languagehat.com

Christina Xu’s article for Logic about a feature of East Asian videos is interesting in its own right:

Bullet comments, or 弹幕 (“danmu”), are text-based user reactions superimposed onto online videos: a visual commentary track to which anyone can contribute. When a beloved character dies in a web series, a river of grieving kaomoji (╥﹏╥)—a kind of emoticon first popularized in Japan—washes over whatever happens next. A child’s overly honest response to a TV anchor’s question triggers a blizzard of different ways to signify laughter (2333, 哈哈哈哈). When the (Chinese) good guy punches out the (American) bad guy in 2017’s blockbuster Wolf Warrior 2, jingoistic cries of “Long live China!” erupt across the screen. Each comment is synchronized to an exact moment in the video, and will fly across the screen on cue on every subsequent replay. On particularly popular videos, they pile up so thick that they can cover the original entirely. The result is a viscerally social experience, like an opening night crowd at a movie theater that you can summon anytime. […]

When a Japanese site called Niconico invented the idea of writing comments directly on top of YouTube videos in 2006, it took less than a year for a clone of the platform to appear in China. In Japanese, the system was named 弹幕 (danmaku), or “bullet curtain,” after a subgenre of hardcore shoot-em-up games in which enemies fly in formation across the screen, like the famous arcade game Galaga on steroids. Both kinds of danmaku—the games and the comments—required their audience to process an overwhelming amount of visual stimulation at high speeds. In China, several sites seeking to clone the Niconico experience copied the feature, as well as the Japanese characters for the name, which are pronounced “danmu” in Chinese. Today, the most successful of these clones by far is Bilibili, a social video site that has become an entertainment staple for young people in China. […]

On top of trading witticisms, bullet commenters also play informal, emergent games with each other and with the content. Commenters will synchronize their comments to create a wall of text that shields future viewers from gruesome or scary shots, or create 五毛特效 (“fifty-cent special effects”) like populating a night sky full of ASCII stars. Other commenters spontaneously collaborate to generate subtitles in various languages—both earnest and facetious—as “the Eight-Nation Alliance Caption Club,” a wry reference to the international military coalition that invaded China following the Boxer Rebellion. If a character in a show holds up a sudoku puzzle for even a second, a bullet commenter will probably try to solve it.

The image at the top of the linked page shows an example of those “subtitles in various languages.” But what drove me to post is this bit of cultural background:

热闹 (rè nào) is hard to concisely translate into English with its personality intact. Literally meaning “heat and noise,” it describes an atmosphere of bustling conviviality: a balance point between hygge and lit. A night market sizzling with smells and chatter is re nao, as is a table-slapping game of mahjong after a big family meal. Re nao is as central to the Chinese vision of the good life as freedom is to America’s; it’s deep-rooted in a way that defies rationality.

For young Chinese people, bullet comments are a dose of re nao that fits better into their lives than the karaoke, mahjong, and alcohol-fueled banquets preferred by their elders.

On the one hand, I’m always suspicious of such generalizations; on the other, the general idea fits with what I experienced in Taiwan. What do people familiar with China and its culture have to say about rè nào?

Back in 2008 I posted about hats, quoting from Diana Crane’s The Social Meanings of Hats and T-shirts, where we read that “The bowler was invented in England in 1850 as an occupational hat for gamekeepers and hunters but was rapidly adopted by the upper class for sports”; what Crane inexplicably doesn’t mention is the origin of the term, which Nabokov explains in his invaluable notes for Anna Karenin(a):

In 1850, there appeared a hard hat with a low crown designed by William Bowler, an English hatter, and this was the original model of the bowler, or derby—its American name stemming from the fact that the Earl of Derby wore a gray bowler with a black band to the English races. It was generally adopted in the seventies.

