At Gasan Guseinov’s site I found a poem by Fyodor Sologub (see these LH posts from April: 1, 2) that I like very much; it’s not a great poem, but it’s warm and humane, with a sentiment close to my heart. The Russian (“Разрушать гнезда не надо”) is at that Guseinov link, and here’s my hasty and unpoetic translation:
Don’t destroy a nest,
Don’t disperse a herd;
To beat, cut, trample, burn
Is an evil enemy’s deed.
Whoever has glowed with love’s dawn
Tries his hardest to preserve
All that is gladdened by life’s gleam,
All that listens to God’s speech.
Don’t sully with human lies
Anything living by God’s word;
Devote your days to work.
Despite the earth’s vexations
Make a flowering garden
Of naked Golodai Island.
On the humble Russian rye
Create a universal church.
We don’t need destruction.
We are all God’s herd,
Each of us good in ourselves.
What bold person will bind our hands?
Who will tell us with confidence
What is true in us, what’s a lie?
In the tents of the garden we make
We will find the truth in ourselves.May 20, 1918
The linguistic tidbit is in the name of Golodai Island, a part of Saint Petersburg known since 1926 as Dekabristov Island; as that Wikipedia article says, the old name is “possibly a corruption of a British merchant name Halliday,” changed to sound like the Russian word голод [golod] ‘hunger’ (you can see more details at the Russian article).
The question which interested me was what Guseinov meant by his prefatory phrase “Да, я агностик, но я и анагност” / Yes, I am agnostic, but I am also an anagnost. Apparently, anagnost means “lector, reader”, the most famous person with that name was probably Theodorus Anagnost or maybe John Anagnost. Also anagnost was a position of a reader in Byzantine church and as such is borrowed into Russian church vocab where it is used alternately with чтец/reader. Ok, anyone can tell me in what sense Mssr. Guseinov is “anagnost”? Is it just a funny wordplay?
I’m blown away. I stumbled onto this website regarding a post about Japanese etymology circa 2005, and it seems you’ve been posting more or less daily for the past seventeen (or more) years! That’s amazing!
I also noticed “Anagnost” on that page. I thought it was just clever wordplay. Looked up the origin of the word. ἀναγνώστης – apparently originally a category of slave who would read to wealthy Romans while they ate or socialized.
OED (entry from 1884):
@languagehat,
The definition related to the Roman slave reader seems to be only in the Russian internet – the only reference in English to “anagostes”(misspelled) I could find was in the Baton Rouge Tri-Weekly Gazette and Comet, Sept 26,1865 and the same paragraph in the Welsh newspaper The Rhyl Advertiser, from 1880. Not sure why this is.
“The grave Roman had his reader (anagnostes), generally a highly educated and accomplished slave, who had been formed, by an expensive training in…”
This may be another allusion to the building of the Temple on a foundation of grain.
I’ll repeat what I said there: Thanks, that would never have occurred to me!
I do like the “humble Russian rye” couplet except of course to the extent it reminds me that whatever their other virtues might be you can’t expect the Russians to know how to make proper rye whiskey. I did once in the pre-pandemic days contribute a bottle of Old Overholt to add some ethnic diversity to the various bottles of ouzo and chacha and home-infused vodka and suchlike Old Country tipples gathered for my Orthodox parish’s Easter feast.
Separately, I am amused by this sentence in the wikipedia bio of Sologub: “He was the first writer to introduce the morbid, pessimistic elements characteristic of European fin de siècle literature and philosophy into Russian prose.” Was traditional Russian culture (literary or otherwise) as of the 1890’s really so completely devoid of morbid and pessimistic elements that they had to be imported from the decadent West?
During the siege of Leningrad there was a dark pun on the island name:
– Как жизнь?
– Как трамвай N5. Поголодаю, поголодаю — и на Волково [кладбище].
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Санкт-петербургский_трамвай#Санкт-петербургский_трамвай_в_фольклоре
The tram route number changes in different versions of the story.
To translate:
“How’s life?”
“Like the #5 tram: hunger, hunger, and off to Volkovo [cemetery].”
“We are all God’s herd….”
lest we forget, Some believe they have exceptional dispensation.
Evidently you do.
There is a joke about a recently deceased Irish Catholic who is given a tour of heaven by St. Peter. At the end of the tour, she is taken to a 100 ft. wall. When asked the reason, she is told “God had to put it up for the Presbyterians. They think they are the only ones here.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M0zIv2I37UU
the Russian word голод [golod] ‘hunger’
It struck me tha this could be a cognate of a Germanic *gald behind Da. gold “barren”, Sw. gall “sterile”, and maybe Eng. gelding. But apparently not. Bjorvand & Lindeman says that the Germanic word is an internal Germanic formation *ga-aldá- “out-bred”.
Vasmer says it’s from Proto-Slavic *goldъ.
I suppose that could still be a borrowing from Germanic.
He says it’s related to CSl. жльдѣти; here’s the full entry.
But that can’t be regular. One of them has to be unrelated or a borrowing.
And he also says “ст.-слав. гладъ”.
Ah, so not a Germanic borrowing. I wonder about the opposite direction, though; could this be another Norse borrowing from Slavic?
