A BAD REVIEW.

I've been slowly reading the January 14, 2010 issue of NYRB (very slowly—I keep it in my shoulder bag for emergency reading), and I've just gotten to a review that angered me enough to vent publicly. At the end of last year I posted about Vladislav Zubok's Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia; toward the end of the NYRB issue I found a review of Zubok's book by Michael Scammell, and it's a kind of review I particularly dislike, the kind that attacks a book for not being the kind of book the reviewer wishes had been written.

Now, Scammell is no dummy; he translated The Defense and most of The Gift by Nabokov, and has written well-received biographies of Solzhenitsyn and Koestler. But he apparently loves the cliché narrative of late Soviet times (in which brave dissidents Fight the Power) so much that he can hardly bear to read anything different, even when he recognizes how groundbreaking and well researched and written it is. He eventually gets around to admitting that "Zubok is a reliable and prodigiously well-informed guide to the opinions, attitudes, and changing fortunes of loyal Soviet intellectuals... Zubok tells his story with a density of detail and complexity of analysis that is truly remarkable... His book is scholarly but also highly readable and accessible, and is rich in anecdotal material that enlivens the sociological analysis." But first he bats Zubok around for his alleged omissions, and afterwards he bats him around for his ideologically incorrect orientation, and in general he clearly regrets that Zubok chose to write about the people he did; apparently Scammell is so wedded to the familiar stories of Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, Sinyavsky, and Daniel that he would rather have seen yet another retelling (and he takes up much of his review with yet another retelling). It is as if he were reviewing W. Bruce Lincoln's In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861, a magisterial work on the bureaucrats who beavered away in government offices in St. Petersburg and elsewhere, laying the groundwork for the Great Reforms of the 1860s while the infinitely more famous dissidents like Herzen were thundering anathemas at tsarism from abroad, and complained that Lincoln was writing about such people instead of penning yet another paean to Herzen & Co. As I wrote in this thread, foreigners love to focus "on writers who got actively suppressed and weren't able to publish their great work (Bulgakov, Platonov) rather than on those who managed to publish fine work under existing conditions," and this is another example of the same prejudice.

Scammell annoys me in other ways as well. In his first paragraph he writes "If the classic nineteenth-century authors of Russia marked the golden age of Russian literature, and the modernists of the early twentieth, its silver age, the writers of the latter half of the twentieth century constitute a kind of bronze age," perpetuating the mindless "Silver Age" terminology I complained about here and topping it with an absurd extension to a "bronze age," as if the tale of Russian literature were one of foreordained degeneration (I guess twenty-first-century Russia is doomed to experience an iron age of literature). On page 54 he takes a gratuitous swipe at '60s poets by calling their readings at the statue of Mayakovsky in downtown Moscow "a pale imitation of Mayakovsky's own public readings," just as though he'd been there a century ago and could compare for himself. (But hey, it's bronze versus silver, right? Bronze has to lose.) And on the last page he counters Zubok's "one may suspect that Russia needed its critical intelligentsia and its high culture only as long as it suffered from tyranny, misery, and backwardness" by citing "the brilliance of the modernist movement in Russia, starting with Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, and continuing with the generation of Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Akhmatova"—as though the tsarist Russia those writers lived in were not a place of "tyranny, misery, and backwardness"!

No, it won't do. If you disagree with Zubok, by all means say so, but don't blame him for not writing a different book (especially since that book would have been a rehashing of familiar material), and spare me your false teleologies.

HEMOPHILIA.

A post on Wordorigins.org asks a reasonable question that had never occurred to me: why is hemophilia called by a name that means 'blood-loving'? Apparently it was first used in Friedrich Hopff's 1828 article "Über die Haemophilie oder die erbliche Anlage zu tödlichen Blutungen" (On haemophila or the hereditary predisposition to lethal bleeding). There is an article by KM Brinkhous, “A Short History of Hemophilia, with Some Comments on the Word ‘Hemophilia,’” in Handbook of Hemophilia, Vol. 1, edited by KM Brinkhous and HC Hemker (American Elsevier, New York, 1975), for which Google Books has only the damnable snippet view; if anyone has access to it, it might shed some light.

Update. In the Wordorigins thread, Dr. Techie has discovered that a footnote on this page of Legg's 1872 A Treatise On Haemophilia has a discussion of the word and its history, ending "The word is so barbarous and senseless that it is not wonderful that no one should be proud of it."

PISTOLS AND FOLK.

I'm in the middle of E. E. Cummings's EIMI, a sometimes too poetickal and occasionally wellnigh incomprehensible but withal lively (or Alive with Is, as Comrade Kem-min-kz might say) and well worth reading account of the author's month (May-June 1931) in the still relatively new Soviet Union, newly admired by the Depression-struck West. Cummings went with a wary but open mind; what he saw there turned him into a conservative for the rest of his life. (There's a Frank Bures review, with a couple of quotes, here, and a very useful set of annotations here.) At the moment I am inspired to post by a couple of inspired euphemisms encountered on successive pages.

On page 206, our hero is staggering back to his temporary home from a drunken party with his host and hostess, the American journalist Charles Malamuth (pseudonym'd by EEC "the Turk") and his wife Joan ("the Turkess"), daughter of Jack London; the chapter ends thus:

  ("the")at("engineers have shaggy")random("ears")misquote, upholding the who's me upholding 1
  ("and p-")1 starewiselying meward essays("pi-")his big eyes laugh helplessly("pis-")
  "Charlie!" she admonished
  ("stolsintheirbreeches")he succeeded.

In other words, Malamuth's amused but disapproving wife thinks (as he intends) that he's about to launch into a well-known (at the time) WWI song: "The engineers have hairy ears,/ They piss without their britches [or "through leather britches"],/ They bang their cocks against the rocks,/ Those hardy sons of bitches"; he switches smoothly into the harmless mutation "and pistols in their britches." (The tune, or a tune, is notated here, as "The Mountaineers," by Vance Randolph, who provides many textual variants.)

On the next page and the next morning, the lathered Turk suggests that his hungover guest might "feel like perhaps dropping any soiled object into yonder socalled laundrybag":

  "I cannot" almost tearfully "impose..."
  "you" busily "New Englanders are a very curious" sopping "folk. Folk you" he,beaming,said.

I'm really astonished that "Folk you" could be printed in New York City in 1933, even by a small publisher like Covici Friede (who had also, to be sure, printed The Well of Loneliness, so they did not shun controversy).

Incidentally, Pascal Covici was born in Romania, where I assume his surname was pronounced /ko'vič/ (koh-VEECH), but I assume that in his adopted America, it became koh-VEE-chee; anybody know? [thanks, MMcM!].

Addendum. On page 306, I've run into an even more startling use of obscenity, barely disguised: "Okay... there's uh reel beerjoint eye know,thih beer's suwell... nize un sudzy un beeg un cool... yunno—nut like this fuggin peevoh [Russian beer]!"

OLD DUTCH PROFANITY.

I can't really make use of it myself, since my Dutch is nonexistent, but I can't resist passing it along for those who can: the Oud Nederlandsch Scheldwoorden Archief (Old Dutch profanity archive). Thanks, peacay!

LUBERON AND OTHER SHIBBOLETHS.

