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A correspondent writes: “In the Russian table of ranks you linked to, is Actual in eg. Actual privy councillor a mistranslation? It seems very odd.” I’ve wondered about that oddness myself — it’s not a mistranslation, in the sense that Russian Действительный and German Wirklicher both mean ‘actual,’ but how did that term arise? Anybody know the history of these titles? The OED entry for actual (updated November 2010) is no help; it gives no senses that are obviously appropriate here.

I’m now reading Dostoevsky’s Двойник (The Double), his second published work, which came out in late 1846 after the extraordinary success of his first, Poor Folk (discussed at LH here and here), had turned his head and inspired jealous colleagues like Turgenev to mock him unmercifully; I’m sure I’ll have more to say when I’ve finished it, but for the moment I’ll just note that the use of language is wonderful and frequently hilarious, and the paranoid main character, Golyadkin, may be modeled on Dostoevsky’s friend Butkov, who I’ve been writing about lately — besides the similarities in psychology and social position, they share the same given name and patronymic, Yakov Petrovich. But at the moment I want to post about some colloquial phrases that seem to have given translators some trouble.

As Golyadkin is pouring out his troubles to the irritated and confused Doctor Rutenspitz, he mentions that some people “умеют этак иногда поднести коку с соком” — they know how to present someone with koka s sokom. Now, кока с соком is literally ‘egg with juice’ (кока is a children’s word for ‘egg’), but it is, or was, a colloquial expression for ‘abundance, riches’; it’s not very common (is it still used at all? the last citation in the Национальный корпус русского языка is from 1920), but it’s not clear whether the doctor’s response (“Что? что поднести?” — “What? present what?”) means he doesn’t know the idiom or is simply overwhelmed by Golyadkin’s flood of non sequiturs (he responds with similar confusion to much of what Golyadkin says). Golyadkin reponds impatiently, “Коку с соком, Крестьян Иванович; это пословица русская” (Koka s sokom, Krestyan Ivanovich; it’s a Russian saying), which isn’t much help to the floundering doctor. But how to translate it? Constance Garnett has “they sometimes manage to serve you up a fine egg in gravy,” which, OK, that’s literally pretty much what the Russian says and conveys the general sense, but I’m not sure it’s ideal. The overhyped Pevear-Volokhonsky duo have “a cock with a sock,” which is so ridiculous I can’t even imagine what they were thinking. But let’s move on.

Shortly afterwards, Golyadkin describes how an acquaintance congratulated someone on having attained the rank of collegiate assessor, the eighth rung on the Table of Ranks which ruled Russian official life, and an important one worthy of celebration because it conferred nobility (hereditary until 1845, when Nicholas I reduced it to lifetime nobility, with hereditary nobility beginning at the fifth rank, state councilor). Golyadkin is a titular councilor, the ninth rank, so he himself is of course longing for such a promotion. He quotes the acquaintance as saying “И тем более рад, что нынче, как всему свету известно, вывелись бабушки, которые ворожат”: “and I’m even more pleased because now…” now what? There’s the rub. The Russian literally says “grandmothers who tell fortunes vyvelis’,” the verb meaning either ‘go out of use, disappear, become extinct’ or ‘be hatched.’ Garnett apparently chooses the second sense (“all the world knows that there are old women nowadays who tell fortunes”), P&V the first (“as all the world knows, there are no more little grannies telling fortunes”). But what both of them ignore is that there is a phrase (ему) бабушка ворожит ‘(he) holds good cards’ or ‘has a friend in court,’ which it seems to me must be intended here, because grannies telling fortunes, whether they exist or have gone extinct, are completely irrelevant, whereas “I’m even more pleased because now you have friends in high places” makes perfect sense in context. I know Golyadkin is insane, but that doesn’t mean everything he says is random babbling.

But there’s a third phrase that I myself can’t make head nor tail of. Golyadkin says “Да тут, чтоб уж разом двух воробьев одним камнем убить, — как срезал молодца-то на бабушках”: “But now, to kill two birds with one stone, as…” As what? Garnett has “But, to kill two birds with one stone, as I twitted our young gentleman with the old women”; P&V have “And here, to kill two birds with one stone — once I’ve cut the lad down with the little grannies,” and neither of them makes any sense at all (furthermore, typically for them, P&V translate тут by its literal equivalent “here” rather than the contextually appropriate “now”); surely they are missing some idiom or reference, but I don’t have any idea what it might be. Anybody know?

