Tetradki

Groundhog Day

2012-02-02T21:10:00.001+01:00

Groundhog

It's Groundhog Day today, 2 February.

Groundhog in Russian is сурок - surok.

The European species of marmots are widely spread throughout Russia, Belorussia, Poland and Ukraine and in folklore are associated with deep sleep. One of the well-known idioms is спать как сурок – to sleep like a groundhog, meaning to sleep deeply.

When looking for translations of Russian idioms I recommend this resource: ru.wiktionary.org – Wiktionary. Sometimes there are explanatory articles with interpretations and parallel versions in other languages, sometimes not. If you work with wiki pages, please add your examples and explanations.

The article on the groundhog is here.

The Russian version of this article alludes to the name of deputy prime-minister Vladislav Surkov, chief adviser to Premier Putin with a controversial reputation.

Groundhog photo: EIC, from here.

Poiskslov.

2012-01-16T20:10:00.001+01:00

Knigochei

I'd like to recommend to linguists and students of Russian a simple and fun resource

poiskslov.com

It does what is says – poisk slov – word search. It looks like it was originally developed for lovers of crossword puzzles and Scrabble. Yes, there is a Scrabble in Russian! Same grid, same rules, but the letters are Cyrillic. Pioskslov links to definitions from major Russian dictionaries.

Where linguists, professional and amateurs, may find it useful is in its omitted letters function. Type * sign or ? question mark instead of a sequence of letters and get a selection of words with the same sequence.

What prompted me to go to poiskslov was an interesting – as they always are – discussion on Languagehat about the word книгочей – lover of books, bookworm.

Vasmer's etymological dicitonary lists it as of Turkic origin, while for most Russians today it sounds perfectly home-grown: kniga (book) plus chei, a variation on чтей - чтец - читатель (big reader).

Vasmer's analysis is very convincing, especially considering the rarity of the -chei ending in Russian and the comparison with казначей - kaznachei, practically identical to Turkic kaznacy.

But there is also an odd one out – ручей – stream, brook, creek. The first thng that comes to mind is рука - ручки - рученьки. Аnd the word рукав - sleeve has an additional meaning of branch, tributary, channel. Compare French la Manche – sleeve and the Channel. But again, Vasmer gives a completely different etymological background...

Picture: 'The Bookworm', Carl Spitzweg, c.1850, o/c, 49.5 × 26.8 cm (19.5 × 10.6 in), Museum Georg Shäfer, from here.

Auld Lang Syne in Russian.

2011-12-31T11:40:00.001+01:00

Russian version of this post is here.

Auld Lang Syne is well known in Russia – and throughout Russophonia – both as a melody and in Samuil Marshak's translation of Robert Burns' poem, though not necessarily as a New Year celebratory song. The Russian version is called Zastolnaya – Drinking Song. Can't limit this just to New Year, can we?

Забыть ли старую любовь
И не грустить о ней?Забыть ли старую любовь
И дружбу прежних дней?

(Full text is here)

This is the 1973 song version by the Belorussian group the Pesnyary. The sound is not very good, but it gives an idea of their trademark folk-pop interpretation and a distinct Belorussian accent.

Music by O.Yanchenko, original lyrics by Robert Burns, translated by Samuil Marshak. Leonid Bortkevich, the group's lead singer, was married to Olga Korbut, the legendary Soviet gymnast, also a Belorussian. The photos in the clip are of them as a family couple.

And here is a humorous medley, that includes the Pesnyary version too:

Ideal Roast Tukey

2011-12-25T14:40:00.000+01:00

An old clipping from the Daily Telegraph letters:

"Turn the oven off, leaving the door ajar, and leave the turkey to rest for at least 15 minutes before carving." Simon Hopkinson, whom chefs and fellow food writers decided had written the most useful cookery book of all time, may know how to cook perfect roast chicken but he clearly never owned a cat.

- Dr Hillary Aitken, Inverness.

Silent Night in Russian. Happy Christmas!

2011-12-25T12:06:00.000+01:00

Paul Robeson's version is on Russian Tetradki.

Silent Night was hardly known or ever performed until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union twenty years ago. Now it is as much a part of Christmas and New Year celebrations in Russia as it is everywhere.

Richard Sorge, a hero of Pearl Harbor.

2011-12-07T16:38:00.001+01:00

Richard Sorge in 1940

Today is the 70th anniversary of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the event that brought America into the second world war*, which, in turn, meant that

- there was no way that Japan would attack Russia in the Far East;

- Britain was getting America as an ally against Hitler and was going to war against Japan;

- Germany and Italy were to go to war against America;

- Russia (Soviet Union) was positioned as an Ally of both the USA and Britain;

- and, perhaps most importantly, the strategic odds in the world at war were tipping against Germany.

Tragic as it was, Pearl Harbor marked a turning point in the war, one of the most important in the chain of events that lead to the Allied victory in 1945.

There is one man who may have been the hero, or anti-hero, depending on how you look at the events, of Pearl Harbor. His name is Richard Sorge (Ree-khard Zohr-gheh), a Soviet spymaster, who ran a secret intelligence network in Tokyo working for the Red Army general staff. He was arrested by the Japanese in October 1941, before the attack on Pearl Harbor, but before that he is generally credited with providing Moscow with three crucial bits of information:

- In the first half of 1941 he passed on details of Hitler's imminent attack on Russia, until then a de-facto ally of Germany, including the exact or almost exact date of the invasion. That report was dismissed by Stalin.

- Later in the year he reported to Moscow that Japan will not attack Russia in the Far East. This time Stalin listened and the Red Army was allowed to move 26 fully equipped, winter-ready and battle-wise divisions from the Far East and Siberia to Moscow. The Russian counter-attack began on 5 December 1941, two days before Pearl Harbor. Hitler's army was pushed back.

- Sorge also reported that Japan was about to strike South, against America and Britain.

Articles and books about Sorge concentrate on the intelligence he collected and passed on. What still may not be fully understood is his work as an agent of influence. Japan's decision to attack Pearl Harbor was the result of fierce infighting between several political and military factions in Tokyo, notably the Army and the Navy. The Navy saw little glory for themselves in concentrating on land expansion. Sorge through his contacts, some high-placed, may have played an important role in swaying the balance towards attacking America.

This last bit was investigated by the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951 with a view of uncovering red spies who may have helped to catch America 'with her pants down' at Pearl Harbor. They concentrated on how the attack helped the Russians, but did not look into the possible links to British intelligence, in Japan and in the USA. Britain stood to profit from the American entry into the war, but neither in 1941, nor in 1951 could admit to have covertly worked to engineer such entry.