As irritated as I sometimes get with the imperious aristo VVN, I deeply admire his insistence on getting details right (the OED, in an unrevised entry from 1887, gives an erroneous alternative derivation from the noun bowl, “quasi bowl-hat” [see comments below]) and his eagerness to share them. Here’s his thorough description of the train car in which Anna returns from Moscow to St. Petersburg:

Roughly speaking, two notions of night-traveling comfort were dividing the world in the last third of the century: the Pullman system in America, which favored curtained sections and which rushed sleeping passengers feet foremost to their destination; and the Mann system in Europe, which had them speed sidewise in compartments; but in 1872, a first-class car (euphemistically called sleeping-car by Tolstoy) of the night express between Moscow and Petersburg was a very primitive affair still wavering between a vague Pullman tendency and Colonel Mann’s “boudoir” scheme. It had a lateral corridor, it had water closets, it had stoves burning wood; but it also had open-end platforms which Tolstoy calls “porches” (krylechki), the vestibule housing not having yet been invented. Hence the snow driving in through the end doors when conductors and stove-tenders passed from car to car. Night accommodations were draughty sections, semi-partitioned off from the passage, and it is evident from Tolstoy’s description that six passengers shared one section (instead of the four in sleeping compartments of a later day). The six ladies in the “sleeping” section reclined in fauteuils, three facing three, with just enough space between opposite fauteuils to permit the extension of footrests. As late as 1892, Karl Baedeker speaks of first-class cars on that particular line as having fauteuils which can be transformed into beds at night but he gives no details of the metamorphosis, and anyway, in 1872, the simulacrum of full-length repose did not include any bedding. To comprehend certain important aspects of Anna’s night journey, the reader should clearly visualize the following arrangement: Tolstoy indiscriminately calls the plush seats in the section either “little divans” or “fauteuils”; and both terms are right since, on each side of the section, the divan was divided into three armchairs. Anna sits facing north, in the right-hand (south-east) window corner, and she can see the left-hand windows, across the passage. On her left she has her maid Annushka (who this time travels with her in the same section, and not second-class, as she had on her journey to Moscow) and on the other side, further west, there is a stout lady, who being closest to the passage on the left-hand side of the section, experiences the greatest discomfort from heat and cold. Directly opposite Anna, an old invalid lady is making the best she can of the sleeping arrangements; there are two other ladies in the seats opposite to Anna, and with these she exchanges a few words (p. 118).

It must have taken a tremendous amount of work to extract all that information from the sources available to him in those pre-internet days, and it is invaluable when reading the chapter; furthermore, he supplemented it with a diagram, which you can see here (scroll down). And just before that extended note, there’s a brief one on the bell system which is a delightful example of his playful prose:

The three Russian station bells had already become in the seventies a national institution. The first bell, a quarter of an hour before departure, introduced the idea of a journey to the would-be passenger’s mind; the second, ten minutes later, suggested the project might be realized; immediately after the third, the train whistled and glided away (p. 118).

It’s a crying shame he never completed the annotated edition of the novel he was planning; as it is, we have notes for only the first of the eight parts.

I was looking at Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature (and the more I read him, the less I can stand his sneering, bullying tone when he’s discussing writers he doesn’t like — I’m glad I didn’t have him as a teacher, since he’s not interested in letting you develop your own view, he wants to imprint you with his own) when I came across this:

I want to stress again the fact that Dostoevski was more of a playwright than a novelist. What his novels represent is a succession of scenes, of dialogues, of scenes where all the people are brought together—and with all the tricks of the theatre, as with the scène à faire, the unexpected visitor, the comedy relief, etc.

I wasn’t clear on what “scène à faire” meant, so I started investigating, and I found two crucially different explanations. The OED (updated June 2015) says:

Etymology: < French scène à faire, lit. ‘scene for action’ (1714 or earlier) < scène scene n. + à to + faire do (see fact n.).
Not fully naturalized in English.

  A scene in a play, opera, etc., made inevitable and indispensable by the progress of the action; the most important scene of the play, often the climax, which fulfils the expectation created by the plot. Also figurative.

1884 R. L. Stevenson in Longman’s Mag. Dec. 145 Even in the heroine the working of the passion is suppressed; and the great struggle, the true tragedy, the scène-à-faire, passes unseen behind the panels of a locked door.
1893 Manch. Guardian 24 Oct. 8/3 The subject of the ‘Dame aux Camellias’..has often been essayed, and the scène à faire of her confrontation..with the inexorable reality of things has been often and sometimes admirably composed.
1924 Amer. Mercury Dec. 439/1 If Washington, Lincoln and Lee have an appeal, it has its source in their great scènes à faire, the moments when they made great decisions, rewrote history, changed the map of the world.
1969 Listener 13 Feb. 220/2 Robert Hoffman acts badly, and the scène à faire in a wobbling rowing boat..is a triumph of embarrassment.
2001 P. C. Castagno New Playwriting Strategies ix. 129 The arranged sequence builds towards a climatic scène à faire, the major confrontational or ‘obligatory’ scene.

