For those of you who are interested in the progress of my Russian reading (surely there are at least two of you), I thought I’d provide a brief account of recent activity. After Rasputin’s Живи и помни (Live and Remember; see this post), I read Sinyavsky/Tertz’s Прогулки с Пушкиным [Strolls with Pushkin], which portrays Pushkin as a quintessential outsider and as not taking anything very seriously except poetry; it was very controversial in exile community because they, like all Russians, took Pushkin very very seriously, but it’s a lot of fun and shows real insight. Then I read Georgi Vladimov’s Верный Руслан [Faithful Ruslan], in which Ruslan, deprived of his position as a guard dog when a Gulag camp is closed, finds new purpose in guarding a released prisoner in a nearby town and waiting for the camp to reopen; it’s brilliant and harrowing and deserves its fame and popularity. Then I read Trifonov’s Другая жизнь [Another Life], one of his complex morality tales of late-Soviet Moscow life which I’m still digesting. At that point I thought I’d retreat to Chekhov and finish his major stories; I read В овраге [In the Ravine] (very, very grim), Архиерей [The Bishop] (Bishop Pyotr remembers the past fondly but is tired of his wretched flock and wishes he could go abroad again), and Невеста [The Fiancée, also tr. Betrothed] (Nadya is supposed to marry the rich Andrei, but her dying friend Sasha urges her to “turn her life upside down” and she runs off to Petersburg to live freely), and while I was impressed by them all and glad I’d read them, I was also glad to shake the dust of the 19th century off my feet. I read Bunin’s 1914 Братья [Brothers] (set in Ceylon: a Colombo rickshaw driver despairs, and the Englishman he’s been driving around flees the island on a Russian ship) just to get back to Bunin, then returned to more recent times with Andrei Bitov’s series of autobiographical stories known (in one collection at least) as Улетающий Монахов [Monakhov flying away]. They’re in Bitov’s annoying pseudo-Salinger vein, with a young male protagonist ignoring his duties and his loving and concerned mother to moon after an older woman who keeps him dangling, but I enjoy his style anyway; the second story, Сад [The garden], happens to be set at the end of the year and have sections titled “December 29,” “December 30,” “December 31,” and “January 1,” so I’m reading them on the titular days.
For those interested in recent Russian literature, I present 100 главных русских книг XXI века [100 important Russian books of the 21st century]; needless to say, it’s as fallible as all such lists (it’s got outright errors, like saying Alexander Kabakov’s Всё поправимо came out in 2008 rather than 2004 and calling Senchin’s 2009 novel “Ёлтышевы” rather than Елтышевы, and strange omissions — nothing, for instance, by Lena Eltang, Leonid Girshovich, or Oleg Zaionchkovsky, all of whom are excellent writers who will be read after some of the politico-sociological analyses and printed-up Facebook posts listed are forgotten), but hey, half the fun of such lists is arguing with them, and I learned about some interesting books.
Meanwhile, my wife and I have finished Daniel Deronda (and watched the excellent BBC series based on it) and are reading Tessa Hadley’s Accidents in the Home (not as good as her later novels but still enjoyable reading); I am also (because I’m always reading half a dozen books at once) reading Lena Eltang’s Другие барабаны [Different drums (which refers to the Russian version of the famous Emerson quote about marching to the beat of a different drummer)], which is a lot of fun and just the kind of multicultural mix I enjoy: the protagonist has the Greek name Kostas Kairis but is from the ex-Soviet Union (he has youthful memories of Vilnius and Tartu) and is living in Lisbon, and there are all sorts of references to world culture. In fact, I’ll take the occasion to see if anyone can help me with a reference: at one point the narrator says “Гоpe душило меня, прочел я у Байрона несколько лет спустя, хотя страсть меня еще не терзала” [Grief suffocated me, I read in Byron some years later, though passion did not yet torment me], and I have had no luck finding Byron’s original English.
And with that, I wish you all the very best of new years (it’s got to be better than 2020, surely…)!
As the wags said a couple of months ago, on Jewish New Year’s day for the year 5781, or תשפ״א:
תהיה שנה פחות איומה
tihiye shana paxot ayuma
‘May it be a less awful year’.
Tɔ. Nɛ ya yʋʋmpaalig!
Please, raise your glasses.
Some decades ago, in the Soviet Union, university students were given a deferment from a 2-year army conscription at age of 18 (for boys only). They had to have some on-campus military training and one summer, a boot camp. In one of them (and probably in many others) there developed a tradition each night after the lights out someone said loudly “Yet another day passed” and the whole dormitory replied “Fucking, great!” [Ну и хуй с ним in the original Russian].
