1) Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti quotes Robert Burns (1759-1796), “A Dream,” lines 30-31:
But Facts are chiels that winna ding,
And downa be disputed.
He gives the glosses from The Canongate Burns: chiels ‘fellows,’ winna ding ‘will not be upset,’ and downa ‘cannot.’ But ding (pa.t. dang, pa.p. dung) means ‘knock, beat, strike; defeat, overcome; wear out, weary; beat, excel, get the better of,’ so I think “winna ding” is rather ‘won’t be defeated.’ And “downa” defeats me — it’s presumably a form of dae ‘do,’ but neither “downa” nor “douna” occurs in the list of forms at DSL. If we assume it belongs here:
(3) Negative: formed in the ordinary way or by the addition of the neg. particle -na, e.g. dinna, disna; dunna […]; düna […]; also daena, disnae, dinnae, dinny, dinnie, doesna, doesnae, doesny, doesni, den no’, döna, donna, din-not.
Then how does it work semantically? Shouldn’t it be ‘can’t be disputed’? Calling all Scotspersons!
2) Bunin’s 1943 story “Речной трактир,” “A Riverside Inn” in Hugh Aplin’s translation, opens with its protagonists doing some drinking at the famous Praga restaurant in Moscow (named Prague not because of any Czech connection but because it was fashionable to name fancy hotels and eateries after European capitals); the first paragraph ends:
Пообедали вместе, порядочно выпив водки и кахетинского, разговаривая о недавно созванной Государственной думе, спросили кофе. Доктор вынул старый серебряный портсигар, предложил мне свою асмоловскую “пушку” и, закуривая, сказал:
– Да, все Дума да Дума… Не выпить ли нам коньяку? Грустно что-то.
In Aplin’s version:
We had dinner together, knocking back a fair amount of vodka and Kakhetian wine and talking about the recently convened State Duma, then asked for coffee. The doctor took out an old silver cigarette case, offered me his Asmolov “cannon”* and, lighting up, said:
“Yes, it’s the Duma this, the Duma that… Shall we have some brandy? I’m feeling a bit sad.”
(The mention of “the recently convened State Duma” suggests we are in 1906 or 1907.) The footnote says:
Asmolov “cannon”: Asmolov and Co. were manufacturers of tobacco products and accessories.
Which is all well and good, but Asmolov is easy to identify (Russian Wikipedia); what the hell does пушка ‘gun, cannon’ mean here? I can’t find any relevant (tobacco-related) sense in any of my references.
3) Not difficult so much as amusing and interesting: I was watching Eric Rohmer’s L’Amour, l’après-midi (Love in the Afternoon; Chloe in the Afternoon) when the annoying young woman attempting to seduce the happily married Frédéric (she’s played by Zouzou, whose other claim to fame is that she had a fling with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones) says that she’s got a job at a new restaurant called L’Olibrius. Naturally I was curious about the name; it turns out that olibrius is a French slang term meaning, according to Wiktionary, ‘kook, weirdo, nutter,’ and according to my Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French by René James Hérail and Edwin A. Lovatt means ‘brash and breezy show-off, pompous extrovert.’ Hérail and Lovatt say “It would appear that Olibrius, a governor of the Gauls around 300 A.D., gained eponymous fame for his erratic behaviour”; the TLFi, which defines it as “Homme sot et prétentieux, importun par son comportement bizarre et ridicule,” says:
De Olybrius, nom de divers personnages de l’empire romain, notamment d’un empereur d’Occident porté au pouvoir en 472 par le militaire Ricimer, allié des barbares, et, selon la légende répandue par la litt. hagiographique du Moy. Âge (cf. 1130-40, Wace, Ste Marguerite, éd. E. A. Francis, 85: Olimbrius), d’un gouverneur d’Antioche persécuteur de sainte Marguerite, puis sur ce modèle d’un gouverneur des Gaules qui aurait fait mourir sainte Reine. De là l’image d’un homme bravache et cruel.
I hope I can remember it if an appropriate occasion to use it ever arises.
Dunno about Asmolov, but cannon-styled lighters were popular for a while back when. Before my time, but popular enough that I’d heard of them. Looking up “cannon lighter” brings up a bunch of old ones offered for sale.
