A reader sent me a quote from a post at the blog Doomsday Machines investigating the origin of the phrase “will the survivors [of nuclear war] envy the dead?” It comes from a speech Khrushchev gave at a Soviet-Hungarian Friendship Meeting that was reprinted the next day in Pravda; the relevant bit goes:
I wonder if the authors of these assertions know that if all the nuclear warheads are detonated the earth’s atmosphere will be so contaminated that nobody can tell in what condition the survivors will be and whether they will not envy the dead. Yes, yes, comrades, that is how the question stands.
The blog post continues:
The exact, original Russian from the speech seems to be: “в каком состоянии будут оставшиеся в живых люди — не будут ли они завидовать мёртвым?” — literally, “of the conditions of the surviving people — won’t they envy the dead?” […]
Did Khrushchev get the phrase from [Herman Kahn’s 1960 book On Thermonuclear War]? I have no idea. I have seen it speculated that the Russian version of the phrase is more directly traced to a particular translation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, but tracing Russian origins of a phrase go beyond my ken.
My correspondent said “Naturally the last sentence triggered the thought, this is a perfect question for Language Hat.” He came to the right place, because although there are a number of Russian translations of Treasure Island, which was wildly popular in Europe as soon as it appeared (the first Russian version came out in 1886), I figured the place to look would be in the most popular Soviet translation, the 1935 one by Nikolai Chukovsky, Kornei’s son (he appears as a five-year-old in this LH post about his dad’s diary), and sure enough, I hit pay dirt — at the end of chapter 20 we find (bold added):
— Вы для меня вот как этот плевок! — крикнул он. — Через час я подогрею ваш старый блокгауз, как бочку рома. Смейтесь, разрази вас гром, смейтесь! Через час вы будете смеяться по-иному. А те из вас, кто останется в живых, позавидуют мертвым!
Stevenson’s original:
“There!” he cried. “That’s what I think of ye. Before an hour’s out, I’ll stove in your old block house like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thunder, laugh! Before an hour’s out, ye’ll laugh upon the other side. Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.”
A very satisfying rummage through literary-quote history; thanks, Duncan!
Now I’m idly curious about one feature of Stevenson’s original, viz., using “stove in” as I guess the infinitive (following auxiliary verb) as opposed to the standard “stave in,” of which “stove in” is standardly the simple past and one candidate for past participle.* Is that an authentic/attested archaism or dialect variation that might have come out of the mouth of an 18th-century piratical type, or is this Stevenson the late 19th-century author just manufacturing fake-rusticisms by muddling up principal parts in a way that actual rustics would not have done?
*”I’ve been kicked by the wind, robbed by the sleet / Had my head stove in, but I’m still on my feet.”
Good question. The OED has only “Past tense and participle staved; also (chiefly Nautical), 1700s–1800s stove,” but it’s basically unchanged from 1915, so there’s probably more variation out there for them as knows how to find it.
Actually, the OED lists a separate sense equal to stave. There are four cites, although two are actually from Treasure Island, including the one above. The earliest cite is from 1820, so after the book takes place; however, the entry is old, and a form primarily used in sailors’ argot could be in use for quite a while before being written down.
Ah, I missed that — thanks for turning it up.
The 1820 citation might be interesting, but dialogue by fictional characters in books set in times and places remote from where they were written seems hazardous as a source of lexicographic data.