Ruqaiyah Zarook writes for the Jordan Russian Center:
The Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin once said that for him, Kalidasa, the great classical Sanskrit playwright and dramatist, “is no less important than Homer.” The visionary Russian painter and philosopher Nicholas Roerich chose to live out his days in Naggar, India, leaving a broad and edifying artistic legacy. And perhaps most famously, Leo Tolstoy wrote to various revolutionary and literary Indian figures, from Mahatma Gandhi to Taraknath Das (to whom Tolstoy addressed his 1908 “Letter to a Hindu”) and the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. These anecdotes reveal a deep historical relationship between India and Russia that has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves.
The historical links between Russia and India are numerous. The two countries have long enjoyed reciprocal artistic and cultural exchanges in literature, theater, and music. Beginning in the 1950s and until the end of the 1980s, the USSR dedicated significant funds to ensuring the availability of Russian texts in India — from children’s classics and philosophical tracts to science textbooks and works of socio-political theory.
During the tense and taxing Cold War years, the USSR and India were able to uphold friendly relations with a distinct focus on artistic and cultural exchange, allowing each to deploy a form of soft power potentially more powerful and diplomatically penetrating than explicit political games. Just as Russian classics by Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Chekhov flooded Indian literary markets, Bollywood movies quickly became popular in Soviet Russia. Well-known actors like Raj Kapoor appeared in Hindi movies dubbed into Russian, enjoying a fascinating popularity among Muscovites (meanwhile, Indian literature and Russian films did not experience the same reciprocal resonance in Russia and India, respectively).
Following the declaration of Indian independence in 1947, the country’s short supply of paper contributed to a great demand for books on math, science, and education. The Soviets were only too happy to fill this void. Translations of various Russian writers from Gorky to Pushkin to Tolstoy and Chekhov became commonplace. While English children’s books were relatively expensive in India at the time, Russian translations of these books were “absurdly cheap,” according to Gautam Ghose, program officer of Gorky Sadan, the Russian Cultural Centre in Calcutta. […]
Theater and music, too, enabled an ongoing program of cultural exchange between India and Russia. In 1914, for instance, the Pushkin Drama Theatre staged a version of Kalidasa’s play Shakuntala. This production faced aggressive resistance from the Russian Orthodox Church, which objected to placing an entertainment venue next to the seventeenth-century Church of St. John the Evangelist. The first stage play’s origins in Hindu epic only amplified Orthodox clergy’s concerns about the increasing sway of Eastern philosophies in Russia at the time. The actors and musicians performing in the play were Russian, but the music was composed by Hazrat Inayat Rehmat Khan, a Sufi and founder of the Sufi Order in 1914. “The Russians have a Western mind, but an Eastern soul,” Hazrat Khan is alleged to have said while in Moscow.
Despite the ROC’s objections, Shakuntala was a success, helping inspire many other adaptations of Indian literary classics by Russian theater companies. The Moscow Children’s Theatre, for example, would go onto stage the Ramayana with Gennady Pechnikov in the titular role of Lord Rama. The same actor would later perform in Moscow for the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, in addition to being awarded the Padma Shri, India’s fourth highest civilian award, in 2008.
Russian fascination with the Sanskrit language, and Sanskrit plays, reportedly began when linguist and writer Gerasim Lebedev went to India. After spending a decade there in the late eighteenth century and learning both Bengali and Tamil, the Russian scholar developed a profound interest in India’s classical literature. Hearing of Lebedev’s Indian sojourn, Tsar Alexander I later ordered a Sanskrit printing press to be established in St. Petersburg.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s led to the end of an era of robust cultural exchange between Russia and India, but lingering artifacts of this longstanding cultural affair still exist within literature, music, and theater, awaiting excavation by historians, literary scholars, and eager internationalists.
(Go to the original essay for links and a portrait of Tolstoy by his daughter, presented as a gift to Mahatma Gandhi.) I knew nothing about any of this, except for Lebedev (about whom I posted in 2016); how varied and interesting history is once you get past the obvious!
When I lived in the former SU in the 90s, Bollywood films were still frequently featured on TV. I don’t know if that’s still the case now.
Victor Hugo was mentioned again. Except for for the crappy Les Miz musical he’s sort of forgotten here and now, but he was the great global humanist of his era (succeeded by Tolstoy). I just remembered from Robb’s bio that he was actually canonized as a demigod by one of Vietnam’s military cults. (Earlier I mentioned his influence on 2 Iimportant Minnesota and North Dakota leftist politicians).
WAIT! DELETE! I was sure I saw Hugo in there. But Western humanist icons did have a big following in Asia.
That would be
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caodaism
Whatever you say about them, they can fairly claim not to be military.
They do indeed venerate Victor Hugo; also Shakespeare, Joan of Arc and Louis Pasteur (but not, contrary to popular belief, Charlie Chaplin.)
