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I am an American living in Russia. When I was studying Russian I read a number of Chekhov's short stories and got a feel for who he was. I later came across o
by siberianbear 10y ago
I am an American living in Russia. When I was studying Russian I read a number of Chekhov's short stories and got a feel for who he was.
I later came across one of his quotes: "В человеке должно быть все прекрасно: и лицо, и одежда, и душа, и мысли" (Everything in a person should be excellent: his face, his clothes, his soul and his ideas). I sometimes discussed this phrase with Russians, eventually coming to be believe that "face" in this context meant that you should do all you can to appear clean and groomed, not necessarily that you need to be beautiful. I liked this quote and it can be a starting point of interesting discussion when I talk to Russians about Chekhov.
There's a funny story about when Chekhov went to Tomsk (now a town of about 500,000 people in Siberia.) In a letter, he wrote "Tomsk is a very dull town. To judge from the drunkards whose acquaintance I have made, and from the intellectual people who have come to the hotel to pay their respects to me, the inhabitants are very dull, too." In recent history, the inhabitants of Tomsk erected a bronze caricature statute [1] of Chekhov which makes him look funny. The local residents consider that touching his nose is good luck, so the statue has a really shiny bronze nose. I personally saw it and even touched his nose.
[1] https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g665310-d3595947-Reviews-Chekhov_Monument-Tomsk_Tomsk_Oblast_Siberian_District.html https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g665310-d35959...
- geoka9 10y ago> Everything in a person should be excellent Probably nitpicking, but I'd translate "прекрасно" as "beautiful" here.
- bushin 10y agoI think "exellent" is an excellent choice of the word (beautiful ≈ красиво).
- Frondo 10y agoAgreed, the English "beautiful" often doesn't seem to capture прекрасно. I always took them to have some overlapping meaning, rather than being a direct translation.
- geoka9 10y ago> the English "beautiful" often doesn't seem to capture прекрасно I agree, but I'd say "excellent" is even further away in meaning. Translating between such distant languages is always an exercise in compromise, unless you're willing to take great liberties at interpretation (when translating poetry, for example).
- kartem 10y agoBeing Russian I suggest "прекрасно" means "perfect" or "excellent" in this context.
- vmarovic 10y agoI don't know russian, but in croatian which is somewhat similar adding pre to infront of the word makes it stronger, does not change meaning. Like too beautiful or as beautiful as it could get. Though in russian it could be different. (edit or even more beautiful than it is allowed/expected/needed)
- uzoodoo 10y agoWell, if you remove "pre" from "прекрасно", you get "red-colored", so it doesn't quite work here. (Actually, it would make the first part of the sentence a bit too literal.)
- c-smile 10y ago"прекрасно" consists of two parts : "пре" ("very" here) and "краса" ("beauty") in Russian so it is pretty close etymologically to English beautiful. Slightly different connotation in this particular case but still close enough.
- uzoodoo 10y agoYou have to jump through some mental hoops to somehow get "краса" out of "прекрасно". It's literally "пре" + "красный", where "красный" in modern Russian means "red". I'm not disputing that it originated from a word meaning "beautiful" (which happened to also mean red, as in the archaic "красная девица", which does not actually mean "red girl" as google translate might think). But saying that you could simply split up the word and get "краса" out of it is disingenuous.
- geoka9 10y agoI often translate "красивый" as "nice" or "pretty" or something similar, depending on the context. I think "beautiful" is more subtle (less banal, if you will) than "красивый". And so is "прекрасный".
- pvg 10y ago"excellent" makes it sound like Bill & Ted doing the translation, though. 'first-rate' is a common choice for that quote which is also unsatisfying - without the unwanted English connotations but also without any of the desirable Russian ones.
- caf 10y agoPerhaps "superlative".
- pvg 10y agoYep, that's (roughly) in the same vein as 'first-rate'. What makes the translation tricky (if you speak Russian, apologies for explaining the obvious) is that while the word has uses other than literal 'beautiful' it is composed of a superlative prefix and the root for 'beauty'. The line itself is spoken by character in a play, a high-minded, provincial county doctor as Chekhov himself once was. 'must be excellent¹' is strained and clunky in English to begin with and none of the more natural-sounding replacements evoke the connotations of the original. ¹ Moreover, nobody ever translated the name of the Russian fairy tale Василиса Прекрасная as Vasilisa the Excellent.
- hanoz 10y agoIt must be a very small subset of English speakers for whom the word "excellent" can only be read in a Bill & Ted accent, so I suggest this is bogus argument.
- pvg 10y agoYes, it must be and yet 'excellent' is a really poor translation for this.
- huhtenberg 10y agoNot really. Excellent is closer to идеально. Both imply relative comparison (to others). Beautiful is an absolute characteristic, same as красиво, so it's a better fit here.
- pvg 10y ago'идеально' suggests perfection, 'excellent' just quality.
- c-smile 10y agoAs our workshop teacher in USSR's school said once to us: "всё что технически-совершенно то прекрасно" - "everything that is technically perfect / harmonious is beautiful". I would say that "прекрасно" is "harmonious and so beautiful" in this context.
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- baursak 10y agoI'd translate it as "wonderful".
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- sssilver 10y agoI second this translation.
- xerxes777 10y agoRussian here. "Excellent" is better. "Прекрасно" is "good in every way", "perfect", it is something that cause wonder and delight or feeling of exaltation. So it's not about beauty. It's about what beauty of something do to you.
- hossbeast 10y agoI thought excellent was a strange choice as well
- aisofteng 10y agoIdyllic.
- rimliu 10y agoAt least in Soviet times this quote was taught and discussed in schools and I'd dare to argue that for some it is the only quote by Chekhov's they remember.
