Russia. Donald Mackenzie Wallace

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СКАЧАТЬ his honest German face expressed the most undisguised astonishment. "Are you, too, a Nihilist?" he inquired, as soon as he had partially recovered his breath.

      "I really don't know what a Nihilist is, but I may assure you that I am not an 'ist' of any kind. What is a Nihilist?"

      "If you live long in Russia you'll learn that without my telling you. As I was saying, I am not at all afraid of the peasants citing me before the justice. They know better now. If they gave me too much trouble I could starve their cattle."

      "Yes, when you catch them in your fields," I remarked, taking no notice of the abrupt turn which he had given to the conversation.

      "I can do it without that. You must know that, by the Emancipation Law, the peasants received arable land, but they received little or no pasturage. I have the whip hand of them there!"

      The remarks of Karl Karl'itch on men and things were to me always interesting, for he was a shrewd observer, and displayed occasionally a pleasant, dry humour. But I very soon discovered that his opinions were not to be accepted without reserve. His strong, inflexible Teutonic nature often prevented him from judging impartially. He had no sympathy with the men and the institutions around him, and consequently he was unable to see things from the inside. The specks and blemishes on the surface he perceived clearly enough, but he had no knowledge of the secret, deep-rooted causes by which these specks and blemishes were produced. The simple fact that a man was a Russian satisfactorily accounted, in his opinion, for any kind of moral deformity; and his knowledge turned out to be by no means so extensive as I had at first supposed. Though he had been many years in the country, he knew very little about the life of the peasants beyond that small part of it which concerned directly his own interests and those of his employer. Of the communal organisation, domestic life, religious beliefs, ceremonial practices, and nomadic habits of his humble neighbours, he knew little, and the little he happened to know was far from accurate. In order to gain a knowledge of these matters it would be better, I perceived, to consult the priest, or, better still, the peasants themselves. But to do this it would be necessary to understand easily and speak fluently the colloquial language, and I was still very far from having, acquired the requisite proficiency.

      Even for one who possesses a natural facility for acquiring foreign tongues, the learning of Russian is by no means an easy task. Though it is essentially an Aryan language like our own, and contains only a slight intermixture of Tartar words—such as bashlyk (a hood), kalpak (a night-cap), arbuz (a water-melon), etc.—it has certain sounds unknown to West-European ears, and difficult for West-European tongues, and its roots, though in great part derived from the same original stock as those of the Graeco-Latin and Teutonic languages, are generally not at all easily recognised. As an illustration of this, take the Russian word otets. Strange as it may at first sight appear, this word is merely another form of our word father, of the German vater, and of the French pere. The syllable ets is the ordinary Russian termination denoting the agent, corresponding to the English and German ending er, as we see in such words as—kup-ets (a buyer), plov-ets (a swimmer), and many others. The root ot is a mutilated form of vot, as we see in the word otchina (a paternal inheritance), which is frequently written votchina. Now vot is evidently the same root as the German vat in Vater, and the English fath in father. Quod erat demonstrandum.

      All this is simple enough, and goes to prove the fundamental identity, or rather the community of origin, of the Slav and Teutonic languages; but it will be readily understood that etymological analogies so carefully disguised are of little practical use in helping us to acquire a foreign tongue. Besides this, the grammatical forms and constructions in Russian are very peculiar, and present a great many strange irregularities. As an illustration of this we may take the future tense. The Russian verb has commonly a simple and a frequentative future. The latter is always regularly formed by means of an auxiliary with the infinitive, as in English, but the former is constructed in a variety of ways, for which no rule can be given, so that the simple future of each individual verb must be learned by a pure effort of memory. In many verbs it is formed by prefixing a preposition, but it is impossible to determine by rule which preposition should be used. Thus idu (I go) becomes poidu; pishu (I write) becomes napishu; pyu (I drink) becomes vuipyu, and so on.

      Closely akin to the difficulties of pronunciation is the difficulty of accentuating the proper syllable. In this respect Russian is like Greek; you can rarely tell a priori on what syllable the accent falls. But it is more puzzling than Greek, for two reasons: firstly, it is not customary to print Russian with accents; and secondly, no one has yet been able to lay down precise rules for the transposition of the accent in the various inflections of the same word, Of this latter peculiarity, let one illustration suffice. The word ruka (hand) has the accent on the last syllable, but in the accusative (ruku) the accent goes back to the first syllable. It must not, however, be assumed that in all words of this type a similar transposition takes place. The word beda (misfortune), for instance, as well as very many others, always retains the accent on the last syllable.

      These and many similar difficulties, which need not be here enumerated, can be mastered only by long practice. Serious as they are, they need not frighten any one who is in the habit of learning foreign tongues. The ear and the tongue gradually become familiar with the peculiarities of inflection and accentuation, and practice fulfils the same function as abstract rules.

      It is commonly supposed that Russians have been endowed by Nature with a peculiar linguistic talent. Their own language, it is said, is so difficult that they have no difficulty in acquiring others. This common belief requires, as it seems to me, some explanation. That highly educated Russians are better linguists than the educated classes of Western Europe there can be no possible doubt, for they almost always speak French, and often English and German also. The question, however, is whether this is the result of a psychological peculiarity, or of other causes. Now, without venturing to deny the existence of a natural faculty, I should say that the other causes have at least exercised a powerful influence. Any Russian who wishes to be regarded as civilised must possess at least one foreign language; and, as a consequence of this, the children of the upper classes are always taught at least French in their infancy. Many households comprise a German nurse, a French tutor, and an English governess; and the children thus become accustomed from their earliest years to the use of these three languages. Besides this, Russian is phonetically very rich and contains nearly all the sounds which are to be found in West-European tongues. Perhaps on the whole it would be well to apply here the Darwinian theory, and suppose that the Russian Noblesse, having been obliged for several generations to acquire foreign languages, have gradually developed a hereditary polyglot talent.

      Several circumstances concurred to assist me in my efforts, during my voluntary exile, to acquire at least such a knowledge of the language as would enable me to converse freely with the peasantry. In the first place, my reverend teacher was an agreeable, kindly, talkative man, who took a great delight in telling interminable stories, quite independently of any satisfaction which he might derive from the consciousness of their being understood and appreciated. Even when walking alone he was always muttering something to an imaginary listener. A stranger meeting him on such occasions might have supposed that he was holding converse with unseen spirits, though his broad muscular form and rubicund face militated strongly against such a supposition; but no man, woman, or child living within a radius of ten miles would ever have fallen into this mistake. Every one in the neighbourhood knew that "Batushka" (papa), as he was familiarly called, was too prosaical, practical a man to see things ethereal, that he was an irrepressible talker, and that when he could not conveniently find an audience he created one by his own imagination. This peculiarity of his rendered me good service. Though for some time I understood very little of what he said, and very often misplaced the positive and negative monosyllables which I hazarded occasionally by way of encouragement, he talked vigorously all the same. Like all garrulous people, he was constantly repeating himself; but to this I did not object, for the custom—however disagreeable in ordinary society—was for me highly beneficial, and when I had already heard a story once or twice before, it was much easier for me to assume at the proper moment the requisite expression СКАЧАТЬ