They were called military during the war, but people also said they were not military enough. Perhaps a misclassification.
Well, they did have armed forces, which were involved (among other things) in struggling against the French, though those seem to have been pretty definitively suppressed by Diệm in 1955.
The WP pages relating to Caodaism and to its leading lights have evidently been heavily worked over by Caodai devotees, to the point of outright hagiography. You may well know much more about it than I do.
No, I’m just remembering 50 year old news stories.
Considerable number of Russians converted to Hinduism too. Mostly they are Krishnaites.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Rath_Yatra_russia_winter.jpg/1280px-Rath_Yatra_russia_winter.jpg
Hindu religious festival in Russia
Apparently I memorized Hare Krishna mantra without even trying – heard it so many times on streets of Moscow back in 1990s.
Krishnaites were so common back then and they would chant it everywhere.
We discussed the Cao Dai a bit last year.
“Well-known actors like Raj Kapoor appeared in Hindi movies dubbed into Russian, enjoying a fascinating popularity among Muscovites ”
It is an understatement. Awaara Hoon was recorded in Russian and sang by everyone. Mera Jootah Hai Japani was supplied by a rhymed translation in subtitles and also sang. I sing it myself – especially when skiing, but in the original langauge with thick Russian accent.
Cardiologist and raconteur Itzhak Kronzon, who died earlier this year, told the story of being enchanted with Raj Kapoor, watching Indian movies in Israel. Decades later the ailing, unhappy Kapoor walked into Kronzon’s New York office, and the two bonded over singing Mera Jootah Hai Japani together. The receptionist thought they’d lost their minds.
(Translated here.)
The only song I knew from that era is Ichak Dana Bichak Dana, from another Kapoor movie.
The 1957 film Pardesi, or Хождение за три моря, a co-production based on a 15th century diary of travel from Russia to India, was released simultaneously in Hindi and Russian versions.
Indian literature
Well, an aunt had more books about India than the average household, but then she specialized in Urdu and Pakistan.
Сказание о Лионго Фумо (A tale of Liongo Fumo) has just popped into my head, but it has nothing to do with India.
BTW, does Ruqaiyah mean, or is it related to, this:
Ruqya (Arabic: رقية, IPA: [ruqja]), on the other hand, summons jinn and demons by invoking the names of God, and to command them to abandon their mischiefs and is thought to repair damage believed caused by jinn possession, witchcraft (sihr) or the evil eye.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorcism_in_Islam
I’ve always wondered about it, b/c my mom’s name was similar.
Jootah
This -h was not intended. I wanted to type “joota”, then I saw that I typed “jootah”. Then I deleted it.
I wanted to write it the same way as in Wikipedia, so that it was easily googlable, I went to WP and checked both songs. Then I typed it again and… …I see -h:/
(and it can’t be my thick Russian accent: we do not imagine any -h there orthogrophically. ).
This sort of thing was going on in Yugoslavia during the Non-Aligned era too.
Indian writers & literature (in translation) were on high school curricula, also Chinese and Black American literature.
I’ll dig up the old Croatian textbook/reader to see who else was featured.
Tagore a part of a more mysterious chapter of my family history. An escapee from the Whites, my great grand uncle Leo Lapitsky acted as a guide on a 1918 tour to Tagore’s ashram for a blind Russian poet and philosopher Eroshenko. One of them had eyes and the other, spoke English. Tagore’s secretary published a detailed account about the visit by the crazy Russians. Police was fascinated too and proceeded with arrest and deportation.
This is presumably the same Leo Lapitsky whose post-India wanderings led to various adventures in first South Africa and then Portugal?
This is presumably the same Leo Lapitsky whose post-India wanderings led to various adventures in first South Africa and then Portugal?
The Indian chapter is best documented in Charles Andrews’s report in Calcutta’s “The Modern Review” (April 1919 issue) http://www.relga.ru/Environ/WebObjects/tgu-www.woa/wa/Main?textid=5227&level1=main&level2=articles and a little bit in correspondence of Russian followers of Eroshenko, so it’s pretty uncommon knowledge.
The Russians went to the Japanese consulate in Calcutta seeking to return to Vladivostok through Tsuruga but were denied passage (Polyglot Eroshenko was already involved with the guild of Japanese blind masseurs, fluent in Japanese, and suspected of having anarchist connections by the Japanese secret police …). Undeterred, Eroshenko went to Burma, but Lapitsky didn’t see a chance in the Far East and decided to seek a return route to Russia via South Africa, Madeira and Lisbon. His misadventures in ZA have been widely publicized, based on a Komintern account of his South African host (I copied the whole case in the Komintern archive and those able to read in Russian can read this saga at https://photos.app.goo.gl/c8iJvf76hzjSVVUC8 )
After Lisbon he went to Slovenia, Czechoslovakia and Belgium with pretty outrageous adventures everywhere, and probably even Hollywood, but after about 1929 his trail grows cold. I would appreciate any clues (most likely to come from the newspapers as they become digitized and indexed)
@dp
Теперь у нас есть фото “лже-поэта А. Черного” 1926 года, хотя по-прежнему нет уверенности, что это был тот же Л.М. Лапицкий, что и ранее в 1920-1924 гг. Голливудский “Черный” играл одну из ведущих ролей в балете Фокина “Шехерезада” – роль Главного Евнуха.