Ah, that must be it — thanks very much!
I have to say, that’s the one I had least hope of getting an answer for.
The Concise Scots Dictionary says that dow is a variant of dae, in use 16-e19.
‘Upset’ can mean ‘knocked over’, metaphorically or otherwise, so you might just be saying the same thing in different ways on that one.
The DSL on dow
I think it’s that rather than ‘dae’, although the meaning here seems to be more ‘have the strength not to be defeated’ than ‘not have the strength’.
Is this a relative of English ‘doughty’?
‘Upset’ can mean ‘knocked over’, metaphorically or otherwise
I thought of that, but why use such an ambiguous word? Once you know what it’s intended to mean, sure, it makes sense, but why not use a clearer one?
Because the person who wrote it knew what they meant, I suppose.
https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/dow_v1_n1
Dow is a strong verb. This looks like O.E. dugan with a similar meaning.
https://bosworthtoller.com/8092
However I don’t know if the Northumbrian cognate of O.E. dugan would give Scots dow. Maybe N.G knows this.
Canon lighter doesn’t fit the context. It was oribsbly a sigar. Sigars do resemble cannons in a way.
The DSL on dow
I think it’s that rather than ‘dae’
Ah, so it’s like “I think o’ things that I downa weel forget” (1928 A. Gray Gossip 31). That makes sense.
Probably “Asmolov’s cannons” are not cigars (sorry for creative spelling in a previous comment), but papiroses. I cannot find specifically Asmolov’s type, but there are several others.
If the doctor was offering a cigar or papirosa, would the author still have said that he offered “his cannon”, “свою асмоловскую ‘пушку’”?
On the other hand, did Asmolov sell lighters?
would the author still have said that he offered “his cannon”, “свою асмоловскую ‘пушку’”
I don’t see why not. It seems that a portable cigarette lighter wasn’t even invented at the time.
Because you offer someone a cigarette (out of the cigarette case mentioned), not your cigarette. No?
The Zippo was invented in 1932, 11 years before the story.
The Zippo was invented in 1932, 11 years before the story.
OK, but the story is set when there was a State Duma, that is before 1918 and possibly at the time of the First Duma, about 1906.
Because you offer someone a cigarette (out of the cigarette case mentioned), not your cigarette. No?
Not really. Especially if the speaker wants to emphasize that it was a specific type or brand. In modern Russian “offer one’s cigarette” means to offer a cigarette that the person is already smoking, but “offer one’s ” can mean that the offer is of the cigarette of a superior or at least distinctive quality. In any case, I wouldn’t trust my own intuition on these shades of meaning. And you shouldn’t too.
Well, I would trust yours more than my own, since I don’t know Russian and I haven’t read Bunin.
It seems a type of cigarette is meant; scroll down to the first image.
That solves it!
(The cannon novelty lighter was a nice thought, while it lasted.)
пушка
What an interesting topic! The sides of the whole pack in the image linked to by Hans can be seen here (I hope these pics stick around for a while).
There is an earlier 1899(?) advertising image here from Otto Dempke and Co. I hope this helps someone in figuring out just what defines a пушка and how the term originated. I don’t have any more time to look into this question at the moment.
Looking at the first image from Otto Dempke and Co., I wonder if the notion of ‘cannon’ comes from the appearance of the sleeve, with the tipping paper like a cannon barrel with sectioned by its reinforcement rings? Or is it from the manufacturing process by tamping? Or both? One of my housemates uses a manual cigarette injector to inject empty premade paper sleeves with good Turkish tobacco that he buys in the bazaar, making one cigarette at a time. The operation of this nifty device might remind one of the tamping of a cannon or perhaps even more of the recoil of a cannon firing. The advertising image from Otto Dempke and Co. seems to show Ottoman artillerymen. Is there some reference to wars between the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire, and the availability of good tobacco grown in the Balkans?
I was interested to find this from the opening paragraph of V. Shalamov, ‘Вечерняя молитва’:
Great find by Hans. So if both Dukat and Miller produced „Pushki“ it must have been a type of papiros. Still, the Asmolov papirosy look like they were a higher end brand, did they also produce a „pushka“ or did Bunin misremember?
