Briefly. Dostoyevsky on one page.

I have only just realised that I may have confused the readers with the title of this earlier post, Dostoyevsky on one page. I didn't mean one paper page, which takes 200-500 words, but one internet page, which takes the whole of Crime and Punishment, all 211,591 words of the novel.

Dostoyevsky, 1872.

To compensate, I'd like to recommend an invaluable Russian resource, Брифли. Краткое содержание книг at Briefly.ru. It is in Russian only but these days you can always use machine translation. Briefly offers condensed summaries of world's classic novels. Crime and Punishment, for example, is summarised in 1500 words. Briefly also gives estimated times you'd need to read the summary and the whole book. In the case of Crime and Punishment, it is 5-10 minutes for the summary and 8-9 hours to read the novel in full.

When I first found Briefly I thought it was a collection of students' cribs, but it is based on a printed book, All the Masterpieces of World Literature in Short Summaries, compiled and edited by V.I. Novikov ("Все шедевры мировой литературы в кратком изложении. Сюжеты и характеры", ред. и сост. В.И.Новиков, М., "Олимп"-АСТ, 1996.)

If you are a student too busy to read great novels in full or want to impress a date with your knowledge of Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, or if you are an honest reader and just want to refresh in your memory the plot of a book you've read twenty or thirty years ago, Briefly is for you.

Punch in. (New Russian)

I was swapping telephone numbers and other contact details with an editor in Moscow the other day. He used a verb I've never heard used in this context:

- Вбей себе мои номера на всякий случай.

(Punch in my numbers, just in case.)

Вбей is imperative of вбить (imperfective: вбивать.) It means to knock in, to drive in, to drive (a wedge) in, and, figuratively, to get into one's head, to knock into one's head.

Here, however, the reference is definitely to punching on the buttons of a mobile (or any button-operated) phone with the aim of putting the digits in its memory.

Update: This may change very soon, as a reader has just pointed out to me. More and more phones become tactile, so nobody 'punches in' anything anymore but taps!

©A.Anichkin/Tetradki. Pushkin with a RUS bumper sticker is my design, ask if you want to republish.

A Simple Matter.

 (Translating Crime and Punishment)

Dostoyevsky by Perov, 1872.

A simple matter of checking one phrase in the Pevear/Volokhonskaya’s translation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment left me doubting whether they are as good as publishers and reviewers tell us. 

Zdenka Pregelj's Russia Past and Present published an excerpt from the glowing review of Pevear/Volokhonskaya’s version in Humanities magazine (full text here):

"

"In Crime and Punishment, there is a sentence that goes like this: ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about it.’” Richard Pevear lets the words hang in the air, along with a note of faint bafflement. From his Paris apartment, one half of the world’s only celebrity translation team is recollecting some of the knotty, cross-lingual jumbles that he has spent his working life trying to untangle.

“I came running to Larissa”—Larissa Volokhonsky, Pevear’s wife of thirty years and collaborator on twenty-one works of Russian-to-English translation—“and said, ‘Can that be? Is that what he said?’ And she checked and said yes. ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about  it.’” Reassured, if still skeptical, he jotted it down and moved on to Dostoyevsky’s next syntax-warping creation.

"

After this dramatic opening, the whole review dances around this ‘simple’ phrase. 

Why was Pevear baffled? Because of the apparent repetitiveness of the phrase? I thought there was something suspicious about it. It can’t be that Dostoyevsky is as repetitive as this. His style is different from the beautifully succinct Turgenev, or the elaborately detailed, thoroughly explorative Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky writes in a semi-colloquial, almost chatty way, as though he is sitting at a tea table and telling a story to a group of friends. At times, it is sloppy, or seems so.

I searched the Russian text of Crime and Punishment to find the phrase that baffled Pevear. (See 'Dostoyevsky on one page') This is how it goes (from Part I, beginning of Chapter VI):

Дело было самое обыкновенное и не заключало в себе ничего такого особенного.

It's not repetitive at all, it's a perfectly normal phrase. I'd translate it something like this:

[It turned out that] It was quite simple and there was nothing unusual about it. 

My wife, a native English speaker, thinks that 'and' is better replaced with a semi-colon. She suggested: 

In fact it was perfectly simple; there was nothing out of the ordinary about it.