Несколько новых штрихов к истории лже-Черного в Америке, Европе и Индии. Первое обсуждение американской саги “Черного” шло в середине 1990-х в сборнике “Русское еврейство в Зарубежье”. Во втором томе Анатолий Иванов публикует “Потаенную биографию Саши Черного”, а в третьем томе Эммануил Штейн, исследователь “русского Китая”, пишет о харбинском журнале “Рубеж”, и найденной там неизвестной главе биографии Саши Черного – что Черный ездил в Америку. Наконец, в 4-м томе Штейн и Иванов обсуждают этот вопрос вместе под заглавием “Был ли Саша Черный в Голливуде?” в рубрике “По письмам наших авторов”. Там-то мы и читаем, что “Липицкий”, выступая в Праге под именем Черного, рассказывал там об Индии.
https://j-roots.info/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5711&start=160
Have you looked for Alexander Black/Chorny?
1932 Sasha Chorny [Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg], Russian poet, dies at 51. Could this be your man or is he too old?
tagore’s influence would, i think, be as interesting to map out as hugo’s! and it was certainly strong all over eastern europe: quite a few yiddish poets (sore reyzen, roza gutman, and members of the Di Yunge circle, among others) translated him, with a musical setting of one poem being one of the few translated texts in the standard late-20th-century song collections (“פֿאַר װאָס” / “far vos” [why], in the mloteks’ Mir Trogn A Gezang).
Have you looked for Alexander Black/Chorny?
You copied Dmitry’s own post from another forum.
I am pretty sure he is at the moment the world’s leading (and maybe the only) expert on Leo Lapitsky.
I am pretty sure he is at the moment the world’s leading (and maybe the only) expert on Leo Lapitsky.
LOL people wrote quite a bit about the famous Johannesburg City Hall meeting on aid to Russia which rather incongruously gathered together the cream of international-charity donors and thousands of workers singing the International, and where Comrade Lapitsky lectured, in Russian, on the Revolution. In the already mentioned Komintern file, you can see that the whole report has been copied before by the researchers of the South African Left. Eventually, it got translated into English and spread around.
As to Sasha Chorny and his impostors (of whom there were several), Anatoly Ivanov WAS the leading expert. Although even Ivanov couldn’t connect the faux-Chorny who published poetry in the Red Army newspapers in the Northern Caucasus in spring 1918 (before Shkuro’s White Partisans routed the reds) with the “Lipitsky” impostor of the 1920s. When the Soviet Power in the Northern Caucasus fell under the onslaught of Kuban and Don Cossacks, Lapitsky (who just fled the German-Ukrainian takeover of Eastern Ukraine and Rostov) had to run for his life again. Luckily, his Red newspaper superiors issued him a recommendation letter which introduced him as “the famous poet Sasha Chorny”. This piece of paper may have saved Lapitsky’s life during the fall of Baku, when the retreating British expeditionary force gave the “famous poet” safe passage to Tehran and Basra. There, the British Military Consulate in Mesopotamia gave Lapitsky an “endorsement” (which wasn’t quite a transit visa but still allowed him passage through British possessions as long as his intention remained to return home to Russia).
India and Africa were such oficially-sanctioned stopovers on his never-completed way home.
@LH, DP (aka Moskva 😊)
Thanks for explaining this. Naively I thought that someone who disappears, if not dead, is probably living under a false name, especially if their government is looking for them and no other government wants to protect them. Since Sasha Chorny was a false name he had already used, he might have become Alexander Chorny, Black, Schwarz, etc.
Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg who died in France in 1932 is the real Russian poet Sasha Chorny whose identity was stolen by Leo Lapitsky, International Man of Mystery, on many occasions.
Re: Schwarz
Many years ago on LH
Bill Poser says
October 22, 2005 at 12:27 pm
I heard a story about friends of my great-grandparents whose original name was Chorny, which means “black” in Russian. Once in the United States, they decided to change their name to a an American name, so they changed their name to Schwartz. Their idea of a real American was a German Jew.
Maybe it was Dmitry’s great grand-uncle…
I still remember that comment, and it still makes me laugh!
Naively I thought that someone who disappears, if not dead, is probably living under a false name, especially if their government is looking for them and no other government wants to protect them
People used pen names or scenic names from times immemorial, and it was common knowledge that Sasha Chorny was such a literary pseudonym. But the knowledge of who was the “rightful owner” of the pen name was far less common, especially because Glikberg was notoriously introverted, didn’t make any public appearances, and tried to keep his life as private as possible.
