RUSSIAN COMMEDIA.

A fascinating thread at postumia (Russian LJ, found via Avva) investigates the origin of the Russian fake-Italian phrase Финита ля комедия! [finita la com(m)edia!]; the blogger describes her shock on discovering, upon hearing a classmate corrected in an Italian class, that the actual Italian phrase is "La commedia è finita" (well known from the end of Leoncavallo's Pagliacci). She first suspects it's a misremembering of the line from the opera that somehow got established in Russian culture, but a commenter traces it back to Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (written in 1839, over a half-century before the opera): "-Finita la comedia! - сказал я доктору" ['"Finita la comedia!" I said to the doctor'; note the misspelled "comedia"]. It's not clear whether Lermontov simply mangled the phrase or misunderstood the context it can be used in (as a dependent clause, e.g. "finita la commedia, gli spetattori sono andati dal teatro"). And another commenter makes reference to the supposed dying words of Augustus Caesar, "Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est."

It's all most interesting, but the best thing that came out of it for me was the discovery of the Corpus of the Russian Language. The internet gets better and better.