STENICH.

Occasionally in my reading I come across mentions of people who seem significant beyond the sparse traces they've left in the historical record, and when they have a connection with literature I sometimes try to memorialize them here. Such a case is the couple Valentin Osipovich (or Iosifovich) Stenich (a pseudonym—his birth name was Smetanich) and his wife Lyubov Davydovna (née Faynberg or Feinberg). Valentin was born in 1897 and was probably shot in 1938; Lyuba is given the dates 1908-1983 here, but (according to the Russian Wikipedia linked to her husband's name) the KGB said she was 33 in 1937, which probably is more realistic. They were both translators, as were so many writers not in favor with the Bolsheviks; he (after writing poetry praised by Blok) translated both Dos Passos's The 42nd Parallel and parts of Joyce's Ulysses (according to Geert Lernout's The Reception of James Joyce in Europe, "There are rumours that he had translated the whole novel, but his archive was confiscated when he was arrested"), and she translated Maeterlinck, Sartre, and Brecht, among others. But more important is their humanity. In her second book of memoirs (translated as Hope Abandoned) Nadezhda Mandelstam writes "I can count on my fingers the people who kept their heads and thought the same as M. The main ones were Stenich, Margolis, and Oleinikov [...] All three perished—two in the dungeons, and one in a labor camp." In the first volume, Hope Against Hope, she devotes most of Chapter 67 to a description of the couple, calling Stenich "a man with a great feeling for language and literature and an acute sense of the modern age" and saying "he might have become a brilliant essayist or critic, but the times were not auspicious"; when the Mandelstams said they needed money, Lyuba "put on a stylish hat and set off," returning with "a little money and some clothing." At this time the Steniches were living in terror, waiting for Valentin to be arrested (friends of theirs had been arrested, and they knew it was only a matter of time), but "nothing happened that evening, and Stenich was not arrested until the following winter." This was his final arrest, after which he was quickly shot; before that he had spent some years in internal exile, and it was during such a period that Cummings visited Moscow and met Lyuba, whom he calls "eyes." He reports his last encounter with her thus:

(eyes' eyes open,understanding; she laughs softly)"drôle homme!"(then with a,to myself,completely new part of herself;a secret a luminous — and scarcely which might dare to recognize its own existence — tenderness unadventured,lonely;not with ideas not through ideals nor by comrades by a million or a billion or innumerable or humanity explored)"comme mon mari"

It enrages me that good people like this, utterly harmless to any state, were ground casually underfoot by the Soviet regime, simply because it needed an endless supply of enemies and victims and the name Stenich wound up on their list. It's easy to talk about "millions of victims" and feel an abstract horror, but it's important as well to remind oneself of the lived reality of that victimization for all those real people, people much like you or me. And this is why I urge you all to read Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs if you haven't already.

A BAD REVIEW.

I've been slowly reading the January 14, 2010 issue of NYRB (very slowly—I keep it in my shoulder bag for emergency reading), and I've just gotten to a review that angered me enough to vent publicly. At the end of last year I posted about Vladislav Zubok's Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia; toward the end of the NYRB issue I found a review of Zubok's book by Michael Scammell, and it's a kind of review I particularly dislike, the kind that attacks a book for not being the kind of book the reviewer wishes had been written.

Now, Scammell is no dummy; he translated The Defense and most of The Gift by Nabokov, and has written well-received biographies of Solzhenitsyn and Koestler. But he apparently loves the cliché narrative of late Soviet times (in which brave dissidents Fight the Power) so much that he can hardly bear to read anything different, even when he recognizes how groundbreaking and well researched and written it is. He eventually gets around to admitting that "Zubok is a reliable and prodigiously well-informed guide to the opinions, attitudes, and changing fortunes of loyal Soviet intellectuals... Zubok tells his story with a density of detail and complexity of analysis that is truly remarkable... His book is scholarly but also highly readable and accessible, and is rich in anecdotal material that enlivens the sociological analysis." But first he bats Zubok around for his alleged omissions, and afterwards he bats him around for his ideologically incorrect orientation, and in general he clearly regrets that Zubok chose to write about the people he did; apparently Scammell is so wedded to the familiar stories of Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, Sinyavsky, and Daniel that he would rather have seen yet another retelling (and he takes up much of his review with yet another retelling). It is as if he were reviewing W. Bruce Lincoln's In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861, a magisterial work on the bureaucrats who beavered away in government offices in St. Petersburg and elsewhere, laying the groundwork for the Great Reforms of the 1860s while the infinitely more famous dissidents like Herzen were thundering anathemas at tsarism from abroad, and complained that Lincoln was writing about such people instead of penning yet another paean to Herzen & Co. As I wrote in this thread, foreigners love to focus "on writers who got actively suppressed and weren't able to publish their great work (Bulgakov, Platonov) rather than on those who managed to publish fine work under existing conditions," and this is another example of the same prejudice.

HEMOPHILIA.

A post on Wordorigins.org asks a reasonable question that had never occurred to me: why is hemophilia called by a name that means 'blood-loving'? Apparently it was first used in Friedrich Hopff's 1828 article "Über die Haemophilie oder die erbliche Anlage zu tödlichen Blutungen" (On haemophila or the hereditary predisposition to lethal bleeding). There is an article by KM Brinkhous, “A Short History of Hemophilia, with Some Comments on the Word ‘Hemophilia,’” in Handbook of Hemophilia, Vol. 1, edited by KM Brinkhous and HC Hemker (American Elsevier, New York, 1975), for which Google Books has only the damnable snippet view; if anyone has access to it, it might shed some light.