An interesting piece by Olivier Razemon in Le Monde about the correct/local ways to pronounce various French place names (it's Luberon avec e comme dans "beurrer," pas comme dans "bébé," and Wissant (Pas-de-Calais) is "Uissant", et non "Vissant", encore moins "Ouissant"). Thanks, Paul!

PIG'S WHISPER.

Schott's Vocab has a post today linking to this OED entry (draft revision Mar. 2009):

pig's whisper, n.
colloq.

Brit. /pɩgz wɩspə/, U.S. /pɩgz (h)wɩspər/ Forms: 17- pig's whisper, 18 pigs-whisper. [< the genitive of PIG n. + WHISPER n.]

1. A very short space of time, an instant.
1780 J. O'KEEFFE Tony Lumpkin in Town I. 4 I'll be with them in a pig's whisper. 1837 DICKENS Pickwick Papers xxxi. 333 You'll find yourself in bed, in something less than a pig's whisper. [...] 1918 P. B. KYNE Valley of Giants xxv. 218 'Thanks so much for the invitation', Ogilvy murmured gratefully. 'I'll be down in a pig's whisper'. 1991 R. COOVER Pinocchio in Venice xxi. 229 'Back in a crack, direttore!' 'In a pig's whisper, direttore!'

2. A whisper; a confidential tone of voice.
1846 Swell's Night Guide 110/1 Pig's Whisper.., a word 'twixt you and me. 1866 M. BANIM Peter of Castle 5 The eulogist may.. in what they call a pig's whisper (that is, in a confidential tone).. [relate] a few anecdotes of his prowess. 1922 J. JOYCE Ulysses II. 484 Virag (Prompts into his ear in a pig's whisper). 2001 Hindu (Nexis) 21 Jan., I heard Ata informing Mummy, in a pig's whisper, that plagiarism, too, was actionable.

I had not been familiar with this wonderful phrase; are you? (Thanks, Bonnie!)

NOTHING GOOD EVER CAME OF IT.

I have mentioned Marat Akchurin's wonderful Red Odyssey: A Journey Through the Soviet Republics before, and I thought I'd quote this passage from his visit to Tajikistan in 1990, as the whole Soviet mess was in the process of falling apart; it resonates with the material I've been posting from Terry Martin's book:

We tried to pay the counterman for the green tea that we had drunk, but he refused to take money, saying that he considered us to be his guests.

"If you had an opportunity to address Americans, what would you tell them?" I asked him.

"Americans?" he asked again in surprise. "Let them learn Tadzhik. It's a very simple and beautiful language. Maybe they will make use of it one day!"

Safar and I went out and decided to go to the bookstore and then walk to my hotel.

"Is Tadzhik very different from Farsi?" I asked Safar. "Are they just dialects of one language?"

"Tadzhik is Persian-Farsi transliterated with Russian letters," Safar replied. "But nothing good ever came of it. They took away the old alphabet and thus cut the Tadzhik people off from their ancient history and culture. This monstrously sly Bolshevik act did terrible damage to the national culture of the Tadzhik people. Why? Because letters are culture-producing for a Tadzhik. Can you imagine Pushkin writing in Russian but with Arabic ligatures? That would be crazy, wouldn't it? But this nightmarish experiment was conducted in the U.S.S.R. on many peoples, Tadzhiks among them. I believe that it was a cunning policy."

"What's so cunning about this policy, tell me!" I snorted. Many Soviet and Western intellectuals are keen on ascribing refined cunning and slyness to the Bolsheviks, although they most often were led by nothing more than ordinary cruelty that resulted from their own lack of culture and purely proletarian hatred for the cultures of other peoples that are incomprehensible to them.

"Why? The formal reason they gave was that the Arabic alphabet is difficult to learn. But as a former teacher of Persian-Farsi in the Moscow Literary Institute, I am entitled to say that my students—Russians, Latvians, Georgians—learned the alphabet in just two weeks. And this language wasn't native for any of them. Why then is it more difficult for Tadzhiks, whose ancestors were using this alphabet for ten generations? No, all this talk about the Arabic alphabet being too difficult for Tadzhiks is a blatant lie. So it turned out that in just seventy years Tadzhiks have lost their letters, their cultural legacy, and their cities."

"What about Dushanbe? Or Leninabad? Are you going to give it back its ancient name of Khodzhend?"

"In Dushanbe Russians make up the majority of the population. In Leninabad Uzbeks are the most numerous ethnic group. As far as the restoration of its historical name is concerned, it's true that the people are demanding the return of the former name. When it was renamed into yet another 'Lenin's city,' for that's what Leninabad means in Tadzhik, it was done on the pretext that it was 'by request of the working people.' In fact, as you know, no working people requested it. The Bolsheviks just impertinently renamed Khodzhend Leninabad and Dushanbe Stalinabad. Well, Stalin was dumped, but so far we can't do anything with Lenin. The party functionaries stand firm on this point."

Of course, Khojand was renamed the following year (and most of the Russians fled the new country).

IT TURNS OUT.

James Somers has a good analysis of "it turns out," beginning by saying that Paul Graham knows how to use the phrase: "He works it, gets mileage out of it, in a way that other writers don’t. That probably sounds like a compliment. But it turns out that 'it turns out' does the sort of work, for a writer, that a writer should be doing himself." He goes on to explain convincingly what he's talking about, concluding:

In other words, because “it turns out” is the sort of phrase you would use to convey, for example, something unexpected about a phenomenon you’ve studied extensively—as in the scientist saying “…but the E. coli turned out to be totally resistant”—or some buried fact that you have recently discovered on behalf of your readers—as when the Malcolm Gladwells of the world say “…and it turns out all these experts have something in common: 10,000 hours of deliberate practice”—readers are trained, slowly but surely, to be disarmed by it. They learn to trust the writers who use the phrase, in large part because they come to associate it with that feeling of the author’s own dispassionate surprise: “I, too, once believed X,” the author says, “but whaddya know, X turns out to be false.”

Readers are simply more willing to tolerate a lightspeed jump from belief X to belief Y if the writer himself (a) seems taken aback by it and (b) acts as if they had no say in the matter—as though the situation simply unfolded that way.

It turns out, though, that (as pointed out by a couple of commenters) Douglas Adams expressed the same thought in The Salmon of Doubt:

Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression ‘it turns out’ to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great. It’s hugely better than its predecessors ‘I read somewhere that...’ or the craven ‘they say that...’ because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it’s research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight.

(Via Geoff Pullum at the Log.)

TARUSC.

Angus Trumble has a nice post at Paris Review Daily about the ombrellai (umbrella makers) of Piedmont, who spoke a jargon called Tarùsc:

According to local folklore, il Tarùsc was a very shy, small bad-tempered gnome who lived on the slopes of Mottarone and Motta Rossa. He was surly, difficult, and misanthropic. Nevertheless from him the ombrellai learned the art of making the shapeliest, lightest, most lissome and elegant umbrellas in all the world. And in the process Tarùsc taught the ombrellai how to speak his own strange tongue. [...]

That was of course the unofficial story. In fact, the language called Tarùsc was documented in the seventies by the ethnographer P. E. Manni da Massino, just in the nick of time, before the last old men who still spoke it died out. His view was that Tarùsc drew upon five distinct sources: (1) Italian, that is to say the reasonably stable dialects of Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria, and the southern cantons of Switzerland, and was therefore built, in turn, upon the ancient bedrock of (2) Latin; (3) German, that form of it that seeped across the Dolomites from southern Austria, and across the Swiss Alps from Bavaria; (4) French, thanks to the traditional alliances that regularly formed and re-formed in the same period between France and Savoy, and (5) Spanish, because of Philip II’s sixteenth-century annexation of the Duchy of Milan. [...]