But that last citation introduces a new element, that of obligatoriness, and this is the feature emphasized in the Wikipedia article (which for some reason has a plural title):

Scène à faire (French for “scene to be made” or “scene that must be done”; plural: scènes à faire) is a scene in a book or film which is almost obligatory for a genre of its type. In the U.S. it also refers to a principle in copyright law in which certain elements of a creative work are held to be not protected when they are mandated by or customary to the genre.

That is the sole sense given by M-W (“obligatory scene : a plot element that is standard for a particular genre”), and most of the google hits for the phrase are legal in nature (“Scenes à Faire Law and Legal Definition,” etc.). While I appreciate the usefulness of the phrase to lawyers, it seems a pity that it’s driven out the subtler sense conveyed by the OED definition (and doubtless used by Nabokov), which pins it to the particular work of art (“made inevitable and indispensable by the progress of the action”) rather than to the genre (Wikipedia: “For example, a spy novel is expected to contain elements such as numbered Swiss bank accounts, a femme fatale, and various spy gadgets hidden in wristwatches, belts, shoes, and other personal effects”). Ah well, it’s not a phrase you see much anyway (unless, I guess, you’re a copyright lawyer).

Incidentally, if you’re wondering, as I was, about the 1969 Listener citation, it would appear that the actor thus castigated is this Robert Hoffman, and I’m guessing the movie is Diary of a Telephone Operator (“Pietro’s friend has bought a boat in order to sail around the world with Pietro”).

My wife asked me “Where does the word tax come from?” and all I could say was “Probably Latin.” So I looked it up, and it turns out that it’s “from Old French taxer, from Medieval Latin taxāre, from Latin, to touch, reproach, reckon, frequentative of tangere, to touch” (AHD). The OED (entry from 1910) provides the vital information that the original sense was “To estimate or determine the amount of (a tallage, fine, penalty, damages, etc.); to assess; rarely, to impose, levy (a tax); also, to settle the price or value of.” It didn’t develop the modern sense “To impose a tax upon; to subject to taxation” until the 14th century (c1330 R. Mannyng Chron. 247 Þe dettes þat men þam auht, þer stedes & þer wonyng, Wer taxed & bitauht to þe eschete of þe kyng).

And the beer expert zythophile, who occasionally comments here, provided a word history that truly astonished me at Wordorigins.org; I’ll quote his explanation there, since I can’t improve on it:

Spruce beer is made by boiling the leaves and branches of spruce trees – except that etymologically the link is not as simple as it looks. In both cases “spruce” originally meant “from Prussia”, “Spruce” being an early form of the English name of that country (Chaucer called it “Sprewse”). The original spruce beer, mentioned in English first around 1500, in a poem called Colyn Blowbolles Testament (“Spruce beer, and the beer of Hambur [Hamburg]/Whiche makyth oft tymes men to stambur”) was a thick, strong black brew flavoured with an extract from Picea abies, the tree called Fichte in German and gran in Norwegian. It was exported to other countries from Danzig, then the main port of Prussia, and just as it was known in English as “Spruce beer”, the beer was known in Danish as Pryssing, the old Danish/Swedish/Norwegian name for Prussia, which in the modern languages is Preussen, the same as it is in German. This thick black beer became very popular in the North of England, where local entrepreneurs made their own variety, frequently in establishments called the “Dantzic [sic] Brewery”, and the last brand of black beer, Mather’s, made in Leeds, disappeared only six years ago. Meanwhile English did not have its own word for Picea abies, which became known as the Spruce tree, the tree from Prussia, since, again that was where it came from. So originally, spruce beer being made from spruce trees was just a coincidence of names, since both were so called because they came from Prussia …

However, subsequently in North America, European explorers found two relatives of Picea abies, Picea rubens, which the English named the red spruce, and Picea mariana, which they called the black spruce. It was quickly found that beers made with extracts of either of these two trees were extremely good at keeping scurvy away (since they were rich in Vitamin C), and spruce beer was adopted by both the British Army and the Royal Navy: indeed, it has been argued that spruce beer helped the British defeat the French and conquer Canada, by keeping troops healthy who would otherwise have fallen ill with scurvy. By then, of course, the origins of the name “spruce” in a term for something from Prussia had been forgotten, and this beer was called “spruce beer” because it was made from spruce trees … (Jane Austen was a fan of North American-style spruce beer, a taste she probably got from her brothers in the Royal Navy, and the drink receives a couple of mentions in Emma.)