- eternalban 10y ago> I personally saw it and even touched his nose. Did it work?
- siberianbear 10y agoWell, there's no possiblity of doing A/B testing. I can't go back and live an alternate life where I didn't touch his nose. So there's no way to know. But I'm enjoying my life, and I'm happy with the life in which I did touch his nose.
- igravious 10y agoYour alternative life's imago invented a multiverse wormhole machine and freakily landed up in my backyard and told me that their life had gone pretty badly wormhole machine notwithstanding. So now you know.
- wruza 10y agoThere definitely is a way, that's how all research is done. You send three groups there, one that doesn't touch anything, one that touches his nose, and another one that touches nose of the fake statue, without knowing that it is fake. If second group appears to have more luck than the other two over time, then it works.
- mden 10y agoThis unfortunately does not account for different groups having different starting luck. I suppose you can in part handle that by having very large groups but since luck is luck simply the process of selection, even if random, is biased which gives you another problem.
- pougetj 10y agoWhich is why units should be randomly selected into each groups to avoid confounding factors like the one you mention.
- danielhooper 10y agoOut of curiosity, how long did you have to study Russian before you could enjoy Chekhov's stories?
- siberianbear 10y agoI read a bunch of them (in English) when I was a university student: that's where my first exposure came from. When I started to study Russian, I read one or two of his stories in this book [1], which was great because it has English and Russian versions on opposite pages. I got to enjoy reading in Russian because I didn't constantly have to look up every tenth word in a dictionary. Russian is a hard language but there are some still harder. To understand magazine articles and carry on simple conversations on arbitrary topics is a time investment of about 600 hours. To read Chekhov and speak really well on advanced topics is about double that, or 1200 hours. Chekhov's style is close to modern Russian and his style of writing is more straightforward than earlier writers. To read Dostoyevsky... well, hell if I know, I can barely make it through the first page of Crime and Punishment even with a dictionary even after all this time investment and living in Russia for a few years! It's like a different language. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Stories-Dual-Language-Book-English/dp/0486262448/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1489506833&sr=8-1&keywords=russian+stories https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Stories-Dual-Language-Book-En...
- samat 10y agoThanks for sharing, never realised that Dostoyevskiy is so hard, being kind-of-native-speaker.
- aisofteng 10y agoHe's not, it's just that the average reading comprehension level is low.
- avenoir 10y agoChekhov was very popular in Russian schools up until early 90s because of his writing style. You're absolutely spot on that he writes in very plain Russian. Dostoevsky has some mindfuck-inducing way or getting across to the reader. His writing is difficult even for a lot of native Russian speakers. L.N. Tolstoy also has some easy reading ( Детство. Отрочество. Юность / Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth is my favorite)
- sandworm101 10y agoWhat's the thing about russians and noses? The naval academy also has a statute with a lucky nose. In other cultures people want to touch the hands or feet of statues, but in russia it seems to be the nose.
- sevensor 10y agoI don't think it's a uniquely Russian thing. I think it has more to do with the scale of bronze statuary. Busts have accessible noses, but feet are easier to reach on full figures. My university in the United States had a bust of Abraham Lincoln with a lucky nose.
- sandworm101 10y agoThere may also be a bias tied to medicine. Noses are paticular indicators of some diseases (smallpox and syphalis) that may have created an association with luck.
- cableshaft 10y agoI think you'd be hard pressed to find any bronze statues of Abraham Lincoln without a shiny lucky nose, at least in Illinois. The state capitol of Springfield has several. It probably doesn't help that he's on the penny as well, which is considered lucky if you find one and pick it up.
- dang 10y ago> What's the thing about russians and noses? Well. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/g/gogol/nikolai/g61n/ https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/g/gogol/nikolai/g61n/
- makmanalp 10y agoI'd always had an impression of classical Russian writing as being impenetrable, but this was delightful. Thank you!
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- whack 10y agoCharacterizing a town's inhabitants as being "drunkards" and "dull" doesn't really sound much in keeping with his own first rule...
- gluggymug 10y agoIn Russia, that's not considered as an insult.
- vatotemking 10y agoNo man is perfect, even Checkhov. From the article: "These eight conditions are not a checklist, but a guideline—a “true north” of sorts that reveals to us the direction we must go…"
- frankzinger 10y agoAlso: What is needed is constant work, day and night, constant reading, study, will ... Every hour is precious for it …
- c-smile 10y agoModern Russian [street] variation of "Everything in a person ..." sounds as : "В человеке всё должно быть прекрасно - и душа и джинсы" - "Everything in a human should be perfect, as his soul as his jeans". That's why Russians are paying so much attention to their education/reading and what they wear :) This stuff is taught in school.
- hamilyon2 10y agoThe statue's proportions are somewhat like what you would see if you look at a person from below. As actual drunkard lying on the floor could see Chechov. Source: indigenous Tomsker. We like to joke about Checkov's words about Tomsk.
- westoncb 10y agoThat's a beautiful idea—like you must view Chekhov from the perspective of a drunk person (a near substitution for 'you are a drunk person') even when you're sober and standing up rather than lying down, because of his strange proportioning, therefore he is the 'cause of seeing his peers as like drunkards.
- omginternets 10y ago>I personally saw it and even touched his nose. And? Any luck?
- solipsism 10y agoyou should do all you can to appear clean and groomed Ah yes, unlike that Einstein. That disheveled example of a someone who could have been so much more, had he just reached for a comb. /s
- kerbalspacepro 10y agoWas Einstein actually considered and describes by his peers/comrades as disheveled? Or is that just a cultural archetype we tell ourselves?
- solipsism 10y agoYou're joking right? Are you asking if everyone looked like that back then?