Sorge was working undercover as a correspondent for several German newspapers. Earlier he joined the nazi party to facilitate his intelligence work. In Tokyo he was well-known on the society circuit and knew everyone who mattered, including the British who still were not at war with Japan. The spy writer Chapman Pincher (wiki) in his book 'Their Trade is Treachery' asserted that Sorge recruited Roger Hollis, the future head of MI-5 in 1930s in China (wiki). This has never been proven, but still can be taken as evidence of Sorge's activity involving the British.

What distinguishes spies of that era is that many of them, like Philby, were politically motivated intellectuals who thought that working for Russia was working against nazism. In the case of Sorge, whose mother was Russian and father German, there may have been both a patriotic and an internationalist motive. In his mind he may have been serving both his home countries, Germany and Russia, when he worked for the defeat of the nazis and the victory of the Allies, and ultimately of democracy.

I find it difficult to write this, but the fact remains, Pearl Harbor, with all its human loss, silenced isolationists in America and lead to her joining the fight on the 'right side', the side of democracies.

Soviets, being on the winning side, did impose their regime on Eastern Europe. But millions of Russian soldiers, having marched through Europe, returned home with first-hand experience of the higher standards of living and a bug of democracy – at least some notion of the West's democratic ways – and a desire for a better life. One of them was a political commissar named Nikita Khrushchev. Twenty years after Sorge's execution, the leader of the Soviet Union Khrushchev saw the French film 'Qui êtes-vous, Monsieur Sorge?', checked with his spy bosses and outed Sorge who until then was not recognised by Russia as one of her spies. Moscow refused Japan's offers of trading him for their own spies and it is still not entirely clear why. 'Because that would mean admitting that it was us who turned Japan against America', one Russian academic told me in the 80s.

Or perhaps it was to cover Sorge's links in the US and Britain, still active many years after the war ended.

In 1964 on Khrushchev's initiative Sorge was awarded medal of the Hero of the Soviet Union, the country's highest decoration.

The film Qui êtes-vous, Monsieur Sorge? (dubbed in Russian) is available on YouTube. It is based on the book by Hans-Otto Meissner 'The Man with Three Faces: Sorge, Russia's Master Spy'. The Russian text is here.

Photo: Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive)

*WWII or World War II is Henry Luce's invention to which I strongly object and try never use it. Wars don't deserve to have royal names.

Check this chronology if you are interested in who went to war against whom when on whose side.

The Real Svetlana's Breath

2011-12-01T18:01:00.001+01:00

The original Svetlana

Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's daughter, died on 22 November 2011. She had a long and, at times, troubled life. A Kremlin princess until Stalin's death in 1953, in 1967 she defected to the USA, an event that was a big propaganda coup for the West. (see video below, wiki about her here).

There is a persistent myth linked with her name. At least I think it's a myth. The myth that there was a Soviet perfume named after her.

It was probably started by an American journalist's mention in the 1950s feature and found its way into other publications, including serious studies of Russia, and in a bounce-flash, is now mentioned, as fact, in Russian press. (See this article, which also includes videos about Alliluyeva.)

One blogger's obituary says: 'Growing up, she was a beloved celebrity in her home country. Thousands of girls were named after her. So was a bestselling perfume.'

The obituary links to an article from Russia by the AP Women's Editor Dorothy Roe. It is dated December 1957 and says: 'Just recently Russia started manufacturing perfume, the most expensive and prized of which is called 'Svetlana's Breath' – Svetlana is Stalin's daughter, you know'.

The American article is uncomplimentary about conditions of life for Russian women. But the correspondent obviously did an honest job walking around, observing and interviewing people. The year 1957 was an exciting time in Russia. Khrushchev has just denounced Stalin's crimes, Sputnik was launched and the International Youth Festival created an atmosphere of incredible openness and optimistic outlook. Khrushchev and Eisenhower were looking for a way to end the cold war.

The Moscow perfume factory, 'Novaya Zarya' – New Dawn, founded 1884, (link to their official web-site, small wiki article in Russian here), did indeed make a perfume called 'Svetlana', not 'Svetlana's Breath'. It is mentioned, for example, in this overview of the factory's products as one of its top quality brands. Either the correspondent misunderstood the name of the brand, or the interviewee made a joke about Stalin's personality cult that was lost in translation.

The trap here, for a translator – and a journalist, is in the word дух – spirit, ghost, which also means smell, scent. In fact, Pushkin played on the word in the introduction to the poem Ruslan and Lyudmila: "Там русский дух, там Русью пахнет" – "there is the Russian spirit, it smells of Russia there". Dahl's dictionary (словарь Даля), the biggest collection of Russian words, gives the whole range of meanings in an article on дух (link to Vasmer's etymological dictionary on dukh, which in turn links to major Russian dictionaries, click on Dahl). Дух is cognate with душа (soul) and дыхание (breath) but духи in plural with the stress on the last syllable has only one meaning – perfume.

The name of the perfume, after Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin, is unlikely to have been linked to Svetlana Alliluyeva, but, I am almost sure, is a reference to 'Lullaby for Svetlana', a hit number from the musical "Давным-давно" – 'Long Time Ago' (play by Alexander Gladkov, music by Tikhon Khrennikov). In 1962 Eldar Ryazanov made a film version, "Гусарская баллада" ('The Hussar Ballad). Svetlana is the name of the doll belonging to the main character Alexandra (Shurochka). She sings the lullaby 'Sleep, my Svetlana' before running away from home to join, disguised as a hussar, the Russian army fighting Napoleon in 1812.

The play was written in 1941, just before Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, and staged for the first time in 1942 in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), where many Moscow organizations were evacuated. Scenes and musical numbers from the play were broadcast over the national radio. It has remained a signature production for the Central Army Theatre in Moscow ever since. Its patriotic theme was apt for the time and the catchy tunes are still, seventy years on, popular.

My grandmother and mother, a little girl then, were also evacuated to Sverdlovsk – and my mother had a doll there called Svetlana. That's where my sister later got her name from. I didn't know about the doll, mother only told me the other day when I mentioned the death of Svetlana Alliluyeva. My mother doesn't remember the perfume, nor the play from those times, but she and my grandmother may have seen it then.

The name Svetlana in the play might have been 'inspired' by Stalin's daughter, but would have been linked to the poet Vasily Zhukovsky's 1808-1812 romantic ballad 'Svetlana' based on Gottfried Burger's Lenore (wiki on Lenore). Zhukovsky did another version of Lenore titled 'Lyudmila'. Both Svetlana (meaning the Light One) and Lyudmila (Beloved by the People) remain two of the most popular pre-Christian Russian women's names. It is possible that Stalin's daughter was named after Zhukovsky's heroine. While 'thousands of girls named after Stalin's daughter' is obviously what was happening at the height of his cult, the name had its own life, separate from Stalin.

