Russian Blog

I know that there was a frequent practise of publishing smaller texts in Russian on this blog before I arrived, and I have thought about whether or not to countinue this tradition myself. After long consideration (about five months) I have decided to give it a try. I will only touch upon subjects regarding a little something I’d like to call “Russian Realia”. It is not thanks to my imagination that I came up with such a catchy name. It is a rather common thing to give classes on this subject at most universities where Russian language is being taught, and I thought to myself – почему бы нет? And here I present to you my first text about Reality a la Russe:

Some of the more attentive readers (or probably just about everyone who reads this) might have noticed that there’s a new feature to this blog – a little something called ‘Community Project’. After writing for this blog for about five months now I couldn’t help but to become aware of the good, sometimes even exceptional, knowledge of Russian language among many of the readers. This sparked an interest to create a dialogue between you here, a place where you could share your knowledge with others as well as getting a share of theirs, and discuss different words and grammatical constructions. I’ve already taken a sneak-peak of the first contributions and I must say that I’m quite impressed with you (someone mentioned the jargon word for money «бабки», which comes from the word «бабка», «баба» [all of the words have the stress on the first vowel], which my dictionary claims to be colloquial words for “woman”, but in my opinion today in Russia these words are not only informal, but even rude). I can’t wait to see what’s you’re going to come up with next – everything is welcome, all kinds of words and constructions and sayings and random fragments of Russian language. And in regard to my last post, my modest paraphrase on Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time”, I might have been mistaken when I assumed that most Russophiles have read the 19th century classic and are familiar with the irony and the sarcasm directed towards society that the author was aimning from when he called the main hero – Печорин – a hero of the 1830's. Of course Yan Syzo is an anti-hero, just like his prototype Pechorin, but I wanted to say that today’s Russia is just like Lermontov’s present day Russia in the way that often anti-heroes are turned into heroes. Any kind on polemic on this subject is more than welcome. And I’d tought I’d also take a moment to discuss a sentence in the text in my last post, that I made the mistake of not commenting on.

I’ve lived here for over 3,5 years (on August 30th 2008 it will be 4 years since I came to Russia) but I’ve only spent one day in Moscow, not counting all of those innumerous times that I’ve traveled through the capitol by plane or train. On the one day I spent in Moscow I was shown around town by a Siberian businessman [who was later to name his Omsk-based company Esomo, a word that I made up] and he took me to the The State Vladimir Mayakovsky Museum. He explained to me that it was the best museum in town, and even though the museum that I really had wanted to visit on my one day in Moscow was The State Dostoevsky Museum, I agreed and together we spent over three hours in the building where Mayakovsky used to live in the Lubyanka Passage in downtown Moscow. I don’t regret this visit, not the least, quite on the other hand – I stood still on the spot where the poet had shoot himself dead for several minutes in silence without knowing how to handle the situation. It was an enormous moment, a terrible moment, a moment that contained as much fear as astonishment as confusion and a feeling of never being able to comprehend this. I guess not everyone experiences such a metaphysical sensation as I did there, and even without it the Mayakovsky Museum is well worth a visit, no matter if you love his art or not. Even if you hate everything that has to do with Mayakovsky, and can’t stand even one line of his poetry or as much as a glance at his propaganda posters, humble yourself enough to drop in for fifteen minutes and those precious fifteen minutes of your life will not be lost. I suppose most people who grew up in the Soviet Union, for understandable reasons, can only learn to love Mayakovsky after overcoming some difficulties, one of them being seeing his name everywhere – улицы Маяковского here, парки Маяковского there, библиотеки Маяковского everywhere and so on and so forth. And after all his ‘communistic poems’ written in the 20’s that proclaimed a new world based on an ideal that was impossible to believe in after seeing it fail in reality later in the 20th century, there is a great need of a reconsideration of his art now in the 21st. As the ‘revolutionary poet’ Mayakovsky became State Property after his death and remained so during many years, something that forced school children to recite his poetry by heart according to the official program instead of finding him on their own, instead of coming upon his poems printed in a small red edition in the library on some dusty shelf on a slow Saturday and sit there for hours on the window sill, lost among poetry and mesmerized by the rhythm, by the sentences, by the words, by their meaning. (In Russia I have come to know that the official program on literature in Russian schools tend to kill any kind of love for the Russian classics among this country’s kids – I guess anyone who is forced to read Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky all in one year at 15 is bound to grow up to hate «Рудин» and «Анна Каренина» and «Братья Карамазовы». But that’s another discussion for another day!) I believe that every poet has to be a private poet. There can be no State Poets. I believe that to be able to love a poet and his or her poetry, you have to find him or her on your own. Their words must speak solely to you, and be almost your own, or even closer to your skin than your own words can ever be… I know not everyone agrees with this, but this is my firm opinion – poetry is made for those slow Saturday afternoons when the sun seems to have a dusty glow or when it won’t stop raining and you find those tainted and tattered but old and beloved copies of Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Brodsky, Yesenin, Pushkin, Fet, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Chyutchev or someone not Russian at all but just as brilliant, like, for example Allen Ginsberg, who will take you into their poetry and only let you go at dusk…