As to the actual id papers, people still needed to use their official travel documents for international travel, and, often, for legal residence too. America was the biggest exception where millions of immigrants changed names without any legal paperwork, but they can still be found by their original names in the border crossing records (and naturalization petitions of those who changed names had to include an arrival-record search under their original name to confirm that they arrived legally).
I still remember that comment, and it still makes me laugh!
There is nothing laughable about Eastern European Jews changing their surnames to something German or Hebrew rather than “real American”. Most Ashkenazim out East weren’t yet attached to their surnames, which were imposed on them by the repressive governments barely a century earlier. That’s why of all immigrant groups, the Jewish immigrants had the highest rate of surname change. But they wanted to shed the unloved names and the aura of clueless newbies, not their Jewish identity. So taking names of the well-established, previous-generation Jewish immigrants was almost perfect. A way to claim, “we are Jewish but we didn’t come out of woodwork just yesterday”. Taking Cohen or Levy or some variation thereof as a name was also common in families who had a valid claim to these titles, at the same proudly affirming their ancient Jewish roles and rejecting the unloved old-country surnames. Sometimes just changing spelling from Polish (the lingua franca of Jewish travel agency steamboat line contracts which most families used in lieu of international passports) to German was all they wanted.
Sometimes the same “change-it-but-only-to-a-Jewish-name” attitude was shared by the Americans, too. In rare cases the immigrants wanted to have official court-approved surname changes. I saw a case of a prominent Jewish family who tried to change their ill-pronounced surname to an Anglo name in a Brooklyn court. They were denied, the reason being that the chosen surname concealed or misinterpreted their actual identity. Two years later, they went to court again with an “easier” Jewish surname, and were approved. On the other hand, another branch of Lapitskys became Harris’s in America, after an in-law who emigrated earlier and turned Harrison after Hershenson (quite often, a phonetically dissimilar surname was chosen after a friend or a relative who signed the newcomers’ first lease or wrote a reference letter for their first job).
“They were denied, the reason being that the chosen surname concealed or misinterpreted their actual identity. ”
Wow. I thought that it is a Soviet thing. I mean, in USSR “nationality” was an important characteristic of a person formally, and surnames were an imprortant indicator of it infomally.
Most Ashkenazim out East weren’t yet attached to their surnames, which were imposed on them by the repressive governments barely a century earlier.
I do not think the process was any different for others. Not an objection, I just note that factors “imposed” and “repressive government” are like area bombing and are not where differences between communities may originate from. Our governments impose even more paperwork on us now.
In Soviet Central Asia, the surnames campaign went into different direction – father’s name was turned into a surname by adding Russian endings -ov, -ev, -in.
Presumably everyone has (or had) a father or grandfather, so there was nothing to hate about new surnames, except perhaps the Russian ending.
The Jewish surnames of late 19th century apparently had much more varied origins.
There is nothing laughable about Eastern European Jews changing their surnames to something German or Hebrew rather than “real American”.
I wasn’t saying the phenomenon was funny, I said the comment was. And it was.
It reminded me the epoch of “films with Schwarz[enegger] and films with Stallone”.
I do not think the process was any different for others. Not an objection, I just note that factors “imposed” and “repressive government” are like area bombing and are not where differences between communities may originate from. Our governments impose even more paperwork on us now.
It was different for the Slavic people which have had noble, landless noble, free holder, clergy classes with surnames for centuries. For their commoners, winning the right to have a surname was seen as upward social mobility. For the Jews, semi-anonymity where only the local kahal would know the full identity of a debtor or a contract holder or a criminal, and therefore no scores can be settled by an outside authority without kahal’s approval, was the time honored way of life. Fixed surnames weren’t a social victory for them. It was an enemy plot.
In the aftermath of WW1, it became ubiquitously difficult to travel internationally without “official” identity documents, thus giving rise to the need for Nansen Passports. But my vague impression is that was in many parts of a world a fairly sudden development that reacted to war-associated crises and increased hesitation in many places about having an open door for refugees or even “normal” types of immigrant. Dmitry P. refers to, e.g., “Jewish travel agency steamboat line contracts” as a passport substitute (presumably in the pre-1914 era?), but what if any proof of identity did the steamboat line agent at the port of embarkation require? Or did he just take your money and write down whatever you said your name was on an honor-system basis?
Yes, as I said, I do not disagree.
