"In days of doubt, in days of sad brooding on my country’s fate, thou alone art my rod and my staff — oh great, mighty, true and free Russian tongue!"
Ivan Turgenev, “The Russian Language”
Ask any Russian what they think about their native language, they will likely say it’s ‘great and mighty’ citing Ivan Turgenev (1818—1883), a famous author of “Fathers and Sons”. What they mean is that they are extremely proud to speak the language of Tolstoy and Chekhov but that their grammar lessons at school were anything but fun.
Russian is undeniably hard work, with its tricky pronunciation, its convoluted declension system and its unnecessary gender differentiation. Even more so for non-native Russian speakers who attempt to learn and practise the language.
The language complexities that modern learners of Russian are experiencing today have remained the same as those Lewis Carroll, Alexandre Dumas and Friedrich Engels living in the 19th century encountered. We all have Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), Russia’s greatest poet and playwright, to thank as he’s rightly considered to be the founding father of modern Russian language still in use today.
Red Square in Moscow (1801) by Fedor Alekseev
Lewis Carroll
More than 150 years ago Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), a world-famous writer of “Alice in Wonderland”, on his first overseas holiday took an ambitious long journey to Russia. Before his adventure he knew little about the country and certainly didn’t speak Russian. Quite quickly though, his travel journal becomes full of exciting discoveries about the new foods, customs, languages and peoples to which he was exposed.
Carroll spent his time in Russia eating cabbage soup, drinking rowanberry liqueur and going to theatres never minding the plays were in Russian. As a writer, he was naturally interested in how the Russian language worked. He was learning it everywhere he went. In his diary he would painstakingly write down any new word he saw in a store (хлеб - bread, вода - water) or in a restaurant menu (щи - cabbage soup, осетрина - sturgeon, пирожки - pies, мороженое - ice-cream). It was the impenetrable long Russian words, however, that he had the most fascination for. Using English letters, Carroll notes this ‘extraordinarily long’ and ‘alarming’ Russian word in his diary:
zashtsheeshtshayoushtsheekhsya
- защищающихся (those who protect themselves)
It seems he wanted to make a point about his ‘rather dismal prospects’ of ‘pronouncing the language’. But soon enough his immersion into Russian culture paid off: he learnt to pronounce simple phrases and was even able to haggle with droshky drivers and with traders at fairs.
Russia made a big impression on Carroll, and many believe that Moscow
“... this wonderful city, a city of white houses and green roofs, of conical towers that rise one out of another like a fore-shortened telescope; of bulging gilded domes, in which you see as in a looking-glass, distorted pictures of the city”.
became the inspiration for “Through the Looking-Glass”. This great adventure to Russia was the only time Lewis Carroll ever left British soil. ‘Curiouser and curiouser’ you may say.
Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) was a famous French writer, best remembered for “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo”.
For a long time his dream was to travel to Russia but he was prohibited from visiting the country after the publication of his novel “The Fencing Master”. The book described the events of the Decembrist revolt against Czar Nicholas I and was banned in Russia.
It was not until after the Czar's death that in 1859 Dumas travelled to Russia where he was already the most famous living Frenchman. He was given a hero’s welcome. At the time, French was the second language of the elite and his books were enormously popular. He writes in his diary:
“I’m travelling here like a prince. Russian hospitality is as dazzling as Ural’s gold mines.”
His adventure was of epic proportions, spanning the cities of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan and Astrakhan. He had no prior knowledge of Russian before the trip but made great progress and even translated works by Alexander Pushkin, his contemporary and namesake, and who Dumas greatly admired. Both were fathers of romantic prose in their countries, both could claim Generals of African descent in their heritage, and both even fought in duels. We, Russians, are grateful to Dumas for his translations of Pushkin into French and promoting Russian literature in France and abroad but there’s nothing like reading “Eugene Onegin” or “Captain’s Daughter” in the original as much of the subtlety is often lost in translation.
The notes Dumas made on his trip across Russia were later published in “Adventures in Czarist Russia, or From Paris to Astrakhan”.
Friedrich Engels
Some people take years to learn Russian. This wasn’t the case for Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) a German philosopher, who along with Karl Marx were the intellectual leaders of the early socialist movement.
Engels was a polyglot, and Russian was amongst the 12 languages he could speak fluently. In his letter to Karl Marx Engels is boasting of his yet another linguistic achievement:
“For the past fortnight I have been swotting hard at Russian and have now got the grammar pretty well licked; in another 2-3 months I shall have acquired the necessary vocabulary, and then I shall be able to tackle something else.”
Engels clearly loved the Russian language and never missed an opportunity to use it. At that time, he was also in active correspondence with Russian revolutionaries and preferred to speak their native language with them. He read books by Pushkin, Tolstoy and Nekrasov in the original. To him Russian was:
"A language that, both for its own sake, as one of the richest and most powerful living languages, and on account of the literature thereby made accessible, richly deserves study".
Russian learners of the 21st century
Most of what these famous writers, philosophers and intellectuals found difficult about the Russian language back in the XIX century is still true about modern Russian. Learners are still struggling with the Russian grammar.
One of my students, Michelle, shares her own experiences with the Russian language:
"The cases is what makes it a challenge for speaking Russian fluently. There are just too many exceptions to the rules! But even if my endings are sometimes wrong, who cares - my Russian friends or business partners still understand me. I'm not giving up on the cases though! I know the more I speak Russian, the easier it gets".
Although Russian learners of the past and of the present may agree that it’s a difficult language, that’s certainly no reason to avoid it. As Nietzsche put it, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” If an easy life was all that mattered, Leo Tolstoy would not have written “War and Peace” and so many people would not have at least tried to read it, or Yury Gagarin would not have become the first man in space and possibly many of us would not have been able to Dream Big ever after. Exercising our minds makes us both smarter, wiser and more useful to society.
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