Truth vesus Truth / Pravda v. Istina

[Edward M Dumanis]

I guess the question was only about a linguistic dictinction.
Then it can be said that "istina" is the true essence of things, e.g.,
both scientists and philosophers try "najti istinu" (not "pravdu")
[or, maybe, as Alexander Blok said, "In vino veritas krichat" :).
"In vino veritas" in Russian is "istina - v vine."]
"Pravda" is either justice, or the logical value of a statement
(opposite to "lozh'"-lie). One can seek truth ("pravda" in the former
meaning) or swear to say the truth ("pravda" in the latter meaning).

Sincerely,

Edward Dumanis <dumanis at buffalo.edu>

On Sat, 23 Sep 2006, Condee wrote:

> >> but not one has given me the answer to what is the 'difference between
> pravda and istina'.>>
> 
> Vera, this is "Condee"--i.e., one of three colleagues who took time to
> respond.  I was so taken with your cordial tone and the set of conditions
> you so generously set out as acceptable responses, to wit--
> 
> >>The answer should be, surerly, not longer than one long sentence or one
> short paragraph.>>
> 
> >> Don't send me dictionary definitions>>
> 
> --that I thought I would write back so that we could get to know each other
> better.  A couple of points:
> 
> 1. The distinction "in one long sentence" is not a adequate way to explain
> the difference, which has a deep and long history.  Its very complexity
> might have been what prompted your question in the first place.
> 
> 2. The difference is often an implicitly theological one, which then became
> complicated through a number of factors (among them the Enlightenment, the
> Masons, Marxism-Leninism).
> 
> 3. That which is associated with justice, with rationalism, scienticity-an
> applied, practical or "clear" truth-tends to be "pravda." "Istina," by
> contrast is often truth in a higher sense, a theoretical, pure, or "deep"
> truth in the realm of intuition, spiritual faith, vision, and the empyrean
> soon-to-be.  
> 
> 4. Because of its spiritual associations, istina-in the Soviet period-was
> often displaced by (what might be thought of as) the pseudonym, "higher
> pravda" [vysshaia pravda], but the distinction remained in tact.  This
> distinction was, of course, a Romantic convention, but in Russia it was more
> than that; like Schelling and Hegel, its conceptual usefulness granted it an
> interminable afterlife.  
> 
> 5. The Masons, who preferred truth in this world, saw "pravda" as itself a
> two-sided concept (both justice and wisdom).
> 
> 6. A number of Populists, such as Mikhailovskii, also saw "pravda" as
> containing both objective and subjective dimensions.
> 
> 7. In any event, the truth/value distinction has been a weak tradition in
> Russian intellectual history. For example, "scientific fact" (for which one
> might anticipate "pravda" pure and simple) is often "pravda-istina," whereas
> "moral principle" is often "pravda-spravedlivost'."
> 
> My suggestion is that you remove the punctuation in this email and you would
> indeed have one long sentence.
> 
> Prof. Nancy Condee, Director
> Graduate Program for Cultural Studies
> 2206 Posvar Hall
> University of Pittsburgh
> Pittsburgh, PA 15260
> 412-624-7232
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Slavic & East European Languages and Literature list
> [mailto:SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU] On Behalf Of atacama at global.co.za
> Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2006 5:40 AM
> To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Truth vesus Truth / Pravda v. Istina
> 
> Dear Seelangers,
> 
> Three people replied to me (Danko, Victoria and Condee), but not one has
> given me the
> answer to what is the 'difference between pravda and istina'.
> 
> The answer should be, surerly, not longer than one 
> long sentence or one short paragraph.
> 
> Don't send me dictionary definitions, because I have already
> consulted the dictionaries, which give the meaning of the nouns,
> but don't explain the different nuances. Dictionaries aren't very good
> at this.  I am a near-native speaker but still don't know, so
> maybe I should be asking a philosopher ?  I only hve a hunch that I know.
> 
> Vera Beljakova
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Original Message:
> -----------------
> From: Condee condee at pitt.edu
> Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 19:47:57 -0400
> To: atacama at global.co.za, SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
> Subject: RE: [SEELANGS] Truth vesus Truth / Pravda v. Istina
> 
> 
> Aleksei Yurchak's book--of which I forward Harriet Murav's review, pasted
> here from Sergei Oushakine's Soyuz list (with apologies and thanks)--has
> several passages on this difference.  In addition to his unpublished _The
> Politics of Indistinction: Bioaesthetic Utopias at the End of Soviet
> History_ (University of Chicago: Political Communication and Society
> Workshop: 5 April 2006) online at
> cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/pcs/yurchak-politics-indistinction.pdf, there are
> also of course the old standards: Berdiaev, et al.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> ....Everything Was Forever provides fresh paradigms that pack a hefty
> explanatory punch both with regard to its immediate subject matter and
> beyond. Its publication means that discussions of Soviet life, culture, and
> literature that rely on the old, rigid binarisms are going to seem instantly
> dated. For anyone interested in Soviet culture broadly defined, including
> literature, language, discourse, music, and art, as well as those interested
> in the interface between the study of anthropology, ideology, subjectivity,
> and governmentality both in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, this
> study is a must-read.
> 
> 
> CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 47, Number 5, October 2006