Maybe I do not fully agree with Russain part (and I doubt that it was different in Poland), but certainly Jews did have a reason to react differently. As for the Russian part: most – almost all! – Russian population were villagers, and village was and even is a different world.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Русские_фамилии#Распространение_фамилий_у_крестьянства
В 1888 году был опубликован специальный указ сената, гласивший:
…Как обнаруживает практика, и между лицами, рожденными в законном браке, встречается много лиц, не имеющих фамилий, то есть носящих так называемые фамилии по отчеству, что вызывает существенные недоразумения, и даже иногда злоупотребления… Именоваться определенной фамилией составляет не только право, но и обязанность всякого полноправного лица, и означение фамилии на некоторых документах требуется самим законом.
And indeed the dictator of Tajikistan has changed his last name from Rahmonov to Rahmon.
but what if any proof of identity did the steamboat line agent at the port of embarkation require? Or did he just take your money and write down whatever you said your name was on an honor-system basis?
Great questions. Yes, it’s pre-WWI system. After WWI, many Russians used passports issues by consulates of the defunct Provisional Government (typically in Bucharest) rather than the classic Nansen “white” passports.
But no, the steamboat contracts were drawn in the towns of residents of the prospective emigrants rather than the ports of embarkation. One had to leave Russia with the “coyotes” to reach the ports of embarkation, transiting through Germany which required official papers. The contract served as an official proof of transit status. Most contracts were paid in America by friends and relatives (Temple U preserves digitized ledgers of the main US travel agencies, which used Polish language because it was the only Latin-script language understood by all parties). Sometimes a ticket’s recipient couldn’t go; then the ticket was refunded or transferred as requested by the payer. Since in most cases, a person in America paid and a person in “Russia” received the contract, identity check was required, either using an internal id or a word-of-mouth of neighbors and relatives.
An exception was the British Castle Line and a few Russian steamers such as Kursk which operated out of Libava. Castle entered into a cartel agreement with Hamburg Amerika Line and lesser competitors, securing for itself a monopoly status for the governorates adjacent to Libava, primarily Kovno Governorate. Libava rules were different. Being a Russian port, it required Russian foreign passports, which were really hard to get, and Castle’s agents were known to engage in convoluted identity fraud, creating fake “families” traveling on one passport per group.
Thanks, that’s extremely interesting information! Are there photos of those Provisional Government passports online?
By “internal id,” I take it what is meant is a пропи́ска? At the time, of course, citizens of free countries thought the Czarist system of internal passports evidence of barbarism and oppression but in hindsight they were just ahead of the curve on the pathway those other countries would subsequently follow.
Like the Great Chinese Firewall today.
Are there photos of those Provisional Government passports online?
Not too few. In the early 1920s, it was still possible for the people born in Eastern Europe to emigrate into the US, before America imposed draconian quotes. So many future Americans traveled with Provisional Govt holdover documents. One example I know off the to of my head is this Bucharest-issued 1922 passport:
https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/verbovets/#PICSMOISHE
By “internal id,” I take it what is meant is a пропи́ска? At the time, of course, citizens of free countries thought the Czarist system of internal passports evidence of barbarism and oppression
Broadly speaking, yes, the Czarist predecessor of the Soviet internal passport + propiska (residential registration with its restrictions) + domovaya kniga (roster of a house residents) system. The details differ in important ways though. Passports or residential registration weren’t universal requirements in the old-regime times.
Internal passport (then known as “gubernskiy pasport”) was the most potent form of a permit to travel outside of one’s official place of residence, but there many other types of internal-travel permits and ids (unlike passports, they had shorter validity and more specific restrictions spelling out where the bearer may go and why).
Propiska didn’t really exist yet, but people traveling to certain bigger cities or strategic military areas had to register their travel papers with the police on arrival. Hoteliers or landlords would be fined if they didn’t comply within a few days. Fines for the actual travelers were minor.
Residential registration was originally required for tax purposes (and was then known as “pripiska”, literally “inscribing into a list”, which is of course frequently conflated with “propiska”). Poll tax payers lists were revised every few years in a protractive, expensive process of Revision, where all residents had to go to their places of registration and wait, sometimes for months, to be counted. Over time Russia abolished most poll taxes but kept the lists, now for draft purposes. After the Crimean defeat and the military reform which followed, the government created a separate draft registry, and stopped revising the taxpayer lists altogether. So the last, Tenth Revision happened in 1858, and in the decades which followed, the mismatch between the official registry and the actual place of residence grew and grew. As a practical consequence, millions of people living away from their ancestral localities of “pripiska” required internal travel documents. To meet this massive need, internal passports became really common and easy to get, turning into a de-facto national id by WWI.
In the early 1920s, it was still possible for the people born in Eastern Europe to emigrate into the US, before America imposed draconian quotes. So many future Americans traveled with Provisional Govt holdover documents.
Thanks very much for the information and the photos; it’s very valuable to me.
@Dmitry Pruss: What do you mean by “poll taxes”? Surely most people in tsarist Russia were not voting.
“Poll tax” just means “A tax levied on every person” (OED); it has nothing to do with taxes. (It’s from poll “The part of the head on which the hair grows.”)
