BOOKMARKS www.sovlit.com Encyclopedia of Soviet writers
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Reflections
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jrusk.tripod.com/russian/russian.html Russian Lit-
DISTRIBUTED WITH THE DAILY TELEGRAPH TUESDAY_SEPTEMBER 29_2009 erature in English translation
Found in translation
DISCOVERING ZOSHCHENKO
Paradoxal semantics
of Russian suffixation
Some say there are only three Russian writers that viet absurd is the natural order of things. volunteered for the Red Army and spent six
the Western reader is familiar with: Tolstoy, Dosto- The totalitarian world of Zoshchenko could not months fi ghting against the White Guard forces.
evsky and Chekhov. Meanwhile, the gold reserves be further from Orwell’s world, where love rises I have never been satisfi ed with my satirical po-
IN A RECENT TRANSLATION OF WAR AND PEACE,
of Russian literature include dozens of names. up against the power of slogans and critical sition in literature. I have always tried to portray
PLATON KARATAEV, TOLSTOY’S KINDLY PEASANT, AD-
We are launching a series dedicated to famous thinking encroaches on total control. Zoshchen- the positive sides of life. This wasn’t easy to do,
DRESSES HIS INTERLOCUTOR AS “LITTLE FALCON”. IT
Russian authors who remain largely unknown in ko’s world is devoid of slogans, love and critical however; it was as hard for me as it is for a comic
JUST DOESN’T SOUND RIGHT, REMINDING OF SOMEONE
the West. One such author from the 20th century is thinking. His heroes come together and part actor to play heroic roles…
FROM FENIMORE COOPER’S THE LAST OF THE MOHI-
Mikhail Zoshchenko. owing to primitive everyday circumstances, Please believe me when I say that I am not look-
CANS. REMEMBER MONTIGOMO HAWK’S CLAW?
while the slogans in their speech come through ing for any improvement in my fate. And if I am
ALEXANDER MELIKHOV only as parody. In this world there is no room for writing to you, then it is solely for the purpose of
PAVEL PALAZCHENKO
RUSSIA NOW ideology, for it is dominated by a single total somewhat easing my pain. I was never a literary
RUSSIAN TRANSLATION COMPANY
power – the power of a crust of bread and a roof scoundrel or a base man, or a man who worked
The relationship between English and Russian over one’s head. If history plays any part – the for the good of landowners and bankers. That is
Actually,“lit tle falcon” is a literal translation of the literature – before the emergence of Tolstoy, Dos- Pushkin Jubilee, say – it affects the inhabitants an error. I assure you.
Russian word sokolik, an intimacy or endearment toevsky, and Chekhov – was strictly one way of this world in only one way: they are evicted But Stalin never thought Zoshchenko was work-
that is still used by older people. The Russian lan- (west to east). Russia’s greatest poets, Pushkin from their miraculously obtained cubbyhole, ing for the good of landowners and bankers. It
guage is full of such words: First, the Russian na- and Lermontov, both in their youth imitated which, it turns out, the poet himself once “graced was enough that the writer’s attitude did not co-
tional character is expressive and emotional, and Byron, but when the author of Fathers and Sons, with his insufferable genius”. incide not only with the Communist one, but with
one aspect of it is that it has so many diminutive ad- Ivan Turgenev, told William Thackeray that the Even so Zoshchenko was almost a favourite of any other spirit: “Life in my negligible view is
jectives and nouns (hence attempts to render them Russians had a writer just as good (Gogol), the the Soviet elite who viewed his satire in ideolog- constructed more simply, it is offensive and not
in English by the word “little”); second, the lan- Englishman laughed. Later, Turgenev would ical terms – as a denunciation of “Philistinism” for cultivated people.” And where Byron scorns
guage itself offers a variety of ways to be expressive write that “the author of Vanity Fair is himself in- and the “birthmarks of the old world”. By the end people from the height of certain ideals, in Zosh-
and emotional. One of them is suffixes. Russian is fected with the vice he so mocks”. of the war, however, Stalin saw in Zoshchenko’s chenko’s world the idealists are the fi rst to be bro-
sometimes called the language of suffixes. I fear that the name of one of the most famous fi ction not only the rank-and-fi le “positive he- ken, turning into boors at best, and at worst out-
Russian suffixes express an extremely wide range successors to the Gogolian tradition in Soviet lit- roes”, but even that most human of human beings, right troglodytes. Zoshchenko insults not so
of emotions and attitudes. They can produce erature, Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894-1958), is not Lenin, assumed the features of an amusing mar- much the power of tyrants as the overall power
words that are caressing, diminutive, familiar, too well know to the English. ionette. Stalin signalled a crackdown. of matter over spirit, an “anatomical depen-
vulgar or contemptuous. He wrote most of his best stories in the 1920s In 1946, Zoshchenko was labelled a vulgar and dence”.