You can argue about the first part of the sentence, whether 'the matter' is needed there. It appears in phrases like 

“В чём дело?” - ‘What’s the matter?’

“Это не ваше дело!” - ‘It’s none of your business’

“Я к вам по делу” - ‘I have business to discuss’.

“Дело [оказалось] серьезное”. - ‘It’s a serious matter.’

But the second part is definitely wrong. That's why it sounds repetitive in English.

"Ничего особенного" can mean 'nothing complicated.' For example, when you ask ‘Is it a difficult problem?’, you can get an answer ‘Nothing complicated.’ But here, in Dostoyevsky’s context it's definitely 'nothing extraordinary, nothing unusual, nothing suspicious'. 

When you read the Humanities article between the lines, you can see that every time Pevear, who has 'only a basic Russian' as the author mentions, has doubts, Volokhonskaya bullies him into accepting her version.

Publishers have built such a juggernaut of PV's translations, probably because of 'live' copyright, it's unstoppable now.
You can get a Redmolotov t-shirt with the opening line of Crime and Punishment in Garnett's translation: 'On an exceptionally hot evening early in July...' Click on the image.

The full paragraph from Crime and Punishment in Russian (from Lib.ru/Классика):

"

Впоследствии Раскольникову случилось как-то узнать, зачем именно мещанин и баба приглашали к себе Лизавету. Дело было самое обыкновенное и не заключало в себе ничего такого особенного. Приезжее и забедневшее семейство продавало вещи, платье и проч., всё женское. Так как на рынке продавать невыгодно, то и искали торговку, а Лизавета этим занималась: брала комиссии, ходила по делам и имела большую практику, потому что была очень честна и всегда говорила крайнюю цену: какую цену скажет, так тому и быть. Говорила же вообще мало, и как уже сказано, была такая смиренная и пугливая...

"

The same paragraph, in Garnett’s translation (from Gutenberg): 

"

Later on Raskolnikov happened to find out why the huckster and his wife had invited Lizaveta. It was a very ordinary matter and there was nothing exceptional about it. A family who had come to the town and been reduced to poverty were selling their household goods and clothes, all women's things. As the things would have fetched little in the market, they were looking for a dealer. This was Lizaveta's business. She undertook such jobs and was frequently employed, as she was very honest and always fixed a fair price and stuck to it. She spoke as a rule little and, as we have said already, she was very submissive and timid.

"

Update: It turns out that the phrase quoted in Humanities article didn't even make into P/V published translation. The actual sentence in the book runs like this: 'It was a most ordinary matter, and there was nothing very special about it.' Thanks to Anatoly Vorobey who found it on Google Books here. Which makes the Simple Matter even more baffling. See Languagehat's post and discussion of the phrase.

Update two: In David Magarschak's translation, which I have, the sentence reads: 

It was a most ordinary sort of business, and there was nothing at all remarkable about it.

Disclosure: Tetradki is an affiliate of Redmolotov.com. Every time you buy a Redmolotov t-shirt, Tetradki gets a small commission.

Dostoyevsky on One Page.

Dickens and Dostoyevsky.

I was looking for a particular phrase in Crime and Punishment today. (Read A Simple Matter) The full text of Dostoyevsky's novel is on many Russian sites but they usually break it into chapters or parts which makes it impossible to search the full body of text in one place, you have to go from page to page repeating the search.

After having spent some time going from site to site I found one where the whole novel is on one page, here, on Lib.ru/Классика website.

In most word processors, Pages, Word, Open Office, you can do a quick search in text by typing Command+F on a Mac or Control+F on a Windows machine, and then type a key word or phrase in the search window. Not everybody knows that the same trick works in internet browsers. Type the same command and a small search window opens within the browser. In Safari and Chrome it opens at the top, in Firefox it's at the bottom. Type in your key word and the window will show how many times it appears in the text, if any. Click on the arrows in the search window to go straight to the place in the text, no matter how long, where the word is used.

The collage with this post refers to the hoax started by 'Sophie Harvey' in the Dickensian. She claimed to have found a letter by Dostoyevsky describing his meeting with Dickens in London. A number of scholars and critics fell for it. Read Languagehat's post with a link to Eric Naiman's exhaustive investigation into the identity of hoaxer.

In the collage I put Dickens and Dostoyevsky over the photo of a meeting between Lenin and Stalin in 1922, famous for being radically 'photoshopped.' If reposting put in a link to this post.