Even long before the main hero of Nikolaj Gogol’s [Николай Гоголь] short story «Нос» [“The Nose”] met his own nose on Nevsky Prospect dressed as a general, the nose had a special place in Russian culture and language. A couple of days ago I was reading my favorite Russian weekly newspaper and came across an interview with Hungarian writer Peter Esterhazy, in which he (partially) answers the last question, «А для вас что значит Россия?» [“And what does Russia mean to you?”], with the following words: «…но ведь я не знаю, что такое жить здесь и быть интеллигентом. Каково здесь писать. Как вообще писать на русском. Как можно написать фразу после Гоголя» [“…but I don’t know what it’s like to live here and be an intellectual. How it is to write here. What it is like at all to write in Russian. How it is possible to write a sentence after Gogol”]. At first this comment unsettled to me, since it seemed to me a little bit too categorical, but then I remember his wonderfully grotesque and beautifully strange “Nose” and yes, I had to agree. Though amazing and pioneering as this little novella is (it was one of the first pieces of Russian literature I ever read in my life, I think I was sixteen at the time and I loved it straight away) that is not what I had intended to linger on today. I advice everyone who hasn’t read it to read, and to those who have read it to remember it from time to time and, if time allows, to reread it someday. Today I’m going to talk about Russian phraseology again, and this time about the nose, нос (2nd loc. носу; pl. носы)

Simon Ager, otherwise known as Omniglot, is well known in the language learning community. His online language resources are unparalleled, and provide perhaps the best, most accessible alphabetic reference available.

For those of you who are starting out with Russian and are still frustrated by the Cyrillic alphabet, be sure to check out his history of the Cyrillic alphabet page, where you can learn not just today's standard alphabet, but how it evolved over time. Better yet, bookmark the page while you're there.

I have on several occasions gotten completely sucked into the explanations of various exotic alphabets for hours!

For those of you always in search of other great language blogs, Omniglot has you covered in this category as well. Check out (and subscribe to) the Omniglot Blog. Common features include a 'mystery language' audio quiz, where readers fiercely debate the origin of an unidentified speaker. Simon also provides and ad hoc Word of the Day from time to time, in which he focuses on an engaging lexical item from on eof the various languages he is currently studying.

Oh, and we have a special message to Simon today: с днем рождения! Many happy returns sir!

This morning, while browsing through the main page of www.izvestia.ru for some appropriate piece of Russian news to comment on here, I came across this fascinating headline: «Микола Гоголь – нарезка в семи томах: украинские переводчики отредактировали и подправили "пророссийскую" повесть Гоголя "Тарас Бульба"» [Mikola Gogol – a slicing in seven volumes: Ukrainian translators edited and fixed up Gogol’s “pro-Russian” story “Taras Bul’ba”]. My first question was, naturally, who is this Mikola? A brother of the famous Nikolaj (remember the last post on the ‘Russian Nose’) perhaps? Or another relative, maybe not even in any way related to the great Ukrainian born writer? But then it hit me that “Taras Bul’ba” is written by Nikolaj Gogol, that I know this for a fact and have known it for quite some time. While continuing to read the article, it was explained to me that Mikola is the Ukrainian version of Nikolaj. Here’s the beginning of the article:

«К 200-летию со дня рождения Гоголя на Украине выпустят юбилейное собрание его сочинений в семи томах. В переводе на украинский». [For the 200th year anniversary since the birth of Gogol in Ukraine a collection of his works in seven volumes will be published.] «Русский текст повести для школьной программы не годится: что ни слово, то "русские", что ни воин - то за "Русь" биться готов». [The Russian text of the story is not fit for the school program: every word has something to do with “Russian” and every soldier is ready to fight for “Rus’”.] «Ясно, что писатель заблуждался, ведь не довелось ему встретиться ни с Ющенко, ни с Тимошенко, ни с другими достойнейшими людьми». [Clearly the writer got lost, well he never got the chance to meet with Yushchenko, or Timoshenko, or with any other of the most worthy people.] «А раз так - не грех классика и поправить. Переводчики заменили противные патриотическому (и политическому) духу слова на "Украина", "казацкий" и "наш"». [And if that’s the way it is – then it’s no sin to fix up the classic writer. The translators changed the words that go against the patriotic (and politic) spirit into “Ukraine” and “Cossack” and “our”.]

Sometimes the lists of books assigned for you to read during the course of a semester for a class at an institution of higher (or middle) education can make you feel anything but excited or even a tiny bit thrilled. Usuallly the student asks himself (or herself) the following question (given that the class being taught revolves around a for the student interesting topic): “If I haven’t read it already then it must mean that it is bad or boring or… just not my kind of book.” This was pretty much exactly what was going on in my head when I found the novel «Зависть» [“Envy”] on a directory of recommended reading in preparation for the examaniation in Russian Literature at Gothenburg University’s Slavic Department. Up until a couple of months ago I knew practically nothing about 20th century Russian literature (although I can pride myself on knowing EVERYTHING about the classics that belong to the century prior) which is why I was not surprised to find it’s author Юрий Карлович Олеша [Yuri Karlovich Olesha] completely unknown to me. I am now ashamed of my previous ignorance. This book is a wonderful work of fiction, a truly enjoyable piece of art, both humorous and astonishing (especially in it’s plentiful and eccentric – because of its Soviet Union in 1927 setting – Biblical references) and very easy and fast to read. I finished it in two days, not very surprisingly though since it is no more than 130 pages long (in my copy that’s a cheap paperback edition from www.azbooka.ru).

For some reason whenever I’m searching for some interesting piece of news from the Великая Родина [Great Motherland] to comment on here, there’s nothing even remotely interesting to be found on any of the many abundant Russian news sites. I’m not just trying to find a news story to comment on in a purely ‘journalistic’ way, no, my goal is more of a linguistic one – the articles have to contain at least one good sentence from a Russian grammatical point of view. Just like in most countries today, Russian journalists aren’t always that concerned with remarkable grammar or skilled stylistics, but prefer to write simple, dry sentences without any of that juicy use of cases or imperfect/perfect verbs or impersonal constructions. While surfing Комсомальская Правда [which has an amazing website on which you can choose your city or region, and after that get almost nothing but local news – but if you don’t have an uncle living in Penza or friends in Ulan-Ude, you should pick the capitol… if you think you can handle all the gossip about Russian stars that cover the pages of the weekly paper] I came across this headline: Гомосексуалистов Содома и Гоморры убило астероидом? [Were the homosexuals of Sodom and Gomorra killed by an asteroid?] Of course the article, though perhaps worth a quick glance nevertheless, is, as the Russians would say, полная чушь [complete nonsense], but the construction used in the headline with the perfect verb убить [to kill] combined with the instrumental case, чем, did catch my attention. The sentence in the headline is of my personal favorite kind – the impersonal kind. In such constructions the verb is written in third person singular, in every tempus, making the past form of it «убило астероидом» [killed by an asteroid]. In such a simple way the sentence above conveys that the death was accidental and not the fault of the people killed (i.e. in this case that the ‘homosexuals’ of the Old Testament weren’t actually punished by God, but suffered death because of foreign objects coming from space). You can of course use other ‘reasons of death’ like for example, «убило молнией» [killed by lightning] or «убило чумой» [killed by the plague].