Manni never got as far as plotting any plausible grammar of Tarùsc. He made some progress with his old men, but they were inclined to be grumpy, suspicious, and maddeningly reluctant to share any expressions that related directly to the craft of umbrella-making, because obviously their commitment to trade secrecy outweighed any desire to preserve the language they must have known was on the verge of extinction.

All we have is a few stray words, a list of numbers, some cooking terminology, and names for a handful of farm animals and plants.

The post concludes with a list of such words, and G.L. at Johnson (whence I got the story) ends his own post with:

But as someone who has learned all the supposed source languages of Tarùsc except Italian, there are many words that seem to me to come from something else altogether. A doctor is sbrugnabäcâgn. Shoes are sciärbëtul. A priest is t’zurla. Wander over, read the article, and take a look at the list. Does anyone recognise where these are from? Does Tarùsc look similar to the other dialects of the region?

Good questions, and I too would welcome answers and suggestions.

RUSSIAN BOOK REVIEWS.

Lisa Hayden Espenschade has provided a very useful resource at her blog Lizok's Bookshelf: a list of a couple of dozen Russian-language sources of book reviews, including both individual bloggers and institutional sites. The second one on the list, В топку.ру ("Into the fire"), provides scathingly negative reviews of books that have often been critically praised, like Alexei Ivanov's Золото бунта and Vladimir Sorokin's День опричника; the first was favorably reviewed by the esteemed slawkenbergius, so I suspect the топку.ру reviewer of excessive bile, but I don't really care, since the trashing is so enjoyable to read. (Apparently that site is exclusively for pans; the normal book discussions are at ChitClub.ru.)

HORACE LUNT RIP.

I recently learned of the death of the Slavist Horace Lunt, a student of Roman Jakobson who taught at Harvard; I still consult my first edition (1955) of his compact Old Church Slavonic Grammar, admirably sensible and structuralist. You can read some reminiscences here. (Thanks, Cherie!)

KHATUL MADAN.

I am deeply grateful to the blogger at Particularly in Burma for first reposting the wonderful anecdote recounted by slawkenbergius in this contentious thread ("my uncle, who lives in Israel, sent me this great story...") and then, in today's post, translating it from Russian, saving me the trouble. So instead of producing and posting my own translation of a hilarious story that gave me a much-needed laugh that day, I can just send you there, adding only that getting the joke depends on awareness of the beginning of Pushkin's Ruslan i Lyudmila: 'By a sea-cove [stands] a green oak,/ on that oak a golden chain,/ and day and night a learned tomcat/ walks on the chain around [the oak]. If he walks to the right, he starts singing a song; if to the left, he tells a fairytale.' These are some of the most famous lines in Russian poetry, and any Russian with more than a minimal education knows them by heart.

While I'm at it, let me highly recommend to readers who know Russian the latest post at Anatoly's blog, in which he asked readers to describe their experiences with Soviet elections. I've read all three pages of the thread, and it's a fascinating look at one aspect of Soviet life. Everyone remembers the holiday atmosphere and the spread of hard-to-find items (sausages, books, etc.) offered as inducements for voting (i.e., dropping the ballot into the urn—there was, of course, no choice of candidates); opinions differ on how widespread failure to vote was and what the consequences were (apparently none in the last years of the USSR, but older people remembered the harsher conditions of Stalin's day). I particularly recommend this lively comment by drakosha_ru about what voting was like in a small town in 1958.

LATINIZING RUSSIAN.

Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 has astonished me yet again. Back in 2003 I posted about Eugene Garfield's 1975 effort to get Russians to "give up their ugly Cyrillic ... for the flexible, international Roman alphabet." Now, in Chapter 5 of Martin, I learn that there was a serious project along those lines decades earlier:

The main obstacle to NA [the new latinized alphabet]'s world mission, within the Soviet Union at least, was the Russian alphabet. There had been some talk after the Revolution of latinizing the Russian alphabet, but nothing came of it. In 1929, with a second wave of utopian internationalism rising, the subject was again broached. Lunacharskii wrote several articles in support of latinizing Russian. Like Agamali-Ogly [an Azerbaijani revolutionary who led the campaign for latinization of the Turkic languages], he claimed he had Lenin's endorsement. Most important, Lunacharskii helped put the educational bureaucracy behind the idea. On October 19, 1929, Uchitelskaia gazeta (Teachers' Newspaper) published a discussion article on the latinization of the Russian alphabet. A month later, Izvestiia announced plans to reform the Russian orthography. Three committees had been formed within the Scientific Department of the Education Commissariat: on orthography, spelling, and the latinization of the Russian alphabet. At the same time, another committee was formed within the Council on Defense and Labor (STO) to deal with the publishing consequences of the proposed reforms. At least one of its members also publicly advocated latinization. The Communist Academy, an early supporter of latinization, hosted an exhibition devoted to the new alphabet, which showed how under the russificatory Tsarist regime the Russian alphabet had expanded outward, and how under the new progressive Soviet regime its domain was continually contracting. This flurry of activity suggested that the latinization of Russian was being seriously considered.

The idea was quickly quashed (in "a laconic Politburo resolution of January 25 1930"), but that it was taken seriously for even a time is amazing.

By the way, as Jongseong Park said in this thread, Korean was one of the languages for which latinization was proposed, as was Chinese:

Objections that this policy would make Soviet Chinese and Korean culture (there were several hundred thousand Koreans and Chinese in the Soviet far east) inaccessible to their compatriots abroad were brushed aside with characteristic bravado: "Not the twenty million strong population of Korea, but the 170 thousand strong Korean population of the Soviet Union should become the advance-guard of the cultural revolution of the Korean people."

[...] It was eventually decided to form five separate Latin alphabets for five major Chinese dialects. [Footnote: The five dialects, in Russian transcription, were severnoi/shandunskii, guandunskoi, futszianskoi, tsziansu/chzhetsziana, khunaii/tsziansi.] [...] In practice, only a Latin alphabet for the northern Shandunskii dialect was approved and put into use for the Soviet Chinese. Plans for a Latin Korean alphabet were approved but apparently not actualized.

FRANK KERMODE RIP.

One of the few literary critics I both respected and always enjoyed reading has died at 90: Frank Kermode, for whom John Mullan wrote a good obituary in The Guardian. A few excerpts:

This was what he did best, and with grace: unravelling the ways in which ideas worked in literature. Some of the poets to whom he was most drawn were, indeed, self-consciously difficult: John Donne, on whom he published a book in 1957; Wallace Stevens, whom he, in effect, introduced to an English readership in a study published in 1960, and whose "lucid, inescapable rhythms" often return in Kermode's criticism.

While at Reading he also wrote his major work of the 1950s, Romantic Image (1957), which secured his intellectual reputation. It was an account of the continuities between Romanticism and Modernism, with the poetry of Yeats at its heart. With its easy erudition, but not a footnote in sight, this book seems a long way from today's average academic output. In range it is huge, reaching into European and classical literature, aesthetic philosophy as well as poetry, verse from the Renaissance as well as the 19th and 20th centuries – yet in tone it is modest, provisional (it calls itself an essay). Learning with a certain lightness was his style. [...]

