Archives for December 2009

My latest historical reading is a book about a nearly forgotten episode: Lesley Chamberlain’s Lenin’s Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, about the 1922 expulsion of many of Russia’s most prominent anti-Bolshevik intellectuals. I’m not even halfway through it, but I wanted to mention an onomastic oddity I encountered on page 14, where the wife of Nikolai Berdyaev, the most famous of the expulsanty, is referred to as Lidiya Yudifovna. There must be some mistake, thought I: Yudif is the Russian equivalent of Judith, and Russian patronymics are called that for a reason—you’re not named after your mother. But I learn from this site (apparently the only place on the internet that mentions the fact) that her father was Юдиф Степанович Трушев, Yudif Stepanovich Trushev. How he wound up being named Judith is a story probably lost in the mists of time.

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I’m so out of touch I knew nothing about James Cameron’s forthcoming science fiction movie Avatar, but I’m happy to learn from Ben Zimmer’s latest “On Language” column for the NY Times that Cameron has taken the trouble to commission linguist Paul Frommer to create a coherent, plausible language for its aliens the Na’vi, “with mellifluous vowel clusters, popping ejectives and a grammatical system elaborate enough to make a polyglot blush.” Ben discusses the history of alien languages onscreen (the first linguist to be commissioned for such a purpose was apparently Victoria Fromkin, “a U.C.L.A. professor who fashioned a language for the apelike Pakuni creatures on the 1970s children’s TV series ‘Land of the Lost'”) and quotes my pal Arika Okrent, and the whole column is worth your while (especially, of course, if you have a fondness for sf).

Update. I saw it and thought it was dumb.

A fascinating AskMetaFilter thread set off by the question “Why didn’t I say anything until I was three?” It’s full of interesting anecdotes and references to studies, and one commenter quotes this great Einstein story:

Otto Neugebauer told the writer the following legend about Einstein. It seems that when Einstein was a young boy he was a lake talker and naturally his parents were worried. Finally, one dat at supper, he broke into speech with the words “Die Suppe ist zu heiss.” (The soup is too hot.) His parents were greatly relieved, but asked him why he hadn’t spoken up to that time. The answer came back: “Bisher war Alles in Ordnung.” (Until now everything was in order.)

I think I once knew how old I was when I started talking, but I’ve forgotten. Anyway, late talking doesn’t seem to be a cause for concern.

Miky (pronounced Mikey) is a recent immigrant from Israel who has wound up in Helena, Montana. Did you know that Montana had a substantial Jewish population in the nineteenth century? And “in a minor revival, Montana now has three rabbis, two in Bozeman and one (appropriately) in Whitefish,” according to a NY Times story by Eric A. Stern: “Yes, Miky, There Are Rabbis in Montana.” Read it: it doesn’t go where you think it’s going. (Thanks, Eric!)

In case anyone was wondering what Russian novel I turned to after finishing Fathers and Sons (discussed here), it was Andrei Bely’s 1909 Серебряный голубь (Russian text; translated as The Silver Dove). I had actually been planning to tackle Bely’s Петербург (Petersburg), which Nabokov called one of the four greatest novels of the twentieth century, but since it had been intended as a sequel to The Silver Dove and I had a copy of the latter, I decided to start with that and get acquainted with Bely’s prose style, and I’m glad I did, partly because it’s a wonderful read and partly because the Russian is so difficult just about anything I read next is bound to seem like a cakewalk.

I wouldn’t call it a great novel, because the plot is slender and pretty silly: a soulful young aristocrat, Daryalsky, is lured away from his virginal young fiancée Katya by a pockmarked village woman, Matryona, whose husband, the leader of a messianic/revolutionary cult called the Doves, wants them to have a child together for vaguely apocalyptic purposes. There’s a good deal of mystical hugger-mugger, and it’s impossible to take the characters very seriously, but who cares? The real hero of the book is Bely’s prose, and it’s mesmerizing, an astoundingly accomplished variant, sophisticated and flexible, of Gogol’s early village-bumpkin style. The novel is the first of what Bely intended as a trilogy on the East-West theme so dear to the Russian intelligentsia of a century ago; Petersburg, with its pastiche of official jargon, represents the West, and The Silver Dove the East, with its backwoods village of Tselebeevo, located (as is frequently pointed out) to the east of westernized Gugolevo, home of the forsaken Katya. The whole thing is told in the cheerful voice of a narrator from Tselebeevo (the first chapter is called “Our Village”), and it slides from thick dialect to highfaluting prose-poetry and back, depending on the situation. The opening paragraph will give an idea of the style:

Еще, и еще в синюю бездну дня, полную жарких, жестоких блесков, кинула зычные клики целебеевская колокольня. Туда и сюда заерзали в воздухе над нею стрижи. А душный от благовонья Троицын день обсыпал кусты легкими, розовыми шиповниками. И жар душил грудь; в жаре стекленели стрекозиные крылья над прудом, взлетали в жар в синюю бездну дня, – туда, в голубой покой пустынь. Потным рукавом усердно размазывал на лице пыль распаренный сельчанин, тащась на колокольню раскачать медный язык колокола, пропотеть и поусердствовать во славу Божью. И еще, и еще клинькала в синюю бездну дня целебеевская колокольня; и юлили над ней, и писали, повизгивая, восьмерки стрижи.
[Again and again, into the dark blue abyss of the day, filled with hot, cruel brilliance, the Tselebeevo bell tower sent forth loud cries. Hither and thither in the air above it fidgeted the martins. Whitsunday, sultry with fragrance, strewed the bushes with light, pink dogroses. And heat stifled the chest; in the heat dragonfly wings were glassy over the pond, they flew up into the heat into the dark blue abyss of the day, there, into the blue peace of emptiness. With a sweaty sleeve a perspiring villager diligently spread dust over his face, dragging himself to the bell tower to shake loose the bronze tongue of the bell, to sweat through and show diligence for God’s glory. And again and again, into the dark blue abyss of the day, the Tselebeevo bell tower pealed forth, and above it fussed the martins, shrieking and inscribing figures of eight.]

