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I’ve only got a little over a hundred pages left in Karl Schlögel’s Moscow, 1937, and I really can’t recommend it highly enough to anyone interested in the time and place; it immerses you in just about every imaginable aspect, from construction projects to literature to music (Utesov, Dunayevsky, Shostakovich) to the brand-new Gorky Park to the unstoppable, unmanageable flood of people from the starving countryside to the capital, where at least there was the hope of a job in one of the many new factories and therefore of survival. Here’s an excerpt on the latter subject that I found enlightening:

Proletarskii District and the car plant thus became a giant social laboratory. It represented a break with the past and a starting point for the metamorphosis of a world that had been smashed but had not yet disappeared. It was filled with expectations, dreams, hopes and traumas. This was where people encountered new opportunities. It was the site of a millionfold mimicry and a desperate need to fit in, a process of acculturation under the conditions of a state of emergency, since everything depended on whether a person could discover a route into the new, Soviet society. The way back had been cut off, blocked; the only route that remained was the escape into one’s new role, one’s new identity. The creation of a workforce with an identity of its own was of crucial importance for the stability of the country and the regime.

The conditions in which this process unfolded have been well described by an American working in the USSR:

[Read more…]

That title should look funny to you if you were brought up, as I was, on the old typesetters’ standard order of frequency, ETAOIN SHRDLU (which I, like many an sf fan, learned from a short story by Fredric Brown). But the old order has been dethroned; you can read all about it at Peter Norvig’s English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited, which begins with a letter from Mark Mayzner, who studied the frequency of letter combinations in English words in the early 1960s, and proceeds to all manner of interesting information about word counts, word length, letter frequencies by position within word, you name it. Thanks go to John Cowan for passing it along.
Also: 4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence. I especially love the conclusion: “Officials also stated that an innocent 35-year-old passerby who found himself caught up in a long-winded dispute over use of the serial, or Oxford, comma had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

A CBS News story reports on an exciting discovery:

A trove of ancient manuscripts in Hebrew characters rescued from caves in a Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan is providing the first physical evidence of a Jewish community that thrived there a thousand years ago.
On Thursday Israel’s National Library unveiled the cache of recently purchased documents that run the gamut of life experiences, including biblical commentaries, personal letters and financial records.
Researchers say the “Afghan Genizah” marks the greatest such archive found since the “Cairo Genizah” was discovered in an Egyptian synagogue more than 100 years ago, a vast depository of medieval manuscripts considered to be among the most valuable collections of historical documents ever found. […]
The Afghan collection gives an unprecedented look into the lives of Jews in ancient Persia in the 11th century. The paper manuscripts, preserved over the centuries by the dry, shady conditions of the caves, include writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judea-Arabic and the unique Judeo-Persian language from that era, which was written in Hebrew letters.

Unfortunately, they only acquired “29 out of hundreds of the documents believed to be floating around the world,” but hopefully they’ll be able to get more. I’m not sure what’s intended by the phrase “unique Judeo-Persian language” in the last quoted paragraph; Judeo-Persian is no more and no less unique than any other language (and of course there were comparable Jewish forms of just about every language spoken in areas where there were substantial Jewish communities). At any rate, you can see a selection of images at the library site. Thanks, Paul!

A nice roundup by Michael Johnson of the history and current state of Pushkinophilia starts with the titular tea in Brussels with the great-grandson of the poet and proceeds to a “supple and insightful new biography and translation” by Julian Lowenfeld (I find the translations quoted in the post awful, but to each his own), a “documentary film for U.S. consumption… directed by Michael Beckelheimer of Los Angeles” to be titled Pushkin Is Our Everything, David Bethea’s Pushkin Project (actually, as far as I can tell, called the Pushkin Summer Institute), Johnson’s own Pushkin obsession (“dating from the 1960s when I was an Associated Press correspondent in Moscow”), the Nabokov/Wilson feud, and much more. It’s an enjoyable read, with some good quotes; I particularly like this one from Marc Slonim: “A poem by Pushkin creates the impression that what he says could never be said otherwise, that each word fits perfectly, and that no other words could ever assume a similar function.” I recently reread “Бахчисарайский фонтан” (The Fountain of Bakhchisarai), and I was constantly having that feeling; a line as simple as “Отец в могиле, дочь в плену” [otéts v mogile, doch v plenú] ‘The father in the grave, the daughter in captivity’ has a feeling of inevitability and perfection that sends it straight into the deeper folds of the brain, never to be dislodged. Thanks, Paul!