Update. In the Wordorigins thread, Dr. Techie has discovered that a footnote on this page of Legg's 1872 A Treatise On Haemophilia has a discussion of the word and its history, ending "The word is so barbarous and senseless that it is not wonderful that no one should be proud of it."

PISTOLS AND FOLK.

I'm in the middle of E. E. Cummings's EIMI, a sometimes too poetickal and occasionally wellnigh incomprehensible but withal lively (or Alive with Is, as Comrade Kem-min-kz might say) and well worth reading account of the author's month (May-June 1931) in the still relatively new Soviet Union, newly admired by the Depression-struck West. Cummings went with a wary but open mind; what he saw there turned him into a conservative for the rest of his life. (There's a Frank Bures review, with a couple of quotes, here, and a very useful, though occasionally mistaken, set of annotations here.) At the moment I am inspired to post by a couple of inspired euphemisms encountered on successive pages.

On page 206, our hero is staggering back to his temporary home from a drunken party with his host and hostess, the American journalist Charles Malamuth (pseudonym'd by EEC "the Turk") and his wife Joan ("the Turkess"), daughter of Jack London; the chapter ends thus:

  ("the")at("engineers have shaggy")random("ears")misquote, upholding the who's me upholding 1
  ("and p-")1 starewiselying meward essays("pi-")his big eyes laugh helplessly("pis-")
  "Charlie!" she admonished
  ("stolsintheirbreeches")he succeeded.

On the next page and the next morning, the lathered Turk suggests that his hungover guest might "feel like perhaps dropping any soiled object into yonder socalled laundrybag":

  "I cannot" almost tearfully "impose..."
  "you" busily "New Englanders are a very curious" sopping "folk. Folk you" he,beaming,said.

Incidentally, Pascal Covici was born in Romania, where I assume his surname was pronounced /ko'vič/ (koh-VEECH), but I assume that in his adopted America, it became koh-VEE-chee; anybody know? [thanks, MMcM!].

Addendum. On page 306, I've run into an even more startling use of obscenity, barely disguised: "Okay... there's uh reel beerjoint eye know,thih beer's suwell... nize un sudzy un beeg un cool... yunno—nut like this fuggin peevoh [Russian beer]!"

OLD DUTCH PROFANITY.

I can't really make use of it myself, since my Dutch is nonexistent, but I can't resist passing it along for those who can: the Oud Nederlandsch Scheldwoorden Archief (Old Dutch profanity archive). Thanks, peacay!

LUBERON AND OTHER SHIBBOLETHS.

An interesting piece by Olivier Razemon in Le Monde about the correct/local ways to pronounce various French place names (it's Luberon avec e comme dans "beurrer," pas comme dans "bébé," and Wissant (Pas-de-Calais) is "Uissant", et non "Vissant", encore moins "Ouissant"). Thanks, Paul!

PIG'S WHISPER.

Schott's Vocab has a post today linking to this OED entry (draft revision Mar. 2009):

pig's whisper, n.
colloq.

Brit. /pɩgz wɩspə/, U.S. /pɩgz (h)wɩspər/ Forms: 17- pig's whisper, 18 pigs-whisper. [< the genitive of PIG n. + WHISPER n.]

1. A very short space of time, an instant.
1780 J. O'KEEFFE Tony Lumpkin in Town I. 4 I'll be with them in a pig's whisper. 1837 DICKENS Pickwick Papers xxxi. 333 You'll find yourself in bed, in something less than a pig's whisper. [...] 1918 P. B. KYNE Valley of Giants xxv. 218 'Thanks so much for the invitation', Ogilvy murmured gratefully. 'I'll be down in a pig's whisper'. 1991 R. COOVER Pinocchio in Venice xxi. 229 'Back in a crack, direttore!' 'In a pig's whisper, direttore!'

2. A whisper; a confidential tone of voice.
1846 Swell's Night Guide 110/1 Pig's Whisper.., a word 'twixt you and me. 1866 M. BANIM Peter of Castle 5 The eulogist may.. in what they call a pig's whisper (that is, in a confidential tone).. [relate] a few anecdotes of his prowess. 1922 J. JOYCE Ulysses II. 484 Virag (Prompts into his ear in a pig's whisper). 2001 Hindu (Nexis) 21 Jan., I heard Ata informing Mummy, in a pig's whisper, that plagiarism, too, was actionable.

NOTHING GOOD EVER CAME OF IT.

I have mentioned Marat Akchurin's wonderful Red Odyssey: A Journey Through the Soviet Republics before, and I thought I'd quote this passage from his visit to Tajikistan in 1990, as the whole Soviet mess was in the process of falling apart; it resonates with the material I've been posting from Terry Martin's book:

We tried to pay the counterman for the green tea that we had drunk, but he refused to take money, saying that he considered us to be his guests.

"If you had an opportunity to address Americans, what would you tell them?" I asked him.

"Americans?" he asked again in surprise. "Let them learn Tadzhik. It's a very simple and beautiful language. Maybe they will make use of it one day!"

Safar and I went out and decided to go to the bookstore and then walk to my hotel.

"Is Tadzhik very different from Farsi?" I asked Safar. "Are they just dialects of one language?"

"Tadzhik is Persian-Farsi transliterated with Russian letters," Safar replied. "But nothing good ever came of it. They took away the old alphabet and thus cut the Tadzhik people off from their ancient history and culture. This monstrously sly Bolshevik act did terrible damage to the national culture of the Tadzhik people. Why? Because letters are culture-producing for a Tadzhik. Can you imagine Pushkin writing in Russian but with Arabic ligatures? That would be crazy, wouldn't it? But this nightmarish experiment was conducted in the U.S.S.R. on many peoples, Tadzhiks among them. I believe that it was a cunning policy."