Shamil Khairov Petrozavodsk /Glasgow

(N. Jarintzov's Book and Modern Linguistic Culturology)

The Russians and Their Language (Oxford: B.N. Blackwell, 1916) by N. Jarintzov is a work in which the author herself claimed that her main ambition was "to show the national character of the Russians as reflected in their language" (P. 3) was published more than eighty years ago and for different reasons played little part in later Slavonic or Russian studies. But a comparison with certain contemporary works on linguistic culturology, a field which has recently been gaining popularity in the humanities could produce essential material concerning some (new) ideas and methods. The main purpose of the present paper is to present a short comparison of this kind.

The algebraic deadlock in which structural semantics found itself, and the shift of the focus from pure linguistic facts to the domain of culture, brought about a more "human" approach to the lexicon - through the identification and description of the "key words" in a "natural semantic metalanguage", or "semantic primitives" (such as person, good, bad, think, know, live, die, very, like etc.). The leader of this school of studies - the Australian-Polish linguist A. Wierzbicka, has described in several publications the foundations of this theory and its application to different languages; one example is her recent book Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese (New-York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Studies of this kind tend to be synchronic and non-evaluative.

2. Evaluative-reflexive (evaluative-introspective)

This approach (different from but not opposed to the typological one) considers the lexicon to be a part of cultural heritage, which reflects unique (usually positive) features of a national mentality. Original culturally relevant words are regarded as "millenial toilers of the culture" and their loss or change as a result of borrowings is qualified as "ousting the fundamental conceptions of the ethno-historical consciousness" (L.V. Savelyeva, Yazykovaya ekologiya: Russkoye slovo v kul'turno-istoricheskom osveshchenii, Petrozavodsk: KGPU, 1997, pp. 44-45).

What both approaches have in common is examination of the connotations based on different types of contexts (fiction, sayings, colloquial usage, texts on philisophy).

A special feature of the second approach is "etymologization", i. e. actualization (refreshing) the ancient meaning of a word or revealing the literal meaning of its parts. An example of it is the analysis of two culturally relevant Russian words - chest' (honour) and sovest' (conscience) by V.V. Kolesov, Professor of Saint-Petersburg University, who demonstrates the priority of the latter in Russian national thought and mentality: "The concept of chest' (honour) still retains for the Russian the immemorial idea of chast' (part), namely its secular part; it is not a soul, but flesh, the homogeneous mass of which is divided between those worthy of their chest'. Cast' - chest' is too much rooted in the earth" (V.V. Kolesov, 'Mental'nyje characteristiki russkogo slova v yazyke i v filosofskoi intuicii', Yazyk i etnicheskii mentalitet, Petrozavodsk: Izdatel'stvo Petrozavodskogo Universiteta, 1995, p. 18).

The evaluative-reflexive method is - to a considerable extent - based on a historical approach to the semantics and (as in works by Prof. V.V. Kolesov) on national philosophical thought.

N. Jarintzov's book belongs without doubt to the second direction, being openly biased and evaluative (it should be pinted out that it was written during the World War I and its political background is easily recognizable). The author even underlines her partiality: "As long as national individuality remains an unconquerable feature (however much modified by the wisest cosmopolitanism), we Russians cannot help loving our language passionately" (P. 2); "The luxuries of speech which we do possess and you {British} don't are so numerous that they overwhelmed me for a moment when I was starting on my interesting task (P. 4)". But despite this, a reader can find the application (some times rudimentary, but often well developed) of many principles and methods characteristic of both approaches, which demonstrates their mutually supplementary character.

It should be mentioned that N. Jarintzov does not concentrate on the lexicon alone: there are many original formulations of what are now popular statements on Russian grammar and word formation in the book as well. She gives much space in her work to presenting "the creative elasticity of the Slavonic roots" (P.28), "boundless logical analitical subtlety of the Russian grammar" (P.29) and to the freedom of the word order. Her typical statements on Russian Grammar include the following: "The syllables of nuances have in Russian a magic power" (P.29); "We could not do without a choice of terminations. They make a world of difference. We like a word to obey the minutest vibration of our thought. This flexibility is quite different from the English manner of stringing different nouns like beads on a string..." (P. 40); "The music of the Russian speech is as free as a composer when he arranges his little black word, hooked and tailed, in this or that special succession" (P. 62); "To my mind they {Russian and English} bear the same relationship to one another as do clay and cement. The one pliable to any extent, the other - strong, but hard" ( P.169).

