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That bawdy tales circulated in the 19th century is something we know not only for Russians, but also from the dozens of peoples who live under Russian occupatio
by OfSanguineFire 3y ago
That bawdy tales circulated in the 19th century is something we know not only for Russians, but also from the dozens of peoples who live under Russian occupation. The word-lists compiled by 19th-century European linguists doing fieldwork in the Volga-Kama area or Siberia contain words like “whore”, “dick”, or even “clitoris” and we get some transcriptions of tales where all these words are put to use, revealing that life was not as prim and staid as one might assume.
In fact, due to Soviet-era and post-Soviet censorship where dictionaries compiled for these languages were usually forced to leave out the bad words, it is the 19th-century sources that we rely on for them.
- fuzztester 3y ago>That bawdy tales circulated in the 19th century is something we know Gadzooks! Balzac? Rabelais? Chaucer? Turn. Grave.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoAll French or English writers you list. The context of this HN post is 19th-century Russia.
- fuzztester 3y agoGood catch, by logic, but you're wrong, in reality: The mistake is mine, though. I did not make my point clear enough. My intention, by saying gadzooks (a word from an earlier century, that I have read in historical novels, such as by Georgette Heyer - I'm not a scholar), was to express surprise, and to indicate that bawdy writing was not only from the 19th century, but existed much prior to that. Hence the references I gave. And they're not even very old. Bawdy writing probably existed from hundreds, if not thousands, of years earlier. And bawdiness is human and global, dude, I mean, tovarisch ;-). No need to limit it to Russia.