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I’ve started reading Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams by Charles King, a well-written history full of riveting details, and I’ve just gotten to a passage (on p. 68) describing the city in the early nineteenth century, just after its great governor, the Duc de Richelieu, had ended a terrifying episode of bubonic plague in late 1812 by drastic expedients like shutting the entire city down and burning the harbor (and not, amazingly for the time, blaming the Jews):

As the owners of the major trading houses and with strong family and business connections with the Mediterranean, Italians dominated city life, a recapitulation of their role when Genoese and Venetian trading centers ringed the Black Sea. Italian became the city’s lingua franca, lilting through the commercial exchange and wafting up from the docklands. Street signs—another innovation of Richelieu’s tenure—were written in both Italian and Russian, a practice that lasted well beyond his days in office. An eight-hundred-seat opera house, established by Richelieu only three years before the plague and designed by Jean-François Thomas de Thomon, one of the great shapers of St. Petersburg, featured a visiting Italian company performing a standard repertoire of classics. The company offered an early-nineteenth-century version of surtitles: a Russian actor would helpfully summarize the libretto for any audience members who happened not to speak Italian. Even the city’s ubiquitous carters and petty traders, or chumaks, were known to break into choruses of “La donna è mobile”—that is, unless they were singing their own ditties about the glories of the city at the end of the drover trails…

(The picky will point out that “La donna è mobile” didn’t exist until 1851, but they could have been singing something from Tancredi.)

Having finished Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life, by Brodsky’s friend and fellow poet Lev Loseff (thanks, Sven & Leslie!), I want to quote a passage from chapter 8 that will give an idea of the kind of thing you won’t find in most biographies, no matter how well researched and written:

Brodsky’s choices in prosody were no less important than his verbal choices and, in fact, preceded them. […] Prosody is the manipulation of speech within time. “[M]eters are simply different forms of distributing time. They’re seeds of time in the poem. Every song, even the bird’s, is a form of restructuring time.” Thus, for Brodsky, the choice of rhythmic structure is a philosophical one. No matter what the subject of the poem, the contrast between the metrical model and the rhythm introduced by the poet reminds the reader of the two contexts in which that subject is elaborated: one is the monotonous, indifferent beat of time marching on (meter), and the other is an attempt by an individual (the author, the lyric hero) to break that monotony—to slow time, to speed it up, to turn it back (rhythm). The dolniks that begin to dominate Brodsky’s verse in the 1970s allowed him far more leeway to work out his individual concept of time than classical meters could have. […]

But another direction was to prove more productive—dolniks written in longer lines. Of all that he wrote between 1972 and 1977, Brodsky was most fond of the cycle “A Part of Speech.” Fifteen of the twenty short poems that make it up begin with what seems to be an anapest[…] In Russian poetry, the anapest has a certain sentimental semantic aura to it, perhaps arising from its waltz-like three-beat rhythm. It is rarely found in Blok’s lyric verse, while for Mandelstam it was the rhythm of cheap, vulgar romance. […] Interestingly, Vladimir Nabokov, that scourge of vulgarity, never sensed this undertone. […]

Brodsky chose a different way to make the anapest the prosodic foundation of some of his most important texts, those on love and nostalgia. The lines in “A Part of Speech” are very long for anapests (five or six feet, as a rule), and in most of them the anapest is actually transformed into a dolnik by a minimal but decisive break in the meter: immediately before the last stress in the line, one unaccented syllable goes missing. Heretofore, such anapest-like dolnik lines were quite rare in Russian poetry.

Obviously that kind of detailed analysis isn’t for everyone, but if you like it, you’ll like this book.

[Read more…]

Ben Zimmer has a Visual Thesaurus post on the language of Lincoln (see this LH post) with some good examples of anachronisms that I completely missed, like “imagine the possibilities,” “I like our chances,” “patronage jobs,” and “lame-duck Congress.” Even “the Thirteenth Amendment” is a term that would not have been used by politicians of the time.
But what really excited me was this:

Benjamin Schmidt, a doctoral student at Princeton University and a fellow at Harvard University’s Cultural Observatory, has reached many fascinating conclusions by comparing scripts from period dramas with historical language use as reflected by the digitized volumes on Google Books. Check out his Prochronisms site for more, as well as his appearance on the Lexicon Valley podcast.