Heh. A poll tax is a tax levied per counted head without regard to income or property. In Norwegian we call it koppskatt, probably from a Low German word corresponding to High German Kopfschatz.
But it occured to me that I didn’t know how the word poll came to mean “counting of heads”. I still don’t, but at least now I know that it’s an old word for “top of the head” found in several Germanic languages. It’s not a recent borrowing, but it can’t be Germanic in origin..
Edit: Ninjaed by the Head Master. That’s the price of research, or of self-conscious editing.
Why not Germanic?
Because of the initial p. But I agree that that’s no waterproof assumption.
I was just contemplating how to unite these mostly West Germanic forms in p- with North Germanic kolle etc. “roundish or single hill; hornless head (of cow)”. I guess I shouldn’t posit P- and Q- Germanic based on a single comparison.
Oh, I see that the cattle breed svensk rödkulla is translated (by Wikipedia) as Swedish Red Polled.
I’m not surprised that that’s the etymological meaning of poll tax. I am, however, surprised that the OED entry (supposedly fully updated) does not list the meaning I was thinking of (now the usual one in American politics)—given by Wiktionary as:
For example, many sources discussing the Twenty-Fourth Amendment describe it as a civil rights measure that banned poll taxes, including the official House of Representatives page about the passing of the amendment:
If this had said, “outlawing paying the poll tax as a voting requirement,” that would have been consistent with the older meaning as well, but the actual phrasing seems hard to square with anything except the “tax that must be paid in order to vote” definition.
However, the text of the amendment itself is ambiguous about which meaning of poll tax the framers in Congress had in mind in 1962:
(And there are also plenty of discussions that similarly phrase their descriptions of the what the amendment did so as to be consistent with either definition.)
This US meaning presumably began life as an outright error: there would be no sense in outlawing the requiring the payment of a poll tax in order to vote if “poll tax” actually in itself meant “a tax that must be paid in order to vote.” You would instead say that you were outlawing poll taxes tout court.
The original (and One True) meaning remains well-known in the UK thanks to Margaret Thatcher. (I believe in giving credit where credit is due.)
There is a sort of half-way case, inasmuch as it is not unknown for people here to decline to register to vote because they are afraid of coming to the official notice of the government. It is a conversation I have had on the doorstep …
If registration meant that you were then, and only then, listed as liable to pay the poll tax (as being a breathing individual that the government was now officially aware of), the mere existence of said tax might indeed infringe on voters’ rights, because it had become a de facto tax on voting. I suspect that is what the 1962 folk in Congress had in mind.
The thing about poll taxes (stricto sensu) is, of course, that, being flat-rate, they are proportionately harder to pay for the poor than the rich: hence the attraction both to Margaret Thatcher and to would-be suppressors of votes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_States
I think that the introduction of the catchy nickname “Poll Tax” for whatever it was that the Blessed Margaret actually called her regressive local tax, which finally did for her politically, actually successfully leveraged on the bad smell associated with such things in the US. Historical British efforts were not so infamous by then.
I imagine Conservative Central Office are even now trying to come up with nice unthreatening names for a relaunch. Zakat? … perhaps not.
Surely most people in tsarist Russia were not voting.
Of course they were.
After reforms of Tsar Alexander II, the peasants were granted wide-ranging self-government. First they voted in their mir communes (village level direct democracy), then they voted for delegates to the volost self-government (county level), then the peasants along with the nobility and urban dwellers voted for the elective district and provincial assemblies (zemstvo) which exercised limited self-government at the province (governorate) level.
After 1906, the peasants also voted in the elections for the new Russian Parliament – State Duma.
The cities, of course, had their own self-government since forever (regularized by Catherine the Great in 18th century).
Post-reform democracy was especially funny in the ethnic minority regions where elections often were introduced for the first time by the Tsarist government (replacing earlier feudal system with hereditary lords). Countless books were written about elections among the Kazakhs, Buryats etc where the candidates were bribing the voters by holding feasts and giving gifts and were widely expected to steal public funds after getting elected in order to repay the loans taken to finance the election campaign.
In the US, Russian immigrants (Jewish or not) who knew only Cyrillic script often would be assigned names at the whim of the immigration intake officer. Sometimes they would go to the law to have their real name restored, and sometimes they didn’t. I have known guys names Thomas, Philips, and McNellis whose names were of that description. (Timothy Leary travelled under the name McNellis after his escape from prison, and I suspect that my friend had something to do with that).
Scandinavian commoners in the US often just changed their patronymic into a surname, which is why you have all the Johnsons, Andersons, Olsons etc. But middle class families had real surnames and kept them, and in some cases they adopted real surnames in the US even though they weren’t authorized to have them back home. I knew a family named Soma which had done that, and the grandfather of Charles Lindbergh the aviator had come to the US as a Mattson, as I remember. (My Dutch ancestors used patronymics up to a certain point before they came here).