From Lauren Collins’s “Letter from Copenhagen: Danish Postmodern” (“Why are so many people fans of Scandinavian TV?”) from the January 7 New Yorker (sorry, only the summary is available to nonsubscribers archived):

To quote from “The Killing Handbook,” by Emma Kennedy, “A virus has swept the Great British islands, blown in on a north wind; and it has brought with it the murky Nordic noir televisual blockbusters that have gripped the nation ever since.” The reception of the shows was unexpected, even for Danes. When asked by the Guardian to account for the popularity of Danish television overseas, the actress Sidse Babett Knudsen [Danish pronunciation: ˈsisə b̥ab̥ɛd̥ ˈkʰnusn̩]—who plays Birgitte Nyborg, Denmark’s first female statsminister, on “Borgen” [Danish pronunciation: ˈb̥ɒːˀwən]—replied, “I’ve no idea, because our language is one of the most ugly and limited around. You can’t seduce anyone in Danish; it sounds like you are throwing up.”

Incidentally, I was perplexed by the verb in the earlier sentence “The BBC was, of course, drafting on the recent success of noirish northern fare such as ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,'” but my wife explained to me that “draft” in this sense means to ride close behind someone to take advantage of their slipstream. That’s what I get for not following bike racing.

Addendum. Later in the piece, Collins writes “Because Denmark is small and relatively heterogeneous, DR can attempt to appeal to almost everyone.” This makes no sense unless “heterogeneous” should read “homogeneous”; what happened to the magazine’s famed high standard of editing?

Back in 2009 I posted about Martian Spoken Here, a blog by LH’s favorite Mauricien/Martian commenter Siganus Sutor (and I’m happy to see it’s still going strong); now I bring to your attention Mo Koz Kreol Morisien, “a comprehensive, step by step, guide to speaking the Mauritian Creole language…. Includes fun quizes to check your developing knowledge, language and pronunciation tips to perfect your understanding, and a word list of over 2000 of the most commonly used words.” You can download PDF, ePub, iBooks, and Kindle versions, all absolutely free. (Paul Choy, who runs the site, says “If I sell stuff, I have to spend vast amounts of my time protecting that stuff. […] Not everything in this world needs to be rewarded in terms of money. I enjoy creating things. That is my reward. And if other people can use or enjoy the things I create, then that is enough.”) Thanks for the heads-up, Martin!

Anatoly Vorobey’s latest post provides an excellent illustration of the mind’s way with language. There’s a poem by Bella Akhmadulina called Прощание (“Farewell” or “Parting”), with a musical setting by Andrei Petrov (you can hear it sung here by Valentina Ponomaryova), whose first stanza is:

А напоследок я скажу:
прощай, любить не обязуйся.
С ума схожу. Иль восхожу
к высокой степени безумства.

[And finally I’ll say:
farewell, don’t oblige yourself to love (me).
I’m going out of my mind. Or I’m rising
to a high degree of madness.]

Now, the expression “С ума схожу,” which I’ve translated idiomatically as “I’m going out of my mind,” literally means “I’m coming down from (my) mind,” so that “С ума схожу. Иль восхожу/ к высокой степени безумства” is a nice play on words: “I’m coming down from my mind/ or going up to a high degree of madness.” (You could try to reproduce the effect in English by saying “I’m going out of my mind or into a high degree of madness,” but it would sound forced.) But Anatoly—an extremely good reader who frequently ponders questions of language—just realized this; for many years, he says, he was irritated by the “or” in the third line: “I’m going crazy or I’m becoming mad,” what sense does that make? He writes “I completely failed to get [the play on words], because I took сходить с ума as an idiom and didn’t hear in it the literal sense of сходить [i.e., to go/come down, descend].” I imagine we’ve all had similar experiences.