One thing that is clear from Schmidt’s work is that while screenwriters (and audiences) may have a good ear for discerning when individual words are anachronistic, it’s less easy to pick out when combinations of words are unlikely to have been used in a historical setting.

I’m not a podcast kind of guy, but I’m bookmarking Prochronisms, because that’s my kind of site.

I was reading Hal Foster’s “Preposterous Timing,” a review of a couple of art history books [archived], when I hit this sentence: “Both of the books under review propose historical connections that are provocatively ‘preposterous’: that is, they link works of art from ‘before and after modernity’, the premodern and the postmodern.” (Footnote: “I borrow the term ‘preposterous’ from the Dutch art historian Mieke Bal, whose Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (1999) is an early instance of this interest in anachronism.”) This is one of those things I doubtless used to know but had forgotten, though the etymology is so transparent it’s a wonder how I managed to forget it; to quote the OED (Third Edition, updated March 2007): “classical Latin praeposterus placed in the wrong order, inverted, unseasonable, wrong-headed, perverse (< prae– pre- prefix + posterus later, next[…]) + –ous suffix. Compare Middle French prepostere placed in a wrong and unjust order (1462[…]), Italian prepostero placed in the wrong order (a1498).” In other words, arsy-versy.

Such is one geologist’s suggestion, according to a LiveScience story by Tia Ghose:

“This was not a single summer or winter, this was 200 to 300 years of drought,” said Matt Konfirst, a geologist at the Byrd Polar Research Center. … Several geological records point to a long period of drier weather in the Middle East around 4,200 years ago… “As we go into the 4,200-year-ago climate anomaly, we actually see that estimated rainfall decreases substantially in this region and the number of sites that are populated at this time period reduce substantially,” he said. Around the same time, 74 percent of the ancient Mesopotamian settlements were abandoned… The populated area also shrank by 93 percent… After around 2000 B.C., ancient Sumerian gradually died off as a spoken language in the region. For the next 2,000 years, the tongue lingered on as a dead written language, similar to Latin in the Middle Ages, but has been completely extinct since then, Konfirst said.

This is fascinating stuff to read about, but I’m a little perplexed about the focus on the language. Why not “Drought May Have Killed Sumerian Civilization”? Not that I’m complaining; I like language.
Completely unrelated to Sumerian, but I want to pass along the news that two of my favorite Russian-Americans, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, have won the 2012 Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize for their translation of Полевой госпиталь (“Field Hospital”) by Arseny Tarkovsky, one of my favorite less-famous modern poets. Сердечно поздравляю!

I’ve finally finished Narezhny’s Российский Жилблаз (A Russian Gil Blas; see this post), and I’m even more struck by what a loss its suppression was for Russian literature. The introduction to the two-volume edition of Narezhny’s works is a long and well-informed essay by Yuri Mann, a Gogol scholar with a fine appreciation of early nineteenth-century Russian writing; he begins by quoting an 1825 article by Vyazemsky mentioning Narezhny’s recent death and lamenting that he had created the Russian novel and yet received little recognition, and says that this remains true to the present day, though far lesser writers are remembered.

Narezhny was born in 1780 into a noble but poor family (they had no serfs and worked their own land) in a village in the Mirgorod uyezd of Poltava guberniya, the same part of Ukraine Gogol was from—but Narezhny was a crucial generation earlier, growing up at a time when there were still people who remembered when the region had been independent. He studied philology and philosophy at Moscow University, where he began writing poetry and historical stories. But upon leaving the university in 1801, he went (for unknown reasons) to Tiflis to take part in the administration of Georgia, a brand-new acquisition of the Russian Empire, remaining there for two years. As Mann says, on the one hand this removed him from the literary journals and the esthetic companionship “so necessary for a young writer,” but on the other it gave him fresh experiences and an acquaintance with an exotic land (as well as with the stupidity of the tsarist administration thereof). In 1803 he went to St. Petersburg, where he held various bureaucratic posts for a decade. At just this time there was a fierce quarrel in literary circles between the reactionary classicism of Shishkov and the sentimentalism of Karamzin, but Narezhny was distant from those circles and took no part in the quarrel (though he made fun of both sides in A Russian Gil Blas). He published some of his own writing, mostly antiquarian in subject, and had success with his Slavenskie vechera (‘Slavonic evenings,’ Ossianic tales set in Ancient Rus), but around 1812 he started something completely different, A Russian Gil Blas.