The OED (entry updated March 2019) agrees about the etymology: “< Spruce, Spruse, Sprws, Sprewse, etc. (late 14th cent. or earlier: see note), variant or alteration of Pruce, former name in English of Prussia (see pruce adj.).” The note at the end says:

The origin of the initial S– of the country name is unclear. It has been suggested that it may reflect misanalysis within English of a construction in a language spoken in the course of Hanseatic trade, such as Polish z Prus from Prussia or Middle High German das Priuzen Prussia, des Priuzens (genitive) of Prussia. However, the initial S– of the English name may simply be an excrescent phonological development.

Also, I can’t resist passing on this passage from Anand Giridharadas’s devastating NYT review of Jared Diamond’s latest book, Upheaval (“Then, before long, the first mistake caught my eye; soon, the 10th. Then graver ones. Errors, along with generalizations, blind spots and oversights, that called into question the choice to publish…”):

There is also a systemic issue here. The time has come for those of us who work in book-length nonfiction to insist that professional fact-checking become as inalienable from publishing as publicity, marketing and jacket design — and at the publisher’s expense rather than as a cost passed on to the author, who, understandably, will often choose to spend her money on health care.

Fun dayn moyl in gots oyern!

I’ve finally started Anna Karenina, certainly the greatest Russian novel I’ve never read even in translation (in fact, it would probably have won me a game of Humiliation), and I’m sure it will provide material for a number of posts. Right now I want to mention a very pleasing fact I learned doing some preparatory reading: Tolstoy got the initial inspiration for the novel from happening to see Pushkin’s fragment “Гости съезжались на дачу” [The guests were arriving at the dacha], which was in a volume his wife had left lying around: “Despite myself, not knowing where or what it would lead to, I imagined characters and events, which I developed, then naturally modified, and suddenly it all came together so well, so solidly, that it turned into a novel.” You can read a chunk of the fragment in translation here. I can see why he was captivated by it; Pushkin is such a great writer even his fragments are amazingly rich.

I have to say, I was a little afraid I would have a hard time getting into the novel, having read so much about it and knowing it was considered a candidate for Greatest Novel Ever, but I was caught up in it immediately, and could understand why Russians grabbed the installments as they appeared and talked about them eagerly. Even though Tolstoy was giving up on literature (he wanted to concentrate on helping the peasants) and came to hate working on it (he only finished it because he needed the money, having blown a large sum on what turned out to be unproductive land in Bashkiria), he just couldn’t help writing brilliantly. What a shame he resisted his calling so stubbornly!

Also, I soon came across the famed term образуется, which Marian Schwartz had the unfortunate inspiration of rendering “shapify”; see the links and discussion at this 2016 LH post.

From Stefan Collini’s LRB review (13 July 2017, pp. 25-27) of Ark of Civilisation: Refugee Scholars and Oxford University, 1930-45, edited by Sally Crawford, Katharina Ulmschneider and Jaś Elsner (Oxford UP, 2017):

One figure who merits, and receives, special attention is Eduard Fraenkel, described as ‘one of the great classical scholars of the 20th century’. By 1934, when he was 46, Fraenkel had already held chairs at three German universities. His family were typical of the stratum of prosperous, cultivated Jews who regarded themselves as Germans. As his son recalled, ‘he enjoyed his ham and bacon, and believed in no god … It was Hitler who made him and us feel Jewish.’ Forced to stop teaching, Fraenkel left for Britain in 1934, where his scholarly reputation eased his path. Maurice Bowra organised a whip-round of sympathetic Oxford classicists to provide some immediate financial aid, and both Corpus Christi and Christ Church extended him support; A.E. Housman seems to have spurred Trinity College, Cambridge to offer him a five-year fellowship. Not that Fraenkel had arrived as the typical penniless refugee. When he brought his family over from Freiburg later in 1934, they came ‘with two railway carriages of possessions, including Fraenkel’s violin and his wife’s Bechstein grand piano’. But what made his case exceptional was that he soon walked into one of the plum jobs in British academia: in December 1934 he was elected to the Corpus Chair of Latin at Oxford, his academic admirers in Britain having paid the costs of printing numerous testimonials in his support.