Happy new year!
С наступающим (и отступающим, as well!), Languagehat!
You’ll find Eltang, Girshovich, and Zaionchkovsky in the individual Полка lists: https://polka.academy/materials/750 I could spend all of next week studying these lists, they’re really fun.
For what it’s worth, I included Zaionchkovsky’s Пертрович in my list. As well as Елтышевы, which I spelled that way!
Петрович! (Of course I only noticed the typo after my fifteen minutes had elapsed, after leaving my desk and returning! I think I was too focused on the Senchin title!)
Frohes Neues Jahr!
ᠰᠢᠨᠡ ᠵᠢᠯ ᠦ᠋ᠨ ᠮᠡᠨᠳᠦ ᠬᠦᠷᠭᠡᠶᠡ!
or
ᠰᠢᠨᠡ ᠣᠨ ᠤ᠋ ᠮᠡᠲᠦ ᠬᠦᠷᠭᠡᠶᠡ!
Is Nɛ ya “New Year”?
And by the way, I am one of those interested in your Russian reading history, even if I am unlikely to ever read any of these books. Your enthusiasm is catching.
Hmmm. “Catching” wasn’t actually a very popular word last year (or this year, if you’re at the tail end…)
You’ll find Eltang, Girshovich, and Zaionchkovsky in the individual Полка lists
Great, thanks for alerting me!
Is Nɛ ya “New Year”?
No. It’s “with your.”
[Bareka] nɛ ya yʋʋm-paalig.
[Blessing] with your (pl) year-new:SG.
The reply is Naa (with a high-falling tone.)
“Barak Obama be with you in a New Year!”
I was interested that Невеста means fiancée: is the slight similarity to Spanish novia just coincidence?
I’d say it’s a case of parallel semantics – while English or German use bride / Braut mostly in the context of and the immediate run-up to the wedding, Russian and Spanish use it from the moment wedding becomes the officially announced goal.
I was interested that Невеста means fiancée: is the slight similarity to Spanish novia just coincidence?
I’m afraid so; it’s probably from ‘unknown [person]’: не- (negative prefix) + ведать ‘to know’ (a good old Indo-European word cognate with wit).
“Know” in the biblical sense?
In a biblical sense it is знать. From PIE *ǵnéh₃t (Greek ἔγνων), while ведать is from PIE *weyd- (seeing is knowing, you know). Tempting to relate it to wedding, but apparently no. Anyone knows how g changed into z?
[ˌg̊ʊɐ̯d̥snɛɪ̯çsˈjɒ̈ɐ̯]! (Immediately recognizable as a wish from its… invisible accusative.)
Wouldn’t “the hell with it” be a better translation? Or is that too close? “Fucking great” as a standalone reply is automatically sarcastic in my experience.
Reminds me of “Polish, the language where no means yes!”
It wasn’t [g] in PIE; *ǵ was most likely [gʲ] – гь.
German preserves both roots as kennen & wissen. The distinction is hard to explain, but basically kennen is the result of having seen something/someone before, while wissen is the result of learning, regional abbreviations like weißt du ein… “do you know where I can find a…” notwithstanding.
IIRC, can is the modal version of kennen and know. (More explicitly, they are different stems of the same root, and can was attracted to the preterito-present paradigm).
Danish uses kan for some things (like languages) that Anglos know. But otherwise, kende and vide largely split the domain of know — I would guess that know and wit had the same split before the latter disappeared.
Ну и хуй с ним
Surely the appropriate rendering would be the Army Creole* “Fucking A!”
*© Tom Wolfe, 1979.
That is können “can” in German, never kennen.
(The infinitives are homophonous in some of the unrounding dialects, but most other forms aren’t. Können has spawned a multitude of irregular paradigms.)
the appropriate rendering would be the Army Creole
Yessir!
Wouldn’t “the hell with it” be a better translation?
I wanted something mildly taboo.
Surely хуй isn’t particularly mild.
Thanks to fundamentalism, H-E-double-hockey-sticks is still banned on a lot of American websites.
And if you’re going to tell me it’s mild in boot camp, so is “fucking.”
I’m a little surprised that this page
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_creole
has survived culling by the Wikicops. I presume it’s because said Wikicops don’t recognise a deadpan piss-take when they see one …
For an actual Army Creole:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubi_language
Surely хуй isn’t particularly mild. — And if you’re going to tell me it’s mild in boot camp, so is “fucking.”
I will try to clarify as soon as I understand what is the Erklärungsnot.
It’s got 5 different references! To me it looks half-serious. 🙂
The pressure to explain yourself after you’ve been caught doing something that seems scandalous.