It’s hard to know how to summarize this sprawling, enjoyable novel. It’s not “great literature”—nobody would put it up against War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov—but it’s a wonderful read (and would make a terrific TV series). Narezhny’s prose rarely rises above the workmanlike, and there is little in the way of characterization (people are either virtuous, wicked, or foolish); his characters do whatever’s needed to advance the plot and reveal more corners of Russian life. The main character, Prince Gavrilo Chistyakov, seesaws between wealth and poverty; when he’s rich, he gives bags of money to people in need, and when he’s poor, people give him bags of money, simply because they’re generous. But it’s not just a random walk: Narezhny has constructed a cunning, complicated plot in which we meet the prince at a late stage of his adventures and his recounting of his past to the Prostakovs (the family with which he comes to stay as the novel opens) is interwoven with his activities in the novel’s now, and the interaction gradually reveals a web of relations between the Chistyakovs, the Prostakovs, and the novel’s villain, Svetlozarov. The more strands are revealed, the more you want to learn about the web, and this carries the reader pell-mell through several layers of narration and shifts of locale from villages to provincial capitals to Moscow and Warsaw. Unfortunately, he never finished the novel (since the censors had forbidden publication, there was not much point), but by the time he quit, the main outlines were clear enough that the reader is not overly frustrated.

But the plot, enjoyable as it is, isn’t the main thing. One reason we read is to hear the voice telling us the story, in some sense to get to know the author, and Narezhny is a supremely likeable fellow. He is the farthest thing imaginable from the wild-eyed popular image of the Russian author, Dostoevsky with his tormented souls and his gambling, Tolstoy with his condemnation of art and renunciation of his own literature, all the brave dissidents and stern moralists. He is essentially an eighteenth-century man, a man of the Enlightenment, amused by humanity’s folly and endless striving for things that ultimately do it no good, and you can tell from the way he treats his characters that he’s been through enough vicissitudes himself that he’s readier to sympathize than to condemn. And (as I said in the earlier post) one of the most striking things about the novel is its entirely favorable portrait of Yanka the Jew, who for a long stretch is Chistyakov’s only friend; it would be remarkable from any gentile writer of the time, but it’s astonishing for a Russian—and of course it appears to have been one of the main factors that got the novel censored and thereby removed from the life of Russian literature, which it would have done so much to leaven. Narezhny wrote more novels (Vyazemsky, in the piece I mentioned at the beginning of the post, writes about the appearance of a posthumous novel by him as even more exciting than the new works by Pushkin and Karamzin), but something went out of him with the catastrophe of A Russian Gil Blas; who knows what would have happened if it had had the success it deserved?

One consequence of its falling into oblivion is the lack of an English translation, which is truly inexcusable considering the amount of socialist-realist garbage that’s been translated over the years. I’m happy to say that this situation may be remedied: Ronald D. LeBlanc, whom I quoted at length in the previous post (and who is one of the very few people who could be called a Narezhny scholar), tells me he is planning to do one himself. If it happens, it could change the picture we now have of nineteenth-century Russian literature, and it would certainly give its readers a great deal of pleasure.

C. Max Magee of The Millions has an annual tradition of asking people to talk about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year, and he has once again begun the series with my contribution; here it is, featuring my recommendations of Timothy Snyder’s The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999, discussed on LH here, and Yuri Slezkine’s Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North, discussed briefly here and here, along with a few others. It’s always an honor to lead off the parade, and I’ll be looking forward to seeing what books got other participants excited enough to write about.

The other day, listening to All Things Considered on our local NPR station (WFCR), I was astonished to hear a segment on a language issue that actually came down on the side of a sensible view of language. Neda Ulaby’s That’s So Random: The Evolution Of An Odd Word (you can read the transcript at that link as well as listen to the audio) starts off by quoting a tedious rant about “misuse”:

“The word random is the most misused word of our generation — by far,” he proclaims to a tittering audience of 20-somethings. “Like, girls will say, ‘Oh, God, I met this random on the way home.’ First of all, it’s not a noun.”