Fraenkel was, according to the editors of this volume, ‘possibly viewed as the greatest “catch” for Oxford of all its refugee academics in the arts and humanities’. He also provides an interesting test-case for assessing the intellectual impact of the German-Jewish émigrés. He remained in his Oxford chair till his retirement in 1953, after which he continued to run an advanced seminar almost until his death in 1970. Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s verdict was that Fraenkel’s influence ‘created an amalgam of German Altertumswissenschaft with English classical scholarship’, but his brand of European learning may not always have been welcomed by college tutors immersed in the task of taking their first and second-year undergraduates through their time-hallowed linguistic drills. Fraenkel attempted to import the Continental tradition of the professorial seminar for advanced students. His seminar on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon ran from autumn 1936 to spring 1942, progressing, as Christopher Stray calculates in his excellent essay on Fraenkel, at a rate of just under ten lines per hour. Various figures have recorded their recollections of this remarkable institution, which Jaś Elsner, one of the editors of this collection, calls ‘the most famous seminar in the history of Oxford classics’. (A less flattering account described it as ‘a circle of rabbits addressed by a stoat’.) Fraenkel seems to have completed his mammoth commentary on the play by 1946, and it was eventually published in three volumes by OUP in 1950. Elsner speaks of it as ‘perhaps the greatest of all commentaries on a Greek play or indeed in any area of classical scholarship’. Yet even Fraenkel, one of the indisputable success stories in Oxford’s engagement with refugee scholars, did not always find adaptation easy. Stray reports that when his great commentary was being reprinted in the early 1950s, Fraenkel complained to OUP that the umlauts in the names of the classical scholars Müller and Löfstedt were missing: ‘Investigation revealed that the staff who checked the bromide films used for the reprint had thought they were specks of dirt and removed them.’

Addendum. Anne Lonsdale wrote a letter in response to the review that begins:

Stefan Collini’s essay on scholars displaced by the Second World War mentions that Eduard Fraenkel’s seminar on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon was described in one account as ‘a circle of rabbits addressed by a stoat’ (LRB, 13 July). I was one of Professor Fraenkel’s ‘rabbits’ from my first week in Oxford. Unusually for Oxford in the 1950s, Fraenkel treated young women as equals, and savaged us equally, which was refreshing at a time when lectures often started with ‘Good morning, gentlemen.’ We progressed at a rate of between ten and twenty lines in two hours. Each session was the responsibility of a single student, who would establish each word of text from a variety of manuscripts and then its meaning with the help of any and every tool known to literature, history, art and scholarship. The bit one ‘did’ was engraved on the brain for months. When I joined, Fraenkel had finished Agamemnon and was working on the Cena Trimalchionis.

She goes on to talk about the current role of the Council for At-Risk Academics (Cara), of which she is chair, in helping academics from Iraq, Syria and elsewhere; you can read both the Collini piece and her full letter (in pdf format) here.

I’ll probably never read any more of Philip Terry than is contained in this Colin Burrow piece in the LRB (13 July 2017), but he sounds like a lot of fun:

If the world of experimental poetry makes you think of pseudy dudes in black 501s and Doc Martens, then I would prescribe a small daily dose of Philip Terry, for whom being experimental chiefly means being thoughtfully rebellious and funny. In his translation of Dante’s Inferno (2014), Terry is guided through the hell that is the University of Essex (where he is professor of creative writing) by the Beat poet Ted Berrigan. They pass throngs of venal departmental heads and VCs (‘“It’s you and your like who have put the ‘vice’/in ‘vice-chancellor’, you should be ashamed.”/And as I ranted on at him like this,//Like I do when I’m completely pissed’) into the depths where Bobby Sands (Terry’s equivalent of Ugolino) gnaws at the head of Margaret Thatcher. In 2010 Terry produced a postmodern rewrite of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, where notes by editors, bits from newspapers and Shakespeareish phrases are mashed up with Joysprick: ‘Not marcasite nor the gilded moolvees/Of the Prince of Darkness shall outlive this powerful rhythm and blues.’ Sonnet 50 (in which Shakespeare grumbles about his horse) becomes: ‘Don’t talk to me about Raymond Queneau,/I’ve had it up to here with French theory./Since Althusser died/I spend my days on eBay.’