Besides the obvious repetitions of phrases, there is a subtler repetition of perhaps the most important word of the novel, дух [dukh] ‘spirit,’ hidden in воздух [vozdukh] ‘air’ and душный [dushny] ‘sultry’ and душил [dushil] ‘stifled.’ And many words and phrases from this prelude are repeated at significant points throughout the novel. Bely had been writing “symphonies” that were narratives in verse [a broken-up lyrical prose, sometimes in numbered sentences]; in his first novel he turned to [a more normal-looking] prose but kept the arsenal of techniques of manipulating sounds and senses he had learned, to superb effect. As I say, it’s not an easy read, full of dialect, idiosyncratic usages, and made-up words like росянистые [rosyanistye] and зызыкнет [zyzyknet], but it’s well worth the effort. (And for the benefit of those of us with philological leanings, at one point characters are said to be making clever remarks about Wilamowitz-Moellendorff “and even Brugmann.”)

I’ll add a little about the real-life sources of the novel. In the years before the 1905 Revolution, Bryusov and Bely quarreled over the affections of the young poet Nina Petrovskaya, a woman whom Kristi A. Groberg, in her essay on Petrovskaya in the Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (pp. 500-02), calls a “Symbolist groupie” who “had affairs with Bal’mont, Belyi, Briusov, and Sergei Auslender in that order. In 1903-4, she was involved with Belyi, whom she saw as her spiritual salvation, the New Christ. When the romance faltered, she turned to Briusov.” She divorced her husband Sergei Sokolov in 1906 and tried to shoot Bely in 1907; the next year she moved to Paris, converted to Catholicism, and started calling herself “Renata” after the character (a witch) based on her in Bryusov’s novel based on “the stories Petrovskaia told Briusov about her fascination with Belyi,” The Fiery Angel, set in 16th-century Germany and full of mysticism and demonology. Her memoirs “treat the relationship with Briusov as the great event of her life and him as a man of spiritual depth, yet she describes it as a pact with the Devil.” Bely (who gave the novel a rather condescending review in the Symbolist journal Vesy) obviously read it attentively, and Groberg says The Silver Dove “can be read as his polemical answer to The Fiery Angel.”

I recently acquired a copy of Our Man in the Crimea: Commander Hugo Koehler and the Russian Civil War, a fascinating look at the final stage of the Civil War through the eyes of an unusually observant American naval officer. I bought it for the Russian material, of course, but before he gets there the book takes him from his youth (he was told at some point that he was the illegitimate son of Archduke Rudolf!) to Annapolis to his first mission abroad, up the Yangtze in the fall of 1911 (just in time to witness the Wuchang Uprising that began the Chinese Revolution), and after a stint with the Atlantic Fleet during World War I he turns up in defeated and resentful Germany, where in a letter (24 February 1919) written from Hamburg we find this piquant paragraph:

It is not difficult to get inaccurate impressions of the scarcity of food. I heard several of our officers and men mention they had seen dog meat and dog sausages for sale in shops at Hamburg and Bremerhaven. I insisted this was not possible, but they insisted they had seen such placards announcing dog meat for sale and had seen the sausages. I was finally led to a shop where the placard in question was triumphantly pointed out. The sign read “Kaninchen Wurst.” He knew that “kanine” meant dog and “wurst” meant sausage and thereby followed the deduction the sausages were of dog meat. Though this officer spoke some German, he apparently did not know that “Kaninchen” happens to be German for rabbit…

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C. Max Magee of The Millions has an annual tradition of asking people to talk about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year, and in previous years he had gotten into the flattering habit of beginning the series with my contribution; this year, alas, my habitual feckless procrastination combined with limited computer time (most of which had to be spent editing) meant that my contribution was both late and unwontedly rambling. At any rate, here it is; LH aficionados will have read longer discussions of most of the books here, but I would direct their attention to the last review, of The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America by Gary B. Nash. I haven’t posted about it here because there isn’t even a tenuous LH connection (though I did find an amusing misprint on page 380: “a Russian nobleman, Count Rosenberg, who had fled his country after a dual”), but it’s the best history book I’ve read in a long time, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the Revolution in anything other than the usual triumphalist terms.

Over at linguaphiles, ein_wunderkind asks: “What is the most interesting language you know of and why? I’m bored and need some reading material.” The mischievous Anatoly, from whom I got the link, answers “English” (“Just about the most weird-ass grammar out there, a vocabulary that reads like a Wal-Mart shopping list, and don’t even get me started on spelling, ‘cuz maaaaan!”), but there is discussion of the intricacies of languages like Navajo, Hebrew, and Tibetan (“This is how you can have, for instance, words that are spelled bka’ brgyud or ‘bras spungs and pronounced, respectively, [kacy] and [tʂɛpuŋ]”). Makes me want to start learning another language.