Stalin's daughter or not, the lines from Zhukovsky's ballad "О, не знай сих страшных снов, Светлана" – 'Oh, never shall you know those terrible dreams, Svetlana' are widely known, and during the Stalin period would have had certain reverberations – abduction, having a dead man for a groom, trying to figure out your fate and then waking up from a bad dream.

Novaya Zarya has a long tradition of giving their perfumes women names with romantic connotations. In the 70s one of the popular brands – which I remember buying myself – was called 'Natasha', possibly after Tolstoy's Natasha Rostova. One of their current brands is 'Yelena'. My theory about 'Svetlana' perfume could only be confirmed by evidence from the Novaya Zarya archives or by someone who remembers how the name was assigned. For now I simply offer it as a theory.

The Hussar's Ballad can be seen on YouTube in full. The lullaby scene begins at 22 min. (Embedding is disabled, copyright is owned by Mosfilm). RuTube has a clip with the lullaby:

Here Svetlana Alliluyeva speaks at the press-conference after her defection in 1967:

Picture, an illustration to Zhukovsky's poem: Karl Brullov, Svetlana's Magic Fortunetelling, 1836, o/c, 94 x 81 cm, Art Museum of Nizhny Novgorod.

Special thanks to Languagehat for the prompt to make this post.

Je Fume: Support the Strike.

2011-11-30T09:14:00.001+01:00

British workers are on strike today – because people are fuming over cuts and pension age hike.

Despite the massive anti-strike propaganda pre-strike opinion polls showed that 61 percent of the public support the industrial action. It is expected to be the largest industrial action since the 70s. Estimates say that around 2 million workers will be on strike today. Follow the events on Twitter with #strike or #november30 hashtags.

Here is what some of the tweets say today:

-Average female NHS worker's pension: £3,500. Average Managing Director's pension: £224,121. That's why we #strike.
-When we're all working at 70 with no NHS and a broken education system, at least we can say we saved the banks. #strike
-Gove says it's unfair for taxpayers to support hard-working public sector workers - but footing the bill for bankers is fine. #n30 #strike
-Disgusted by some of the lies being told about the strikers today. As a private sector company director I support #nov30 100%. #strike

-Proud of my dad on strike today. Ashamed of this out of touch, millionaire filled government #strike #solidarity
-Today's #strike will 'cripple the economy' but the bank holiday for the royal wedding was fine and dandy? Aye right! #priorities

-School is closed. Some people not happy because the #strike is disruptive.... That's the whole point of a strike! Will take boy to toddler... [group]

I thought of posting a working class protest song, but then remebered Edith Piaf's 'Je fume' (I smoke). It's a love song with the refrain that goes 'I don't want to work, I don't want to lunch – and then I smoke'. Let's do a little fuming at what's going on:

Miss Shelter-From-The-Storm (a Russian name explained)

2011-11-29T14:37:00.001+01:00

Zatuliveter reporting for RT, click to watch.

Katia Zatuliveter has been in the news in Britain for months, but presenters and newsreaders still stumble over her seemingly un-Russian looking/sounding surname.

It is indeed uncommon. To the point that one Russian name-deciphering web-site even says it is of Germanic or Jewish origin.

However the name's semantics are perfectly Russian and follow the pattern of many other compound surnames.

It consists of two parts zatuli- and -veter. The second part is clear enough – veter is wind.

The first is formed with the common root -tul- (-тул-, similar words: втулка - insert, притулиться - to huddle, сутулиться - to stoop one's shoulders) and equally common prefix za- (за-). The verb затулить is in many larger Russian dictionaries, including the largest one, the Dahl dictionary. Its general meaning is to cover, to shelter. Dahl gives this folk rhyme: Не велик муженек (хоть плох мужичек), да затулье мое: завалюсь за него - не боюсь никого! – My man may not be big, but he's my shelter/cover (zatulye), I fall behind him – and I'm afraid of noone.

Whatever her morals, at the appeal hearings she produced a wonderful adlib (BBC report here). In response to an allegation that her relationship with Mike Hancock, MP, was based on sex, she said: "I don't know how people usually have relationships but when I have a relationship, it's based on communication."

Examples of similarly constructed Russian names: Volkogon(ov/a) - Wolfbeater, Myaosyed(ov/a) - Beefeater, Dobrolyub(ov/a) - Goodlover, Dobrodey(ev/a) - Dogooder.

And here is Bob Dylan singing his Zatuliveter hit song:

'Little Sparrow' Dies.

2011-11-29T12:37:00.001+01:00

Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva died on 22 November in the USA.

She had an amazing life, forever trying to escape from the shadow of the great dictator and never quite being able to.

Without any connection to her at all, this beautiful song, Aderyn Llwyd (Sparrow) by Mary Hopkin sprang into my memory (she recorded it in English too, listen on the Russian Tetradki):

Mensch and Rakhmetov: the Starbucks Argument.

2011-11-28T11:17:00.001+01:00

Mensch, click on photo to go to clip.

Four men with sharpest minds – or rather tongues – in England ganged up and tore to pieces a woman Conservative MP, Louise Mensch, who suggested in a popular satirical programme 'Have I Got News for You' that 'occupy' protesters at the City of London were not steadfast enough in their anti-capitalist action because they a: formed the longest queue in the world for Starbucks coffee; b: had fancy tents; c: used iPhones to tweet about the protest.

'You don't need to return to a barter and a Stone Age to complain about the cuts and the financial crisis?', said Ian Hislop, the feared editor of satirical magazine 'Private Eye'.

'If you buy coffee, have a tent and use iPhone your opinion is worthless?' said comedian Paul Merton.

Poor Louise, she didn't have a chance! Not against those four. On the surface, her Starbucks argument does look wide off the mark. But is she really that wrong? At first I thought she was. After all, if Merton and Hislop think 'it's so obvious that they can't be bothered' – even though they did – then it is. Or is it?