Angela Brintlinger posts at NYU Jordan Center News about the traditional prudishness of Russian high/literary culture and how it’s been eaten away since perestroika by writers like Viktor Erofeev and Eduard Limonov, and about one aspect of the alarming new “bloggers law” (thanks for the link, George!):

All that is about to end. As reported this week, Putin’s new “bloggers law”—which goes into effect on August 1—includes a section on profanity. Four “vulgar words” will no longer be permitted. The New York Times explains: “(The words, not mentioned in the law either, are crude terms for male and female genitalia, sex and a prostitute.)”[2]

Really? We’re going back to х**, п***а, е****, and б***?

In other words, they’re banning the Big Four: хуй ‘cock, prick,’ пизда ‘cunt,’ ебать ‘fuck,’ and блядь ‘whore’ (but functionally equivalent to ‘fuck’ in that it can be inserted anywhere in a sentence just to add an extra helping of profanity). This is obviously far from the worst thing in the law or in what’s going on these days in Russia, but even though having a finger cut off isn’t as bad as having your head cut off, you still don’t want to have a finger cut off. I just wish she hadn’t felt the need to add the prissy caveat “I am no fan of profanity. The great and powerful Russian language, as Turgenev had it, has made a lasting impact on world culture even without those nasty words…” Fuck that shit, lady. Profanity is an inherent part of the великий и могучий, as it is of any proper language, and there’s no need to hold it at arm’s length when you’re going to the trouble of deploring its banning.

The Most Common Language In Each US State—Besides English And Spanish: the title is pretty self-explanatory. In Arizona and New Mexico, it’s Navajo, which is unsurprising. In California, Nevada, and Hawaii, it’s Tagalog, which surprised me. In large swaths of the Midwest, it’s German. And in Oregon, it’s Russian! (Thanks, Sven!)

I know, I know, online polls, but how could I resist this one? My one concern was that my variety was so out of fashion it wouldn’t even be included, but no, it placed me properly:

Historical Linguist

Latin, Ancient Greek, Hitite, etc… are far from dead to you. You have a firm grasp on phonological processes and philology. You memorize etymology texts in your free time. The Brothers Grimm are so much more to you than fairy tale writers, and you can explain every spelling discrepancy for both English and French. You are social, but mostly with illuminated texts and Shakespeare. You are SO over current trends and know that modern technology is only good for improving our understanding of the past.

Silly, but it improved my morning just a bit, and I’m passing it along in case it might do the same for others.

Christopher Culver writes about “Some semantic shifts found in motion verbs” (“in Old English, wendan meant ‘to turn’. Thus we find the shift ‘he turned’ > ‘he went’”; “Romanian a merge ‘to go’ < Latin mergere ‘to sink’”) and concludes:

It would be nice if there were some massive encyclopedia of attested semantic shifts in the languages of the world. To defend one semantic shift in Chuvash that I claim in a paper I’m working on, I’ve had to gather cross-linguistic support for such a change either from the trivia that I myself know, or from hitting up my colleagues working with different languages for the trivia they know.

What a great idea! It’s so great, and so obvious once you think of it, that it’s hard to believe there isn’t such a thing. Somebody make it happen!

Reading further in Émile (see this post), I came to the following amusing passage. Natalya Dmitrievna, who has adopted little Emelyushka, or Émile as she prefers to call him, against her husband Platon’s objections, has decided now that he’s twelve or so it’s time for him to be educated. She delegates finding a Russian tutor to her husband, while she herself picks a French one; since she takes quite a while to choose one, by the time she settles on monsieur Griselle the boy has already mastered the Russian alphabet.

“Let us begin from the beginning!” And monsieur Griselle placed his finger on the first letter of the alphabet and loudly pronounced “A!”

“A,” repeated Emelyushka, “and here’s an az, and here’s an az, and here’s an az, I know.”

“Good!… bé.”

“Bé? No, that’s not be, it’s yer’; I know,” said Emelyushka.

“Don’t argue, darling, just repeat what monsieur Griselle says.”

“I can’t, mommy, he doesn’t say it right.”

“Ssh!” said Natalya Dmitrievna, and left the room.

“Cé.”

“Sé? No, that’s not sé, it’s slovo.”

“What’s that boy muttering?” said Griselle, who didn’t understand his pupil’s objections, and continued to name the French letters; Emelyushka would repeat the letter, and then say angrily to himself, “No, it’s not dé, it’s dobro.”

“No, mommy, say what you like, but that monsieur doesn’t know the alphabet himself. He calls yer pé and cherv’ er; he wants me to call izhitsa vé and kher iks… The devil knows what he’s teaching!”