Polish linguist Anna Wierzbicka studied the way when the ideals of the revolution were replaced loathsome proponent of rotten non-progressive, After Stalin’s death in 1953 Zoshchenko’s situa-
Russian suffixes work with Russian personal by petit bourgeois values. Zoshchenko’s stories trivial and apolitical ideas. Zoshchenko (with tion very slightly improved. But then in May 1954
names. She says the meanings expressed by names resemble vignettes or anecdotes: short, in simple poet Anna Akhmatova) was expelled by special a group of English students asked to meet him
with suffixes are so rich and complex they can- language, often paradoxical and always very decree from literature and deprived of his “work- and Akhmatova. They naively asked if they
not be represented by simple labels such as “affec- funny. er’s” ration card. Publishers, journals and the- agreed with the Central Committee’s inquisition-
tionate” or “scornful”. Some are ambivalent. The He peopled his “Soviet universe” with amusing atres began cancelling their contracts and de- al resolution against them. Akhmatova proudly
suffix ka (as in Mashka) may express familiarity puppets, as in Gogol. These puppets lack an in- manding that advances be returned. said “yes” (her son was then a prisoner in the
or “anti-respect” but it becomes diminutive and ternal world thus allowing Zoshchenko to make The writer was making ends meet with transla- Gulag), while Zoshchenko said that he disagreed
even caressing in Mashenka. fun of them without feeling compassion. tions; he sold all his things and even tried to earn with certain things.
Ik (the suffix used in Karataev’s sokolik) is dimin- Although if we had seen in them beings like our- money working for a shoemaker. In an effort to A new wave of persecution threw him into a deep
utive when used with masculine names. People selves, we would have been horrifi ed: all of their absolve himself, Zoshchenko wrote a letter to St- depression which, in essence, drove him into his
use it when they talk to small boys, who begin to energies go into struggling for at least some sem- alin that is painful reading: grave.
-
resent it in their early teenage years. blance of a normal (petit bourgeois) existence. Dear Iosif Vissarionovich!
In English, suffixes are rarer, and they are less ex- But they always lose and never despair: the So- I have never been an anti-Soviet person. In 1918 I Alexander Melikhov, writer and columnist
pressive. Most commonly, standard short forms
such as Tom or Bill are used with regard to people
one knows well. Sometimes, such short forms are
preferred by the person and are used officially as
From the newspapers
in Jimmy Carter rather than James Earl Carter, as
Leonid Brezhnev’s letter of congratulations was
addressed to the then president-elect.
The sticky multipolarity The internet rescues Russia
Translators of fi ction face enormous problems
rendering the expressive range conveyed by Rus-
Leonid Radzikhovsky Igor Petrushov
sian suffixes. I’ve noticed recently that simple
shortening has become widespread, at least in
male names. Increasingly, people prefer to be In 1990-1991, it was clear that Russia’s super- President Dmitry Medvedev is giving consider-
called Vlad or Stas. We’ll see how that plays out. power days were over. But the idea that the vic- ation to a letter written by a futuristic writer,
tor of the Cold War was now the US was unbear- Maxim Kalashnikov, which was addressed to the
able for Russia. A new idea served as a consola- Kremlin and published on the internet. In it, the
tion: instead of a unipolar world order replacing writer proposes to create an innovative, futuris-
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