The Apaches had a special “war-path language” only spoken by warriors during raids. I can’t access the articles from here, but as I remember it was just the Apache language with a bunch of stylized reversals— hot for cold, black for white, etc.
War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength!
The etymology i’ve heard makes nevjesta = someone who doesn’t know.
Hrvatski jezični portal says:
prasl. i stsl. nevěsta (rus. nevésta, polj. niewiasta) ≃ ne- + prasl. *věstъ: poznat; prvotno je značenje »nepoznata (žena)«
So according to this it’s not a woman who doesn’t know but an unknown woman.
Yeah, you’re bringing in a woman from outside the свой (“our people”) group, and it takes time to get to know and accept her (which is one explanation for why mothers-in-law are traditionally so shitty to brides).
In Taiwan, I’ve read, suicide is most common among brides in the first year of marriage.
one explanation for why mothers-in-law are traditionally so shitty to brides
Power struggle. The mother-in-law is defending her top spot in the household pecking order for as long as she can To understand the dynamics of traditionally organized societies you have to understand the class dynamics in junior high school.
This is not a misogynistic position, it’s basic feminism. The power struggle ends with emancipation — when mothers and daughters-in-law find prestige and fullfillment outside of the traditional family system. A related effect is how husbands would keep their wives from education, and how some immigrant husbands today will keep their wives from learning the new language. And outside of the family, bosses in crews of seasonal guest workers are often the only one to speak the language. In the latter case the emancipation in question is from the traditional patron-client system.
Isn’t some of this also hardwired genetic tendencies, i.e the mother-in-law does not want the bride planting cuckoos in the family nest?
E.g., the mother of the groom at the beginning of The Deer Hunter.
I’m sceptical to hardwired culture. Obviously we do have instincts, but they are all over the place and give us double and conflicted signals all the time. Much of human culture may be about organizing our interactions so that our individual instinctive reactions are clearer and yield useful results.
The simple power struggle between individuals in a group is observable in most or all social mammals. Mother-daughter rivalry does exist, both in fiction and in popular stereotype, as does sibling rivalry, but the daughter/sister-in-law comes in from outside and has to make a place for herself in an existing hierarchy.
If there’s also a genetic tendency to chase the intruding female away, that ought to mean that human society is naturally matrilocal. Maybe it is. There are human cultures that are. But that would normally also mean that young males are driven away (by force or by instinct). And maybe they are. Adolescent boys are notoriously restless. Young men are risk-seakers. Rites of passage for young men could be designed to take us around that. But from what I’ve read about matrilocal systems, their social constructions are no less elaborate and could just as easily be taken as ways to override natural tendencies. Our chimp cousins are loosely patrilocal, i.e. young females tend to move out.
I agree with Trond; “hardwired genetic tendencies” are way too easy a recourse for those who want to impose particular interpretations of cultural elements. They may exist, but we’re a long way from knowing what they are and how they work.
If Russian folk humor to be believed, relationship of son- and mother-in-law are no better than the double-female version. This should be the situation where the bride is not taken from a distant village.
Such easy-to-propose-but-difficult-to-falsify evolutionary explanations of human behavior are often called “just so stories.” When I first heard that term, I wondered whether its meaning was anything like what Kipling was thinking of when he titled his book. To this day, I am not really sure, since I have never seen a clear explication of what Kipling was driving for. (Compare, however, “the Law of the Jungle,” whose modern usage bears essentially no resemblance to its meaning in Kipling’s The Jungle Book.)
The only one of the Just-So Stories that has a place in Danish culture is the one about how Elephant got his trunk. So that is the kind of explanation I think of when I hear the term — a plausible chain of events posited as the true explanation of something, just because it’s possible. (Not that Kipling’s story seemed very possible even to a child, but you know what I mean).
to me “just-so story” (i think that The Elephant’s Child is the best-known of kipling’s fables in the u.s., too) isn’t about plausibility so much as reverse reasoning: what chain of events, no matter how implausible, could make my a priori conviction into Inevitable Truth. as always (echoing TE & our host), best illustrated by the (soi disant) sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, whose Objective Conclusions about the inevitable results of Universal Processes seem somehow to always precisely coincide with their misogynist and otherwise reactionary politics.
There is a kind of paradox here: if you believe that some sort of evolutionary inevitability applies to the thought processes and self image of individual humans, you must accept that humans inevitably have a self image that does not involve their thought processes being subject to evolutionary inevitability — so you had better shut up about it before you make them sad.
