The Russian language has no word for “privacy”, perhaps because the
concept has no real place in Russian life.
(Kaiser, p.61; 1976)
 |
| S.I.Ozhegov's Dictionary of the Russian Language: an essential tool for many years for students of Russian |
Anyone who
has chosen to learn Russian has had the experience of telling someone that they
are learning the language and received the response, “Oooohhh, it must be
difficult!” Usually this is based on no more knowledge than simply an awareness
that Russian is written with the Cyrillic alphabet, in which most Slav
languages are written. But learning another alphabet of 32 characters is not
the difficult part. Some letters are the same as the Latin alphabet (for
example, А
in Russian is A in Latin; М is M); some look the same as Latin letters but represent a
different letter (В in Russian is V in Latin; Р is R); and a little over one third are uniquely Russian or
Cyrillic (such as Ж, usually transliterated as ZH and with the sound of the “S” in
“pleasure”; and Щ,
which needs four Latin letters to transliterate its sound: SHCH). If learning
the alphabet was all it took, half the world would be speaking Russian in one day.
Ж
Linguistically,
the biggest challenge in learning Russian is coming to terms with the grammar.
Noun declensions; agreement of adjectives in each case; verb conjugations where
a simple prefix can alter the meaning significantly (for example, Я читал книгу, I read the
book; but Я прочитал книгу, I
read the book from beginning to end; or Я перечитал книгу, I read the book again): all of these
grammatical points and others make the study of Russian a challenge. But there
are other aspects of the language, which are particularly relevant for this
chapter, such as trying to convey a concept when either Russian does not have
an equivalent word, or, on the contrary, the Russian term is so specific to the
country or the system in which it is used that it becomes very difficult to
translate.
When native
English-speaking Russianists get together there will frequently be Russian
words thrown into the conversation. This is not because we are trying to show
off or baffle our non-Russian-speaking friends. It is because the Russian word
sums up so much that we would otherwise need a paragraph to explain. For
example, if we are talking about someone we know being granted the right to
live in Moscow, we would probably say, “I
hear that Ivan got his propiska”. There is no adequate translation in
English, less for the term than for the concept behind propiska. Every citizen in Russia has to be registered where they
live, and the propiska is the
valuable permit which allows them to live in a particular place (see above,
Chapter 3, Moscow, quotations
by Mikhail Bulgakov and David Shipler.)
Concepts can
equally be lost in translation from English to Russian. One of the most
difficult concepts to convey to a Russian (certainly one who has not travelled
or lived abroad) is the idea of “privacy”. As Robert Kaiser says (above) and
Hedrick Smith agrees there simply is no word in Russian for the term.
The Russian language does not have a word for privacy. In the natural
order of things, the individual simply takes second place to the kollektiv.
(Smith, The Russians, p.376; 1977)
Kaiser’s
suggestion that this is because the concept has no place in Russian life rings
true: in the previous chapter, Sex,
journalist Katya Deyeva makes the point that, “couples live apart… They may
spend days together but not nights”; this is because of a shortage of housing
and the lack of the concept of privacy.
Щ
To the
English mind a lack of “privacy” may be as difficult to comprehend as a lack of
respect for one’s personal space; but there is a host of other areas of life,
too. The most authoritative source on this remains Robert Hingley’s excellent
book, The Russian Mind. In this
example, Hingley points out what is effectively an extension of the idea of no
privacy: no private property.
Russian generosity of spirit extends, naturally enough, into the
financial sphere. The Russian is liable to lend or give away his last rouble,
and to borrow someone else’s – both with equal unconcern. To this must be added
a sense of property so alien to the non-Russian mentality that the language does
not possess a proper verb for “to lend” or “to borrow”…
(Hingley, pp.43-44; 1978)
Furthermore,
Russian has no word for “kick”… Nor can something be described as
“shocking” except by use of the obviously borrowed verb shokirovat… Still less does the Russian – emancipated, devil-may-care,
un-bourgeois, with soul unbuttoned – have a word for “respectability”… Nor…does
Russian possess native words for “job”, “business” or “weekend”.
(Hingley, pp.60-61; 1978)
And Simon
Ings takes this one stage further:
There is a word for debt in Russian (dolg), but no
word for favour. The nearest equivalent, odolzhenie, still expects a return.
(Ings, p.183; 2016)
Arkady
Shevchenko, who was the most senior Soviet diplomat to defect to the West, when
he went over to the USA from the Soviet delegation to the United Nations in
1978, makes the point that there is no neutral word in Russian for “defector”.