However hard monsieur Griselle and Natalya Dmitrievna tried to make Emelyushka read the French alphabet in French and not in Russian, he could never reconcile himself to one and the same letter having different names. Natalya Dmitrievna got angry not at him but at the Russian alphabet.

“What a strange language Russian is, the letters are all mangled! I never noticed that before,” said Natalya Dmitrievna.

—Начнем съ начала!—И мосье Гризель громогласно произнесъ А! поставивъ палецъ на первую букву азбуки.

—А, повторилъ Емелюшка, —и воть азъ, и вотъ азъ, и воть азъ, я знаю.

—Хорошо!… b….

—Бе, нѣтъ не бе-съ, а ерь-съ; я знаю,—сказалъ Емелюшка.

—Ты не спорь, душенька, а повторяй, что говоритъ мосьё Гризель.

—Нельзя, маменька: онъ не такъ говоритъ.

—Тсъ! произнесла Наталья Дмитріевна строго, выходя изъ комнаты.

—Се.

—Се? нѣтъ, это не се-съ, а слово-съ.

—Что это мальчишка ворчитъ себѣ подъ носъ, говорилъ Гризель, не понимая возраженій ученика, и продолжая называть Французскія буквы; а Емелюшка повторитъ букву, да потомъ про себя сердито: нѣтъ, не де-съ, а добро-съ.

—Нѣтъ, маменька-съ, какъ хотите, а этотъ мусье самъ не знаетъ азбуки: еръ называетъ пе, червь называетъ еръ, ижицу велитъ называть ве, херъ иксомъ…. чортъ знаетъ чему учитъ!….

Какъ ни бились мосье Гризель и Наталья Дмитріевна, чтобъ Емелюшка читалъ Французскую азбуку по-Французски а не по-русски,—ни зачто онъ не могъ примириться съ различнымъ названіемъ однѣхъ и тѣхъ же буквъ. Наталья Дмитріевна сердилась не на Емелюшку, а на русскую азбуку.

—Странный русскій языкъ! всѣ буквы перековерканы! я этого до-сихъ-поръ не замѣтила,—говорила Наталья Дмитріевна.

Her husband tries to convince her it’s the French who have mangled things, but she fires the Russian tutor. I wonder if this sort of confusion was the reason Nabokov disliked the Cyrillic alphabet? (For more on the old Russian letters and their names, see this post.)

We interrupt our series of posts drawn from the Hodgson book on Butkov (1, 2) to return for a moment to my man Veltman. I’ve been reading Boris Bukhshtab’s 1926 article “Первые романы Вельтмана” [Veltman’s earliest novels], thanks to the generosity of Erik McDonald of XIX век (see this post of his for more on Bukhshtab’s article), and I naturally found this passage on Veltman’s 1836 novel Aleksandr Filippovich Makedonskii [Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon], in which the narrator rides to ancient Greece on a hippogriff, of great interest:

Veltman, who considered the Macedonians to have been Slavs, humorously stylizes them as having Russian ways. This involves an obvious element of parody both of his own views and of the historical novel (a genre by that time thoroughly discredited). […] On the basis of such notions of origins, Veltman has the Phoenicians talk and sing in an artificial language of Scandinavian type, the Scythians in a somewhat altered English, and so on.

But then again, multilingualism is characteristic of all Veltman’s work.

Считая македонцев славянами, Вельтман комически стилизует их на русский лад. Здесь есть очевидный элемент пародии и на собственные воззрения, и на исторический роман (жанр к тому времени окончательно дискредитированный). […] На основании тех же соображений о происхождении Вельтман заставляет финикиян говорить и петь на условном языке скандинавского типа, скифов — на несколько измененном английском и т. д. Разноязычность получается невероятная.

Разноязычность, впрочем, характерна для всего творчества Вельтмана.

By happy synchronicity, I had just started reading Veltman’s 1845 novel Емеля, или Превращения [Émile, or Metamorphoses] when I hit the following passage (a married couple is being described; he’s playing solitaire):

All this was back in the days when the tone of old France, émigré France, prevailed in Russia, at the end of the happy century of toupets, farthingales, and hoop skirts; when in high society everything was thought, said, and done completely in French, while in the middling circles the Russian language was merely touched up with French words, and instead of “my dear” they said mon âme, instead of “my love” ma chère; when everyone, young and old, learned how to dexterously click their heels and bow, which, to tell the truth, did not suit the Russian figure, which mother Nature minted rather than molded out of wax; but such was the age.

