I’m finally working my way through Skaz
To get the obvious out of the way: yes, бурбон can mean ‘bourbon (whiskey),’ and that is the only definition given in English Wiktionary, but I guarantee you it did not mean that in 1880 Russia. What are the possibilities? In its earliest uses, the Russian word refers to the House of Bourbon (which is presumably the ultimate source of the whiskey name, though the details are unclear); the fact that the word is capitalized in all editions of the Chekhov story I can find might support this hypothesis, except that it makes no sense in context. No, the meaning is clearly that given in Russian Wiktionary: грубый и невежественный человек [rude and ignorant person] (so that the translation should read “he is an ignorant fellow who has no love for science). But where did this come from? Well, Dahl (or rather Baudouin de Courtenay, since the word is in brackets in the reprint of the 1903-09 edition I own) says “офицеръ, выслужившійся изъ нижнихъ чиновъ, изъ кантонистовъ и сдаточныхъ” [an officer who was promoted from the lower ranks, from the cantonists and conscripts], and Makaroff’s Dictionnaire russe-français complet (11th ed., 1908) defines it as “officier de fortune” [officer commissioned from the ranks] (see Charles J. Wrong, “The Officiers de Fortune in the French Infantry” [French Historical Studies 9.3 (Spring 1976): 400-431]), and the transition from this to the “ignorant person” sense is not surprising. The earliest relevant citation I can find in the Национальный корпус русского языка (National Corpus of the Russian Language) is from N.I. Lorer, Записки моего времени (1867): “К людям, подобным Скалозубу, носившим у нас название бурбонов, я не имел никогда симпатии” [I never had any sympathy for people like Skalozub, who we call burbony]. Skalozub is a character in Griboedov’s famous play «Горе от ума» [Woe from Wit], and you can get an idea of him from the image at the linked Wikipedia page. But why burbon? Alas, Vasmer doesn’t include the word in his etymological dictionary (presumably because it’s not in the first edition of Dahl), but perhaps some of my readers will have suggestions.
FWIW the wiki bit about the uncertain etymology of “Bourbon” in the whiskey sense suggests it may not have arisen until the 1850’s, but I dug a little bit into the google books corpus. The handful of pre-1840 uses were all spurious bad dates in the metadata, but there’s a genuine one at least as early as the 1843[?]-published* “Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana ‘Swamp Doctor,'” by Madison Tensas, M.D. (Apparently a pen name for Henry Clay Lewis, 1825-1850.) In a comical scene with some racial humor and dialect that may have aged badly, he is as a teenaged apprentice who has not yet gone to medical school trying to learn about the various medications his mentor has on hand. One jug he opens is labeled “Fowler’s Solution,” said to be efficacious for arsenic poisoning. However … “Had it not been for the label, bearing, in addition to the name, the fearful word ‘Poison,’ and the ominous skull and cross-bones, I would have sworn it was good old Bourbon whiskey.” [It then transpires that his mentor had deliberately mislabeled his whiskey to discourage theft.] But it is written as if no explanation is needed as to what “good old Bourbon whiskey” refers to.
*That’s what it says on the copyright page. Wikipedia thinks published later in the decade and perhaps not until 1850. I cannot resolve this discrepancy.
Based only on Googling “bourbon mercenaries” I see that Charles de Bourbon used mercenaries in an attack on Rome, who sacked the city and, apparently, ended the renaissance. So maybe a bourbon is a bit like a vandal?
There is a whole chapter entitled Бурбонъ with many army life details here, but no explanation of the origin of the label AFAICT
https://books.google.com/books?id=2Ui_p7bZ0A0C&pg=PA102&dq=%D0%91%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B1%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%8B&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjEjs7OmLyLAxXDCTQIHZoOCto4HhC7BXoECAcQCA#v=onepage&q=%D0%91%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B1%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%8B&f=false
@J. W. Brewer:
The OED’s first citation for “Bourbon” in the sense of whiskey is from 1846. The second is the one you gave, dated 1850.