Gelding can’t be native in English anyway, seeing as it begins with g and not with y. And should contraction of *ga-a- really result in a short vowel?
Totally regular: one in o-grade, the other in zero-grade (*gl- > *gil- > жьл- ~ жль).
J.W. Brewer: “I am amused by this sentence in the wikipedia bio of Sologub: ‘He was the first writer to introduce the morbid, pessimistic elements characteristic of European fin de siècle literature and philosophy into Russian prose.'”
Some Wikipedia articles are made of lengthy quotes from less than authoritative sources. Googling shows, however, that literary scholars are still arguing over the idea that Huysmans was a major influence on Sologub. Some say the early drafts of The Petty Demon were Zolaesque while the finished novel owes much both to Huysmans and Zola. Apparently some scenes in The Petty Demon have parallels in À rebours and Nana.
It’s also well known that Sologub was fond of Verlaine and translated him with some success. He would produce a lot of translations from various poets later on but his interest in Verlaine goes back to the 1880s, early enough to be formative.
David M.: Ah, so not a Germanic borrowing. I wonder about the opposite direction, though; could this be another Norse borrowing from Slavic?
I don’t think the semantics fit for a borrowing in that direction. The Germanic words center around “barren, sterile” and maybe “castrated”. More about the latter:
Gelding can’t be native in English anyway, seeing as it begins with g and not with y. And should contraction of *ga-a- really result in a short vowel?
B&L cite a number of forms in several languages, but end up going with OHG gialta “sterile, not pregnant (of cow)”,seeing gi- as a reinstated prefix. They quote other examples where the prefix was shortened in NG without leaving any vowel length, e.g. granne “neighbour” and gjøre “do, make”. Eng. gelding was borrowed from ON, formed from the derived j-verb meaning “sterilize (of males)”. The reason I said “maybe” is that words like galte “castrated male pig” are seen as unrelated.
Totally regular: one in o-grade, the other in zero-grade (*gl- > *gil- > жьл- ~ жль).
Yes, of course. I didn’t say it clearly, but I meant in relation to the Indo-Iranian words with g, which makes me even wronger. So I went straight to bed…
@Alex K..: I don’t have any problem with the notion that Sologub was the first Russian writer to be heavily/overtly influenced by e.g. Huysmans, just with the notion that there was no prior tendency toward morbidity and/or pessimism to be found anywhere in the Russian literary scene. Of course, I’m not convinced that morbidity and pessimism are the best ways to characterize what made Huysmans innovative compared to prior writers in his own langauge either.
Yes, that was a badly written sentence (not a shock at Wikipedia).
And now I’m wondering when it was that Russian literature started to be notable for “morbid and pessimistic elements”; I’d say that stuff started to be noticeable in the 1850s, with Turgenev’s suffering-peasant stories and grim plays by Pisemsky and Ostrovsky, but didn’t take over till the 1860s, when it’s suddenly hard to find anything that avoids grimness.
morbid, pessimistic elements characteristic of European fin de siècle literature and philosophy
I guess, fin de siècle does a lot of work here. Of course, Russian literature had a lot of pessimism and morbidity from early on. Radischev, Herzen, Chaadeaev. But here it says specifically about philosophical pessimism, not social one. If anything, all those Onegins and Pechorins who cannot find their place in the world are closer to the mark. But P. and L. do not dwell upon pessimism and morbidity. Luckily for us.
D.O. makes an important distinction: there’s a great gap between Laxness-like everything-is-crap miserabilism and there’s-something-fundamentally-wrong-with-reality stuff like À rebours. Decadence and misery are quite different things.
The Importance of Being Earnest has a perfectly good claim to being fin de siècle, whereas New Grub Street is just miserable.
What D.O. and David Eddyshaw said. Pre-decadent grimness is attendant to social criticism. Turgenev’s peasants are miserable because they are serfs oppressed by their owners. The solution is to set them free – serfdom gets abolished – peasants are still unhappy – the solution is land reform, or communal ownership, or universal education. Things look very bad, especially if narrated by a depressive like Gleb Uspensky, but they aren’t hopeless.
To some degree, Sologub was an heir to that tradition in his prose fiction and politics. But the pessimism in much of his lyrical poetry is strictly a matter of personal worldview. Consider this poem, for instance:
Impressions are random;
Knowledge is false;
To penetrate holy mysteries
Is impossible.
Humans, walls, paved streets,
Chariots –
All are tiresome and wicked
Fictions.
To be with them is to dissemble
And to lurk,
But the heart doesn’t want to believe
And to pray.
Or consider the epigraph to The Petty Demon (which brought him fame and money; he owed his high status in the literary world to his poetry): “I wanted to burn her, the evil sorceress.” It comes from one of his own poems:
I wanted to burn her, the evil sorceress,
But she found accursed words:
I saw her again, alive –
Her head was all in flame and sparks.
And so she spoke: “I did not burn away –
The fire has restored my beauty.
The body, nourished by the fire,
I’ll carry away from the bonfire to enchantment.
Running over, the flame is going out in the folds
Of my magical clothing.
You are insane! In my riddles
You will not find your hopes.”
Gelding is directly < ON geldingr.