The delights of eBay have presumably worn off, since Terry in his latest volume follows in the footsteps of Queneau, mathematician, poet and founder member of OuLiPo, by offering a collection of quennets [Quennets by Philip Terry (Carcanet, 144 pp., £12.99, July 2016, 978 1 78410 268 5)].​ The quennet – invented by Queneau in his Morale élémentaire of 1975, though Queneau himself wanted to call it the lipolepse – is an OuLiPean arbitrary form consisting of 15 lines. The first six lines are divided into three sets of two-line ‘stanzas’. The first line of each stanza is made up of three noun-plus-adjective phrases (‘Drowsy marshes Green swamps Spewy bogs’ is one from Terry’s own 2007 translation of Morale élémentaire). The second line is just one noun-plus-adjective phrase (‘Latent waters’). After the first three stanzas the classic quennet has a middle section of seven very thin lines, arranged as a central column, in which verbs are at last allowed, though seldom do they readily unfold the mystery of the poem: ‘Passing/the usual threshold/the wood drifts/beyond rot/You must climb/the slick/greasy pole.’ This is followed by a final stanza which follows the same pattern of noun-plus-adjective phrases as the opening lines. Rhymes and repetitions are optional. Much is left out and much has to be inferred by a reader – hence Queneau’s ‘lipolepse’, ‘laisser, prendre’, or roughly ‘leave ’n seize’. The form brings out the Li Po within OuLiPo: Queneau, much influenced by Eastern writing, suggested readers should hear an imaginary gong as they read the noun lines and a flute melody behind those containing verbs.

The quennet in its classic form invites you to dart around. You can read downwards through the columns of noun phrases and feel as though you are encountering something haikuesque. Or if you are an orthodox centrist in your reading practices you can read the whole thing across and down in the usual way. It also invites you to bring your own mental conjunctions to the party, and link the noun phrases around a grammatical structure or a place or an experience or a prior work. […]

I love Bobby Sands gnawing at the head of Margaret Thatcher, and “Not marcasite nor the gilded moolvees” — what an imagination, verbal and otherwise! Since you’re probably curious, “moolvee” is Hobson-Jobsonese for mulvī, a Hindi equivalent to mawlawi.

Steven Poole has a brief Guardian review of what sounds like it might be an interesting book, Four Words for Friend by Marek Kohn:

The author, a native Polish speaker, makes a powerful case for knowing more than one language as a life-enriching skill that may enlarge our sympathies in a world that wants to build walls. Though, as Kohn unsentimentally points out, linguistic differences can sometimes be erected as walls themselves. In Papua New Guinea, home to 800 languages, one village decided to change its word for “No” so as to be different from its neighbours.

We learn much here about the politics of languages in Latvia, India and the US, as well as the science of language acquisition in infancy and adulthood, and the pros and cons of growing up perfectly bilingual. Surprisingly, it was the expert consensus only half a century ago that this was harmful to intellectual development, but current research suggests the opposite.

Alas, it seems to be infected with Sapir-Whorf Syndrome (“different languages, because they carve up the world in different ways, cause speakers to perceive and think differently […]. Hence the book’s title: in Russian, one is obliged to specify one of four levels of closeness when referring to a friend”), but that’s a venial sin that the reader can correct for. Thanks, Lars!

The last chapter of Alison Smith’s For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being (see this post) includes a section titled “Evolving Sosloviia: The Hidden Stories of Ascription,” which begins:

In some ways, the most basic part of being a member of one of imperial Russia’s soslovie societies was having one’s name written down in the pages of a book. The act of listing names in a book or on a document had both evidentiary and symbolic importance. Ascription was the source of proof that an individual had certain rights and privileges.