For your puzzle, I agree that that edition at Google Books has “1843” clearly printed on the copyright page, but on page 27, it says “my being a swamp doctor in 1848”. I’d guess that an extremely careless printer read 1848 as 1843 and put that on the copyright page. (Not that I know anything about book-printing methods of the time, or any other time.)
@Jerry F.: Thanks! Here’s a post in which the noted lexicographic explorer Fred Shapiro beats the OED by eight years with an 1838 Cincinnati newspaper advertisement offering for sale barrels of “Old Bourbon Whiskey.”
https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2014-May/132344.html
From the Russian national corpus:
1.
3. Е. И. Костров. [Примечания к стихотворениям] (1779-1787)
Г. Гюберт сочинил трагедию «Бурбон», в которой он влагает в уста Байярду чрезвычайные мысли.
Joseph Joubert was not a playwright, was their another Joubert? If the character Bayard is the historic chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, this would be a curious link to the looting of Rome by his fellow soldiers under Charles VIII, mentioned by mkvf above.
2.
П. Д. Боборыкин. Жертва вечерняя (1868)
Олицетворенная солдатчина, «бурбон», как называл таких военных мой Николай, прыщавый, грязный, с рыжими бакенбардами, глупый, пошлый до крайности.
This shows the word was still considered military jargon and gives a description.
Perhaps Le Connétable de Bourbon, by comte de Guibert?
The “Old” in “Old Bourbon Whiskey” might be significant. The lands claimed in the olden Virginia charter had no western boundary, and the large then-thinly-populated area that is now eastern Kentucky was designated as Bourbon County, Virginia in the eighteenth century, until all the original thirteen states agreed to give up their western land claims in the 1880s.* There is still a much smaller Bourbon County, and when the historical Virginia county is referred to, it is commonly called “Old Bourbon County.” I don’t know whether that nomenclature was in use for eastern Kentucky in 1838, but it is certainly possible; Kentucky had been a state of its own for more than forty-five years at that point.
*The reorganization of the territory between the east coast states and the Mississippi River is often cited as one of the greatest accomplishments of the first federal government, under the Articles of Confederation, perhaps second only to the prosecution of the Revolutionary War. The cession was a particularly big political issue in Virginia, whose western territorial claims were by far the largest of any state’s, both in area and (European) population.
i’ve always understood “bourbon” as applied to whiskey in the way Brett laid it out, as a regional identifier that carries some stylistic connotations (like “scotch”).
for the military meaning, the mercenary connection makes some sense to me, but i was struck by “promoted from the lower ranks, from the cantonists and conscripts”, which seems to point to other possibilities. that seems like it could imply that the term originated among officers who, as aristocrats, considered themselves entitled to that position, in contrast to commoners promoted from below. if so, i wonder if it could be a reference to the bourbon kings of france’s status as members of not just a cadet branch of the royal line, but a cadet branch of the house of bourbon, that rose to the throne from if not exactly below at least distinctly from the side. and if louis-phillipe’s rise was understood (or referred to) in russia as that of the head of a further cadet branch of the bourbons as well, then his rule could have reinforced that sense of “pretender” in the mid-19th-century.
That makes a lot of sense.
FWIW, a few 19th-century American publications giving a scientific account of Bourbon whiskey (in terms of its typical alcohol content and the like) mention a Russian potation variously spelled as “dobry wutky” and “dobry wutkey.” The first word is presumably добрый and the second looks suspiciously related to “vodka” but I can’t figure out how. Is there some plausible booze-related Russian-or-other-Slavic word of the era that this might be a plausible Anglicized spelling of?
As a matter of American booze-labeling law, “bourbon” is a stylistic (i.e. ingredients and mode of production) term not a geographical-origin one (more precisely, no more specific a geographical-origin term than “somewhere in the U.S.”) but since the overwhelming majority of production has long taken place in Kentucky it has understandably taken on geographical connotations in the public mind.