He had become surer and surer that literary theory, which he had once invited into the seminar room, was strangling the understanding and love of literature. He had come to think that many university teachers and leading critics of literature, particularly in America, had no "appetite for poetry". Earlier works from the 80s, Forms of Attention (1985) and History and Value (1988), had explored the need for a literary canon – a core of especially valuable works of the imagination to which we can keep returning. Now he believed that theory, frozen into formula, was the addiction of academic critics "who seem largely to have lost interest in literature as such". Thus, a final irony: a man who had been one of the country's leading literary theorists became a scathing critic – sometimes satirist – of literary theory's self-importance.

Via Helen DeWitt's paperpools.

Addendum. Like Helen, I had been saying ker-MODE all my life (and that is the only pronunciation given in the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names), but apparently Kermode pronounced his name with stress on the first syllable, so I shall retrain myself.

DOCUMENTING INUKTUN.

Mark Brown has a story at The Guardian about Stephen Pax Leonard, a Cambridge University researcher who's off to Greenland to document the language and traditions of an Inuit community:

Leonard, an anthropological linguist, is to spend a year living with the Inughuit people of north-west Greenland, a tiny community whose members manage to live a similar hunting and gathering life to their ancestors. They speak a language – the dialect is called Inuktun – that has never fully been written down, and they pass down their stories and traditions orally.

"Climate change means they have around 10 or 15 years left," said Leonard. "Then they'll have to move south and in all probability move in to modern flats." If that happens, an entire language and culture is likely to disappear.[...]

The Inughuits thought they were the world's only inhabitants until an expedition led by the Scottish explorer John Ross came across them in 1818.

Unlike other Inuit communities they were not significantly influenced by the arrival of Christianity in Greenland – so they retain elements of a much older, shamanic culture [...] Their language is regarded as something of a linguistic "fossil" and one of the oldest and most "pure" Inuit dialects.[...]

Leonard intends to record the Inughuits and, rather than writing a grammar or dictionary, produce an "ethnography of speaking" to show how their language and culture are interconnected. The recordings will be digitised and archived and returned to the community in their own language.

I'm not sure why creating an "ethnography of speaking" would keep you from writing a grammar or dictionary, which it seems to me could be useful to the community as well, but I wish him well in his frigid journey ("Although the average temperature is −25C, it can plummet to −40 or soar to zero in the summer"). Thanks, Doc Rock and Paul!

LINGUISTIC KORENIZATSIIA.

I'm still reading Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (see the previous post), and I want to quote some material from the start of Chapter 3, "Linguistic Ukrainization, 1923–1932." Martin is explaining the policy of korenizatsiia, which he translates "indigenization" (it's derived from the adjective korennoi, as used in the term korennoi narod 'indigenous people'; I myself would prefer to transliterate it korenizatsiya, but it's his book):

Korenizatsiia, as definitively formulated at party congresses in March 1921 and April 1923, consisted of two major tasks: the creation of national elites (Affirmative Action) and the promotion of local national languages to a dominant position in the non-Russian territories (linguistic korenizatsiia). Linguistic korenizatsiia would prove much more difficult to achieve. Between April 1923 and December 1932, central party and soviet organs issued dozens of resolutions urging the immediate implementation of linguistic korenizatsiia. Local republican and oblast authorities issued hundreds, if not thousands, of similar decrees. Nevertheless, linguistic korenizatsiia failed almost everywhere. Why?

Martin says he "initially assumed that central authorities must have been sending mixed signals, publicly trumpeting the need for immediate korenizatsiia while privately letting it be known that this public rhetoric was largely for show," but this turned out not to be the case: not only the "soft-line bureaucracies" were urging it, but the hard-line organs "frequently rebuked local party organizations for failing to implement korenizatsiia.[...] Stalin publicly and privately defended korenizatsiia and silenced its critics. Despite this sustained central support, linguistic korenizatsiia failed. Why?"

Although the Soviet leadership did consistently and sincerely support korenizatsiia, it nevertheless also viewed its implementation as a secondary task, an auxiliary rather than a core Bolshevik project, and therefore its support was soft. Failure to implement korenizatsiia was censured, but unlike failure to meet grain requisition quotas or industrialization targets, it rarely led to demotion and never resulted in arrest or execution. Interestingly, this meant that local conditions proved decisive. If a republic's leadership aggressively supported korenizatsiia and could overcome local resistance without soliciting punitive measures from the center, linguistic korenizatsiia could be and was achieved. If not, it would fail. The center would not tolerate an open and demonstrative repudiation of korenizatsiia, but it would likewise not intervene decisively to correct a lackluster performance.

In terms of linguistic korenizatsiia, the Soviet Union's non-Russian territories can be divided into three categories. For the vast majority, most of the regions that the Soviets called their "culturally backward eastern national territories," complete linguistic korenizatsiia was never seriously attempted. The national languages were promoted vigorously in the press and general education but made little progress in government, industry, and higher education. There were simply too few educated titular nationals. As a result, all efforts were devoted to the Affirmative Action component of korenizatsiia: the training and promotion of natives into positions of authority.[...]

The opposing category, where local conditions were so favorable that linguistic korenizatsiia was achieved rapidly and with little difficulty, consisted of only two republics: Georgia and Armenia. The Georgian Menshevik and Armenian Dashnaktsutiun governments had already established their respective languages as state languages prior to the Soviet conquest.[...]

Most interesting was the third category, those republics where the local forces backing and opposing linguistic korenizatsiia were in near equilibrium. This was most true of Ukraine, Belorussia, and Tatarstan. In Ukraine, there was both exceptionally strong support for and resistance to linguistic Ukrainization. Moreover, both support and resistance came from within the party.[...] Tatarstan resembled Ukraine, with a very strong national movement encountering an even stronger and more entrenched Russian presence. The large and politically influential Russian population ultimately confined linguistic Tatarization to majority Tatar regions, where it was nevertheless pursued with great vigor.

So we see that even a powerful and brutal state apparatus has to set priorities, and the lower-priority stuff has to take its chances with local conditions. (As Martin points out, this was not the case with a top-priority policy like collectivization, which was pushed through regardless of local objections and massive economic losses, not to mention loss of life.)

RAIONIROVANIE.

I'm barely fifty pages into Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 and it's already clear to me that this is one of those basic works of scholarship that everyone dealing with the field has to come to terms with. As Raymond Pearson writes in his detailed review (which, along with Martin's response, I urge anyone interested in the topic to read): "The Affirmative Action Empire is overwhelmingly a product of archive-based research. Martin's positively Herculean labours in six historical archives in Moscow and another two in Ukraine have been rewarded with a rich and abundant harvest of hitherto-inaccessible primary documentation." And the picture he puts together as a result is astonishing. Like everyone who's studied the Soviet Union at all, I was aware that each official nationality was awarded its own territory in which its language would be taught and its customs maintained, but I had no idea how complex the system had been. How many such territorial units do you think there were? Fifty, a hundred, a few hundred? At its peak, tens of thousands. These ranged from the well-known union republics (e.g., Ukraine), autonomous republics (e.g., Tatarstan), and autonomous oblasts (e.g., Chechnya) down through autonomous okrugs, national districts, national village soviets, and national kolkhozes "until they merged seamlessly with the individual's personal nationality" (as recorded in everyone's passport). This system, established in the mid-1920s and elaborated in the 1930s, was called raionirovanie 'regionalization, division into raions or districts.'