The idea of a Soviet citizen – especially one high up in government service –
going over to the other side could be described only as “treachery”.
(Shevchenko was tried in absentia and sentenced to death.)
I knew I was already a “defector”. That word, so familiar in the West,
does not exist in Russian. This is, as the Soviets say, not accidental.
Contemporary Russian has only two words for people who leave the Soviet Union:
“traitor” and “emigrant”; and in the eyes of the Soviet authorities the two are
synonymous. Both are used to describe persons who have betrayed their
motherland, the Soviet people, everything dear and loved, irrespective of their
reasons for wanting to leave the country.
(Shevchenko, p.13; 1985)
It is
difficult to imagine that an American, Englishman or any other West European
who chose to live abroad would be treated in this way. But such emotive meaning
is not unusual in Russian. When a law was introduced in 2013 limiting the
possibilities of Russian non-governmental organisations and charities to
receive help from foreign organisations, the term used such organisations was
“agents” – for Russians a term synonymous with “spies”.
Ю
It is not
surprising that, as G Dobson mentions, Peter the Great used a French word for
his gatherings:
[Peter the Great] organized social gatherings, which he called
“assemblies” in French, because he said there was no suitable word for them in
Russian.
(Dobson in Dobson, Grove, Stewart, pp.76-77; 1913)
As mentioned
previously, Russian was considered the language of the peasantry and at various
times German or French was the language of the Court. This led to a curious
incident during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. A group of Russian
officers on a reconnaissance mission were apprehended by Russian peasants and
almost lynched, because the peasants thought they were French. Their situation
was made worse by the fact that they could hardly speak Russian. They finally
persuaded the peasants that they were Russian, so the story ends.
Lesley
Chamberlain points out that this use of foreign words has applied also since Peter
the Great’s time in the area of food.
Thanks to close ties with Northern Europe, wrought by Tsar Peter the
Great, they had their first introduction to meat cutlets (kotlety), sausages (sosiski), omelettes
(omlety), mousse (muss) and compote (kompot). The language of food was quickly
Europeanised. The potato came from Germany in the 1770’s and took a German
name. Tomatoes arrived from Italy about the same time and kept their Italian
name …
More foreign words such as buterbrod (from the German for open sandwich), were borrowed.
(Chamberlain, pp.12-13; 1983)
New
foodstuffs and recipes were being tried in Russia, and the names they brought
with them were simply transliterated into Cyrillic. In recent years the
tendency has continued, with examples such as пицца (pizza) and суши (sushi).
Ф
As well as
influence from the West, the Russian language has borrowed terms from the East.
The Tatars ruled most of what is modern Russia for 250 years, following the
campaigns of Genghis Khan and his successors. Hingley gives examples of Tatar
influence on the Russian language:
…certain significant words – kabala, “Bondage”;
nagayka, “whip”; kandaly, “fetters” – came into Russian from Tatar
together with terms reflecting administrative practices: those describing the
postal and customs services; the word for money.
(Hingley, p.163; 1978)
As Hingley
mentions, the Russian word for “money” – деньги (den’gi) – also comes from Tatar. In
passing, it is interesting to note that in post-Soviet Kazakhstan the name of
the currency comes from the same root: the tenge. The original name for the
city now called Volgograd (and Stalingrad from 1925-1961), Tsaritsyn, is also a
Tatar word, and has no relation to the word “tsar”. It is derived from the
Tatar for “yellow water or river”. Many place names in areas of southern Russia
or Central Asia derive from Tatar.
Ч
Just as propiska is a word for which it is
impossible to convey the meaning with one English equivalent, so is pokazuka, as Kaiser explains.
Soviet ceremonies are one manifestation of a national urge to make things
look different than they really are…
In modern times they have even
coined a new word for the phenomenon, an onomatopoeic gem, pokazuka … Just as the Russians have no word for privacy, we have none to cover
pokazuka. It comes from the Russian verb
which means to show or show off. The slang noun means, roughly, something one
does for the sake of doing it, for show, so one can say it’s been done … Pokazuka
is a central element of Soviet life, part
of the social landscape. Perhaps it is unnecessary to add that it also defies
rational explanation, it is so perfectly Russian.
(Kaiser, pp.159-160; 1976)
The concept
of pokazuka is deeply established in
the Russian consciousness. One of the best known examples of pokazuka from Russian history (even if
the term wasn’t in use then) comes from 1787: the Potemkin village. Catherine
the Great’s favourite and lover, Grigory Potemkin, is said to have erected a
“village” which was little more than simply fronts of buildings with happy,
loyal peasants standing before them in order to pretend to Her Majesty that life
was prosperous along the banks of the River Dnieper as she rode past on her way
to Crimea. Apparently, the Empress accepted it, perhaps because it was what she
wanted to see anyway.