So far, so predictable. But then Ms. Ulaby (who was born in Amman, Jordan, and I’d be curious to know the Arabic form of her name, which is Anglicized as OO-laby) turns to Jesse Sheidlower, “the elegant, purple-haired editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary,” and devotes the heart of the segment to his discussion of the history of the word:

“It’s described as a colloquial term meaning peculiar, strange, nonsensical, unpredictable or inexplicable; unexpected,” he explains, before adding that random started as a noun in the 14th century, meaning “impetuosity, great speed, force or violence in riding, running, striking, et cetera, chiefly in the phrase ‘with great random.’”

Well, there’s a phrase that deserves resurrection. Sheidlower says that in the 17th century, random started to mean “lacking a definite purpose.”

“The specifically mathematical sense we have only from the late 19th century,” he observes. “But that’s with a highly technical definition — ‘governed by or involving equal chances for each of the actual or hypothetical members of a population; also, produced or obtained by such a process and therefore unpredictable in detail.’”

Her punchline is unimpeachable: “The message: Life, like language, evolves.” I couldn’t have said it better myself! (If you’re curious about the etymology of the word, it’s from Middle French rendon ‘speed, haste,’ later ‘impetuousness, violence,’ from randir ‘to run fast, gallop,’ probably of Germanic origin.)

My wife and I just got back from seeing Lincoln, which bowled us over—the combined efforts of Steven Spielberg and John Williams (two names that fill the mind with dread) couldn’t mar the brilliance of Tony Kushner’s writing (the language in the script is a thing of joy throughout) and Daniel Day-Lewis’s acting in the title role (his will be the Lincoln of my mind’s eye henceforth). The music is (inevitably) overbearing at times, and (of course) the movie goes on a few minutes too long (see this post), but never mind that; it’s the best movie I’ve seen in quite a while and I recommend it unreservedly.

However, this is not a movie review blog, and I’m writing about it here not to praise it but to complain (mildly) about a couple of linguistic missteps. I’ll forgive them the pronunciation of John Quincy Adams‘s middle name as /’kwinsi/ rather than the correct /’kwinzi/ because the fellow who says it that way is from Kentucky and could plausibly not know any better—if he’d been from Massachusetts, I’d have twitched discontentedly. I did in fact so twitch at two points. The first was when Lincoln pronounced the last word in the phrase “forever and aye” as /ay/ (as in “Aye aye, sir!”) rather than the correct /ey/ (as in “A, B, C”). This is not a matter of dialect or idiolect; in the nineteenth century anyone who used the word would have said it in the only available way (which they would have heard in speeches and sermons, not learned from books). To quote the OED (in an unrevised entry from 1885): “The word rhymes, in the literary speech, and in all the dialects, with the group bay, day, gay, hay, may, way.” The second was when Lincoln is telling his (truly hilarious) story about Ethan Allen going to England after the Revolution and being insulted; when he asks where the privy is located, Lincoln talks about his being directed “thence” when the appropriate word is “thither.” Again, these are words to which dwellers of the twenty-first century are unaccustomed but that no one of Lincoln’s day would have confused. All together, now: tut tut!

Addendum. Ben Zimmer has a nice column on the language of the film. (As he says, “Picky language types may yet find more to poke at.”)

Joan Acocella has a New Yorker blog post that starts: “Many of the world’s best novels have bad endings. I don’t mean that they end sadly, or on a back-to-work, all-is-forgiven note (e.g. ‘War and Peace,’ ‘The Red and the Black,’ ‘A Suitable Boy’), but that the ending is actually inartistic—a betrayal of what came before.” This is an indubitable fact, and it doesn’t only apply to books; I’ve long noticed that almost all movies go on fifteen minutes or so longer than they should. Her discussion of possible reasons is interesting. But what amuses me is that she seems to have entirely forgotten how War and Peace actually ends, which is not “when the excitable young heroine grows up and has kids and gets fat.” I complained about it at length here (scroll down to “But nothing will reconcile me to the Second Appendix”). Not that I blame her—in fact, I think the Second Appendix should be printed in such tiny type only the most hardened seekers after boredom would read it. Or just omitted entirely. Sorry, Lev Nikolaevich!