовы [are you ready]?

Like any other town with a little bit of self-respect, my Russian hometown at the moment, Yekaterinburg, has its own website with all sorts of indispensable information about the city, enlightening both for locals and visitors. The portal’s address is www.e1.ru and the other day I came across a piece there which screamed out loud and clearly what every single citizen of this city is thinking these days – that it’s dirty here. Down right filthy. Incredibly muddy. As a foreigner you can get away with wearing the only foot wear capable of resistance – резиновые сапоги [rubber boots] – and thus still be able to move around streets that are soaked with a special kind of black or brown ‘chunky’ water. If you’re Russian you will of course not submit yourself to such a Western faupaux in public and rather spend about thirty minutes every night scrubbing your shoes clean. This is my fourth spring in Russia, the second in the Urals, and I thought my disgust at the rivers of mud outside was only a result of me getting more sensitive with age. Little did I know that I am actually getting more tolerant and that the streets here are actually gross enough for our city to be awarded the prize of “Russia’s Dirtiest City”. Anyone who has been to Russia in spring time can confirm that such a prize is saying a lot, and earning it is only possible through ‘the natural calamity known under the name of “spring in Russia’s third capitol”’.

Already on the 28th of February 1866 a certain Mr. Fyodor Tyutchev [Фёдор Тютчев] realized what a mystery the Russian Soul is to us ‘non-Russians’ and that’s probably what he was thinking of when he wrote these classical lines: «Умом Россию не понять, Аршином общим не измерить, У ней особенная стать, В Россию можно только верить» I'm not even going to try and translate this poem as beautifully as it deserves to be translated, not only because that's not what I planned to write about today (what I really want to talk about today is phraseology with the word душа) but also because I can’t. It’s not that I don’t speak Russian well enough; I don’t know good enough English to do it. The general meaning of the poem is as follows: it is impossible to understand Russia with one’s mind, she [Russia is a woman in Russian language] is special and can’t be measured in the same way as other countries; in Russia one can only believe. And what better way to believe but by using our soul? In Russian language the frequency of the word ‘soul’ in every day speech is so high that I don’t even know where to begin, but I know that I want to speak about this, no matter how difficult it will be for me (I am after all an alien, despite all these years in the Motherland) because it is such a central, such a vital piece of Russia. If you don’t try your best to understand the Russian Soul, you’ll never even get the slightest chance of understanding Russia. The Russian Soul has its own logic (it really does, though at first it might seem to be the absence of logic). The Russian Soul is proud but deep, it is devoted but transitory, it is playful but serious. The Russian Soul is kind, open, tolerant, affectionate and always ready invite a stranger into their kitchen and serve them a cup of tea.

Today my plan was to comment on one of two news, either «Психолог для грешников» [http://www.izvestia.ru/lpage/article3114416/] or «Православная общественность намерена переименовать Свердловскую область» [http://www.e1.ru/news/spool/news_id286954.html] but during the day my mood changed, from being religiously aware (obviously, if judging by the headlines I chose in the morning) and thus aware of the ‘other’ world, to becoming more aware of the real world around me. All day I couldn’t get the word «иномарка» out of my head. I remembered how I once read in the paper about a car crash, and that it said: «две иномарки столкнулись на Малышева». The word was new to me then, but I didn’t have to look it up in the dictionary to understand what it meant. The sentence means that two foreign cars got into a car crash on Malyshev Street, and not a Волга or a Жигули or a Нива because those are called «наши машины». And when they crash into each other they’re not crashing as ‘Russian cars’ like foreign cars always tend to do, but just as plain cars. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how wonderful it is to study a foreign language, because you’re not just learning new words and new phrases and a different kind of grammar, but simultaneously getting to know a new and different way of looking at the world. Since I began working as a teacher of Swedish at a Russian university I’ve learned so much about my own language, and about Russian too, that I can’t complain about anything – not even the lack of a paycheck or the fact that I get no assistance whatsoever. I have learned how deep and entwined cultural differences really are and also that these differences are what makes us so much alike at the same time. For example, in Russian (as it seems to me) it is important to make clear what’s not yours, what is unfamiliar, as in Swedish the important thing to stress is the opposite – what’s yours, what is familiar. In Swedish you put the word ‘my, mine’ in front of everything that belongs to you. In Russian that’s not the norm, in fact such a use is foreign alltogether in this language. Instead it points out what’s not yours by putting the little adjective «иной» [other, another; else; some, certain], sometimes in a shortened form, in front of words.

Good question! Of course there’s more to Russia than the Red Kremlin of Moscow and the bridges of Saint Petersburg, though you sometimes tend to forget about the rest, especially if you haven’t been there (which I suppose most tourist haven’t, only in those cities located along the railroad going east from the capitol). Russians call “the rest” «провинция» and there’s a standard joke going around that foreigners call it “Siberia”. I think it is very unfair that most of Russia gets almost none of the attention, not only because these unknown parts of this country are more beautiful (though often they are) but because they ARE this country. How about the white Kremlin in Tobolsk? Or the San Francisco-esque hills of Krasnoyarsk? Or the wide and long prospects of Novosibirsk? Or the religious mixture of Muslim and Orthodox traditions in Kazan? Not to talk about the amazing view of the Don in Rostov-na-Donu! The list of big cities in Russia – with over or almost a million inhabitants – can be made much longer. And though Russia is still overly centralized, with Moscow as the old faithful bellybutton keeping the whole country together, things look like they are changing, at least if the article «Где в России можно жить» in №11 (March 27 2008) of «Русский репортёр» is anything to judge by.