Э
Hingley’s
discussion of “Why?” speaks volumes for the idea mentioned above in National Character about Russians
feeling they have the right, perhaps even the duty, to give advice, whether it
is asked for or not.
Zachem, pochemu, otchevo, dlya chego,
chego, na koy chort: the language seems
to possess, and to need, an infinite number of words for “why”. Why, why, why?
Why do you not grow a beard, why do you not shave off your beard? Why do you
never say what you mean? Why did you learn Russian, why do you not learn
Russian? Why don’t you like me? Why do you like me? Do you love your wife, hate
your children? What are your impressions of Soviet man?
(Hingley, p.69; 1978)
The word for “dissident” in Russian means, literally, “one who thinks
differently”, a good indication of the conventional mentality.
(Kaiser, p.372; 1976)
Kaiser gives
a literal translation for “dissident”. He is referring to the Russian word for
the concept, инакомыслящий, (inakomyslyashchy), which does literally mean one who thinks
differently. But the word диссидент (the simple transliteration of
“dissident”) is widely found in Soviet-era dictionaries, classifying it as a
foreign word, originally from Latin. In 1989 I saw an interesting illustration
of the humour which is often just below the surface in Russian life. This was
the year when Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of openness began to bear tangible
results. One of these was the open-air craft market which sprang up under the
trees in Izmailovsky Park in north-east Moscow (and which would later be
subsumed into a more organised market nearby, largely aimed at tourists). One
man was selling button badges, including one designed as a mock advertisement
for toothpaste: dissi-DENT.
Ы
Another
hurdle for the student of Russian to overcome is the use of the diminutive. As
Hingley shows, this will often signify something small, such as a small house –
but not necessarily.
Nouns tend to possess diminutive and other similar forms, exploiting a
wide range of suffixes to express variations of mood: for example, not only domik, “a dear little house”, but also domishche, “a bloody great house”. The term diminutive is misleading if taken to refer solely to size; rather does its use
reflect the speaker’s mood. To call someone a durak, “fool”, is offensive; but to call him a durachok, “a bit of an ass”, can be affectionate.
(Hingley, p.57; 1978)
Diminutives
are also frequently used with people’s names to illustrate affection, and can
move very far away from the original name. Alexander or Alexandra, for example,
become Sasha; which in turn can then be heard as “Sashka”, “Sashenka”, “Sashok”
and even “Sashulya”. Perhaps in some ways these diminutives make up for the
distinct lack of imagination in personal names in Russia, especially for women,
as George Feifer indicates.
Compared to its richness of idiom, Russian is disproportionately hard up
for contemporary common names: of ten teen-aged girls, seven are Galya,
Natasha, Tanya or Svetlana.
(Feifer, p.140; 1976)
And Feifer doesn't even mention Olga, possibly the most common (and one of the oldest) Russian female names of all. You won't be in Russia long before you encounter an Irina either, or a Maria, or an Oksana...
Ц
Foreigners
in Russia are frequently made to feel that they are just that: foreign. This
manifests itself in various ways, from the cringingly obsequious to the downright
hostile. An example of the former would be the way in which foreigners would be
treated in Soviet times when flying within the country. I recall when taking an internal flight seeing hordes
of local people at Kiev’s Zhulyani airport crowded into a small departure area
with one black and white television high up in a corner, before I was whisked
upstairs to the lounge for foreigners – not first class, not VIPs, just
foreigners – where I had a room all to myself which was twice the size of what
was provided for the masses, complete with colour TV. Foreigners were also
spared the scrum which the locals experienced to get on the ‘plane. We were
boarded either first or last, having been taken across the tarmac in a separate
bus from the rest.
Hostility is
frequently shown to black foreigners, whom many Russians consider as
second-class citizens; and in recent times any foreigner who speaks out against
Russian military actions in Ukraine can expect either resentment, anger or a
patronising attitude of, “you don’t understand”.
Г
It is no
coincidence that over many years so many writers have picked up on the concept that
what is “ours” – nash – is deeply ingrained for many Russians. I have chosen
here three examples:
Words like nash
(our) and chuzhoi (other, foreign, alien) crop up constantly
in both propaganda and conversation. They have immense force in delineating
friend and foe and in fixing attitudes, for Russians think in terms of only two
sides – for and against. They have an ingrained scepticism towards neutrality.