The rationale for the system was the need to resolve a dilemma of Marxism-Leninism: what do you do about nationalism? Theoretically, it was the product of a prior stage of history and was superseded by the rise of the proletariat and the move to socialism, but—as Lenin and the other early Bolsheviks were well aware—however retrograde nationalist feelings were, people were very attached to them, and to try to repress them would lead to massive revolt on the part of non-Russians who felt that the Revolution had only brought a new form of tsarist "Great Russian chauvinism." So one possible solution, assimilation, was out. Another, the strategy of "extraterritorial national-cultural autonomy" championed by Austrian Marxists like Otto Bauer, called for "non-national administrative territories and for special representative bodies, elected by all members of a given nationality," but this was rejected as well; the Bolsheviks insisted on a strictly territorial definition of nationality. The solution was "the strategy of ethno-territorial proliferation" in which the system of national units was extended "downward into smaller and smaller territories, the smallest being the size of a single village." (In Ukraine there were thirteen Czech village soviets, three Albanian, and one Swedish; in Leningrad Oblast there were Norwegian, Jewish, and Chinese national kolkhozes.) They hoped this would put an end to nationalism (the idea being that if, say, ethnic Germans were being oppressed by other ethnic Germans in their own territory, it would sharpen class struggle rather than causing ethnic resentment); in fact, it exacerbated the problem, as could have been predicted by anyone not hampered by ideological blinders. But never mind that for the moment—I want to single out a couple of fascinating language-related bits. From pp. 49-50:

The practice of sending all Jewish children to Yiddish schools created enormous protest and was soon abandoned. Volodymyr Zatonskyi sarcastically recounted how Yiddish-speaking children were "caught" and sent to Yiddish schools:

We receive information from Nikolaev, from Kiev, and from a series of other places, that during pre-enrollment examinations children "suspected of belonging to the Jewish nation", if it becomes clear that "these malefactors [zloumyshlenniki] know Yiddish", they are automatically sent to a Yiddish school "for, you see, we give every nationality full possibilities in this respect, — so off you go to a Yiddish school." The children don't want this and their parents instruct them not to admit that they know Yiddish. And so, comrades, an exam is conducted in order to trick these children — they speak with the child in Russian or Ukrainian, and then, when the child has calmed down (they speak nicely with them), suddenly the examiner tells him in Yiddish to go home. The child jewishly turns around and leaves [po-evreiski povarachivaetsia i ukhodit] [laughter]. "That means you know Yiddish. We'll send you to a Yiddish school."

And from p. 52, explaining why it took longer to form Mordvinian districts: "The Mordvinians were strategically insignificant, and their population was in fact so assimilated that it vigorously resisted native language education."

(I suppose, given the misunderstandings and attacks that marred this thread, I should issue a disclaimer that my discussing these issues does not make me a supporter of the Soviet system, and describing its nationality policy does not mean that I do not realize that it also brutally suppressed many non-Russians and their cultures. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?)

TÜNAYDIN.

MetaFilter user lapsangsouchong posted an interesting AskMetaFilter question: "Which of the thousands of neologisms coined in the Turkish language reforms of the 1920s and 30s stuck, which ones didn't—and why?" In the course of the discussion he posted this fascinating anecdote:

The word günaydın, 'good morning' or 'good day', was coined at this time and achieved widespread currency. But it was one of a pair, with tünaydın, 'good afternoon'. This has achieved absolutely no currency except in schools. In the morning, when the teacher comes into class, the children stand up, the teacher says "Günaydın!" to them, and they say the same thing back; and in the afternoon, when the class comes back after lunch, the same ritual is repeated but with the word "Tünaydın!" Outside this context the word is never used. The explanation my friend suggested is that while gün was and is the normal word for day, so the new coinage (which literally means something like 'bright day!') made sense, tün was one of the 'new old' coinages, an 'authentic' ancient Turkish word... which no-one ever used. So a new word formed from tün had less chance of sticking than a new word formed from gün, despite 65 years* of teachers saying it to their classes every day after lunch.

*According to Nişanyan it was coined by the TDK in 1945. Bizarrely, Nişanyan has tünaydın but not—except in the entry for tünaydın—günaydın.

Anybody know more about this?

By the way, "Nişanyan" is Sevan Nişanyan, who among his other books has written a Turkish etymological dictionary that is available in online form.

FIRST DICTIONARY OF SLANG.

The Bodleian Library announces a new publication, The First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699:

The first dictionary of slang, out of print for 300 years, is being published by the Bodleian Library from a rare copy unearthed in its collections.

Originally entitled A New Dictionary of Terms, Ancient and Modern, of the Canting Crew, its aim was to educate the polite London classes in ‘canting’ – the language of thieves and ruffians – should they be unlucky enough to wander into the ‘wrong’ parts of town.

With over 4,000 entries, the dictionary contains many words which are now part of everyday parlance, such as ‘Chitchat’ and ‘Eyesore’ as well as a great many which have become obsolete, such as the delightful ‘Dandyprat’ and ‘Fizzle’. [...]

Playfully highlighting similarities and contrasts between words, B.E. [the anonymous author] includes entries ranging from rogues’ cant, through terms used by sailors, labourers, and those in domestic culture, to words and phrases used by the upper classes.

The Sample Entries include Arsworm "a little diminutive Fellow," Buffenapper "a Dog-stealer, that Trades in Setters, Hounds, Spaniels, Lap, and all sorts of Dogs, Selling them at a round Rate, and himself or Partner Stealing them away the first opportunity," and Grumbletonians "Malecontents, out of Humour with the Government, for want of a Place, or having lost one." Thanks for the link, AJP!

TRIPLE PAY.

Having finished my rereading of Platonov's Kotlovan (see this post), I find myself more moved than ever by the ending, but I don't really have anything more to say about the novel as a whole, so I'll quote this section from A Companion to Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit, by Thomas Seifrid:

Reading Platonov is a matter of learning to set aside expected clichés and perceive what is truly there.[...] It was for this reason that the typists who had to prepare Platonov's manuscripts for publication would request triple the normal rate of pay—not because of his handwriting, which was clear enough; but because it was impossible with his texts, as it was possible for other writers, to remember an entire phrase by looking at its first few words. Every word had to be checked painstakingly to make sure the typescript followed what Platonov had written.

If you think about it, that's a pretty impressive tribute to a writer.

A HUNDRED THOUSAND BILLION POEMS.

As I have noted before, I am a fan of Raymond Queneau, and I am pleased to discover that his Cent mille milliards de poèmes (Wikipedia) are cleverly generated at this site: every time you visit or refresh, you get a new combination of lines (in both French and English unless you specify a preference). The translations (and the site) are by Beverley Charles Rowe; here's the main page of the site, and here's Rowe's remarkable collection of English dictionaries. And by googling a bit I discover there are a couple of other online editions, which you can read about here.