Or before they ask what it is in those proponents’ evolutionary history that makes them eager to propose that everybody else (especially their wives) should accept that their misogynist and otherwise reactionary politics are genetically determined and thus beyond moral reproach. If their theories can’t explain that, what use are they?
@rozele
I do not find the “wicked stepmother /mother-in-law” trope to be in itself anti-female, just as I do not find the corresponding “king who murders his wife’s previous children after killing their father and marrying their mother” anti-male. I agree that using these tropes to reinforce pre-existing prejudices is harmful.
The word “hardwired”, applied to people, is generally in itself a dead giveaway that pseudoscience is on the way, and that it is a waste of precious time to continue reading.
(Of course, if you agree with me, you won’t have read this far.)
Something else that had never occurred to me before; LH is educational!
It seriously traduces Kipling to use the term “Just So Stories” for the sort of narrative that explains that women are natural housewives because they gathered berries on the savannah instead of hunting leopards like boardroom executives do. Kipling’s Just-So Stories do not pretend to be either real or socially normative.
In fact, the proper term for sociobiological fables is “myth” (in its technical sense.)
Mother-in-law is well respected in many cultures.
Regarding supposed antagonism between mothers and daughters-in-law, I suggest
Ruth 1:16
A splendidly Non-wicked Stepmother figures prominently in the film Juno.
In West African folk tales, the Wicked Stepmother figure usually becomes the Mother’s Wicked Co-Wife; I suppose the principle is pretty much the same.
I think it was Chesterton who pointed out that the Wicked Stepmother is a trope precisely because the great majority of actual stepmothers in fact try extra-hard to be Nice Stepmothers. She’s an Awful Warning, not a piece of social realism.
the Wicked Stepmother is a trope precisely because the great majority of actual stepmothers in fact try extra-hard to be Nice Stepmothers.
[Citation needed], as they say. I’m sure a lot of stepmothers do try to be Nice Stepmothers, but I’m unclear as to the basis for “great majority.” Did Chesterton do a cross-cultural study?
He was often in a brown study, by all accounts. He crossed from the Anglican culture to the Catholic one. It adds up.
Years ago, I came across an all-too-plausible explanation of why Chesterton’s essays are such a bizarre mixture of extraordinary insight and complete tosh: viz, that he was very drunk when he wrote the latter.
A much admired cranker-outer of Christian cred and crapulous crap. As with Trump, it’s not the man himself but his admirers that give one pause.
Chesterton’s paradoxical / aphoristic style thrilled me at first, but in the long run it was unsatisfying and even a little sickening. I felt the same way later when I read a little Seneca, who I suspect was Chesterton’s model.
And then came Tom Friedman……
The wicked stepmother business seems more like cuckoo-by-proxy – trying to make sure that your children get the best of what’s going instead of having to share it with another woman’s children – rather than direct rivalry with the stepchild(ren).
I felt the same way later when I read a little Seneca
I have long felt that, whatever you say about Nero, at least he dispatched that most odious of hypocrites, Seneca*. That’s got to count for something, admittedly to be set over against having had every single one of his close relatives killed and even acting on the stage.
*Yes, I’m bitter. I’ve read his letters to Lucilius. ‘Nuff said.
Nero isn’t done yet. He’s hiding out in Parthia and shall return to make his fans happy.
The chain of events is also detailed: it happened exactly like that – just so. More recent just-so stories are as ridiculous as Kipling’s, they just suffer from the added defect that they’re meant seriously. (Once as a farce, once as a tragic farce…)
“wicked stepmother / mother-in-law” trope
i wasn’t talking about the literary / folktale trope, but about the idea that it reflects some innate/eternal/genetic drive. i see the trope as only incidentally misogynist – and in many cases (the Cinderella-model stories, especially All-kinds-of-fur, for example) i’d argue for it as carrying quite the opposite message…
the trope overall, it seems to me, has a lot to do with the very material reality of children as semi-disposable domestic labor in contexts with high child and maternal mortality (like early modern europe, where so many of the wicked stepmother stories that have entered popular media were in circulation). easier to present stories grounded in what’s awful about a very common familial situation as being only about people who aren’t “real parents” – especially when honoring your father and mother is considered a divine commandment, and divine commandments are enforceable by the secular powers that be…
@rozele
I have no problem with genetic tendencies or constraints; they are a spur to creativitity. People cannot fly, so they build aeroplanes; people are born male or female, so they get sex changes. Genetic tendencies or constraints are made to be overcome (or their negative impact minimised) by social or technological means. ????