That said, if you look at a map of Kentucky so ancient that Bourbon County has not yet been subdivided and is one of only four counties within what is not yet that state, most of the state’s bourbon production occurs outside the boundaries of the most capacious sense of “Old Bourbon County” – somewhat further west and/or southwest. But the footprint of distillieries may have been different early on, and/or stuff distilled elsewhere may have left Kentucky for more distant destinations via a port on the Ohio River that was in “Old Bourbon,” back before railroads had become a more efficient mode of long-distance booze distribution.
Another possible connection to the royal Bourbons is that they “learned nothing and forgot nothing”. (“No one has forgotten anything, nor learned anything,” Léopold de Brunet, Chevalier de Panat, in a letter of 1796, according to this site. I’d have written “or”, not “nor”.) I can imagine it being applied to someone who had learned nothing and maybe forgotten no misinformation.
Officers from the lower-class background had suffered plenty of abuse during their conscription-service or boarding school years which others may have wished them to forget
Г. Гюберт сочинил трагедию «Бурбон», в которой он влагает в уста Байярду чрезвычайные мысли.
Joseph Joubert was not a playwright, was their another Joubert?
Joubert would be Жуберт in Russian cyrillic transcription.
Perhaps Le Connétable de Bourbon, by comte de Guibert?
He’s normally Гибер in Russian (s. his Russian WP page), but maybe Kostrov misunderstood the pronunciation of Guibert. Гюберт would normally represent a French Hubert or Gubert.
The first word is presumably добрый and the second looks suspiciously related to “vodka” but I can’t figure out how.
It may be just Russian “vodka”, severely mangled. OTOH, dobryj mostly refers to moral qualities in contemporary Russian and one would use the normal word for “good”, khoroshiy, for the quality of a drink. But dobry is the usual word for “good” in Polish, and the drink is wódka [vutka], so that would be closer. And the form looks like someone mistook the genitive dobrej wódki “of vodka” in a construction like “a glass / bottle / barrel of good vodka” for the quotation form of the drink. Maybe that’s all just baseless speculation on my part.
@Dmitry Pruss:
That too, though in my limited experience of human beings, people promoted to the abusing class often show no resentment toward their abusers and soon start abusing members of their former class.
On the subject of promotion, since the letter-writer is an NCO, am I right in thinking that his brother the major is probably one of those very officers who rose from the ranks?
@JWB: yes, that’s the legal situation now, but i think you have the chronology reversed. i don’t think that calling whiskey “bourbon” meant anything but geography (and perhaps by extension stylistic elements understood to be connected to that geography) in the days when a federal proposal to tax whiskey could start an armed rebellion. and similarly, i don’t think that the geography in question has to do with official county lines – these are informal, vernacular designations. an example closer to home for me is “the genesee country” (more or less the same zone of western new york as “the burned over district”), which as a label precedes the establishment of genesee county and has only has a loose relationship to its (steadily shrinking) official borders.
This specific uryadnik signs the letter as an NCO (retired) of the Don Cossack Host and a nobleman. Don Cossacks had their specific rules and traditions, in which I am no authority, but I have to assume that neither the uryadnik nor his brother had to rise all the way from the ranks. Noblemen were only denied their traditional privilege of serving as officers regardless of their education levels 5 or 6 years earlier, during Alexander II Military Reform which started to roll out in 1874.
It was probably a part of the joke that someone served in the Army for many years and, despite noble class origins, ended up only an uryadnik in retirement… like how dumb could one be?
Thanks for clearing that up.
It was probably a part of the joke that someone served in the Army for many years and, despite noble class origins, ended up only an uryadnik in retirement
In light of this, on the origin of бурбон… From the entry in the Российский гуманитарный энциклопедический словарь :
So something to do with the purges of officers suspected of opposition to the new régime and consequent indiscriminate promotions of inexperienced men (including aristocrats with the right politics) handed out during the Bourbon Restoration? I would be interested to know more about Russian attitudes to events in France between 1814 and 1848.