While we're on the subject of poetry, yesterday's wood s lot features the wonderful Louise Bogan, whom I quoted here. And while you're there, don't miss the interesting excerpt from "A Farewell to English," by Michael Hartnett ("...they came like grey slabs of slate breaking from/ an ancient quarry, mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach,/ álainn, caoin, slowly vaulting down the dark/ unused escarpments, mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach,/ álainn, caoin, crashing on the cogs...").

FODDER FOR ALLUSIONS II.

I wanted to quote a particularly good example of the way quotations are used in Russia from the Boyle/Gerhart book I wrote about here; I was googling for an English translation of the Pushkin poem cited when I discovered that this section happens to be included in a webpage of sample passages from the book (scroll down, it's the second one). So I'll let you read the poem there (the lines in italics in the Russian are ones that are particularly often quoted on their own), and I'll just quote the jokes based on it here (the Russian is on the linked page):

“Why do you have Pushkin’s portrait on the wall in the KGB office? Why not Dzerzhinsky’s [founder of the KGB]?”
“Because he was the first to say ‘Strangle the noble impulses!’ [= ‘The soul’s noble impulses’].”

This quotation has to be pronounced with the intonation of an imperative. The punchline is based on the coincidence between the Genitive of душа (‘soul’) and the imperative of the verb душить (‘strangle, repress’), which is of course lost in translation. Another joke of the perestroika period shows people’s bewilderment and mistrust of the entire concept of glasnost:

Comrade, trust me: the era of Gorbachev’s glasnost will pass,
and the KGB will remember our names.

By the way, speaking of Russian literature, I found the interesting link Что читать? ('What to read?'; Ищем советы, что почитать 'We're looking for suggestions about what to read') in a comment at Lizok's Bookshelf; it looks like a useful source of book descriptions.

THE SECRET VAULT OF REJECTED WORDS.

Ben Zimmer has a wonderful takedown of the Telegraph story you may have seen: "Secret vault of words rejected by the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered." An excerpt:

Looking deeper into the list, I felt a creeping sense of déjà vu. It turns out that a healthy majority of the entries come from a single source. In 2005, Merriam-Webster asked users of its online dictionary, "What's your favorite word that's not in the dictionary?" It compiled a top ten list (and later, with much fanfare, announced that the top vote-getter, ginormous, would enter the next edition of the Collegiate Dictionary). Beyond the top ten, Merriam-Webster provided a list of "Previous Favorite Words (Not in the Dictionary)." Of the 39 words listed by the Telegraph, a whopping 27 of them — from asphinxiation ("being sick to death of unanswerable puzzles or riddles") to wurfing ("the act of surfing the Internet while at work") — come from Merriam-Webster's 2005 selection of "previous favorite words."

Of the remaining words on the Telegraph list, some (such as freegan, griefer, and nonversation) have their own entries in Merriam-Webster's Open Dictionary, an ongoing compendium of user-generated suggestions. A few others have actually achieved dictionary status already. Earworm, locavore, and pharming can all be found in the latest edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

Ah, journalism! Ah, humanity!

CHAIRPERSON.

Stephen Chrisomalis, an anthropologist at Wayne State University who once ran also runs the site Forthright's Phrontistery (which I wrote about here), now also has a blog Glossographia ("Anthropology, linguistics, and prehistory"), whose latest post is a very interesting examination of the history of the word chairperson. He writes:

A couple of weeks ago I started making some open notes here about a potential student project on word histories for use in my undergraduate teaching, which I am tentatively calling the Lexiculture Project. My desired learning outcomes for this course include a) getting students to discover or awaken whatever love of language; b) to get essentially untrained (budding?) linguists to be able to ask and answer interesting questions about language and culture in topics of interest to them. While my students (mainly anthropology majors with a smattering of linguists and others) aren’t mostly ready to undertake original research in most areas, they can certainly be taught the research skills needed to investigate word histories.

Sounds like a great course! At any rate, he decided to use chairperson as a research topic, hoping to antedate the OED's first citation from 1971 (Israel Shenker, New York Times, Aug 29, 58 "Instead of turning up as chairman or chairlady, each will have been transmuted into a sexually obscure 'chairperson'").

I didn’t expect much, maybe to find a few from the 60s, then move on with my demonstration of other techniques. The usual Googlery didn’t produce much of interest – not least because of the wacky metadata in Google Books and Google News Archive, producing thousands upon thousands of misdated records and more than one feisty embuggerance. (Oh, and PS, Google, when I search for chairperson do not show me results for chairman automatically.) I cursed once or twice at the Great God of Search, against my normal classroom practice (uhh … you can stop laughing now.) But Proquest, oh, sweet Proquest, how you came through for me. So instead of 1971, we have the following four early attestations:

1899 Washington Post Jul 15, pg. 6 “Indignant Womanhood”
“Madame Chairperson,” exclaimed the delegate, earnestly, “I feel the force of all that has been said concerning the necessity for us, the women of the nation, to nominate a clean candidate!”

1899 The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest Dec 1899, 10(1), pg. A32
NOTICE – Members of the East Aurora Don’t Worry Club are notified that there will be no more meetings until Mrs. Grubbins, the Chairperson, returns from the Sanatorium.

1902 The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest Sep 1902, 15(4), pg. 126
The answer is, I think, that a passion for the Chairperson is hardly possible when any moment you may be ruled out of order, and ordered to take your seat.

1910 Puck Aug 3, p. 68
“Madame Chairperson,” she shouted, “this measure is maternalism, plain and simple!”

All four of these quotations are clearly linked to first-wave feminism, the movement (to oversimplify grossly) for political rights such as the vote led by feminists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And of course (it almost goes without saying), all four instances are used to describe women – no man is described as a ‘chairperson’ until the 1970s. The first (WaPo) quotation actually is a quotation taken from the (sadly, undigitized) Detroit Journal – my Wayne State students were thrilled to find that chairperson first occurred in a Detroit publication! But the article is no feminist tract, but rather a jocular commentary on first-wave feminists, entitled ‘Indignant Womanhood’.

He goes on to say that the most interesting thing is that "I can find literally no further attestations of the word for over half a century":

After 1910, we have no further ‘chairperson’ until 1970, when once again (as in 1899) it appeared in the Washington Post, this time associated with Betty Friedan, who used the term to describe herself. After that point, ‘chairperson’ occurs regularly up to the present, although the Corpus of Historical American English data suggest that it is being replaced by ‘chair’ as the gender-neutral form.

We live in a great age of lexicography, and I look forward to many more such discoveries.

DORMIR DEBOUT.

Checking my referrer log, I just discovered a blog I wish I'd known about earlier, dormir debout. On the about page, the author (who goes by "kato" in the comment threads) says:

dormir debout – a French expression meaning, literally, ‘to sleep standing.’ Usually used in the expression ‘une histoire à dormir debout,’ meaning “a story at which to sleep standing,” in other words, a really boring story. So boring, in fact, that despite the act of standing usually discouraging sleeping, one passes right out….

Currently working on my MA in Zoroastrian Studies/Old Iranian languages at SOAS.

There's much discussion of Arabic language and literature, including occasional quotation of Arabic poetry with translation and commentary; I noted with interest a post on 17th-century Egyptian curses. Unfortunately, there have been no updates since December. I hope it's just on hiatus rather than defunct.

THE IGNATZ PARTY.

A fascinating factoid:

Nazi is obviously a short form of National socialist, or Nationalsozialist to be precise, just as Sozi is a short form of Sozialist. But the word has a much more interesting story than that.