According to www.lenizdat.ru where the following article was published "Блогеры не правы. Путин не женится на Кабаевой" [The bloggers are wrong (not right). Putin isn't marrying Kabaeva] it's far too early to start speculating of future baby names for the offspring of the former president and the olympic athlete. Perhaps one should not only put off such speculating for the future, but stop it completely. Here's a peculiar qoute from the article indicating that though not marrying Alina, Vladimir is still, first and foremost (as we all have been suspecting, I suppose), a ladies man:

"Первое, что я хочу сказать. В том, что вы сказали, нет ни одного слова правды, — сказал Путин, передает "Газета.Ru". — Второе, вы упомянули статью в одной из наших газет, в которой действительно упоминается наша чемпионка по гимнастике Алина Кабаева…" — сказал президент. "И в других публикациях подобного рода упоминаются успешные и красивые девушки. Думаю, что не будет неожиданным, если я скажу, что они все мне нравятся. Так же как и все российские женщины", – добавил он.

["The first thing that I want to say. In that which you said there's not one word of truth", said Putin, as reports "Gazeta.ru". "Secondly, you mentioned an article in one of our magazines, in which truly the name of our gymnastic champion Alina Kabaeva is mentioned..." said the president. "And in other publications of similar sort there are mentioned also other succesful and beautiful girls. I think that it will be no surprise if I say that I like them all. Just like I like all Russian women", he added.]

Bummer - what about the Swedish women? Don't you like us, Vova? Or at least me? A little bit?

Once in a while you come across a new word in a foreign language that just grabs a hold of you hard and refuses to let go for a long period of time. This word can be as plain as vanilla ice-cream, but it is more often than not an exotic word, and frequently also hard to translate fittingly into an equivalent of your native tongue. For me such a word in Russian is the verb «хлопотать» which is rather difficult to translate properly into English, though its meaning can be understood on a purely ‘logical level’ by most people, not only Russophiles I presume. But in order to truly understand what this verb stands for, and what kind of action it represents, one must have knowledge of Russian society, not only of present day but of it during the Soviet Union and even earlier in history. People in Russia – not always necessarily Russians, since this action effects everyone who happens to find themselves on the country’s territory, Tatars as well as Americans, both Germans and Ukrainians alike – are constantly forced to deal with endless «хлопоты» [a noun only existing in plural form, and I suppose no one is surprised as to why]. Let’s enter into the world of this fascinating little verb and the various words it has given birth to since entering into the reality of life in Russia.

Politics, huh? Russian politics are great, very entertaining and at times rather frightening – just not my shot of vodka, if you get my drift. When I started out as a ‘watcher & commentator on Russian life’ [particularly from a Siberian point of view] back in 2005 at the tender age of 20, I was very angry with myself because I lacked political awareness and couldn’t comment wisely on any current events of certain weight. I still lack political awareness but have since grown to accept this and thus I can now comment on current events as much as I’d like. Perhaps I should’ve looked into the ‘argument’ that aroused this past week between Georgia and Russia, but I’m afraid it didn’t really catch my attention. However this headline did: «Достоевского признали женатым» [Dostoevsky was declared married]. The article - perhaps only interesting to me and other «достоевсковеды» - is about finding the marriage certificate of Dostoevsky and his first wife, Maria Isaeva, in the Siberian town of Новокузнетск, where they were married in 1857. Here’s a little excerpt:

«Находку прокомментировала Валентина Ветловская, специалист по творчеству Достоевского: - Любой документ, касающийся жизни и творчества Достоевского, на вес золота.» [The find was commented on by Valentina Vetlovskaya, a specialist on the works of Dostoevsky: - Any kind of document that has anything to do with the life and works of Dostoevsky is worth its weight in gold.]