non-bookish terms for "well-endowed," etc.

[Slivkin, Yevgeny]

Israeli wrote, "Slivkin's comment not withstanding (...)"


"Slivkin's comment" about "piatka" was intended to be humorous. I believe
everyone understood that.
Speaking more seriously, the concept of aristocratic female beauty in the
18th and 19th centuries was based not on "piatka" of course but on
"zapiast'e". The military officers' subculture of the late 19th century
preserved a saying in reference to an ideal women: "taliia, kak dve shei, a
sheia, kak dva zapiast'ia", thus a women's wrist was the base of  the
esthetic pyramid of a female body.

Yevgeny Slivkin

P.S. By the way, if Israeli insists, since Pushkin's Don Juan could not see
Donna Anna's wrist under her long black cover, her "narrow hill" could be a
semiotic substitution for her wrist. After all, the anatomy proves that if a
women has narrow palms she has narrow feet as well.





Yevgeny A. Slivkin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Russian 
European and Latin American School
Defense Language Institute
Presidio of Monterey
Monterey, California 93950
Of. 831. 643-0474  

 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Slavic & East European Languages and Literature list
[mailto:SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU] On Behalf Of Alina Israeli
Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2006 5:28 PM
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] non-bookish terms for "well-endowed," etc.

Slivkin's comment not withstanding,

>I do not know about the other Slavic cultures, but in Russian culture 
>which is still based on literature the most attractive part of femail 
>body is "piatka".

culturally, not individually (I mean male-heterosexually, for which it is
probably the same three body parts I alluded to with varying individual
preference), I think it is "tonkaja talija" that is the main element of
feminine body for the Russian culture (143 000 on lib.ru). "Uzkaja talija"
and "osinaja talija" also qualify. Otherwise the woman must be "v tele". If
one doesn't jive with the other, well, that's the Eurasian push and pull
(and I am not attempting to open another can of worms).

And here I must relate an anectode. When I was studying Polish in my youth,
in one of the textbooks made in Poland with a record to go with it with all
sorts of nice dialogues, there was one dialogue between a husband and wife
(I think Janek and Agata), and he was late or something and as an apology he
said that he was watching umbrellas (oglandam parasolki, if I remember it
correctly), and she replied, no you are watching girls because they have
"bardzo zgrabne nogi" (or maybe simply zgrabne nogi). I cannot recall any
language textbook (and I studied a few) where women's legs would be part of
elementary language course. In Italian only at the third year level did we
encounter the pappagallismo italiano. Food for thought.

As for "pjatka", I think men were more or less fed up with women's shoulders
in Pushkin's time and were fantasizing about all the hidden body parts (just
remember "Car' Nikita"). Somewhere else he wrote something about "edva
najdetsja para strojnyx nog" or something like that, not that legs were on
display like the shoulders, mini-skirts appeared 130 years later. As far as
I remember Anatole Kuragin used to kiss the shoulders of his sister. Of
course it could mean incest, but also that shoulders were like cheeks,
always uncovered.


__________________________
 Alina Israeli
 LFS, American University
 4400 Mass. Ave., NW
 Washington, DC 20016

 phone:    (202) 885-2387
 fax:      (202) 885-1076 

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