Posted by Josefina
«На Берлин. За Сталина.» [To Berlin. For Stalin.]
Walking through my Russian hometown of the moment, I came across this ‘graffiti’ on a truck. Yeah, it’s kind of funny and that’s the reason why I decided to take a picture of it. It reminded me of those Soviet propaganda posters from WWII with the happy soldier tying his boots with the words «Дойдём до Берлина!» [We will reach Berlin!]. This made me curious to know if there was any propaganda made back then with the same words as on this truck in 2008? I googled the sentences above and guess what the first picture that came up was? A pic almost identical to mine above, only that it was taken in Moscow about two months ago, from a Russian blog. Is this a trend among Russian truck drivers? Is this a way of showing patriotic feelings to other drivers on the road? Or is it another symptom of the sentimentality felt by large parts of the Russian public towards everything Soviet lately?
At first I named this entry ‘Back To The Future’ [after the famous movie, that’s rather obvious – by the way, the same movie is in Russian called «Назад в будущее»] but then I realized that it would fit very badly in the context, and so I changed it to «Вперёд в прошлое». From here on I shall stick to these words when choosing titles for my entries: “Call things by their right names,” as Boris Pasternak wrote in «Доктор Живаго» (did anyone else watch the movie “Into The Wild” directed by Sean Penn? It doesn’t really have anything to do with Russia, yet it is still a great movie, but in the end of it *spoiler warning* the main hero reads Tolstoy’s “Family Happiness” and has an appifany about life, and then he dies holding Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize winning novel in his hand…)
Posted by Josefina
Since it is not yet the 9th of May, but still only the 8th, I’ll be the first one to say “Поздравляю Вас с днём победы!” [I congratule you with Victory Day!]. The day will be celebrated tomorrow in all of Russia with everyone getting the day off so as to be able to enjoy the spring sun with a beer in a park and watching the occasional military parade on Red Square. If you want to take a sneak peak already now of what it’s going to look like tomorrow in Moscow, I advice to check out EnglishRussia and these pictures The Parade Reharsal. It’s the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union that Victory Day will be celebrated with military tanks inside the Kremlin. Is this good or bad? I don’t know, all I know that it seems to be lacking of logic to celebrated the end of one war by showing off what kind of stuff you could pull out in case of another.
Every town in all of Russia, big city as well as tiny village, are decorated with signs such as this one everywhere weeks in advance. But the preparation for Victory Day May 9th goes even further than that - the country also gets a good, general cleaning of streets and buildings and that makes the day special for two reasons.
Posted by Josefina
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?
Posted by Josefina
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].
Though perhaps not that easy to make out on this small photo, the sign on the building says «1а проспект Ленина» and could therefore be located in any given Russian (or former Soviet Union) city.
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Posted by Josefina
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!
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I was just commenting on the fact that the term itself is a problematic one, in the context of what I said about Jews reading the Christian Bible. Sorry if I was unclear."