I just read an illuminating post by Sergei Zhuk, Soviet Baby Boomers – Closed Cities, CHMO and Soviet Regionalism, which anyone interested in the phenomenon of closed cities should read—I knew of their existence, but had no idea how they actually functioned in Soviet society and what the consequences were when the country collapsed. (This is one of a series of blog posts at Russian History Blog in response to Raleigh’s Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation, which I mentioned here.) He discusses phenomena like “envy of Moscow” and the “Dnipropetrovsk Mafia” (from which, by 1996, 80% of the major political leaders of Ukraine came!); what makes it LH material, however, is the following passage:

This envy of Moscow produced a new anti-Moscow folklore that initially began among military personnel of the military garrisons in the secret closed cities, and later on spread all over the Soviet Union. As early as the 1950s, provincials began calling Muscovites chmo (acronym from combination of the Russian words chelovek Moskvy i Moskovskoi oblasti – a resident of Moscow and Moscow region). According to the retired Soviet military officers, in the 1950s a sudden influx of the physically weak and effeminate, but smart, young conscripts from Moscow region into the Soviet Army, patrolling the secret nuclear closed cities around Moscow, resulted in their senior officers complaints about unpreparedness of these young soldiers from Moscow for the requirements of military service. Eventually, Soviet military officers from the garrisons in the closed cities used acronym chmo in their documents to mark the names of the conscripts from Moscow and Moscow region. In the 1960s and the 70s this acronym left the closed society of military garrisons from the secret cities, penetrated first the “wide Soviet army circles,” then reached the Soviet civilian population, and became a popular word used to characterize any weak and effeminate male character. As a result, people forgot about the origin of this term, which was directly related to the military personnel of the Soviet closed society.

It’s referenced to “Interview with Ivan Mikhailovich K., a retired colonel of the Soviet Army, June 3, 1990, Kyiv, and interview with Valentin V. Piskarev, a retired colonel of the Soviet Army, March 12, 1991, Moscow. These officers explained the origin of the word chmo.” Now, on the face of it this would appear to be just another acronymic folk etymology on the order of “port outward, starboard home” or “for unlawful carnal knowledge”; this feeling is strengthened by the fact that there is a word chmok, defined identically to chmo in my Dictionary of Russian Slang as “worthless or unpleasant person,” and these look suspiciously similar to the American slang words shmo and shmuck, which are unquestionably derived from Yiddish. On the other hand, modern Russian does make use of an amazing variety of acronymic words, so I’m not rejecting that explanation out of hand. Does anybody have any verifiable information that would shed light on this?
Also, when he talks about “Soviet labor camps scientific facilities, known as ‘shabashki,'” doesn’t he mean “sharashki”?

I was thinking of posting one of my favorite winter poems, Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man” (since it’s finally snowy and wintry around here), but you probably all know it already (and if you don’t, you can read it at the always readworthy wood s lot, where you will also find Klee’s “Angelus Novus” and Walter Benjamin’s famous meditation on it). Instead, I’m posting a poem by perhaps my favorite living poet, Richard Wilbur (from his 2000 collection Mayflies), which I found at the always readworthy Avva (Anatoly Vorobey’s blog, in Russian):

Crow’s Nests

That lofty stand of trees beyond the field,
Which in the storms of summer stood revealed

As a great fleet of galleons bound our way
Across a moiled expanse of tossing hay,

Full-rigged and swift, and to the topmost sail
Taking their fill and pleasure of the gale,

Now, in this leafless time, are ships no more,
Though it would not be hard to take them for

A roadstead full of naked mast and spar
In which we see now where the crow’s nests are.

(Also from Avva: a video of Wilbur reading the title poem from the book.)

And a happy new year to all.

Paul Postal, a former disciple of Noam Chomsky’s who used to go around viciously attacking non-Chomskyites, famously apostasized and now turns his rhetorical guns on the Master in an invigorating style not unlike that with which Trotsky assailed his former comrade in arms Lenin [er, either change “former” to “future” or “Lenin” to “Stalin”]. I give you his “Two Case Studies of Chomsky’s Play Acting at Linguistics“:

In his famous review of Skinner, Chomsky introduced the phrase ‘play acting at science’. This work, focusing on his talk of The A-over-A Principle and Recoverability argues in detail that that term precisely characterizes much of Chomsky’s own work in linguistics.

Even if you don’t care about the ins and outs of theoretical linguistics, it’s worth downloading the pdf available at that link in order to enjoy his vinegary blasts of character assassination. If, of course, you like that sort of thing.