As an aside… Vladimir Orel (2007) Russian Etymological Dictionary, vol. 1, has something completely different:
Orel says ‘id.’ (‘churl’), but I have not been able to find any philological treatment of this exact meaning being attributed to bourbon. Here is the entry in the Етимологічний словник української мови :
So for Orel and ЕСУМ, brutality and arrogance were the original central concepts, not coming up through the ranks. I wonder if any of that holds up when considered in the light of Russian attitudes towards Bourbon France (both before 1789 and after 1814) in the relevant time period—something about which I know nothing.
Misreading Guibert as “Gubert” will get you to Гюберт.
The doubled-up spelling with that extra й indicates a Baillard.
What Hans said.
Xerîb: Thanks as always for your spadework! That certainly clarifies some things, even if there’s no ultimate answer.
Russian attitudes to events in France between 1814 and 1848.
A related question is about the evolution of the noblemen’s entitlement to serve as officers.
TLDR; it fully started between 1808 and 1812 with Alexander I reforms of military education
Indeed, at the start, Peter I required all noblemen to start service as privates in the Guard.
Later on, the rule remained formally in place but in practice, the sons of nobility were assigned to the regiments in childhood, so that they would already be officers by the time they reach maturity.
Paul I banned this practice of nominal service of the children, but he also stipulated, in 1797, that young noblemen begin their service as NCOs rather than privates. They still had to serve as NCOs for 3 years before getting an officer’s rank.
Alexander I further modified the system in 1807, by allowing the young noblemen, in lieu of joining regiments as NCOs, to come to St. Petersburg for military education, after which they would be released as lieutenants. This schooling was fairly short, and the less well-off noble families received subsidies for moving their sons to the capital. Noblemen with formal school education would become officers even faster. The Czar justified it by the needs of Napoleonic Wars to incentivize more noblemen to choose military service. And indeed, it more than doubled the flow of new officers into the army in the first year. In 1812, the new system was ramped up & produced 10 times more officers than Pavel’s system ever could. Needless to say, their military education was so abbreviated that it became pretty much equivalent to the system Paul I abolished in 1797, with the sons of noble families getting an officer’s rank almost instantly and without much work or study or testing.
After Russia’s loss in Crimean War, Alexander II pushed for a military reform with substantial training requirements and a sizable trained reserve, but the nobility correctly feared loss of their instant-officer privileges. Because of the resistance of the noble class, it took nearly 20 years to push the Reform into law. Emperor’s last straw was France’s loss in the Franco-Prussian war, predetermined by Prussia’s ability to mobilize hundreds thousand of pre-trained troops in mere weeks.
I traced down the version of бурбон coming from a crop of officers promoted by the Restoration to a note by someone called I.D. Belov in Историческій Вѣстникъ for 1884. There was no sources given and the author concluded by the following caveat emptor “We conclude this note by a usual disclaimer: what we bought it for, dear reader, for the same [price] we are selling”. I would say that normally that should mean that Mr. Belov have “bought” it from somewhere, not just dreamed it up. In the same note there was also unattributed etymology of шаромыжник from cher ami, but it hardly has a reasonable alternative. The stories, though, of Russian officers being addressed thusly in Paris in 1814 out of either dire necessity to get some favors from them or because of great love of Parisians to the said officers are either totally made up or nothing more than folk tales.
Thanks for digging that up, D.O.!
For the curious, here is Belov’s account (OCR’ed from here, p. 808):
This Belov has a Wikipedia entry here, I think.
Этого не может быть, потому что этого не может быть никогда
Can’t fault the logic.
TIL where the phrase came from; it’s a common memetic comment these days but I had no idea it was that old.
A curious intersection…
Many glossaries of 19th-century French argot report bourbon ‘nez’ (an early example in a dictionary made by Francisque Michel from 1856 here)—the term makes reference to the grandiose noses characteristic of the Bourbon dynasty.
And the ultimate story of rapid promotion of the arrogant and unfit to high rank—статский советник, in fact—also involves a nose….
That aside, here is an interesting study of солдафон by V. V. Vinogradov that touches on бурбон in an attempt at the explanation of -фон.