This mildly confused me. Of course, having studied Latin with the redoubtable Brother Auger in high school, I knew that ascription was from Latin ad– ‘to’ + scrībere ‘to write’ and thus could theoretically mean ‘writing into/onto,’ but I’d never seen it used that way, only in the (originally metaphorical) sense of ‘attribution,’ and the dictionary (M-W, AHD) confirmed that that was its current meaning in English. The OED provided the interesting tidbit that it had once, in 1597, been used to mean “The action of adding in writing, subscription” (T. Morley Plaine & Easie Introd. Musicke Annot. sig. * All diminution is signified, either..by a number sette to the signe, or else by asscription of the Canon), but that has no relevance to a 21st-century book; since the 17th century it has meant “The action of setting to the credit of; attribution of origin or authorship” or “The action of ascribing, attributing, imputing, or declaring that something belongs to a person or thing; concrete the declaration thus made.” So what was going on here? Alison Smith has a fine command of English and seemed unlikely to make a blatant error.

Then it occurred to me that it might be a Russian-translation thing. If you look up ascription in an English-Russian dictionary you get приписывание, which is formed exactly the same way as the Latin: prefix при- plus the root of писать ‘to write.’ But the Russian verb приписывать/приписать can also be used in the literal sense of ‘to add (to something written),’ and I suspect that if you spend a lot of time using Russian archives that sense will leak over into your use of the English sort-of-equivalent. In essence, it’s another example of the “echelon” problem.

I’m almost halfway through Dostoevsky’s Дневник писателя [A Writer’s Diary], and I’ve gotten to the onslaught of mad apocalyptic prophecy I was dreading in this post — I have to skim whole chapters as he rants repetitiously on about wicked Westerners and Jews and the salvation the great Russian people will bring the world under the holy leadership of the tsar. It’s bizarre, a real Jekyll-and-Hyde thing, as Gary Saul Morson points out in his brilliant introduction to the first volume of the English translation: his original concept for the diary was imaginative and original, a mix of genres circling around a common theme (childhood, trials, etc.) for each monthly issue, and as long as he stuck to it the diary makes fascinating reading, but once the Balkan crisis erupts he forgets everything he knows about the vital importance of individual cases, the prosaic nature of life, the importance of the family, etc., and falls right into the cesspit of bloodthirsty patriotism (he actually celebrates a man who leaves his home village to fight the Turks, taking his little daughter with him and saying he’s sure he’ll find a good Christian family to look after her while he’s killing or being killed!).

But then comes the November 1876 issue, which is wholly given over to a novella, Кроткая, translated as A Gentle Creature (and I see it was made into a movie by Bresson, which I’ll have to watch someday). It’s a wonderful piece of writing; of course it’s got the melodramatic features Dostoevsky loved so much — eavesdropping on assignations, hidden revolvers brought out at dramatic moments, weeping, kissing the beloved’s feet, hysterical fits, etc. — but either I’ve gotten used to them or they’re used appropriately for the story, because I didn’t find myself wincing. It’s in the form of a confession/self-analysis by the husband of a suicide (suicide was much on Dostoevsky’s mind, and he had noted several recent examples from the news in earlier issues), and it’s done with penetrating psychological analysis. I recommend it unreservedly.

Here’s the thing, though. As good as it is, it’s basically turning a woman’s story into a man’s. He started from a news report of a young woman made desperate by poverty and inability to find work who threw herself out of a high window clutching an icon to her chest, which understandably haunted him… but instead of imagining himself into her head, he imagined himself into that of a man who married her (essentially the Underground Man, except that instead of staying in his basement he became a pawnbroker) and slowly drove her to desperation. I kept thinking of the failed promise of Netochka Nezvanova (see this post) — he was clearly capable of creating an individualized woman seen for her own sake rather than as an accessory to a man, but after his arrest and exile he seems to have lost interest in doing so. Almost all his later women are either pathetic young victims (as here) or elderly relatives. I’m glad about what he gave us, but I can’t help wishing for more; Russian literature had too many Tatyanas, Natashas, and gentle creatures, and it desperately needed more Netochkas.

[N.b.: I changed “All” to “Almost all” in the penultimate sentence because of D.O.’s correction of my overstatement in the first comment.]