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Ljiljana Progovac and John L. Locke have published an intriguing paper, “The Urge to Merge: Ritual Insult and the Evolution of Syntax” (you can download the pdf from that page; the article is, admirably, published under a Creative Commons license). Here’s the abstract:

Throughout recorded history, sexually mature males have issued humorous insults in public. These ‘verbal duels’ are thought to discharge aggressive dispositions, and to provide a way to compete for status and mating opportunities without risking physical altercations. But, is there evidence that such verbal duels, and sexual selection in general, played any role in the evolution of specific principles of language, syntax in particular? In this paper, concrete linguistic data and analysis will be presented which indeed point to that conclusion. The prospect will be examined that an intermediate form of ‘proto-syntax’, involving ‘proto-Merge’, evolved in a context of ritual insult. This form, referred to as exocentric compound, can be seen as a ‘living fossil’ of this stage of proto-syntax — providing evidence not only of ancient structure (syntax/semantics), but also arguably of sexual selection.

Their conclusion begins: “Not only do exocentric VN compounds suggest an ancient syntactic/combinatorial strategy, but their semantics and use also provide potential evidence of ritual insult and sexual selection at work, selecting for this basic/protosyntax.” Now, all of this is pretty hand-wavey and involves unhealthy dollops of Chomskyan syntax (like this Merge business), but it’s still an interesting idea, and of course I particularly enjoyed Section 4.4. “Availability across (Unrelated) Languages”:

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Felipe Martinez, an independent researcher from San Diego, California, is “investigating the absence of Brazilian author João Guimarães Rosa (1908-1967) in the English-speaking world.” To this end he has set up a website called “A Missing Book,” where he invites “any and all inquiries, submissions of articles, essays, translations, etc. concerning João Guimarães Rosa.” The first response links to this site, where you can read the entire (long out of print) translation of his masterpiece, the novel Grande Sertão: Veredas, translated as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís (Knopf, 1963). The second response says “I have cherished it from the first time I was lucky enough to read it and have made it my life’s mission as a writer and filmmaker to disseminate the reputation of this, one of greatest novels ever written.” I’ve heard of it but never read it, which I guess is not an uncommon phenomenon.

The good people at Oxford UP sent me a copy of Ruth H. Sander’s German: Biography of a Language, which I recently finished reading. This odd and entertaining book is not well represented by its title, which suggests a relatively straightforward history of German. In fact, Sanders has chosen to focus on six “turning points, leaving the connecting events largely in the dark.” The chapter titles, each representing one of these turning points, are “Germanic Beginnings,” “The Germanic Languages Survive the Romans,” “A Fork in the Road: High German, Low German,” “Bible German and the Birth of a Standard Language,” “The German Language Gets a State,” and “Postwar Comeback Times Two: A High Point, a Double Fall from Grace, and Recoveries.” (You can see a more detailed table of contents, with descriptions of the sidebars, here.)
You will note that Chapter 2 talks about “The Germanic Languages,” and that’s one odd thing about the book: while German itself is the main focus, a great deal of space and attention is devoted to the other Germanic languages and the history of the peoples associated with them. I’m not sure the average student of German will be quite so interested in Gothic, English, and Yiddish as this book expects them to be. Another odd feature is the emphasis on history; of course, it’s useful to be reminded of the context in which a language is used, but the long and detailed account of the Battle of Kalkriese (which when I was a lad we used to call the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest) seems excessive for a book with just over 200 pages of text, and what the account of Luther’s marriage is doing there (“The Luthers had six children and, to all evidence, a loving marriage…. The highly competent Katharina… kept house, managed the family finances, cooked, grew a vegetable and fruit garden, raised pigs, and brewed beer for visitors and family…”) is anybody’s guess. And the first chapter, on Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic and the peoples who may have spoken them, is pretty much all speculation—interesting speculation, and presented as such rather than as fact, but still, in such a short book one might have expected a brief rundown of the known elements of prehistory and a quick transition to the documented facts of the language.
But I don’t want to give the wrong impression by my carping and quibbling. This is a book that anyone with an interest in the Germanic languages that extends beyond sound shifts and syntax is likely to enjoy and learn from. It’s quite well written for a scholarly book, and one thing that pleases me greatly is her habit of quoting other scholars, frequently in extenso, rather than paraphrasing them and stashing the source in a footnote. To give you a taste, here’s part of her account of Luther’s impact:

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Long-time readers of LH will know my negative feelings toward the much-lauded translating duo of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (see, for instance, here); imagine, therefore, my pleasure on being sent a link to “The Pevearsion of Russian Literature” by Gary Saul Morson, and my disappointment on learning it was only an abstract. If anyone has a subscription to Commentary or otherwise has access to the full article, I’d love it if you’d e-mail it to me. Otherwise, feel free to discuss Peveolokhonsky, translation, or (as usual) anything else in the comment thread.