Genetic tendencies or constraints are made to be overcome (or their negative impact minimised) by social or technological means
I am, myself, undoubtedly “hardwired” to inflict grievous bodily harm on those who displease me*, but for many years now I have suppressed this tendency, inherited from my savannah-dwelling ancestors. But at what cost have I thus repressed my own nature? Should society be organised in a way so contrary to our ineluctable genetic programming? Can we be truly fulfilled without mindless violence? Surely this is the most pernicious of bien-pensant liberal illusions. The hard scientific facts of sociobiology point elsewhere.
*Analysis of prison populations has repeatedly confirmed the correlation between my minority genotype and violent lawbreaking. The science is incontrovertible.
It’s just occurred to me that sociobiology is essentially Noble Savage-ism.
From the WP article on “Noble Savage”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage#Attributes_of_romantic_primitivism
In the 18th century the debates about primitivism centered around the examples of the people of Scotland as often as the American Indians.
Seems fair.
Can we be truly fulfilled without mindless violence?
Not “truly” fulfilled – that would be unreasonably greedy – and yet fulfilled enough to be getting by on. I think interludes of mindless violence a few times a year should make up the deficit, over Christmas and Easter say.
@de
I am struggling to engage with what you are writing here: there appear to be two points, at least one of which is extremely emotive:
1. Sociobiology is “bad science”.
2. All forms of violent or aggressive behaviour within families are caused by uncorrelated failures of individuals or systematic failures of society; any questioning of this statement is at best useless, and probably pernicious.
I agree with 1. The methods used and the standards applied by researchers ensure that any conclusions they reach are fatally flawed. I would need a more convincing argument for 2.
@PP: I take DE to be cunningly illustrating the effects that the discourses of sociobiology can have on impressionable minds. Today is Epiphany, after all.
On the contrary: maleness undoubtedly correlates with a propensity to violence, and it seems exceedingly unlikely that this has nothing whatdoever to do with genetics. It seemed an apt illustration of your point that “Genetic tendencies or constraints are made to be overcome (or their negative impact minimised) by social or technological means”, with which I fully concur.
An attempt at such social means is related in
Now I dare say, said Sir Ector, thou Sir Launcelot, there thou liest, that thou were never matched of earthly knight’s hand. And thou were the courteoust knight that ever bare shield. And thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrad horse. And thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman. And thou were the kindest man that ever struck with sword. And thou were the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights. And thou was the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies. And thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.
Apologies for triple-posting, for which I blame my telephone. Delete between one to three instances to taste.
You people with your fancy phones. I carve my comments in stone with a chisel, the way the gods intended. Anyway, deleted; your bill will be sent by camel courier.
An attempt at such social means
Another such means, apparently quite successful, is Welsh board games. I cite The Dream of Rhonabwy (Breuddwyd Rhonabwy):
Y Gododdin implies that my fellow-countrymen went into battle at Catraeth while extremely drunk* (or possibly merely very hung-over), which will at any rate have limited casualties on the English side.
*Ultimately, it’s a question of priorities. Who am I to criticise the Ancestors?
My impression is that a large number of people on both sides of most battles in premodern times went into battle while extremely drunk.
Then it might well be primarily alcohol consumption that propends to violence, not genetics. Your genes merely like booze and speed.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation except when there’s a pub or football match nearby. That doesn’t line up with a genetic disposition to violence.
perhaps the relative qualities & quantities of the booze (or other intoxicants) is the real secret to premodern military history? and more recently too: british naval success driven by a generous rum ration, and the wehrmacht running largely on speed…
It provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.
Have a care, Sir, there are ladies present !
Indeed. In my enthusiasm I forgot the proprieties. It will not happen again.
But it should. And indeed it must. One such person (spectrally) present is Le Guin:
—Ursula K. Le Guin, “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night; or, Why Are We Huddling about the Campfire?” Critical Inquiry Vol. 7, No. 1, On Narrative (Autumn, 1980), pp. 191-199 (9 pages)
And here I thought it was the genes from Alpha Centauri, and it was just a boring X chromosome…
Personally I am not yet ready to dismiss the effect of social imprinting in this matter.
…he survived in order to tell us about his friends who did not survive
This might be a common sentiment of soldiers turned writers. Several Russian writers of war generation felt compelled to write because of all their friends who didn’t survive to tell their stories. I am almost sure that I’ve heard a similar sentiment of some holocaust survivors.
I think you’ve independently discovered the ideology of the Proud Boys.
Sociobiology, though, has been dead & forgotten for 30 years and has been replaced by evolutionary psychology, which is… exactly the same thing, complete with women liking pink because berries.
Do men like anything because of something on bushes, according to evo-psycho ? I’d like some clarity as to my roots. Oh, wait …