The topic of expressive derivation provides contemporary studies important evidence in the attempts to link language and culture (A. Wierzbicka, Semantics, Culture and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configutrations, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, paragraph 5 'Personal Names and Expressive Derivation', pp. 225 -308). A. Wierzbicka is usually referred to in many modern culturological studies when considering grammatical forms which allegedly reflect mental features, as in the following observation on the case of "the new Russians": "In this new cultural situation, the New Russians 'play it cool', leaving the patriots to vent their feelings, to kipiatit'sia 'to boil away' - significantly a verb with the reflexive suffux -sia, denoting a 'quasivoluntary' indulgence in a self-induced emotional state" (reference to Wierzbicka's book, P. 401) (Henrietta Mondry and John R. Taylor, 'The cultural dynamics of "national character": The case of the new Russians', in Speaking of Emotions: Conceptualisation and Expression ed. by Angeliki Athanasiadou and Elzbeta Tabakovska, Cognitive Linguistic Research 10, ed. René Dirven, Ronald W. Langacler, John R. Taylor, Berlin, New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 1998, p. 43).

We can see how N. Jarintzov draws the readers' attention to the verbs reflecting "subconscious will": "{The form Mne hochetsa 'I will' in comparison with Ja hochu} conveys a vague desire for something, 'as if commanded by some power from without', and even the dative of personal pronoun is usually omitted: Ne hochetsa rabotat'! = I don't want to work. Hochetsa otdohnut'! = I want to rest. Spat' hochetsa! = To sleep I want. Hochetsa molodost'i! = One wants to be young" (P. 121). And A. Wierzbicka in her turn writing on "involuntary mental acts (processes)" (P. 428) refers to N. Jarincov's statement that this pattern represents "the numerous everyday expressions when we subconsciously acknowledge an involuntary desire, as it were".

Ethnogrammatical statements are not the theme this paper. Our main object is the lexicon as interpreted in N. Jarintzov's book.

Describing the Russian people to the British, N. Jarintzov solves in a natural way two methodological problemsof linguistic culturology.

The problem of metalanguage. The author is aware of the danger which can arise from confusion of the same language as a meta- and natural language. And - to be more easily understood - she developes another "natural" and original (or rather consistently uses the old "naïve") method. She includes a previously described Russian word into the English explanatory context as she does with the word 'nichego' (the word which, the author thinks, "has acquired much misleading fame abroad" (P. 57)) : "True, with us it is 'nichevo' when people walk into the room without knocking; or come without invitation at any time for the simple reason that they wish to see you... or get up from their seats and pace the room up and down, in the heat of a discussion during the course of a meal; all is certainly 'nichevo' , because these points are but trifles to a Russian mind, and the westerner may smile with disgust or condenscension at the thought of such manners!" (P. 57); "But one should be far from smiling at a Russian man who says seriously and whole-heartedly, 'nichevo!' as he marries a girl with a tragic past who is left with a child. .... Nor is a 'nichevo' funny when uttered with a smile by a soldat'ik, who is creeping towards the dressing-station wounded in his shoulder, side or leg" (P. 58). The same method is used by N. Jarintzov in another type of context, namely, in translation:

(a fragment from a poem by Igor Sever'anin, P.27).

The author even connects a Russian prefix with an English verb : "The raz- attached to such verbs as to speak, to make merry, to walk, to sleep, conveys the idea expressed in English by 'To let oneslef go': if you let yourself go in speaking, merry-making, walking, or sleeping to such an extent that it becomes difficult to prevent you from going on with - you fall under the Russian definitions razgovoritsa, razv'es'elitsa, razospatsa. etc. There are dozens of them. One can do anything to the extent of raz-doing it! Only, English people seldom allow themselves such luxuries, so there exist no definition for them" (P. 72).

The problem of contrastive background, which is needed for the rounded picture of any national language and culture. The role of such a background is assigned to the English language and culture. Examples of different perceptions of many corresponding concepts in both cultures are numerous in the book.

An oppositon lover - lyubovnik can be given as an example: "I am quite ready to admit that, with us, the definition 'lover' (l'ubovnik) is somewhat an offence against its original meaning. But so it may be here: with us it is too specific - with you casual. We never know what to think exactly when people in England are called lovers (with us the definition is, at least, far from being vague!), and when this is done in an English company it makes us feel a little bit awkward - at the expence of the speaker's lack of delicacy!" (P.16).

Here are some other oppositions, in which N. Jarintzov founds important national distinctions:

It should be underlined that the the most evaluative-like statements in the book do not refer to bad or good national featurs but to differnt linguistic elaboration of certain semantic or cultural areas.