Update. I have been kindly provided with the article; many thanks!

A NY Times story by Simon Romero describes the unusually promising situation of the Caribbean language Papiamento:

Papiamentu, a Creole language influenced over the centuries by African slaves, Sephardic merchants and Dutch colonists, is now spoken by only about 250,000 people on the islands of Curaçao, Bonaire and Aruba. But compared with many of the world’s other Creoles, the hybrid languages that emerge in colonial settings, it shows rare signs of vibrancy and official acceptance.
Most of Curaçao’s newspapers publish in Papiamentu. Music stores do brisk business in CDs recorded in Papiamentu by musicians like the protest singer Oswin Chin Behilia or the jazz vocalist Izaline Calister.
“Mi pais ta un isla hopi dushi, kaminda mi lombrishi pa semper ta derá,” goes a passage in Ms. Calister’s hit song “Mi Pais.” (That roughly translates as “My island is a lovely place, where my umbilical cord forever lies.”) […]
“While English and French Creoles get more attention, the extension of Papiamentu into different domains like writing, education and policy is incredibly high,” said Bart Jacobs, a Dutch linguist who studies Papiamentu. “This bodes very well for the language’s chances to survive, and possibly even thrive well into the future.”
Scholars, writers and composers here say Papiamentu’s resilience has roots in a mixture of radical politics and pragmatic planning. They often tie Papiamentu’s resurgence to a violent uprising against symbols of Dutch power on May 30, 1969, known here as Trinta di Mei. […]
Papiamentu’s vibrancy is related to the creation in 1998 of the Fundashon pa Planifikashon di Idioma, a language institute that maintains an orthography. Papiamentu also thrives on the street level, with immigrants from Haiti and Suriname often picking up the language quickly and using it instead of Dutch.

Nice to see an upbeat story on a “small” language for a change. (Thanks, Bonnie!)

Stan of Sentence First has a most enjoyable post about an excellent word:

On a walk last week, I overheard a woman speak a word (Irish English slang, chiefly Munster I think) that I hadn’t heard in a long time: cnáimhseáiling, or knawvshawling. The opening c or k* is pronounced distinctly: /’knɔːv’ʃɔːlɪŋ/. After making a quick note on Twitter, I was too busy to elaborate until now, but you won’t hear me knawvshawling. The word means muttering complaints, whingeing, sullen grumbling, finding fault, or — another very Irish idiom — giving out:

Finish your plate now and don’t mind your cnáimhseáiling.

The Anglicised spelling knawvshawling is a loose phonetic approximation, as are knauvshauling and cnawvshawling. There are short entries in an online dictionary of Cork slang and a directory of Irish slang, but I think the word deserves a longer write-up.

His write-up is well worth reading; I will add a mildly interesting linguistic observation of my own. When I studied Modern Irish, it was the western dialect of Connemara that I learned, and in that dialect initial cn- is pronounced /kr/, so that the word cnáimh ‘bone’ (the first part of cnáimhseáil) is pronounced /krɑ:w’/, sounding something like “croive.” But this word is apparently not used in Connemara, only in the southern dialect region, so that if I follow my natural inclination and pronounce cnáimhseáiling “croiveshawling,” I’ll be using a pronunciation no actual Irish person uses. Ah well, I’m told it’s a grand language by them that knows.

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Lord knows I get frustrated with the general level of ignorance concerning language and linguistics out there in the world; lashing out at it has been a feature of LH from the beginning. But I direct my fire at those who have a professional responsibility to know better, primarily journalists. Journalists reporting on language cannot be expected to know the facts as a linguist would (apart from those rare exceptions like Michael Erard, who took the precaution of getting an MA in linguistics before going into journalism), but they have the same responsibility to get the basic facts right as those reporting on astronomy, nuclear physics, or for that matter politics. When they fail egregiously, as they do on a regular basis, I let them have it.