Does anyone know if Bunin was actually a smoker?
It seems a type of cigarette is meant; scroll down to the first image.
What a great find! You get the coveted Languagehat Researcher of the Week award, and I have annotated my Bunin accordingly.
About thirty years ago, I saw a television show (maybe an episode of Law & Order involving the Russian mob) in which two American characters were talking about their shared love of Russia and Russian culture and lamenting the political and economic chaos of the 1990s. One of them mentions her father’s old Russian friends smoking cigarettes with cardboard filters. And now I finally know how those worked!
So it should probably be offered me his Asmolov “Cannon”, since in English brand names are capitalised as a rule.
Quite so.
Although we have a solution, I think that an earlier criticism of an earlier hypothesis may not have been as strong as presented. Zippo was not the first entrant to the tobacco-lighting business, FWIW. The internet asserts that the Ronson Wonderlite was a recognizable early version of the modern cigarette-or-cigar lighter and was on the market by 1913. Ronson also had a well-regarded Pist-O-Liter they sold around the same time (shaped like a pistol, so getting closer to a cannon), but that generated a shower of sparks without (because it did not have its own fuel source) a steady flame, so it was presumably not suited for the tobacco use case.
I don’t know when this new technology reached the smokers of Russia and there may have been a lag. Bunin was presumably himself old enough to remember the lighterless world quite well, but a younger writer writing a story in 1943 set three decades or whatever previously could have easily introduced a slight anachronism.
The Ottoman-themed images on old Russian tobacco products were a legacy of the Karaim domination of the industry. The Karaim capitalized on their Turkish links…
Пушки that Hans found (I looked at them too) are not quite the thing that in Bunin’s story. All references to them are after the revolutions of 1917. If you looked at the artwork on the pack, it is a clear modernism/futurism. I highly doubt that before the Bolshevick revolution merchants put artwork of this type on they products. But after the revolution, it was a common thing.
I found at least two merchants who produced cigarettes Пушка in 1900s, but not specifically Asmolov. Maybe Asmolov’s tobacco was used in someone else’s cigarettes?
Probably Xerib is right and those cigarettes were self-filled with Asmolov’s tobacco. That’s why Bunin writes “пушка” with lower case. The only difficulty — I cannot find пушка as a generic term.
I was separately struck by the exotic sound of “Kakhetian wine,” only to learn upon googling that I’ve almost certainly drunk some myself, as Kakheti turns out to be the primary wine-producing region of Georgia. Perhaps something I’d previously been told but which had failed to register. So in context it’s no more exotic than saying “Burgundy* wine” rather than “French wine.”
*You can find uses of the phrase “Burgundian wine” but that trails the usual name by several orders of magnitude.
All references to them are after the revolutions of 1917.
I guess you missed the 1899 image from Otto Dempke and Co. that Xerîb linked.
Old Scottish joke:
What’s the difference between Frank Sinatra and Walt Disney? Frank sings and Walt disnae.
I saw that one. It’s not Asmolov.
Oh, you were just talking about Asmolov. Yeah, Bunin might have made that up.
Re Bunin’s smoking, there is a book “Bunin bez glantsa” by Pavel Evgen’evich Fokin.
https://www.litres.ru/book/lada-syrovatko/bunin-bez-glyanca-10777351/chitat-onlayn/
(This is copyrighted material).
The artist Tatyana Dmitrievna Muravyova-Loginova, a personal friend, noticed his pronounced smoking habit:
—
Когда И. А., всегда куря и сам увлекаясь, что-то рассказывал, то было необычайно интересно следить за сменой выражений его «многоликого» лица.
When Ivan Alekseevich [she would not have said “I.A”, I think], always smoking and in full flight, recounted something, it was especially [or “unusually”] interesting to watch the changing expressions of his multifaceted [lit. “multifaced”] face.
—
There are other quotes where she says that he was a chainsmoker ( kuril bezpererivo) and that at his last public speaking appearance in 1947 he was coughing and evidently suffering from emphysema.