Here is the video clip with the argument (read further below the video):

A character called Rakhmetov from the Russian novel 'What is to Be Done?' (1863) by Chernyshevsky might help to sharpen the 'Starbucks argument'. Rakhmetov has been an icon, an ideal to aspire to for generations of Russian revolutionaries. The author describes him as an 'uncommon man' as opposed to common people and 'new people' – the ones who only reject the exploitative society, but are not ready to fight for its overthrowal. Rakhmetov developed a complicated code of behaviour, which included what he could and couldn't eat and drink and how he should and shouldn't sleep. Here is the passage that describes the code:

For the same reason he forced himself to lead a very austere life. [...] food that he ate at home was of the cheapest. He gave up white bread, and ate only black bread at his table. For whole weeks he did not taste sugar, for months together he did not touch fruit or veal or poultry, nor did he buy anything of the kind: "I have no right to spend money on a whim which I need not gratify."
Yet he had been brought upon a luxurious diet and had a keen taste, as could be seen from his remarks about food when dining out: he ate with relish many dishes which he denied himself at his own table, while there were others which he ate nowhere, and this for a well-founded reason: "Whatever the people eat, though only at intervals, I may eat also, when occasion offers. I must not eat that which is entirely out of the reach of the common people. This is necessary in order that I may feel, though but in a very slight degree, how much harder is the life of the common people than my own." So, when fruits were served, he always ate apples, but never apricots. At St.Petersburg he ate oranges, but refused them in the provinces. Because at St.Petersburg the common people eat them, which is not the case in the provinces. He ate sweets because a good cake is no worse than pie, and pie made of puff-paste is known to the common people; but he did not eat sardines.
He was always poorly clad, though fond of elegance, and in all other things lived a Spartan's life; for instance, he allowed himself no mattress and slept on felt without so much as doubling it up.
But he had one thing to trouble his conscience; he did not leave off smoking. "Without my cigar I cannot think; if that is a fact, it is not my fault; but perhaps it is due to the weakness of my will." He could not smoke bad cigars, having been brought up amid aristocratic surroundings, and he spent money for cigars at the rate of three hundred and seventy-five roubles a thousand. "Abominable weakness," as he expressed it. But it was only this weakness that made it possible for him to repel his assailants. An adversary, cornered, would say to him: "Perfection is impossible; even you smoke." Then Rakhmetoff redoubled his attacks, but aimed most of his reproaches at himself, his opponent receiving less yet without being quite forgotten.

Difficult to say how today's lattes and iPhones fit into that picture, but the idea of rejecting what accompanies affluence is there. Mensch wasn't that wrong.

Chernyshevsky

Nikolay Chernyshevsky (wiki) was one of the most influential revolutionary writers of Russia. Marx valued him as the only original mind in modern economics. The founder of Russian marxism Plekhanov called his book the most important work in Russian since the invention of the printing press. Lenin knew the book almost by heart and took the title for his own work in which he defined the political principles of bolshevism.

A link to the novel in several popular formats, Kindle, ePub and PDF.
The quote is from a translation by Benjamin Tucker, Boston, 1886.

The Volga Boatmen Big Stick

2011-10-29T12:02:00.000+02:00

Some Russian boatmen without the stick...

Popularised by Shaliapin and Glen Miller, the emblematic Russian folk-song known in the West as the Song of the Volga Boatmen, to Russians is the Song of the Big Stick ("Дубинушка").

The discrepancy is hiding somewhere in the mists of history. There isn't really a dubina there, it's just a metaphor for using brutal force instead of thinking or applying clever machinery. One obvious explanation is that it has its origins as a work-song giving a beat, a rhythm to hard, monotonous manual work, the kind of work done by the men who towed the goods-laden barges upstream along the Volga river, the main trading route through central Russia. In 19th Century they were called the burlaki – the tow men. But the Volga connection must have stuck at some point and the strange burlaki got changed to boatmen.

...and a US boatman with the big one.

In 1870-80s Russian revolutionary intelligentsia started to look to organised manual workers, the proletariat, as the future force for changing the country into a modern democratic nation. Several full-blown song versions appeared building on the theme of what is probably the original folklore chorus of 'hey-ey, ookh-neem' – roughly, 'hey-ho, heave-ho, let's do it'.

The song grew in popularity and was strongly associated with mass protest. So much so that when during the 1905 revolution the tsar yielded and published a manifesto promising personal freedoms and an elected parliament (the Duma) it was sung at rallies throughout the empire. The great singer Shaliapin came to one such meeting, was greeted enthusiastically by the crowd who had demanded that he sing a 'revolutionary' song.
'But I don't know any', he said. 'Will Dubinushka do?'
'Yes!' the crowd roared.

That was how Shaliapin got his 'revolutionary' credentials with the progressive public and was black-listed by the authorities who were preparing a clamp-down. The great singer emigrated from Soviet Russia a few years after the next revolution, the 1917 bolshevik take-over, but Dubinushka, or the Song of the Volga Boatmen, stayed as one of his signature performances. He recorded it several times, including in 1930s.

Glen Miller and his orchestra made a jazz version of the Volga Boatmen which reached number one in the US in 1941 when America had not yet entered the war, but all eyes were on Russia fighting for survival against the advancing nazis.

In Stephen Ambrose's book' D-Day (link to Amazon) there is a comparison between the American and the British approach to war. While the British were trying to out-think the Germans, inventing new tactics and new machinery, the Americans, he says, were less war-weary, less concerned by casualties. Theirs was push on regardless. The US had more resources, men, tanks and planes, – a bigger stick-dubinushka which they didn't hesitate to throw at the Germans. The Big Stick must have been on the minds of American commanders who grew up in the shadows of Theodore Roosevelt's famous phrase 'Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far'. In fact, a relative of Roosevelt, also Teddy, was a commanding officer who took part in D-Day landings and died in Normandy.

When I think of that difference, I also think that it explains the symbolism of Dubinushka for the Russians. In the version sung by Shaliapin there is a verse:

Англичанин-хитрец, чтоб работе помочь,
Вымышлял за машиной машину;
Ухитрились и мы: чуть пришлося невмочь,
Вспоминаем родную дубину:
Ухни, дубинушка, ухни!
Ухни, березова, ухни!

The clever English, to help them with their work,
Have invented one machine after another;
But we, we are clever too: as soon as it gets tough,
We remember our good old dubina:
Hey, dubinushka, heave-ho,
Heave, you're made of birch, heave-ho!

(-ushk- is a Russian affectionate suffix)

That verse points to the same strength of mass action and disregard for 'clever tricks', that the war historian Ambrose noted on the Western front. Of course, in the mind of a Russian the 'dubina' is closely associated with another dramatic episode in their history and a great work of literature. 'The Big Stick of people's war' was, according to Leo Tolstoy, the ultimate reason for Napoleon's demise in Russia in 1812.

I doubt very much that Ted Roosevelt drew his Big Stick inspiration from War and Peace. He said the source was a 'West African proverb'.