This list of national words (or their national meaning) corresponds to the reference by A. Wierzbicka to "cultural elaboration and lexicon" and "key words and cultural values" (Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words, P. 15). Among the words taken by N. Jarintzov as representing of the Russian national character are those present as favourite ones in many contemporary studies: chort, udal', dolya, durak, prostor, toska (See for ex.: A. D. Shmelev , 'Shirokaya russkaya dusha', Russkaya rech, 1998, 1, pp. 48 - 55). A. Wierzbicka gives dusha, sud'ba, toska as the three words which most accurately ferflect Russian mind (A. Wierzbicka, Semantics, Culture and Cognition, pp. 31 - 116), while Z. K. Tarlanov in a critical response to the Russian edition of Wierzbicka's book questions this choice as arbitrary and not well represented in the Russian sayings and literary usage (Z. K. Tarlanov, 'Russkoye bezlichnoye predlozheniye v kontekste etnicheskogo mirovospriyatiya' , Filologicheskiye nauki, 1998, 5-6, p. 73).

The methodological duality of linguistic culturology makes it different from other linguistic disciplines. It lies in combining (or connecting) three planes of analysis: on the one hand - the plane of pure linguistic facts (words), on the other hand - the conceptual plane and that which relates to national character (mentality). Whereas A. Wierzbicka advocates a sequence of steps (first words, then cultures through words), N. Jarincova demonstrates syncretism in her approach to the problem which is also reflected in the title of the book - "The Russians and their Language". There is no priority of a certain "point of departure", it can be a national mental feature, illustrated by the facts of the language; it can also be a separate "very national word" with its description, and then followed by the statements on national character, it can be a statement on the richness of the language as well. This may be demonstrated by the list of some of the sub-headings used in the book.

A word: A very Russian word for affection (about rodnoi ); a typical Russian word for quick wit ( about sm'otka); two words for 'Truth';

A concept: The beloved Russian conception (about prostor); conceptions without which a Russian could not live (about razdolye, razmach); difference between the English and the Russian conceptions of belief; Tenderness and Love winding their way through the language;

Mentality: The oneness with Nature (as a feature of the Russian national character); A mainspring of the Russian character (about faith).

The decoding an old semantic structure of certain Russian words is often used by N. Jarintzov to draw conclusions regarding differences between the two cultures or some mental pecularities, as with the words zhenit's'a and vychodit' zamuzh: "The English expression 'to marry' is strictly divided in Russian according to facts. Speaking about a girl who is going to marry we say ona vyhodit zamuj: note the last two-syllabled word, which means 'behind a man', and you will get the original meaning: 'she is going out, or leaving her parental home, to place herself behind a man'; isn't this an exact definition of what marriage meant for a girl even not so long ago? Whilst speaking of a man about to wed, we say on jenitsa - which means, as it were, 'he be-wifes himself'. This façon de parler indicates much more independence in comparison with the marriage for a girl: it is just the same grammatical form as 'soaping oneself' (mylit'sa) or 'steaming oneself in a bath-house (parit'sa)" (P. 86).

This method in a similar form is also used at the present time. The following passage from the above mentioned book by L. V. Savelyeva offers a parallel to that given above (the only difference is in the depth of etymologization): "The Russian word suprugi etymologically means "linked with each other (sopr'azhonnyje)" (see the words derived from the same root: zapryagat', upryazhka (yoke, harness)). And as is shown by the usage of this word in the formulae of Russian culture this is "the s p i r i t u a l harness established from above" and at the same time the indissoluble unity of the spirit and the flesh" (P.48).

An example of semantic decoding in combination with contrastive conceptual analysis in 'The Russians and Their Language' is the following: "Chutkost' - deriving from the above- mentioned adjective chutki - is a very Russian word; it means an extremely developed sense of what a scientist would call a flair for discovering the mood and position of others; an extreme tact alive not merely with diplomacy, but with genuine refinement of feeling: not only thinking for, but thinking with. It reflects in the saying, 'One does not mention ropes in the house of a man who has been hanged'.

The difference between chutkost' and the English word consideration, by which it is usually translated, should be clear from the fact that consideration refers to a mental attitude only, whereas the root of this Russian definition is chutyo, implying the instinctive capacity of 'scenting things' (P. 20).

All this leads to the conclusion that the essential methods of contemporary linguistic culturology resemble the approach adopted by N. Jarintzov (although in a less elaborated form) in 1916 for the representation of the certain national character through the certain language and vice versa. In his article mentioned above V.V. Kolesov establishes as a fact that "the description of the lexical material with the reference to the concepts of the national mentality is a new form of word analysis in principle" (P. 15). In the light of the book by N. Jarintzov this statement appears to be questionable.

The work by N. Jarintzov (both its objective and evaluative content) could give valuable comparative material regarding the descriptions of the present state of the Russian mentality in its social varieties as reflected in the Russian language. The only problem is that today, at the time of strict methodological and terminologcal divisions in the humanities, such a synthetic work has not yet been written.