After a long silence, Platon Andreevich, shuffled the cards and said, appropriately for the occasion, in Russian:

“Confound it, it just won’t come out!”

Then Natalya Dmitrievna said tenderly, in French: “Mon ami!”

“What can I do for you, my dear?” asked Platon Andreevich in Russian, and in a fit of tenderness forked his fingers and tried to tickle his wife.

“Please stop it!” said Natalya Dmitrievna.

Все это было еще въ то время, когда въ России преобладалъ тонъ старой Франции, Франции-эмнгрантки, въ исходѣ счастливаго вѣка тупеевъ, фижмъ и роброновъ; когда въ высшемъ обществѣ все мыслило, говорило и дѣлало чисто по-французски; а въ среднемъ кругу русскій языкъ только еще подкрашивался Французскими словами, и вмѣсто «душа моя» говорили—монъ амъ, вмѣсто «моя драгая»—ма шеръ; когда всѣ, отъ мала до велика, учились ловко шаркать и гнуться, что, правду сказать, не шло къ русскому стану, который мать-природа чеканила, а не изъ воску лѣпила; но ужъ таковъ былъ вѣкъ.

Послѣ долгаго молчанія, Платонъ Андреевич, смѣшавъ карты, сказалъ, прилично случаю, по-русски:

—Фу, ты, пропасть! никакъ не выходит….

Тогда Наталья Дмитріевна сказала нѣжно, по-Французски: —Mon ami!

—Что прикажешь, мой другъ? спросилъ Платонъ Андреевичъ по-русски, и, въ припадкѣ нѣжности, сдѣлавъ рогульку изъ пальцевъ, хотѣлъ пощекотать жену.

—Перестань, пожалуйста! сказала Наталья Дмитріевна.

It’s not as wild as Scandinavian Phoenicians, of course, but it’s interesting in its own right.

And by further happy synchronicity, while working on this post I took a break, turned to the next article in the LRB I’m reading, and found this opening paragraph of Marina Warner’s review of Je parle toutes les langues, mais en arabe by Abdelfattah Kilito:

‘I speak all languages but in Yiddish,’ Kafka remarks in his Diaries; and when it came to writing, he might have chosen any one of them, besides German. We now read him in all languages, receiving glimpses, like faraway signals at sea, of the original German, and beyond the German of the other languages that made up Kafka’s mindscape, with Yiddish beating out a bass line, familiar ground. Echoing Kafka, the Moroccan writer and scholar of Arabic literature Abdelfattah Kilito declares ‘I speak all languages but in Arabic,’ in the title of his recent collection of essays. Kilito is a writer who reads (not all do) – and widely, in several languages. He’s an amphibian creature, living in Arabic and French with equal agility, and ambidextrous with it, continuing to use one language or other at will for his critical studies or his ‘récits’ – his gnomic, often poignant memoirs and fictions.

Multilingualism all over!

More from the Introduction to Hodgson’s wonderful little Butkov book (see this post):

It is, of course, well known that during the second half of the century frequent open clashes occurred between the critics and the creative writers to whom they dictated. One might mention Turgenev’s break with The Contemporary (Sovremennik) in the 1850’s, or Dostoevsky’s polemics with Chernyshevsky in the 1860’s. The covert confrontation between imaginative fiction and utilitarian criticism which took place in the forties, however, was far more significant for the subsequent development of Russian realism and more revealing of its internal tensions. It was a confrontation between two opposing literary aesthetics which had been largely isolated from each other for over a hundred years. One of these was an imported literary sensibility, formed in the eighteenth century, and fostered by the cultivated intelligentsia up through the Golden Age of Russian poetry. The other reflected the tastes and values of an older popular tradition of narrative fiction. The 1830’s had witnessed a decline of poetry and the collapse of the aesthetic standards which had shaped serious letters since the eighteenth century. Consequently, within a decade, the “legitimate” and the popular layers of literary activity converged. The first professional critics began to grapple with the issue of the “democratization” of literature which was then being raised abroad by the Romantics, and writers began to address themselves to a single, broad-based reading public. The great realistic Russian novels owe their power and originality to the tension between these two precipitously united currents. Belinsky’s views were not just a progressive Westernizer’s infatuation with the new “scientific” methods of the French physiologie. His program for literature, though it bears the marks of German Idealism, can be traced directly to the utilitarianism of Saint Simon, and is an extension of similar didactic views of literature which had dominated “legitimate” literature in Russia since the Petrine reforms. By the same token, Gogol’s stylistic resources were not simply a quaint holdover from the popular chapbook fiction of the 1830’s. “The Nose” is an extreme manifestation of a baroque undercurrent in Russian fiction which went back nearly two centuries. (p. 11)