Long before the rise of the NSDAP in the 1920s, people in at least southern Germany could be called Nazi if they were named Ignatz, or came from Austria or Bohemia (where they apparently had lots of Ignatzes); it was supposedly also used as a generic name for soldiers of Austria-Hungary, like the German Fritz or Russian Ivan. It had to be used with caution between friends, though, since it could also mean "idiot" or "clumsy oaf". That's how it found it's way into politics; the fact that Adolf came from Austria (not Bohemia, though) could have made the pun even better. [...]

An example of pre-hitlerian use of Nazi in southern Germany can be found in a "Bayerische Komödie in 4 Akten": Der Schusternazi, "the shoemaker nazi", by Ludwig Thoma in 1905.

Via bayard at Wordorigins.org, where Oecolampadius points out that the OED agrees: "The term was originally used by opponents of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and may have been influenced by Bavarian Nazi, a familiar form of the proper name Ignatius and used to refer to or characterize an awkward or clumsy person." (Odd that they use the Latin form of the name.)

SOME LOVE FOR DOVLATOV.

Last year I wrote about the mysteriously limited availability of the wonderful Sergei Dovlatov in English; I am happy to learn from this PEN America post that "when we were putting together PEN America 12, we decided we would re-publish one of Dovlatov’s stories. Happily, one of his translators, Antonina W. Bouis, is a generous member of PEN; I still have her copy of The Suitcase (though I’ll be returning it soon, promise!), from which we selected 'A Poplin Shirt.'" And I'm pleased that my championing of Dovlatov seems to have played a small role in their decision.

VERBIAGE.

A recent post by Geoff Nunberg at the Log discusses the dudgeon people get into over verbal blunders by politicians (and inevitably the comment thread descends rapidly into tedious political bickering); however, he links to this fascinating post from 2008 (which I apparently missed at the time) in which he provides a new etymology for verbiage: apparently it has nothing to do with the other verb- words (from Latin verbum)!

As it happens, though, the word almost certainly doesn't come originally from verb- + -age, as the OED says it does. According to Alain Rey's Dictionnaire Historique de la Langue Française, the word verbiage first appeared in French in 1674. It was derived from the the Middle French verb verbier or verboier, which he glosses as "gazouiller" ("chirp, warble") as applied to birds, and which he connects to a 13th-century Picardian verbler, "warble, speak in singsong" this in turn derived from Frankish *werbilon, "whirl, swirl" (cf German Wirbel "whirl"). "Since the 17th century," Rey writes, "the derived form verbiage has been connected by popular etymology to verbe and for its meaning to verbeux [ = 'verbose, wordy']." Since the English verbiage isn't attested until 1721 (and then, as it happens, in Prior's poem about Locke and Montaigne), it seems quite likely that it was borrowed from the French — this would explain both its idiosyncratic form and its unaccountably restricted original sense. Both morphological and semantic analogy, then, would favor a popular reanalysis of the form of the word as verbage and of its meaning as "wording."

I did not know that, and I'm glad to learn it.

FODDER FOR ALLUSIONS.

I'm digging into The Russian Context: The Culture Behind the Language by Eloise M. Boyle and Genevra Gerhart (which I wrote about here), and I'm sure I'll have much more to say about it, but right now I just want to quote this paragraph from the introduction to the Literature section (which "contains those quotations from literature that the educated Russian carries in his head, and that a student of Russian will encounter not only in everyday conversations with Russians, but when he picks up a newspaper or turns on the television"); it provides a concise explanation of a well-known phenomenon:

Educated Russians carry a virtual library around with them, not necessarily because of an innate interest in literature, but because their teachers (and sometimes parents) made sure it would be carried around: practically everyone in the country has been required to memorize essentially the same bits of poetry and prose. (Scratch a Russian, any Russian, and you can hear about a green oak tree at the seaside with a golden chain around it.) Such memorization led to a shared interest in and understanding of literature, which then became a way for people to communicate with one another. This led in turn to a sense of community felt at poetry readings and other literary events. This fodder for allusions is therefore readily available to all, and is found everywhere in Russian life: in speech, in advertising, and in journalism.

I wrote about the green oak here:

Pushkin, of course, is a far greater poet than Landor, and he is not only a classicist; his Mozartean combination of classical expression and frequently romantic sensibility can be found in English poetry only in Coleridge. What Nabokov calls "the extraordinary lines, among his greatest, that Pushkin added in 1824, four years after its publication, to the beginning of Ruslan i Lyudmila ('By a sea-cove [stands] a green oak,/ on that oak a golden chain,/ and day and night a learned tomcat/ walks on the chain around [the oak]...') is the only thing in any language I know that can be set beside Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."

I could wish there were a similar literary culture among my own countrymen.

KOTLOVAN.

An author might start a novel this way: "On his thirtieth birthday, Voshchev was laid off from his factory job for weakness and woolgathering." Or he might lay out a whole little scene, with the protagonist thinking about his birthday on his way to work, then being called into the personnel office and told the bad news, with persuasive descriptions of decor and tones of voice. But that's not how Andrei Platonov does it. Here's the first paragraph of Kotlovan, in the superb translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson, The Foundation Pit (the Russian is below the cut):

On the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his private life, Voshchev was made redundant from the small machine factory where he obtained the means for his own existence. His dismissal notice stated that he was being removed from production on account of weakening strength in him and thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor.

There's nothing attractive about those sentences. Their wordiness, their labored syntax, their odd and rebarbative jargon, everything about them seems to want to push you away rather than lure you in. And yet you are drawn in; there's something about the narrative, some funhouse-mirror quality, that makes you want to see where it's going. You follow Voshchev to "a beer room for workers from the villages and low-paid categories" where he hears "sincere human voices" and remains "until evening, until the noise of a wind of changing weather; he then went over to an open window, to take note of the beginning of night, and he caught sight of the tree on the clay mound—it was swaying from adversity, and its leaves were curling up with secret shame." The next morning, Voshchev walks further down the road but is soon exhausted, and at this point comes a sudden irruption of intensity, the kind of thing we hope for from a Russian novel:

A dead, fallen leaf lay beside Voshchev's head; the wind had brought it there from a distant tree, and now this leaf faced humility in the earth. Voshchev picked up the leaf that had withered and hid it away in a secret compartment of his bag, where he took care of all kinds of objects of unhappiness and obscurity. "You did not possess the meaning of life," supposed Voshchev with the miserliness of compassion. "Stay here—and I'll find out what you lived and perished for. Since no one needs you and you lie about amidst the whole world, then I shall store and remember you.

"Everything lives and endures in the world, without becoming conscious of anything," said Voshchev beside the road. And he stood up, in order to go, surrounded by universal enduring existence. "It's as if some one man, or some handful of men, had extracted from us our convinced feeling and taken it for themselves!"

Here the words "dead," "earth," "meaning," "endure," and especially "conscious" are signals of where the novel is going. Who is living and who and what is dead, and can we always tell the difference? Who is conscious, and of what? What meaning can we find, enduring on and in the earth? Soon Voshchev joins a crew of men digging the titular pit, intended for the foundation of a building to house proletarians. But there are many discussions of the novel's political content (Chandler and Meerson's Afterword does a good job of summarizing the history and politics involved, though I've added a short bibliography below for those particularly interested); what I want to focus on here is the amazing language.