> 
> BOOKS
> 
> How Things Were Done in the U.S.S.R.
> 
> Harriet Murav
> 
> Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois at
> Urbana-Champaign, 3080 Foreign Language Building, MC-170, 707 S. Mathews,
> Urbana, IL 61801, U.S.A. (hlmurav at uiuc.edu). 4 V 06
> 
> Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. By
> Alexei Yurchak. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
> 
> 
>      Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More is an important book, and
> not only for scholars whose research concerns the former Soviet Union or its
> republics. Yurchak offers a new paradigm for the analysis of Soviet culture
> from the death of Stalin to the collapse in 1991. His work goes beyond
> political and economic interpretation to focus on language, discourse, and
> forms of knowledge integral to the lives people actually lead in the Soviet
> Union. Furthermore, and more impressively, it goes beyond the binarisms that
> have long dominated scholarly and journalistic writing on this question,
> including, for example, freedom and oppression, public and private, the
> state and the people. Using a sophisticated theoretical framework, it
> explains both how the Soviet system kept on reproducing itself and,
> paradoxically, how it kept on producing new opportunities for its own
> destruction. This is a model that could well be applied beyond the
> boundaries of the former Soviet Union.
> 
>      Yurchak's theoretical framework has several key points of departure,
> including Claude Lefort, John Austin, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Lefort showed
> that in order to function successfully, ideology must claim the status of
> truth, and that in order to do so it requires a "master" outside the system
> who allegedly possesses the objective knowledge of that truth. As Yurchak
> argues, in the Soviet context, the figure who played the role of "master,"
> to whom all ideological questions could be referred, was Stalin, and it was
> Stalin's death that made possible both the continuation of the system and
> its undermining. To show how this dual process worked, Yurchak relies on an
> expanded notion of John Austin's two functions of language. In the
> constative function, statements say something about reality, but in the
> performative, statements do something (e.g., "I now pronounce you husband
> and wife"). The performative function is of particular interest to Yurchak
> because of its open-ended and unpredictable capacity to produce new meanings
> and new relations between people. When Stalin died there was no one to turn
> to provide so-called objective knowledge of reality, and "authoritative
> language" (Bakhtin's term) became increasingly rigidified to the point where
> individual words lost their meaning and prefabricated "blocks" of language
> became the norm in every official communication. This shift toward what
> Yurchak calls "hypernormalization" meant that the constative function of
> authoritative language decreased (that is, its perceived capacity to relate
> to reality declined) but its performative function increased, giving rise to
> new formations of group identity, new modes of knowledge, new relations, and
> new interactions.
> 
>      Yurchak traces these other forms of community, knowledge, discourse,
> and artistic production in specific contexts, beginning with those most
> closely associated with the Soviet system and concluding with those least
> associated with it. Chapter 3 focuses on the Soviet youth organization, or
> Komsomol. After showing how Komsomol leaders learned the "block language" of
> authoritative discourse, he explores the means by which they made their work
> actually meaningful and, in so doing, used language to perform new roles and
> forms of social relatedness amongst themselves and with their clients,
> Soviet young people. A key term found in this community was svoi, which
> means "our type of people, normal people." In contrast to other scholars who
> define svoi in terms of the opposition between the state and the people,
> Yurchak convincingly argues that svoi meant the kind of people who shared
> the same tolerant attitude toward the government without aspiring to join
> the Central Committee and who saw the Komsomol as a potentially meaningful
> site for social, cultural, and other activities. These Komsomol leaders
> carried out a "deterritorialized" (i.e., transformed) version of Soviet life
> not controlled by the top tier of the system but one which nonetheless was
> made possible by the system itself.
> 
>      Yurchak's combination of indigenous language and current critical terms
> is one of the most successful aspects of his study, since it precludes the
> complaint voiced by some scholars that Western critical theory does not
> apply to Russia. The critical apparatus in Everything Was Forever is in key
> instances "native" to the informants. Chapter 4, "Living `Vnye':
> Deterritorialized Milieus," discusses the concept of being "within and
> without" (vnye) or "beside," a state of "extra-locatedness." This term
> appears in Bakhtin's early work as vnyenakhodimost, somewhat inaccurately
> translated as "outside." While he is right to criticize this translation,
> Yurchak does not take full advantage of the excellent commentary in the 1990
> translation of Bakhtin's essay "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,"
> which offers the alternatives I have given above. This demarcation of a
> space "beside" was used by Yurchak's informants to describe literary clubs,
> archeological circles, cafes such as the well-known Saigon in St.
> Petersburg, and other forms of sociality-including conversation itself-which
> enabled their participants to find themselves "elsewhere," not oriented to
> Soviet life as such. For example, people who lived vnye eagerly sought jobs