OMG (New Russian).

OMG - oh my god - has entered and firmly established itself in new Russian over the past few years.

Some, mostly young women, use it with relish, others complain about its omnipresence and ask whatever happened to the original Russian gospodi bozhe moy (господи, боже мой) - my good Lord.

In Cyrillics, it's transcribed as ОМГ, or omg. 

What makes OMG a case of special interest, is its pronunciation. An abbreviation mostly used in written speech, it is subject to all sorts of transformations in oral usage. I haven't actually heard it spoken, but have asked several times on social networks how Russians pronounce it.

Replies varied from 'omega' to 'oink'. Don't ask me how OMG becomes oink, it's just what they told me. 

See the recent entry on OMG in 'Dictionaries of the 21st Century' website here.

Russian Orthoepy. Resources.

Russian stresses can be maddening. There is hardly any pattern and they can shift depending on the grammatical form, the presence of a preposition which creates a liaison with the noun, or simply because of social and educational background of the speaker. Languagehat once mentioned the word коротко (short) that can have stresses on each of the o-s.

'Correct' stressing is highly valued among educated Russians, it's a sign of being 'one of us.'

Most ordinary dictionaries give stresses. And there is a number of print and online dictionaries and websites specifically dealing with standard and non-standard stresses and pronunciation.

Here is a short list.

Avanesov's Orthoepic Dictionary - navigable scan of the print version.

Rosenthal's Dictionary of the Complexities of the Russian Language - navigable scan of the print edition. This is one of the most widely used dictionaries.
(Словарь трудностей русского языка)

Reznichenko's Orthoepic Dictionary of the Russian Language - another navigable scan of the printed book.

Zarva's Russian Literary Stress - also a scan, emphasis on 'correct' stresses in words.
(Русское словесное ударение)

Gramota.ru website search engine gives a selection of entries for the word with stressed vowel in red. The above example with коротко, when searched, does not appear with the third variant (short adjective) where the stress is on the last o.

Yandex.ru Dictionary of Stresses. - Yandex.ru is a popular Russian search enginge, that also includes multiple language translation option (words only). Dictionary of Stresses is based on Zarva's printed dictionary.

Udarenie.info (Ударение.инфо) - a Russian website specifically dealing with stresses and pronunciation. An expanded list of printed dictionaries of stresses is here. The site has a Поиск слова (Search the word) window but it takes you to the Gramota.ru search page.

Among the printed dictionaries one of the most authoritative is the Ageenko/Zarva Dictionary of Stresses for the Employees of Radio and Television (Агеенко Ф. Л., Зарва М. В. Словарь ударений для работников радио и телевидения / Под ред. К. И. Былинского. М., 1960; 6-е изд. испр. и доп. Под ред. Д. Э. Розенталя. М., 1985.). The 1960 edition is still used and there was an updated edition in 1985. This dictionary may be the biggest influence in instilling stress standards since it is used by radio and tv editors, announcers and presenters. I couldn't find it online. If you see it somewhere please let me know. 

Scrambled Eggs, or Why the Russian Revolution Happened.

Fried eggs - яичница-глазунья.
Design by ©A.Anichkin.

I wrote about Maugham's Christmas Holiday here. Another of his Russian novels is Ashenden.

In a series of novellas Maugham recalls, through his alter-ego Ashenden, how while in the service of the British foreign intelligence he was tasked with preventing the bolshevik takeover in 1917.

Ashenden sets everything in motion to stop the revolution but in the end fails, as we know from history.

It turns out that scrambled eggs were, at least partly, to blame. The passage below describes the falling out between Ashenden and Anastasia, the Russian woman, on whom he later had to rely in St.Petersburg.

There is an awkward translation point here. The Russian translator Victor Veber (see the passage on my Russian blog post here) uses the word омлет  — omelette — for scrambled eggs.

It may be a mistake but could also be a deliberate choice to avoid readers' confusion. Fried eggs in Russian is яичница, or to be more precise, яичница-глазунья — fried eggs with eyes, as in my photo above. Scrambled eggs is also called яичница but with a different extension, яичница-болтушка — whipped, stirred or scrambled fried eggs. To build the growing antagonism between Ashenden and Anastasia on the differences between глазунья and болтушка could distract the reader from the humour of the original, the translator may have thought.