But it is folly to expect a member of the general public to get things right. To expect the public at large to grasp the fundamentals of physics or chemistry is setting oneself up for disappointment, but at least they are taught these things in high school, so one can, if one is so inclined, blame them for being inattentive or for forgetting what they once knew. No one who has not taken a linguistics course can be expected to know about, let alone understand, the scientific view of language. So I was not pleased to visit Language Log this morning and find Victor Mair attacking the Chinese-American author Ruiyan Xu for a brief op-ed piece she wrote for the NY Times a couple of months ago (finding her “claims to be highly dubious, some to be rather troublesome, and yet others to be downright annoying”) and saying “Mark Swofford, over at pinyin.info, has just written a masterful dissection: ‘Chinese characters: Like, wow‘, 7/2/2010.” Upon visiting pinyin.info, I found Swofford saying Xu writes like “a stoned grad student with a large vocabulary” and dissecting her little op-ed practically word by word as though it were a dissertation, or a paper in Language, scrawling contemptuously “No, no, and no…. No, that’s wrong….” and hauling out the big guns of sarcasm (“Alas, poor English! How confused we must be to be using a mere alphabet. Oh, if only we could achieve linguistic, aesthetic, and historical meaning!”) and irrelevant snide observations (“The author of the poem… lived from 1140 to 1207 and was thus a contemporary of such Western poets as the troubadours Bertran de Born, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Giraut de Borneil — hardly poets whose work suffered for having been written with an alphabet”). I am reminded of Pope’s line “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” (though I’m afraid I tend to remember it as I first learned it from William Rees-Mogg’s famous 1967 Times editorial attacking the prison sentences handed down by a vengeful court to Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, the title of which ended “….on a wheel”).

What was Xu’s sin? Talking about language in general and Chinese characters in particular the way virtually everyone who has learned any Chinese and is not a linguist talks and thinks about them. What was her main point? That something valuable is lost when the phrase 百度 bǎidù ‘hundred times,’ which in Chinese alludes to a well-known poem by Xin Qiji (or, for people who still use Wade-Giles, Hsin Ch’i-Chi), becomes in a non-Chinese context the meaningless Baidu. Is her point correct? Unquestionably. Does either Mair or Swofford appear to understand or care about it? No. They are far too concerned with bashing her for not being a linguist.

Now, if her little op-ed were somehow to become a major source of people’s understanding of language, then sure, blast away; I attack Strunk and White on precisely those grounds. But to drag out an inoffensive little op-ed by a novelist who makes no pretense of being a linguist and is concerned with other matters and to attack it at such length suggests exactly the kind of seething rage the Loggers are always attributing to those who get upset about “incorrect usage” in English. If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, I guess a foolish intolerance is the hobgoblin of frustrated specialists.

Incidentally, you can hear a musical rendition of Xin Qiji’s poem here (you can find the poem itself at Swofford’s post), and for sheer amusement value, here’s what Google Translate does with it:

Dongfeng night, the Arcadia. More Blew, star like rain. BMW Man Road, Hong Thai car. Fung study on three dynamic, glimmer turn, fish and dragons dance night. Moth child Xueliu gold thread. Laughter floats. Searching for her 1000 Baidu public. Looking back, that person is in, the lights dim.

Formerly (and hopefully future) frequent commenter Xiaolongnu sent me a link to the Periodic Table of Swearing (click image for large version). This is a U.K. model, with entries like “Looking Like A Right Arsehole” and “Bollocks To That”; someone should do equivalents for the U.S., Australia, and other English-speaking regions. Actually, now that I think about that, someone should do equivalents for every language with a decent swearing culture.

I’ve been trying to investigate Schlegel‘s use of Arabesk ‘arabesque’ as a literary term (Nicholas Saul says in the “arabesque or hieroglyph” the “material is to be ordered into complex symbolic forms which allude ironically to the inexpressible absolute rather than attempt prosaically to embody it”: The Cambridge History of German Literature, p. 230), because it influenced Gogol in his Arabeski (1835; Proffer writes: “There are two works of Gogol which nobody reads: The Arabesques is one and Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends the other”). Google Books sent me, inter alia, to Ginette Verstraete’s Fragments of the Feminine Sublime in Friedrich Schlegel and James Joyce, and in perusing it I discovered that she translated Schlegel’s Parekbase as parabasis. Why not “parecbasis,” I wondered? So of course I went to the OED, where I discovered that parabasis does indeed have the required meaning (“In ancient Greek comedy: an interlude in the action of the drama in which the chorus dance and sing, addressing the audience”), but there is also a word parecbasis “A deviation, a digression,” which has the remarkable property that “almost all early uses evidenced involve transmission errors”:

1584 R. SCOT Discouerie Witchcraft XV. xxiii. 438 A parecuasis or transition of the author to matter further purposed. 1589 G. PUTTENHAM Arte Eng. Poesie III. 195 (margin) Parecnasis, or the Stragler. 1599 A. DAY Eng. Secretorie (rev. ed.) II. sig. Mm4^v, Pareonasis [sic], or Digressio, a speech beside the matter in present spoken on, as to say, But here let me remember vnto you something of the deserts and eternized memory of your worthy and most vertuous parents. 1678 E. PHILLIPS New World of Words (ed. 4), Parechasis [1706 parecbasis], a digression, in Rhetorick, it is a wandering in discourse from the intended matter.

Note. Closed due to a massive influx of spam. I will try opening it later, perhaps tomorrow, to see if the spammers have gotten bored and gone away; in the meantime, if you have a comment you’d like to add, drop me a line and I’ll reopen it for you. [Later: Reopened it, had to delete a huge influx of spam. Bah.]

As I wrote here, I’ve been reading Tynyanov’s Смерть Вазир-Мухтара [Smert’ Vazir-mukhtara], “The death of the vazir-mukhtar [ambassador plenipotentiary],” and now that I’ve finished it, I’m trying to figure out why I didn’t like it more than I did. Tynyanov is a fine writer (as well as a brilliant critic), and I certainly enjoyed his novella Podporuchik Kizhe (“Lieutenant Kije”), but I found the novel something of a slog. It wasn’t just that the characters were uniformly unsympathetic, and it certainly wasn’t a failure to paint an adequate background for the protagonist Griboyedov‘s doings—in fact, it was the well-drawn picture of Qajar Iran and its courtly intrigues that kept me going toward the end. No, I think Chukovsky hit the nail on the head in his diary entry for March 17, 1926, discussing the excerpts Tynyanov read him: “They were well written—too well written. He overdoes the archaic style. There isn’t a line left unstylized. The result is overly concentrated, lacking in inner truth, smacking of ‘literature.'” [Отрывки хорошо написаны — но чересчур хорошо. Слишком густо дан старинный стиль. Нет ни одной не стилизованной строки. Получаются одни эссенции, то есть внутренняя ложь, литературщина.] And as I was trying to finish last week’s New Yorker (the new one has already come), I found that James Wood, in his review essay on David Mitchell, has things to say that are equally relevant to Tynyanov:

Mitchell is ancestral in another respect, too. He may be self-conscious, but he is not knowing, in the familiar, fatal, contemporary way; his naturalness as a storyteller has to do not only with his vitality but also with a kind of warmth, a charming earnestness. This is why he can so speedily get a fiction up and running, involve the reader in an invented world. One would be hard pressed to separate the quality of his sentences from the quality of the human presence.[…]

Despite the novel’s liveliness and deep immersion in the foreignness of its world, there is something a bit mystifying about its distance from contemporary life, something a little contrived in its brilliant autonomy. The publisher promises “a bold and epic novel of a rarely visited point in history,” and this is not wrong, except that choosing rarely visited points in history for novelization seems to lack inner necessity. Mitchell’s new novel has already been likened to Tolstoy, but Tolstoy wrote “War and Peace” because he felt compelled to examine and dramatize a great national crisis, and it is that compulsion that makes “War and Peace” a novel of the eighteen-sixties, and not merely “a novel of 1812.”

It is precisely War and Peace that kept occurring to me as a point of comparison as I read Tynyanov, who sometimes seems to be deliberately playing off its methods. It is, of course, unfair to use Tolstoy as a stick to beat another novelist with, but I think it’s reasonable to point out the difference between Tolstoy’s compulsion (the mot juste, as one expects from Wood) and Tynyanov’s… desire to illustrate his critical theories? I’m frankly not sure what made him want to write historical novels (this was his second), but one doesn’t get the sense that he had a burning need to tell us this particular story. And there is certainly none of the warmth and “charming earnestness” Wood sees in Mitchell; this is even more unfair, of course, but let’s face it, “the quality of the human presence” is something most of us look for in a piece of writing, and here it’s so dry and arm’s-length it doesn’t invite us in or lure us onward.