Belinsky and the progressive Westernizers equated realism with seamy urban settings and sociological determinism. Just as they failed to see the incompatibility between naturalism and the native prose traditions which were being reasserted by Gogol and Dostoevsky, they failed to appreciate the “natural school’s” heavy commitment to Romantic conventions—from Sentimentalism to gothic melodrama. It requires a modernist approach, like Bakhtin’s, to help us see that the half century of aesthetic thinking which separates Karamzin and Belinsky is a consistent development toward stricter didacticism. … As Ortega y Gasset wrote, “seen from the vantage point of our day, Romanticism and Naturalism draw closer together and reveal their common realistic root.” Not Romanticism, but modern art, “which exists alongside reality, but does not want to take its place,” is the first genuine pendulum swing away from the prerequisite for didacticism—allegorization—since the Baroque. (p. 16)

This is a take on literary history that makes a lot of sense to me, and I wish I’d run into it several decades ago. Never too late to learn!

Thanks to this XIX век post, I discovered the existence of a book that truly excited me: Peter Hodgson’s 1976 From Gogol to Dostoevsky: Jakov Butkov, A Reluctant Naturalist in the 1840′s. A whole book about Butkov? Be still my heart! A friend very kindly checked out a copy for me from the library of the college where he works, and I’m happily engaged in reading it — very slowly, because it’s dense and packed with good stuff about Russian literary history (I haven’t even gotten to the section on Butkov yet). I’m going to be posting a lot of excerpts from it, since it’s long out of print and I think its insights are worth sharing; here’s a bit from section 1 of the Introduction, “The Grotesque and Metaliterature”:

It is not difficult to demonstrate that Dostoevsky did indeed bring Russian prose further than Gogol had into the urban landscape cleared by Dickens and Balzac. And, in their turn, Turgenev and Tolstoy began to move into the realm of poeticized and “psychological” realism claimed by Stendhal and, later, Flaubert. At the same time, however, Dostoevsky’s writing betrays a certain recalcitrance in the face of Western literary and critical influence; if he is an organic part of the forties (which Chernyshevsky calls “the Gogol period” in Russian literature), then Turgenev and Tolstoy belong outside it. Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches (Zapiski okhotnika, 1847) and Tolstoy’s “Childhood” (“Detstvo,” 1852) look ahead, beyond the forties. They anticipate the cultural poise of the novels these young men were to write in the 1860’s, when they had been fully assimilated into the mainstream of European realism. The stories Dostoevsky wrote before his exile in 1849, on the other hand, keep coming to grips with a problem Gogol had faced, namely, how to accommodate European realism within the framework of a native literary tradition which seemed, somehow, to resist it.

There is in Gogol and Dostoevsky an obvious reluctance to westernize Russian fiction, a reluctance which is gradually being recognized as essential to the history of the forties. … I intend to explore the connection between the grotesque in Gogol and Dostoevsky, and their reluctance to fall in line with Belinsky’s utilitarian naturalism. I would like to show that if we apply an appropriate historical perspective to a definition of the grotesque mode in prose fiction, we find that we are dealing with a subversive literary strategy. The grotesque is reluctant naturalism driven to its furthest extreme. (p. 4)

Like the medieval carnival, the novel “offers a field for the joyful exercise of perception, and not a platform for derision.” [Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (N.Y., 1955), p. 23.]

…In order to apply Bakhtin’s historical formulation of the grotesque to Gogol and Dostoevsky in the 1840’s, we must specify more closely the system of Baroque stylistics which in subsequent periods serves the literary strategy we want to call grotesque. I submit that as the grotesque was driven underground—which is to say, spurned by utilitarianism within the literary aesthetic—it increasingly took the form of a preoccupation with the literary medium itself. The grotesque is a subversive literary strategy which exposes literary devices and conventions and thereby discredits the kind of literary sensibility whose utilitarianism cramps its appreciation of the artistic process. (p. 7)

I love “how to accommodate European realism within the framework of a native literary tradition which seemed, somehow, to resist it” and “a field for the joyful exercise of perception, and not a platform for derision”; the latter quote got me to look up its author, Dorothy Van Ghent, who seems to have vanished off the face of the earth after publishing The English Novel — at least, I could find little information online apart from her dates (1907–1967). If anybody knows anything about her, I’m all ears; from what I can tell, she had the kind of approach to literature I like.