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.