> in boiler rooms to have time to pursue interests in such fields as medieval
> history, law, and rock music. These other milieus, both real and imaginary,
> were, according to Yurchak, not oppositional or resistant to the Soviet
> regime but rather prime instantiations of the flourishing of the Soviet
> system.
> 
>      Chapters 5, 6, and 7 address forms of cultural production oriented
> "elsewhere," encompassing fashion and rock music, as well as more extreme
> versions of what can be called performance art (the Mit'ki). The ambiguity
> of official Soviet judgments about "bad" cosmopolitanism versus "good"
> internationalism opened up considerable space for what Yurchak calls the
> "imaginary West" in late Soviet culture. This was a version of the West
> created on Soviet soil, including, for example, Western jeans, shortwave
> radio, and homemade phonograph records from old X-rays on which rock music
> could be enjoyed-required extensive networks of knowledge, distribution, and
> the creation of new technology. Yurchak's discussion of a 1985 list of
> banned Western rock groups, including, for example, Black Sabbath, which was
> blacklisted for "violence" and "religious obscurantism," typifies his
> approach (pp. 214-15). The government's attempt to restrict rock music by
> circulating this list among Komsomol leaders also created the possibility of
> expanding the list of what was acceptable and created a space for debate and
> discussion that Yurchak traces concretely in the correspondence between two
> Komsomol activists. The performance art activities of the Mit'ki, the
> fascination with dead bodies (the "necrorealists") and the corrosive irony
> of their aesthetic, with its parodies of socialist realism, were, of course,
> at a far greater degree of extralocality (living vnye) from the Soviet
> system than the Komsomol activists who debated the meaning of various rock
> groups, but both, according to Yurchak, were located on the same spectrum
> and both were actively deterritorializing Soviet life into new forms of
> expression.
> 
>      One can see the influence of Bakhtin on the work as a whole: quotation,
> as in the citation of the "block" form of authoritative discourse on the
> part of the Komsomol leaders, which he discusses in chapter 2, and parody,
> which Yurchak discusses in chapter 7, are both forms of what Bakhtin calls
> "double-voiced discourse," speech that is oriented towards and relies on
> another's words. The late Soviet system, in Yurchak's view, looks less like
> the Kremlinocentric stereotype of a single dictatorial voice or a closed
> circle of voices endlessly repeating the same words (about the triumph of
> communism) against an apocalyptic backdrop of the ultimate confrontation
> with the real, not the imaginary West. Instead, it looks more like a novel,
> with multiple, shifting centers and voices (authors and heroes at one and
> the same time) that expand and reinvent each other's words in a framework
> that could last forever, as the title suggests. The work is much more about
> the production, productivity, and creativity of late Soviet culture than it
> is about its collapse. The discussion of the events and shifts precipitating
> the collapse and the nature of post-Soviet entrepreneurship comes at the
> very end of the study and is far less well developed than the work as a
> whole. The post-Soviet cultural phenomenon that carries on some of the
> features of what Yurchak describes may very well be found on the current
> Russian Internet and not among post-Soviet entrepreneurs as he suggests.
> Scholars interested in the geopolitical, economic, and ethno-national causes
> for the decline of the Soviet Union should look elsewhere. 
> 
>      Everything Was Forever provides fresh paradigms that pack a hefty
> explanatory punch both with regard to its immediate subject matter and
> beyond. Its publication means that discussions of Soviet life, culture, and
> literature that rely on the old, rigid binarisms are going to seem instantly
> dated. For anyone interested in Soviet culture broadly defined, including
> literature, language, discourse, music, and art, as well as those interested
> in the interface between the study of anthropology, ideology, subjectivity,
> and governmentality both in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, this
> study is a must-read.
> 
> Reference Cited
> 
>     * Bakhtin, M. M. 1990. Author and hero in aesthetic activity. In Art and
> answerability: Early philosophical essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim
> Liaponov; trans. Vadim Liaponov. Austin: University of Texas Press.
> 
> Prof. Nancy Condee, Director
> Graduate Program for Cultural Studies
> 2206 Posvar Hall
> University of Pittsburgh
> Pittsburgh, PA 15260
> 412-624-7232
> 
> 
> 
> Prof. Nancy Condee, Director
> Graduate Program for Cultural Studies
> 2206 Posvar Hall
> University of Pittsburgh
> Pittsburgh, PA 15260
> 412-624-7232
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Slavic & East European Languages and Literature list
> [mailto:SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU] On Behalf Of atacama at global.co.za
> Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 4:56 PM
> To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
> Subject: [SEELANGS] Truth vesus Truth / Pravda v. Istina
> 
> Greetings !
> 
> A friend of mine with an MA in Russian (!) asks
> what is the difference between 
> PRAVDA and ISTINA ?
> 
> Is the 1st 'factual accuracy' (as in correct)
> while the 2nd is 'spiritual/abstract truth' 
> as in revelation ?
> 
> Or is it a real synonym?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Vera Beljakova
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
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> 
> 
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