Perhaps Americans are not as sentimental about their big stick as in Roosevelt's times, I don't know. What I don't doubt is that Dubinushka has become the source of numerous self-deprecating jokes among the Russians. A friend of mine, who runs a decorating and removals business, once saw me taking measurements of a piece of furniture before moving it and said ‘That’s somehow un-Russian’ - “Это как-то не по-русски. Мы с ребятами один раз американский холодильник на 11-й этаж по лестнице подняли – а он в дверь не проходит”. – 'My boys and myself once carried an American fridge up the stairs to the 11th floor because it wouldn't fit into the elevator. Only to discover that it wouldn't fit through the door of the apartment either.'

The Big Stick principle doesn't always work.

Fyodor Shaliapin sings the Volga Boatmen:

And Glen Miller's version:

Read the Russian version of this article here.

Text quoted from 'Dubinushka' in Russian by Alexander Olkhin.

Painting by Ilya Repin, The Burlaki on the Volga, 1870-1873, o/c, 131.5cm x 281cm, Russian State Museum.
Cartoon by William Allen Rogers, Theodore Roosevelt and his Big Stick in the Caribbean, 1904, (Courtesy of Granger Collection) link.

Gavrilov Translation

2011-10-26T08:03:00.000+02:00

Andrei Gavrilov

This is a video with Andrei Gavrilov (Андрей Юрьевич Гаврилов) talking about translation. Gavrilov is a legendary figure in Russia. He dubbed an endless number of English, French and Japanese-language films on video, beginning from 1980s when the flood of Western cinema started to break through the walls of the Soviet Union on VHS cassettes. The films were voiced-over in Russian by a handful of translators who had a knack for a fast-paced, practically simultaneous translation in good intelligible Russian.

Gavrilov, usually uncredited, became one of the best known of them. To the point where the technique of voice-over, when the whole film is dubbed by one translator and his voice is heard a few split seconds after the actors' voices, had become known in Russia as 'Gavrilov translation' – "перевод Гаврилова".

Gavrilov is a professional journalist, fluent in French and English (he translated Japanese films via English subtitles). I worked with him in the European section of TASS news agency in the early eighties where I remember him as the fastest-working, practically faultless editor and writer of news despatches. Which allowed him to carve out time for writing on the side – additional stories, sometimes political, but often on Western culture. He wrote numerous introductory articles on musical record jackets.

Gavrilov stumbled into translating films almost by chance. When the regular translator at an important viewing for Soviet bosses didn't show up, a desperate manager grabbed Gavrilov and put him behind the mike.

His big love has always been music, classical, rock and especially jazz. Gavrilov now runs one of the top quality music companies in Russia, Solyd Records.

In the clip, one interesting observation by Gavrilov is on translating English-language invectives into Russian. He argues that Russian 'mat' (sexually based expletives) have a stronger offensive power than in English. That difference, he says, should be taken into account by a translator. In most cases English swear words shouldn't be translated literally, as Russian mat, but a milder, more acceptable phrasing should be used.

The Undeserted Island

2011-10-25T22:08:00.000+02:00

One of the most optimistic sci-fi novels by the famous Russian duo Arkady and Boris Strugatsky has the title "Обитаемый остров", literally the Inhabited Island.

Max Kammerer, a member of the future Earth's space probing 'Free Search Group' is stranded on a planet which strikingly resembles today's Earth. He quickly realises that things have to be changed on the planet, his Desert Island, and with some help of the local resistance stages a revolution there. Not realising that an undercover agent of the Earth's Committee of Galactic Security (KGB) had been already working for years there to ensure a more painless transition from a totalitarian society to the utopian Earth-like democracy.

The English translation of the book, the first in a trilogy, is called Prisoners of Power.

The title is different because of the untranslatable Russian pun – обитаемый-inhabited vs необитаемый-desert (island).

The difficulty in the pun is that a 'desert island' invokes desolation, being stranded, while 'uninhabited' or 'inhabited' is simply a geographical note, though in Robinson Crusoe's original title it was just that – 'un-inhabited island'. Max is stranded like Crusoe, except that his island is a planet. In Russian a 'desert island' is 'neobitayemy ostrov', so the title 'Obitayemy Ostrov' (inhabited, non-desert or undeserted) is immediately recognisable as the opposite of 'desert island', practically as an oxymoron, while the English 'inhabited island' is not.

Thanks to Languagehat for the original discussion of Strugatskys and to commenters Mockba and AJP Crown for additional probing on the subject.

Inspiration for McKayla: Those Were the Days.

2011-10-13T08:44:00.001+02:00

At the world gymnastics championship in Tokyo American women's team won gold on Tuesday (11 October). The ever-strong Russians were in the second place. But there was a Russian inspiration in the American performance.

Years ago, in the early 90s, a young British journalist came to interview me at Izvestia in Moscow. The interview was the usual political fare of the day (the journalist is now one of the top UK political commentators). What made it different that day was that she was hopping along on crutches. Ever a gentleman I didn't mention the obvious physical condition until the business was over and I was helping her to the lift.
'What's happened to you?' I asked as casually as possible.
'Oh, I just wanted too much to be like Tourischeva', she replied defensively with what sounded a prepared and perhaps rehearsed phrase. When student, at a gymnastics class she developed a chronic sprain, which returned occasionally.

Tourischeva (centre) at the Munchen Olympics, 1972.

The Soviet gymnastics champion Lyudmila Tourischeva was the darling of the world in 1970s, the pretty face looking out from behind the otherwise grim façade of the 'evil empire'. Girls (and boys) all over the world were dreaming of her.

Young gymnasts competing today are daughters, or maybe even granddaughters of Tourischeva's fans. I wonder if they remember the Russian charm of those days fourty years ago?

Here is the winning performance of American McKayla Maroney in Tokyo. She did her somersaults to the tune of Those Were the Days, the Russian song that became so popular in its 1968 English version that now many don't even realise where it's from. Gene Raskin's lyrics are different from Konstantin Podrevsky's, but the melody by Boris Fomin is the same.

And here is Alexander Vertinsky's recording from 1926 when the song first became a hit among Russian emigres:

Vertinsky in 1910s

Photo of Lyudmila Tourischeva by Ulrich Kohls, from

Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive).
Photo of Vertinsky from here.

Who Quacks, Ducks or Frogs? Bathtime International.

2011-10-11T11:08:00.000+02:00

Bathtime in the Anichkin-Ingram household is an international relations minefield. Does a duck, for example, go krya-krya or quack-quack? Are country folk awakened by a cockadoodledoo or a cookarekoo and does the sheep – Vita has a whole menagerie of plastic bathtime playmates – go beh or baa? The one that really gets me is the horse – who has ever heard a horse going eeh-gogo? But then, as Sasha quickly points out, where in the world does a pig (khryu-khryu) go oink?