You heard it here first: most Scandinavian Americans don’t have real surnames!
Welshmen share six surnames between us all. We inhabit an impoverished land. We dream of having as many surnames as Scandinavians, but it is not to be.
The Welsh have only six surnames in all. Icelanders have no surnames at all. Ys is Ís. Hmmmm?
Icelanders have no surnames at all
Ys gwir a ddywedaist. Ond …
Halldór Laxness had two. He probably used up the allowance. How like him …
There are only about 30 “-son” surnames on this list of a few thousand Swedish noble families.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedish_noble_families
Old Testament Jews had no surnames. Therefore Icelanders are the Lost Tribes. Or maybe they are ancient Egyptians.
Oh, I give up. In the end everyone’s Welsh, even if they don’t know it.
@David Eddyshaw: It certainly does appear that the American meaning of poll tax arose through a misunderstanding. I remember the discussion of the unpopularity of the poll tax in Britain when Thatcher was finally forced out as prime minister. (The only British prime minister before her who had been genuinely famous in America was Winston Churchill.) However, when the poll tax issue was covered in the American press, I don’t recall anyone pointing out that the meaning they were using of poll tax was probably not the one Americans would first think of.
A uniform tax, payable by each member of the population, would actually have been one of the few forms of direct taxation that could have been used by the federal government prior to the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, which legalized the federal income tax. The reason that a constitutional amendment was needed is actually a fairly interesting historical matter. It is well known that state populations, for purposes of allocating seats in the House of Representatives counted only three-fifths of a state’s slaves. It is largely forgotten that another part of the system of compromises that were hammered out was that direct taxes by the federal government had raise money from each state in proportion to a state’s population—so if slaves were partially counted for determining House representation, they would be counted the same amount for determining tax liability. This aspect is largely forgotten, because the South managed to ensure that there would be direct federal taxation. Federal revenue was raised via other means—such as tariffs, which came down harder on the South than on the North anyway; disagreement over tariffs was actually probably the (distantly) second-most-important reason for the Southern states’ secession in 1861.
Icelanders who are descended from the non-Natives (mostly Danish colonial officials) have surnames, and aren’t allowed to shed them. This is one of the ways to tell “true” Icelanders from the latecomers.
In the US, Russian immigrants (Jewish or not) who knew only Cyrillic script often would be assigned names at the whim of the immigration intake officer
This is a common myth. For whatever reasons the immigrants insisted to their grandchildren that their surnames have been changed by officers at Ellis Island. In reality the immigration officers were expressly prohibited from changing anything at all. They were under obligation to spell the name exactly as in the steamboat manifest, compiled on disembarkation. Sometimes there were illegible letters to clarify, but that’s the extent of what the officers were allowed to “change”. And the main identification paper, the steamer contract, was, of course, always using Latin script. I mentioned already that this is why Polish was often used to spell names in the contracts, being the most widely known language written in Latin characters out East.
Of the new immigrants, it was the Jews who changed the surnames after (not “on”) arrival most frequently, and I tried explaining the reasons already, too.
Poll tax in Russia wasn’t necessarily a case of flat tax paid by commoners. It was levied on the community and paid by the community leadership, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they collected it from the better off members, skipping the poor.
John Emerson: Scandinavian commoners in the US often just changed their patronymic into a surname, which is why you have all the Johnsons, Andersons, Olsons etc. But middle class families had real surnames and kept them, and in some cases they adopted real surnames in the US even though they weren’t authorized to have them back home. I knew a family named Soma which had done that, and the grandfather of Charles Lindbergh the aviator had come to the US as a Mattson, as I remember.
I can’t speak for Swedes, but the fact that most rural Norwegians had no heriitary surname doesn’t mean they had no right to anything but the patronymic. The use of patronymic or toponymic or (marginally in Norway) occupational surnames was variable with time and place, and also with context. I suspect that the real reason for the many -sen names in the US is that names that were impossible to pronounce for English speakers were inconvenient, but somebody from the farmstead of Soma might easily come to a different conclusion.
Icelanders who are descended from the non-Natives (mostly Danish colonial officials) have surnames, and aren’t allowed to shed them.
What?! What sense does that make?
I just passed along a story which a linguist friend told me when we visited. Wiki actually says that it was legal for Icelanders to adopt a surname between 1913 and 1925 if it could be properly gendered and morphed into cases. In 2013 it was allowed to keep hereditary surnames which couldn’t conform to gender grammar.
arrival most frequently, and I tried explaining the reasons already, too.
As I said, no objections. Trying to verify some claims about surnames (even the fragment quoted from WP above) can be a torture. It is a fact that I am chronically too lazy to get to primary sources, and you chronically are not (which is confirmed by my yesterday’s attempts to find the composer of очи чёрные*). All I wanted to say is that the Slavic parts of the story are compliated too. But they are complicated differently.