On the other hand he may have missed an opportunity to introduce a play on words: болтушка has another meaning — chatter-box, which is exactly what is Anastasia. See for yourself and enjoy the passage. It's tickling when you think what the world could have been in the past Century had it not been for Maugham-Ashenden's dislike for scrambled eggs.

I also recommend a short review of Ashenden on Tolstoy is My Cat blog.

(English text quoted from here)

Ashenden asked Anastasia Alexandrovna what she would have for breakfast.

'Scrambled eggs,' she said.

She ate heartily. Ashenden had already noticed that she had a healthy appetite. He supposed it was a Russian trait; you could not picture Anna Karenina making her midday meal off a bath-bun and a cup of coffee, could you?

After breakfast they went to the Louvre and in the afternoon they went to the Luxembourg. They dined early in order to go to the Comedie Francaise; then they went to a Russian cabaret where they danced. When next morning at eight-thirty they took their places in the dining-room and Ashenden asked Anastasia Alexandrovna what she fancied, her reply was:

'Scrambled eggs.'

'But we had scrambled eggs yesterday,' he expostulated.

'Let's have them again today,' she smiled.

'All right.'

They spent the day in the same manner except that they went to the Carnavalet instead of the Louvre and the Musee Guimet instead of the Luxembourg. But when the morning after in answer to Ashenden's inquiry Anastasia Alexandrovna again asked for scrambled eggs, his heart sank.

'But we had scrambled eggs yesterday and the day before,' he said.

'Don't you think that's a very good reason to have them again today?'

'No, I don't.'

'Is it possible that your sense of humour is a little deficient this morning?' she asked. 'I eat scrambled eggs every day. It's the only way I like them.'

'Oh, very well. In that case of course we'll have scrambled eggs.'

But the following morning he could not face them.

'Will you have scrambled eggs as usual?' he asked her.

'Of course,' she smiled affectionately, showing him two rows of large square teeth.

'All right, I'll order them for you; I shall have mine fried.’

The smile vanished from her lips.

'Oh?' She paused a moment. 'Don't you think that's rather inconsiderate? Do you think it's fair to give the cook unnecessary work? You English, you're all the same, you look upon servants as machines. Does it occur to you that they have hearts like yours, the same feelings and the same emotions? How can you be surprised that the proletariat are seething with discontent when the bourgeoisie like you are so monstrously selfish?'

'Do you really think that there'll be a revolution in England if I have my eggs in Paris fried rather than scrambled?'

She tossed her pretty head in indignation.

'You don't understand. It's the principle of the thing. You think it's a jest, of course I know you're being funny, I can laugh at a joke as well as anyone, Chekhov was well-known in Russia as a humorist; but don't you see what is involved? Your whole attitude is wrong. It's a lack of feeling. You wouldn't talk like that if you had been through the events of 1905 in Petersburg. When I think of the crowds in front of the Winter Palace kneeling in the snow while the Cossacks charged them, women and children! No, no, no.'

Her eyes filled with tears and her face was all twisted with pain. She took Ashenden's hand.

'I know you have a good heart. It was just thoughtless on your part and we won't say anything more about it. You have imagination. You're very sensitive. I know. You'll have your eggs done in the same way as mine, won't you?'

'Of course," said Ashenden.

He ate scrambled eggs for breakfast every morning after that. The waiter said:' Monsieur aime les oeufs brouillés.' At the end of the week they returned to London. He held Anastasia Alexandrovna in his arms, her head resting on his shoulder, from Paris to Calais and again from Dover to London. He reflected that the journey from New York to San Francisco took five days. When they arrived at Victoria and stood on the platform waiting for a cab she looked at him with her round, shining, and slightly protuberant eyes.

'We've had a wonderful time, haven't we?' she said.

‘Wonderful.’

'I've quite made up my mind. The experiment has justified itself. I'm willing to marry you whenever you like.'

But Ashenden saw himself eating scrambled eggs every morning for the rest of his life. When he had put her in a cab, he called another for himself, went to the Cunard office, and took a berth on the first ship that was going to America. No immigrant, eager for freedom and a new life, ever looked upon the statue of Liberty with more heartfelt thankfulness than did Ashenden, when on that bright and sunny morning his ship steamed into the harbour of New York.