In a letter of August 3rd, 1799, A. F. Merzliakov wrote to Andrei Turgenev that he had been to “the lake where Karamzin drowned poor Liza” and overheard two men—a literate worker [masterovoi] previously employed putting rizy on icons, and a peasant—talking about Nikolai Karamzin’s “Poor Liza” (Бедная Лиза, 1792) as if it were a true story (616–17): Worker: About 18 years ago beautiful Liza drowned here. That’s why [women who bathe in this lake] all drown. Peasant: And who was she? Worker: Well, you see, she was a girl from over by that village yonder; her mother traded in fifths [torgovala pi ..read more

A quick follow-up to the recent post about Viktor Borisov-Musatov (1870–1905). In a comment that was caught by an overzealous spam filter, jkdenne suggested some excellent resources on Borisov-Musatov and related topics: A 2023 lecture series by Nadezhda Plungian on “The Evolution of Soviet Modernism,” which looks really interesting and promises to challenge the post-Stalin conventional wisdom about the contradictions between “the avant-garde and socialist realism, the official and the unofficial, between abstract and representational art.” A 3-volume “collective monograph” called Piercing Ti ..read more

The word plevel can be a specific plant from the Eastern Hemisphere, lolium or ryegrass, but in literature you’re more likely to see the plural plevely as a New Testament allusion. It’s not the chaff that Jesus will burn with unquenchable fire (Matthew 3:12, Luke 3:17), which is soloma or miakina in different Russian translations. Nor is it in the parable of the sower (Mark 4:1–9, Matthew 13:1–9, Luke 8:4–15) or the parable of the mustard seed (Mark 4:30–32, Matthew 13:31–32, Luke 13:18–19). It’s from the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24–30 and 36–43), where the equivalent of ..read more

Ten years ago I said that Pushkin’s Count Nulin (Граф Нулин, 1825) didn’t get translated often enough to need a translation comparison, but I was wrong. By then there were already at least three published English translations, all as Count Nulin rather than Count Zero, a title some people use that translates the joke in the name. (If you know of other translations, not counting this apparently machine-translated text, let me know!) I was curious how the translators handled five things. Number one: horns. This playful long poem about one potential and perhaps one real extramarital affair s ..read more

An obvious but still interesting question is how Russian art moved from the various Realisms of Ge, Kramskoi, Repin, and Surikov to the even more diverse Modernist approaches of Kuznetsov, Saryan, Malevich, Goncharova, Larionov, Filonov, Popova, El Lissitzky, and a million others. Part of the answer is that people and images move across national borders, so the second group was reacting to more than just the first group. Another argument you see is that the new generation of patrons from the ascendant (and disproportionately Old Believer) merchant class were used to icons and so had a good eye ..read more

I’m still working on revising last summer’s translation of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s “Behind the Wall” (За стеною, 1862), and I’m still hung up on what to do about formal and informal “you.” At any given moment, each of the two nameless main characters may be using a different pronoun than they were using five minutes ago or than their conversation partner is currently using with them. People I trust gave me contradictory advice—some wanted me to keep noting which pronoun is used where, at least in the most important places, but several people thought it was obvious that, in Languagehat’s wor ..read more

I came to love blogs in the 2000s, reading economists and political scientists who weren’t afraid to hit the same main points again and again, to link to their opponents as well as their allies, and to admit their ignorance about important things in their own field. The one place where I’ve been able to do what they did is in letting my own ignorance show, like when I wrote in 2013 that Nadezhda Durova “used male pseudonyms as a soldier, but AFAIK not as a writer.” I still haven’t read Durova, but now I’ve read an article about that author and can instead say that I haven’t read Aleksandr Alek ..read more

From stanza 31 of Afanasii Fet’s narrative poem The Student (Студент, 1884): Без опыта, без денег и без сил, У чьей груди я мог искать спасенья? Серебряный я кубок свой схватил, Что подарила мать мне в день рожденья, И пенковую трубку, что хранил В чехле, как редкость, полную значенья, Был и бинокль туда же приобщен И с репетиром золотой Нортон. With no experience, money, or strength, at whose breast could I seek salvation? I grabbed the silver cup that my mother had given me for my birthday and the meerschaum pipe that I kept in a case as if it were a rarity filled with significance; a pair o ..read more

Nekrasov’s poem “The Green Noise” (Зеленый шум, 1862–63) takes us inside the perspective of a peasant man who decides to kill his wife. She voluntarily tells him—he wishes she hadn’t—about something that happened to her while he was in St. Petersburg. It’s hard for the reader to tell if she was raped or had an affair, since we hear this through the “I” of a husband concerned about something other than consent. Listening to winter’s cruel voice, the man is obsessed with his own feelings and the fear he will lose the community’s respect if he does nothing. With the coming of spring (the Green No ..read more

With another new year, Putin (24-year reign, if you include the tandem of 2008–2012) is catching up to the nineteenth-century rulers Alexander I (also 24 years), Alexander II (26 years), and Nicholas I (30 years). And just as getting to know the nineteenth century means learning about not just watershed dates, but gradations within one reign—like the comparatively open period under conservative Nicholas I in the mid-1840s, long after the Decembrists but before the events of 1848—people are already starting to divide the Putin years into periods. One way to get a feel for what’s changed is from ..read more