I think the main point Tynyanov wanted to emphasize is the ways in which a title, and the role that goes with it, can take over a life (and cause a death). Here are a few salient quotes involving the Persian phrase vazir-mukhtar ‘ambassador plenipotentiary,’ which provides both the book and its hero with a title:

Abu’l-Kasim-Khan came up to him in a gold-embroidered robe and bowed low:
“Bon voyage, votre Excellence, notre cher et estimé Vazir-Mouchtar.”
Griboedov sat in the coach.
Thus he became the Vazir-Mukhtar.

[Абуль-Касим-хан подошел к нему в шитом золотом халате и низко склонился:

– Bon voyage, votre Excellence, notre cher et estimé Vazir-Mouchtar.
Грибоедов сел в карету.
Так стал он – Вазир-Мухтаром.]

He stopped understanding the rank of ambassador plenipotentiary.
The Persian word Vazir-Mukhtar seemed to him more understandable.
[Он переставал понимать звание: полномочный министр.
Персиянское слово Вазир-Мухтар казалось ему понятнее.]

And it was true that the Vazir-Mukhtar saw himself in mirrors. But he tried not to look for long. The tenfold, brightly colored Vazir-Mukhtar did not bring any special pleasure to Alexander Griboyedov.
[И правда, Вазир-Мухтар видел себя в зеркалах. Но он старался не смотреть долго. Удесятеренный, расцвеченный Вазир-Мухтар не приносил особого удовольствия Александру Грибоедову.]

After his death (which is slipped in casually), it is repeated several times that “the Vazir-Mukhtar continued to exist” [Вазир-Мухтар продолжал существовать]. When a false story of his death, putting all the blame on him, is told to and accepted by the Russian court:

The Vazir-Mukhtar moved no more.
He did not exist either now or earlier.
Eternity.
[Вазир-Мухтар более не шевелился.
Он не существовал ни теперь, ни ранее.
Вечность.]

And in the final chapter, when another Russian is named ambassador to the Qajar court: “The Vazir-Mukhtar was now another” [Вазир-Мухтар был ныне другой]. In a way, he’s making the same point he did with Lieutenant Kije, but the novella was a lot shorter, and funnier.

This is totally irrelevant, but I can’t resist quoting a paragraph from David Mitchell’s new novel that Wood also couldn’t resist quoting; it shows why I like Mitchell so much, and why I’m looking forward to reading more of him:

“On Mr Grote’s last trip home,” obliges Ouwehand, “he wooed a promising young heiress at her town house in Roomolenstraat who told him how her heirless, ailing papa yearned to see his dairy farm in the hands of a gentleman son-in-law, yet everywhere, she lamented, were thieving rascals posing as eligible bachelors. Mr Grote agreed that the Sea of Courtship seethes with sharks and spoke of the prejudice endured by the young colonial parvenu, as if the annual fortunes yielded by his plantations in Sumatra were less worthy than old monies. The turtledoves were wedded within a week. The day after their nuptials, the taverner presented the bill and each says to the other, ‘Settle the account, my heart’s music.’ But to their genuine horror, neither could, for bride and groom alike had spent their last beans on wooing the other! Mr Grote’s Sumatran plantations evaporated; the Roomolenstraat house reverted to a co-conspirator’s stage prop; the ailing father-in-law turned out to be a beer porter in rude health, not heirless but hairless.”

Addendum. There’s a new Russian television serial based on the novel; you can watch it here. It’s in ten parts; I’ve watched the first (45 minutes) and enjoyed it greatly.

Update (Mar. 2021). My favorite critic of Russian literature, Gary Saul Morson, reviews two translations in the March 25, 2021 issue of the NYRB (most of the review is taken up with a lengthy discussion of Griboedov’s life and his play Woe from Wit; I quote the final section):

In 1927–1928 Yuri Tynyanov, arguably the greatest of the Russian Formalist critics and a significant fiction writer, published in serial form The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, a novel following Griboedov through the last eleven months of his life. By this point the Formalists had abandoned their early idea that authors have no relevance to a text, and recognized that sometimes an author’s biography (or legend) can become a “literary fact” in itself. They also became fascinated by “the literature of fact,” which sometimes referred to fiction that was as factually accurate as possible and occasionally consisted entirely of documentary material. Tynyanov’s novel relies on meticulous scholarship. It can almost be read as a straight biography of Griboedov, except at moments when the author fills in what obviously could not be documented, such as a character’s passing thoughts. “Literature differs from history,” Tynyanov explained, “not through ‘invention,’ but through a greater, more intimate understanding of people and events.”