Meanwhile little Vita’s head is twitching from side to side like a spectator at a tennis tournament as she watches what she had hoped to be two intelligent parents screaming bewildering farmyard noises at each other.

In fact, child psychologists seem to maintain that the child won’t become remotely schizophrenic from having a frog that either croaks or kvahks (quacks?), depending on which adult is making the inane noises at the time.

Is it possibly the parents, then, who become mentally imbalanced?

For, of course, the fight for Vita’s cultural heritage extends beyond the bathroom.

All the way to the kitchen, in fact, where I stuff her with Marmite, both to discourage a Russian sweet tooth and on the grounds that you can’t make a stronger statement about your Englishness than having grown up on Marmite. But now Sasha has her eating it off black bread.

Of course it won’t much matter if she watches ‘Blue Peter’ alongside ‘Spokoinoi Nochi, Malyshi’ (‘Good Night, Little Ones’) when we sooner or later resort to television as a part-time substitute for parenting, and she will have the distinct advantage of two great literary traditions to call her own.
But there are, nevertheless, serious minefields ahead, especially when the bicultural family straddles the defunct, for now at least, Iron Curtain.

Like all nearly talking children, Vita refers to all pictures of women as mama and all men as papa.
Thus when she pulled a biography of Stalin off the office shelves the other day, pointed to a portrait of Uncle Joe and triumphantly mouthed the word ‘Papa!’ I naturally launched into a long-winded denial which was inexorably heading toward a ‘Russians-as-baddies’ scenario when I remembered to my horror that she is Russian – partly at least.

Sasha eyed me cautioningly and we somehow distracted her until we have had time to agree upon a unified policy toward the past.

Most crucial of all, points out Sasha, is what exactly are we going to say to her when we settle down, en famille, to watch his favourite movies: John Le Carré and James Bond?

Originally published in The Moscow Times in Educating Vita column by Alexander Anichkin and Miranda Ingram. Read another 'Educating Vita' column 'Tolstoy: What We Need Most'.

'Spokoinoi Nochi, Malyshi' opening jingle:

Tomas Tranströmer. Nobel Prize for Literature, 2011.

2011-10-08T13:09:00.000+02:00

Nobel Prize in literature went to Tomas Tranströmer of Sweden.

He is considered by Swedes as the national poet. They compare him in importance to Strindberg and Bergman. Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990 and has been unable to speak since, but has continued to write. Internationally he is one of the most widely translated contemporary poets, his work has appeared in over 60 languages.

In this audio he gives a master class in English and reads one of his most famous poems Shubertiana.

This is how it sounds in Swedish:

Russian version of this article is here.

He Grew Out of Freedom. Steve Jobs

2011-10-07T13:14:00.002+02:00

Steve Jobs died on 5 October 2011

Steve Jobs' Apple grew out of freedom. Jobs, a hippy, rejected the accepted way of thinking and behaving. His philosophy was to look at the established differently, think laterally, pursue simplicity, reliability – and beauty.

That is what makes him as a man and his creation, a Mac, stand out.

You can do things that you have already been doing, but in a more efficient and enjoyable way.

I was trained as an editor and writer in a just-precomputer era, when machines were big, complicated, ugly and intimidating. Cut, copy and paste was just that, literally – pen, paper, scissors and glue.

I saw my first Mac in the Tokyo bureau of AP. A Japanese colleague let me have a quick go and I said: 'I want one too'. 'Sure, you do', she said.

Then, when I was part of the first joint Russian-American publishing venture in Moscow, the We/Mbl newspaper, I went on an Apple-Mac DTP professional course. What struck me then was how a Mac was built to replicate all the basic human wrtiting, editing, layout and design operations – with ease and elegance.

I've stayed loyal to Apple-Macs ever since, even when, in the late 90s, the brand was on the verge of dying out, and even though I had, during the course of my career, to work on Windows computers.

Today, when I work on a modern Mac, I feel sometimes that it knows what I'm going to do even before I do, a weird, but, again, enjoyable feeling.

'The man who gave Apple its bite' is probably the best tribute to him. Here is a quick remake of the Apple logo I made in Pages:

Russian version here. Republished from I Work in Pages.

Photo by Joi Ito.

The Russian Prince Ali Ababwa

2011-10-05T14:56:00.002+02:00

My daughter gets the giggles every time she listens to this Russian version of Aladdin's grand entry song. And she does it a lot when she's back home from the boarding school. So I got the bug too.

Enjoy!

In the Russian text he is described as "шишка других важней" – 'shishka more important than others'. Literally shishka is a pine cone, but idiomatically it does mean someone important, the big one.

Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman. Wrap-up of the Radio 4 (BBC) Dramatisation.

2011-09-29T12:37:00.000+02:00

Russian women in besieged Stalingrad.

The longer Russian version of this review is here. To read other Tetradki posts on the novel and the Radio 4 project, click on Grossman label.

BBC's Radio 4 broadcasted an 8-hour adaptation of Vasiliy Grossman's novel Life and Fate. It is a tremendous achievement by the BBC team, an achievement that brings back to international readership a 'lost' great novel of the 20th Century literature.

Fifty years ago the KGB arrested the book, Grossman was told it will not be published for another 200 years. When Robert Chandler made the first English translation 25 years ago the book was hardly noticed. Last week it shot to the top of British bestsellers list.

There are brilliant finds in transforming the novel into a drama. Producer Alison Hindell and drama writers Jonathan Myerson and Mike Walker should be feted for bringing to radio such a huge and complex work as Life and Fate.

First, they've changed the narrative from the writer's third person to the characters' first person. It produces a surprisingly fresh, sharp effect in the Viktor and Lyuda episode narrated through the eyes of Nadya, Viktor and Lyudmila Shtrums' daughter, a minor character in the novel. The script writers, while being faithful to the novel rebuild the character to a greater importance which may well be how Grossman himself intended to develop her had he time to carry on with his epic, which he had planned to be in four parts like Tolstoy's War and Peace. Nadya is based on Grossman's own daughter Katya.

Another striking find is the first person narrative of the nazi soldier – operator of a gas chamber in the concentration camp, whose main duty is to watch Jewish inmates die. It's absolutely chilling ('I'm only closing doors').

Another brilliantly played scene is from Chapter 15, Part II, the 'theoretical discussion' between an old bolshevik Mostovskoy and an SS 'thinker' Liss, when the nazi interrogator succeeds in stirring up doubts in the head of the bolshevik. 'We are your mortal enemies, yes-yes. But our victory is your victory. Do you understand? And if you win, then we will die, but also live in your victory. It's like a paradox: by losing the war, we will win the war, we will develop into a new form, but with the same essence,' says Liss. That chapter should be republished separately, included in every anthology of modern thinking, taught and discussed everywhere where thinking and debating is still taught and allowed. And the BBC rendering does it its due credit.