“He is nash (our) man” – or just the
opposite, “He is chuzhoi (on the
other side)” – is enough to settle an issue.
(Smith, The Russians, pp.378-379; 1977)
One can judge something of a nation’s character from the way its soldiers
form up and march and one thing was very evident here: the marching men were
dedicated to expressing the “togetherness” to which the Russians are so
profoundly attached. So successful were they that one seemed to see not fifty
thousand men marching into the square but one. The crowd responded to the
appearance of the soldiers and the emotion between it and them was silent only
because it ran deep. Now for the first time I heard a word used which has great
meaning and power in Russia. Someone near me speaking of the soldiers, breathed
with deep satisfaction the word “nash” (that is
“ours”).
(van der Post, p.168; 1965)
“A private life was something alien. This is reflected in our language: nash narod [our people] and nash chelovek [one
of us]. The word for “personality” appeared only when Stalin’s cult of the
personality came under attack. Anyone who tried to live an individual life was
considered a potential enemy. You had to march in step and try not to be
different.” [Anna Logvinskaya, Psychologist]
(Millinship, p.55; 1993)
This idea of
“for” or “against” played a crucial role in the Bolshevik Revolution: if you
were not “for” the Revolution, you must be, ipso
facto, “against” it. And that meant that you should be eliminated, as
Bolshevism could not tolerate any opposition.
Й
One of the
greatest compliments ever paid to me by a Russian came in 2002 from the then Russian
Ambassador to the UK, Grigory Karasin. At the end of a reception in the Russian
Embassy, all of the foreigners – except for me – had left. I was still deep in
conversation with one of the Russian diplomats. The Ambassador called for quiet
to say a few words to his countrymen. Suddenly, one of them pointed out that I
was there. “Ах, он наш!” (“Oh, he’s
one of ours!”) said the Ambassador with a smile and a wave of the hand.
On another
occasion at the Embassy, when celebrating the Russian National Day on 12 June,
I was literally locked in. When I tried to say goodbye to my diplomat host as
the last foreign guest left at half past two in the afternoon, he said, “Ты куда? Ты наш!” (“Where are you off
to? You’re one of us!”) I eventually left the Embassy two hours later.
One area
where the Russian language is certainly not poor is swearwords and obscenities.
I have two dictionaries devoted to this subject alone. And these quotations,
written over a hundred years apart, illustrate the point:
He used many other expressions which are quite unprintable, though common
on the lips of all classes in Russia.
(Joubert, p.69; 1904)
The Russian language has a rich vein of obscenities that are strictly
excluded from public discourse to the present day.
(Harrison, p.114; 2016)
A whole book
could easily be devoted to the language of Soviet propaganda. Here's just one quotation from Pravda at the time when glasnost was just beginning to
be felt.
It has come to light that [in Ordzhonikidze] almost
25,000 people who are of an age when they are capable of working are not
engaged in social production.
(Pravda,
8 June 1987, Взгляд с трёх сторон [A View From Three Sides], p.4)
This is a
wonderful example of manipulation of language. Officially, there was no
unemployment in the Soviet Union; and in 1987 Pravda could still not bring
itself to use the term “unemployment”. So there were just “people…not engaged
in social production”. Who said “spin” was a Western idea?
Ъ
Lastly,
something for the foreigner who simply wants to be able to say “Hello” and
“Goodbye” in Russian.
The Marine guard sergeant at the embassy had a simplified course for
members of his detachment who might be called on to welcome Russians into the
building or usher them out.
“Gentlemen,” the Gunny said,
“repeat after me: ‘Does your ass fit ya?!’”
The soldiers repeated it.
“Excellent. Now if you practice
saying it quickly a couple dozen times, you will arrive at the Russian word for
‘hello’, which is ‘zdrast-vui-tye’.
Next, when a Soviet citizen is departing
our premises, you may say to them, ‘Just leave us.’ This phrase, once you have
also practised saying it quickly with no pauses between the words, will sound
like ‘shas-lee-va’, which is a very
friendly way to say ‘goodbye’.”
(Lifflander, p.40; 2015)
“Does your ass fit ya?” was in common usage also in BRIXMIS,
the British Military Mission to East Germany, where it was taught to those who
spoke German but not Russian. I’ve told many people to say it. It works – as
long as you get it right. Two people I tried to teach it to later came out with
“Up yer ass!” and “Get-your-knickers-off!” Most people appreciate a foreigner trying
to speak a little of their language. But insults, intentional or otherwise, are
best avoided!
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