And yet you can't discuss the language without talking about politics, because politics is the soil it grows out of. Platonov has been called a natural Stalinist; what is meant by that is that he shared the Stalinist belief that life could be radically transformed, that nothing was impossible to truly conscious people who had thrown off the shackles of the bourgeois past. (Of course, in Platonov's case this came as much from Nikolai Fedorov, with his loony insistence that mankind must become immortal and bring everyone who ever lived back to life, as from Marx and Lenin.) Like a good Soviet citizen, filled with optimism and enthusiasm, Platonov gave up his early career as a writer after the famine of 1921 and spent the next years going around Russia supervising the digging of ponds and wells, the draining of swampland, and the building of power stations. Chandler writes:

And then, between 1929 and 1932, he was sent on a number of journeys through central and southern Russia. Other writers who visited collective farms did so as members of Writers' Brigades—and they, of course, were shown only a few model collective farms. Platonov, however, was sent by the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, and he saw what was really happening.

That experience complicated his optimism. He seems still to have retained a belief that the shining communist future was a possibility, but having seen the stupidity, inefficiency, corruption, and brutality that were everywhere on the ground, no matter what the Kremlin planners might intend, he had to respond, to tell the truth as he saw it, and that response involved a complex and brilliant manipulation of the very language the Kremlin used to propagate its ideas. Characters are always talking about "directives" and "backwardness" and "tempo," regurgitating the catchwords that ceaselessly bombard them from Party organizers, "plenipotentiaries," and other emissaries from officialdom. One of them asks: "Is it really sorrow inside the whole world—and only in ourselves that there's a five-year plan?" The five-year plan inside us is one of the things the novel is about; some of the characters are trying to fulfill it by constant work, others by denunciations and violence, and the main viewpoint character, Voshchev, by questioning and introspection, irritating pretty much everyone else (as Platonov irritated the Party, despite his professed devotion to its ideals). By the time the novel heads into increasingly surreal-seeming and deadly territory, you're so accustomed to the strangeness of the telling that you can't escape its spell.

Fedorov called modern writing "the work of men who have stopped being human and who have become typewriters." It may be that the style of The Foundation Pit is, in its way, an attempt to revive the "sacred, resurrectional character" of language and thus restore fraternal relations to mankind. There's never been anything else like it; even Platonov quickly retreated from it (he did, after all, want to be published), and his later works are written in a more "normal" style. But this will always be his masterpiece.

The first paragraph in Russian:

В день тридцатилетия личной жизни Вощеву дали расчет с небольшого механического завода, где он добывал средства для своего существования. В увольнительном документе ему написали, что он устраняется с производства вследствие роста слабосильности в нем и задумчивости среди общего темпа труда.

A few books to help the reader who wants more background:

A Companion to Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit, by Thomas Seifrid. The Foundation Pit is such a complex novel, with so much going on below the surface, that it's well worth reading this guide (not long, but longer than the novel!), of which its publisher, Academic Studies Press, says "In addition to an overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973." (Fortunately, the paperback is only $21; many of this publisher's books, as you can see on the linked page, are several times that.)

The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization, by Lynne Viola. You have to make allowances for her excessive enthusiasm for her subject, the "25,000ers" recruited from factories and other dens of trustworthy proletarians who fanned out across Russia to help impose collectivization (Mark Von Hagen's review says she is "sympathetic to their struggle against all the other actors in this tragic story, who appear as villains, including ... the backward Russian peasants" who were the victims), but she paints a detailed picture of the nitty-gritty of the process on the ground.

Above all, read Moshe Lewin's classic The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia. Lewin explains the economic background and effects of Stalinism and collectivization in such a clear way that even I, an economic illiterate, could understand what happened. This will help you understand not only Platonov but the entire subsequent history of the Soviet Union.

GIFTED LINGUISTS.

Mark Liberman has a post at the Log in which he waxes wroth about what he calls a "bizarre meme" by which "every piece of linguistic research is spun as a challenge to 'universal grammar'." I wasn't transfixed by it (my throwaway comment: "I, on the other hand, welcome the new wave of anti-'universal grammar' spinners"), but the dreaded name of Chomsky came up, and Dominik Lukeš wrote: "Something about what the statement 'Chomsky was a massively gifted linguist' by the other Mark P rubbed me the wrong way. I was trying to figure out in writing what the reason for my discomfort might be but it got a bit long and a bit too off topic, so I wrote a separate blog post about it." I urge anyone interested in modern linguistics to read his post; not only does he explain (as his post title says) "Why Chomsky doesn’t count as a gifted linguist," but he goes on to ask "So who deserves the label 'gifted linguist' defined as somebody who repeatedly elucidates legitimate language phenomena in a way that is relevant across areas of inquiry?" He discusses the work of MAK Halliday, Roman Jakobson, Charles Fillmore, William Labov, his "personal favorite linguist" Michael Hoey, and William Croft, whose Radical Construction Grammar is "probably the most interesting and innovative view of language that has come about since de Saussure." For anyone who, like me, hasn't been keeping up with the field for a while, it's a great source for further exploration.

And our own gifted linguist, marie-lucie, has an excellent comment from which I extract this eye-opening passage:

I recently attended a presentation which centered on some syntactic structures in a language I know quite well, or rather, on translations into that language of complex English sentences, for which the consultant had obviously tried to please the linguist by coming up with sentences that were quite ungrammatical in her language - while she would have been quite capable of describing the (odd) situations presented if she had responded naturally with the (differently structured) resources of her own language.

This type of problem is one that linguists should always be aware of: a "wonderful" consultant who can always be counted on to come up with a translation may be linguistically imaginative rather than displaying models of her native grammatical competence. The modalities of thus adapting to the English structures could be a valid subject of study, if recognized by the linguist, but it is very misleading to describe such adaptations as spontaneous utterances typical of the structure of the language. Sentences thus obtained, which have no parallel in those naturally occurring in spontaneous utterances or in texts, should be very suspicious, especially if some of the features are quite at odds with those independently described in works on the same language.

By the way, there's been an interesting and irritating discussion going on at the Log about the meaning of most: interesting because it turns out there are two very different understandings of the word (some, like me, think it means 'more than half'; a lot of people, far more than I would have guessed, think it means 'way more than half, an overwhelming majority'), and irritating because the "way more than half" group doesn't seem to want to believe the rest of us are telling the truth ("And, so, while it's a little sketchy to take 51.4% and call it 'most', doing so serves the argumentative ends of the writer"; my response: "It is not 'sketchy' if that's what it means to you!"). I haven't blogged about it because there doesn't seem to be much to say except "This is what it means to me!" "Well, this is what it means to me!" But if you want to follow it, here are the posts: Most, Most examples, Most and many.

Update. See now this Log post, in which Mark Liberman quotes from publications that "provide a variety of (mostly perceptual) evidence for the view that most really does mean 'more than half', while offering a greater variety of theories about the strategies that (different sorts of) people use to determine whether this is true in particular cases." If you're interested in the topic, don't miss it.

HOW TO SWEAR IN ENGLISH.

Another video, this one hilarious: English Swear Words. A Korean teacher of English explains the naughty words. As he says, not for pregnant women and small children. (Thanks, Jeremy!)