The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar opens with “the crack of breaking bones” as the Decembrists, their revolt having failed, begin to flee over the bodies of their comrades. “The age itself was being tortured,” Tynyanov remarks; “it was ‘one big prison cell’ (as they said in Peter’s day).” Peter the Great died exactly a century before the revolt, and more than one reader has suggested that Tynyanov was inviting us to contemplate the prison cell of Soviet Russia a century later, when Tynyanov himself was writing. The suggestion is plausible because the novel’s narrator is always sly and often ironic. He takes special delight in describing the Russian obsession, bemoaned by Chatsky, with everything European. Wryly observing that Karl Robert Nesselrode, the man the tsar chose to direct foreign relations, was the “son of a Prussian father and Jewish mother…born on an English ship sailing to Lisbon,” he points out that this Russian minister spoke no Russian. When the emperor appears at a concert, Tynyanov explains, “there was…a call for the anthem to be repeated—the Russian national anthem, the one composed by a German for the English king.”

Tynyanov grows still more irreverent in his handling of Russian cultural tradition, which, especially in the Soviet period, always portrayed great writers as spotless heroes. Tynyanov’s Griboedov, by contrast, is complex and often less than admirable, as Griboedov himself is well aware. The high-minded speeches in his play come back to haunt him as the words of his conscience. Time and again, Tynyanov describes how Griboedov, in a determined quest for what he calls “profit,” connives to get official support for his plan to set up a Russian equivalent to the British East India Company. If it had been approved, the plan would not only have enriched him, but also made him a quasi monarch. He doesn’t seem bothered that thousands of people would have perished or been enslaved if his plan had succeeded.

In Russian literary mythology, Pushkin above all was irreproachable, but Tynyanov has Griboedov call him “the supreme…weathercock of poetry.” Tynyanov instead chooses as Griboedov’s best friend the usual embodiment of evil, Faddei Bulgarin, and then, despite Bulgarin’s constant help and devotion, Griboedov has an affair with Bulgarin’s wife. None of these blemishes, however, diminishes Griboedov’s genius as a satirist, integrity as a diplomat, courage in refusing to deliver up Yakub Mirza, or, when the mob invades the embassy, heroism in slaying a dozen crazed assailants. One senses that Griboedov’s untimely death deprived us of masterpieces even greater than Woe from Wit.

Much as Griboedov didn’t live to finish his life’s work, Susan Causey, the translator of The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, died in a road accident before she could polish or publish her work, and her husband, already gravely ill, died soon after. Their friends worked with their sons to recover the manuscript in the hope it could appear in print. The Slavicist Tim Johnson commissioned Vera Tsareva-Brauner, a lecturer at Cambridge, to edit it from the perspective of a native speaker. So edited, Causey’s version is not only the first complete rendition of the novel, but usually reads as if it were written in English. Another fine rendition of The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, translated by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush, will soon be published by Columbia University Press, with a splendid introduction by Angela Brintlinger and helpful supplementary material identifying people and allusions unfamiliar to the nonspecialist. A brilliant thinker and a splendid writer, Tynyanov deserves to be better known. With his works, at least, good translators will be able to convey, as Causey does, what makes his novel so important a contribution to historical fiction.

Tynyanov had an eye for the perfect story, like the one about how Pushkin, traveling through the Caucasus, encountered some Georgians leading an oxcart. When he asked what was in the cart, they answered, “Griboyed.” Pushkin reflected, “I know of nothing more enviable than the last years of his stormy life.” He married the woman he loved and “his death itself, overtaking him in the midst of courageous, unequal combat, had nothing terrible, nothing agonizing for Griboedov. It was instantaneous and beautiful.”

Causey’s translation is called The Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar, the Rush’s version the disarticulated The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar; I don’t know why Morson prefers the latter, which seems to me pointlessly confusing — vazir-mukhtar is a title, not a name, and at an earlier point in the essay Morson writes “When it came time for the shah to return [Griboedov’s] body to the Russians, it was so badly mutilated there was no telling which body parts belonged to the vazir-mukhtar.” At any rate, he clearly likes the novel better than I did, so I thought I’d provide another well-informed perspective.