—
*actually, it was a very indirect way to say thank you. Maybe I should do it more directly. I was impressed.
The hunt for the sources is kind of more exhilarating for me than writing up the timeline. The Dark Eyes story I finally wrote is more like an account of the search and its detours and breakthroughs rather than the history of the song or the biography of the composer. But of course I was lucky to start from nonsensical made up stories … and to finish with more of those. It’s a genre too 🙂
Trond: In his memoir “The Other Side of Main Street”, Henry Johnson mentions that his first grade teacher initially had trouble understanding his Swedish name, pr. “Henreek Yonson” but quickly figured it out and told him that he was now Henry Johnson, and he reported that to his father and the family went along with it. The “Soma” story was told to me by a Soma, whose father was a minister, and it seemed that it was an assertion of respectable status, whether it happened in Norway or the US. The Lindbergh story comes from the bio of his father, who was an important local politician and a founder of the Farmer Labor Party, which ended up running the state for at least 8 years. Commoners may not have been forbidden to adopt surnames, but few of them who came to MN seem to have done so, and as I linked, all of the Swedish nobility seems to have done so.
Johnson noted that he was called a Norwegian, though he was Swedish, and at about the same time Hamsun, as a Norwegian, was annoyed by being called a Swede. Likewise, both Hollanders and Germans dislike being called Dutch, and Hellenes dislike being called Greeks. American ethnocentricity impacted even the blond nations
https://www.amazon.com/other-side-Main-street-history/dp/B0007DQX60
Obviously, in my above comment I meant to write: “… the South managed to ensure that there would be no direct federal taxation.”
Hellenes dislike being called Greeks
None of the ones I know seems to mind a bit. Is this a US thing?
None of the ones I know seems to mind a bit.
The reference is to a book published in 1943 and describing the author’s life decades earlier, so current experience is beside the point. I can easily imagine that in those halcyon days when proud Anglo-Americans eagerly showed their contempt for the lesser races of Mediterranean Europe, the term “Greek” was bandied about like an ethnic slur, and people of that nationality would have preferred to be called by the ancient name Hellene. But I’m just guessing.
You can certainly find old-timey usage among Greek-Americans of the H-word as indicative of a posh and formal register, in e.g. the name of the “American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association” (founded 1922). I’m less certain about day-to-day informal usage as an endonym when speaking English. And I don’t think even the most well-meaning Non-Hellenic-Americans (Barbarian-Americans?) ever consistently used “Hellene” as the ethnonym noun (“Hellenic” as an adjective may have been an easier sell, esp. when used in “elegant variation” alternating with “Greek”).
Of course not, but that doesn’t mean Greeks didn’t resent the situation before they got all assimilated and started making pizza.
I think I based it in an English-language nationalist publication in English from Greece which was possibly government sponsored, So there was some exaggeration.
Germans don’t seem to care about their nation being called Germany or Allemagne when they call it Deutschland. But this kind of terminological dispute can get pretty fierce in American or other ethnic politics, and even more so, gender politics.
Hollanders not liking being called Dutch I heard from my mom, whose father was Dutch from Orange City itself. Probably a WWI relic.
an important local politician and a founder of the Farmer Labor Party, which ended up running the state for at least 8 years
Considerably longer than that after the 1944 merger with the third-party Democrats, who had almost entirely collapsed in 1860. No Republican governor has been elected in the state since Tim Pawlenty’s re-election in 2006 by 1% of the votes cast.
Hollanders not liking being called Dutch
I don’t suppose Netherlanders from Zeeland or Drenthe particularly care for being called Hollanders, either.
A lengthy if perhaps dated account of the Feb. 1909 anti-Greek pogrom in South Omaha, Nebraska, where you might have hoped people would be better-behaved than in wicked Minnesota: https://history.nebraska.gov/sites/history.nebraska.gov/files/doc/publications/1970-2-Anti_Greek_Riot.pdf
Yes, I had a conversation with some Netherlanders many years ago about this. They were actually pretty amiable but noted that Holland is only part of their country. But my mother’s people are Hollanders and someone should talk to them.
The Farmer Labor Party part of the DFL Party was pretty much gutted around 1946 by a purge led by Hubert Humphrey. Among those purged were a bunch of dangerous leftist church ladies named Susie Stageberg, Genevieve Stiefel, Selma Seestrom, and Meridel Lesueur. In 1948 Hubert Humphrey was on the far left of the national Democratic Party but in the right of the DFL party. There are still traces of the FLP party spirit left, for example with Ilhan Omar, who also has a quaint immigrant name. (Meridel Lesueur was a published author, and her grandfather or great grandfather had been a disciple of Victor Hugo on Guernsey. (Making Minnesota Liberal”,Jennifer Delton).