Where script-writers needn't change much for the radio is Viktor's mother's last letter from the Jewish ghetto in the Ukraine just before she was killed by the nazis. Grossman's own mother perished in the first wave of the mass shootings of Soviet Jews in September 1941, exactly 70 years ago. The mother's letter is read by Janet Suzman, a great British actress who comes from a South African jewish family with a long history of campaigning for civil liberties and against apartheid.

I am not sure if merging Lieutenant Bach, a German company commander in Stalingrad, with another character, is a good idea. Bach is given the thoughts of a different character, Lennart, also a company commander, but a staunch nazi believer. Bach is a 'normal' German, has a Russian girlfriend in Stalingrad, and it seems slightly incongruous for him to report to the Gestapo chief on the moral spirit of the soldiers – 'there won't be a mutiny', the report which, in the novel, is made by the nazi party member Lennart. The Gestapo officer says words, that could easily have come from the mouth of a Soviet political officer: 'There will be no mutiny because of the genius of our leader. We've cut out the sick among us and also those who might get sick'. The nazi chief prepares to flee from the besieged city and promises Bach (in the play) a free pass out, in the novel the offer is made to Lennart. That doesn't really work quite well, I think, but, then, drama has to be concise.

I think Shtrum played by Kenneth Branagh is a bit too jovial, and both the tank commander Novikov and the commissar Krymov (David Tennant) slightly too hysterical, but, then, again that's drama.

Compositionally, Radio 4 series end with Shtrum being suck into the Soviet system of privilege for those who toe the line. Which, I thought, may be even better than the ending of the novel itself. Grossman rushed it to deliver to a deadline – and after that neither he, nor other Russian editors had a chance of putting it through a proper pre-publishing editorial and review process. When the book was finally published in Russia Grossman was 24 years dead. The novel called Life and Fate that we know today, brilliant as it is, is in fact the 'writer's cut' – the final draft version.

There are a few bits to pick, which are Russia-specific. In the Soviet Union you didn't use 'citizen' as a form of address, not in your own workplace (Shtrum does). 'Citizen' is for those who are denied being a 'comrade', i.e. 'enemies of the people'. There is the usual mistaken shift in the stress in some Russian surnames. The director of an academic institute, Shishakov, in the play is pronounced as SHE-she-koff instead of Shi-shah-KOFF, making the 'boss's name' derived from 'shishka' or 'shishak' – the big one, the important one – sound almost the same as Chichikov (CHI-chi-koff), the comic character from Gogol's novel 'The Dead Souls'.

BBC's radioplay is available for downloading as 13 podcasts from the BBC site. If you use iTunes you can download it in one go. The podcast page is here and the Life and Fate project page with additional information and links is here.

The radio adaptation is from the English translation by Robert Chandler (link to Amazon, some pages available to read).

Photo is from Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), Bild 183-F0703-0217-001, by Yakov Ryumkin, ADN/TASS.

Phantasharmony

2011-09-27T13:28:00.001+02:00

I'm reading Kornei Chukovsky's diary, an extraordinary, legendary document, which the Russian writer continued to write from 1901 to 1969. Chukovsky knew everyone of any importance in Russian literature and left sharp, revealing portraits of their personalities. And it is also full of anecdotes and observations on language.

On 28 October 1918 Chukovsky writes:

Tikhonov today instead of phantasmagoria said phantasgarmonia. Gorky winked at me: excellent!

To explain: harmony in Russian is garmoniya. A tired man inadvertently created a lovely pun – phantastic harmony with an element of primaeval disorder.

Alexander Tikhonov was a prominent publisher of the day.

BBC's Map to Life and Fate: Wrong Beard?

2011-09-23T13:04:00.000+02:00

Readers of Russian novels often complain that it is difficult to follow the narrative because of the complexity of names. People can be called by their name, nickname, full formal name and patronymic, or by surname or title. Add to this numerous affectionate-familiar suffixes used with the main name and it can be a nightmare!

I can assure you that not only it is difficult for a non-Russian reader. It can be quite a challenge for a native Russian reader too.

Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate dramatised on BBC's Radio 4 this week has about a thousand characters, as many as Tolstoy's War and Peace.

Producers of the radioplay found a clever solution: on the programme web-page there is a map of the main characters complete with cartoon portraits and dotted lines showing their relationships.

I found one cartoon a bit puzzling, though. Viktor Shtrum, the physicist working on the Soviet nuclear programme, is given a short beard of the kind that became fashionable among the young Russian intellectuals in 1960s, perhaps after Ernest Hemingway. In 1940s only the eccentric few would wear such a beard, certainly not a relatively young man like Shtrum, raised under Soviet rule.

I wonder if the drawing is after the beard that is currently worn by Kenneth Branagh who plays Shtrum, or Branagh was made to grow a 'Russian' beard for the Life and Fate photoshoot which is now on the BBC web-site?

The episodes broadcasted so far are brilliant. They can be downloaded from the Radio 4 web-site as podcasts.

How Did Life and Fate Get to KGB?

2011-09-22T17:57:00.001+02:00

BBC’s Radio 4 continues with its week-long monumental 8-hour 13-episode adaptation of Vasily Grossman’s world war II classic novel Life and Fate (based on translation by Robert Chandler, producer Alison Hindell).

Practically every reference to the novel mentions that Soviet leadership deemed the work so damaging to the communist cause that the novel was arrested by the KGB. A single copy, or perhaps two, was hidden by Grossman’s friends, smuggled to the West and published there, more than twenty years after it was written.

Here is the story of how it happened as told by Semyon Lipkin, poet and translator and a close friend of Grossman. He was one of the first readers of the book, the one who helped the writer to cut out the more politically risky chapters before presenting the manuscript to a literary journal. He was also one of the friends who saved the novel.

Grossman wrote a prequel to Life and Fate soon after the war and submitted it to the prestigious literary journal Novy Mir (New World). Originally it was titled Stalingrad. Novy Mir editor Konstantin Simonov, himself a famous war writer, rejected the novel after a year-long delay. The new editor Alexander Tvardovsky, a poet and an influential power in Soviet literary establishment, pushed the novel through censors and party bosses. After a few substantial changes – a chapter with a positive portrait of Stalin was added and the Russian-Jewish physicist Viktor Shtrum, the main character in the novel, was given an ethnic Russian mentor Chepyzhin. The novel was published in 1952 under the title For the Just Cause.

The novel came out just as Stalin launched his last campaign of terror, the so-called Doctors’ Plot, aimed at Soviet ethnic Jews. Grossman’s novel was denounced as anti-Soviet and ‘damaging’. There was a possibility that Grossman himself could be dragged into the Doctors’ Plot. Tvardovsky, a personal friend of Grossman, recanted, denounced the novel and declared himself in error. When Stalin died in March 1953 the Plot investigations were stopped, arrested ‘conspirators’ released and Grossman’s novel published widely to huge acclaim.

But he fell-out with Tvardovsky in a big way, remembers Lipkin. Grossman was writing Life and Fate throughout the 50s. Chapters from the novel were published in the press and there was already big interest regarding the new book without anyone realising what was in it. Novy Mir expressed interest in the novel, but Grossman wouldn’t have anything to do with the editor and friend who had betrayed him.

The editor of another literary journal, Znamya (Banner), Vadim Kozhevnikov persuaded Grossman to give the novel to him. During the summer of 1960 the novel was finished and in October Grossman submitted the typed manuscript to Znamya. Weeks passed and there was no answer from the journal. Through friends Grossman found out that the editor was hiding the novel from the staff and that something unpleasant was afoot.

That autumn he and his wife were at a writers’ resort at the Black Sea. Tvardovsky and his wife happened to be there too. The wives, who were friends independently from their husbands, arranged for them to make peace. Tvardovsky asked for a copy of the novel, ‘just to read it’. Back in Moscow, Tvardovsky came to Grossman’s flat in the middle of the night to say that the novel was greater than anything he had read, but was unpublishable. He drunk up all the vodka that was there to drink at Grossmans' and among other things told the writer that Kozhevnikov had denounced Grossman to those ‘who ought to know’, meaning the KGB – or the party, or both.

One day in February 1961, in the morning, two KGB officers, one with the rank of a colonel, came to Grossman’s flat with a warrant to seize the novel and all materials related to it. The officers acted in a polite, but firm, very efficient way. It looked as though they had precise orders about what to do. They only searched the room where Grossman worked, left alone anything that wasn’t connected to Life and Fate, but collected all copies, drafts, studies and scribbles for the novel. They then went to Grossman’s typist's flat and confiscated a copy of the novel she’d kept for proofing, carbon paper and typewriter ribbons. Tvardovsky’s copy of the book was also taken away.

A year later Grossman wrote an appeal to Khruschev asking for the book to be released. He was received by Mikhail Suslov, the party’s chief ideologue. In a meeting that continued for about three hours Suslov admitted that he hadn’t read the book himself, but decided that it couldn’t be returned to the author. Nor could it be published, not for another 200 years, he said. He promised (promise not kept), though, that Grossman’s five-volume collected works would be published and assured him that the party ‘highly valued his previous works’. Suslov based his judgements on two memos prepared for him by party aides. According to Lipkin, by Grossman’s account each memo was about 15-20 type-written pages.

Summing up what’d happened to him, Grossman told Lipkin: ‘I was strangled in a dark passageway’.

He died of cancer in 1964, his books were hardly published, the memoryof him as a writer faded and name rarely mentioned, except by friends and a few writers and scholars.

I was lucky that I had among my university professors Galina Belaya and Anatoly Bocharov, who in their lectures put Grossman among the top writers of the Soviet literature. It was from them that I first heard the name. Bocharov wrote a book on Grossman in 1970.

Semyon Lipkin’s book ‘The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman’ was published by Kniga publishers, Moscow, 1990. The text is available online here.
BBC Radio 4 page on Life and Fate dramatisation is here.
In Russian the book is here.

Grossman's Life and Fate on BBC Radio 4

2011-09-17T16:51:00.000+02:00

From tomorrow, 18 September, BBC's Radio 4 starts broadcasting Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate. For schedule, clips and additional information visit the programme page.

Why were the Soviet authorities so afraid of Vassily Grossman’s great novel ‘Life and Fate’?

As the BBC is about to broadcast a week-long radio adaptation of the novel, the dramatic story of the book, confiscated by the KGB, smuggled out to the West and only now slowly getting the recognition it deserves, is being repeated again and again. And the same question is being asked – what was it that was so frightening about the book? The question is asked rhetorically, but seldom gets a seriouis answer.

Here are a few points:

First of all, because it showed that there was hardly any difference, if at all, between the Soviet-style communism and the nazi system in Germany. Both are presented as totalitarian oppressive inhuman regimes. In one scene an 'intellectual' nazi officer talks to a veteran communist, captured at the front and put in a concentration camp. 'When we look each other in the face, he says, we are looking in the mirror. Our victory is your victory'.

Grossman's history of the Great Patriotic War (WWII) is the history of ordinary people fighting for their freedom – not just freedom from the foreign invader, but from their oppressors at home too.

The writer portrayed the commissars – party functionaries at the front and behind the lines as dishonourable, treacherous and cynical lot who were such by the nature of them belonging to the communist party elite. They undermine and betray the best, the honest, the professional, the loyal everywhere they go. Even in a German concentration camp they arrange for a resistance activist to be sent to the gas chamber.

The party censors wouldn’t have liked the portrayal of people of the two main ethnic groups of the USSR, Ukrainians and Russians, collaborating with Germans en masse, taking part in executions and fighting at the front line.

The people who are systematically exterminated by the nazis in occupied territories are Jews, not the supra-ethnic ‘Soviet people’ – another fact which the USSR leadership didn’t like to admit.

Grossman tells of German concentration camps in the same vein as the camps of Gulag, of the KGB/NKVD as the Gestapo.

And of course what frightened them most was how powerful and convincing the book was. It wasn’t slander, it was the truth.

It is scary to see yourself for what you are, not what you tell yourself and others.

Kindle 3 Reads Russian

2011-09-06T08:47:00.000+02:00

An earlier Kindle, 79 AD.

Not long ago I wrote that Kindle, Amazon's e-book reading device, doesn't read cyrillics.

With Kindle 3 this is no longer true. The newest Kindle reads Russian and other cyrillic-based languages straight from the box.

I learned this from Steven Lubman in a short discussion of the relative merits and prices of existing e-readers on Lizok's Bookshelf, an American literary blog dedicated to Russian literature (see comments to the linked post). In fact, a fellow blogger tells me he already got more than the Kindle's worth of books in Russian!

I am now dying of envy and waiting to see if the Christmas stocking might bring one to me too.

An Amazon list of Russian and Ukrainian titles is here. What a selection!

But there is also a serious puzzlement: why 19th Century Russian classics, such as Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Chekhov, are for sale and not offered as free downloads? They have long been available on the net for free.

Russian version of this post is here.