Truth vesus Truth / Pravda v. Istina

Sun Sep 24 10:30:49 UTC 2006

This is probably the best way in such a situation  -  to give as many examples as possible... because both words _are_ kind of synonyms, but not always interchangeable. Everything depends on the context, as always.

Ustami mladentsa glagolet istina (saying).

Istina/pravda (meaning "sut' dela") zakliuchaetsia v tom, chto...

Istinnaja (vs lozhnaja) posylka (I remember this from my "logika" class. That's probably the only thing I remember from that class...)

Dokopat'sia (colloq.) do istiny (pravdy?..  sometimes it is okay too, I think) (meaning exactly "the true essence of _some_ things", and it can be replaced with "dokopat'sia do suti"...).

Istinnaja pravda! (kind of: I agree absolutely with what you say!)

Poznat' istinu ( not "pravdu"; sort of reach the state when you have no more questions about this crazy world... might be rather boring...)

On skazal nam pravdu (not "istinu").

On otkryl nam istinu (not "pravdu").

Nastavit' kogo-libo na put' istinnyj (probably the same with "pravednyj"...)

Dukhovnaja istina (not "pravda")

Nothing else springs into my mind...
Vera! I hope it may somehow help to understand what is what...

Best regards,
Maryna Vinarska

Edward M Dumanis <dumanis at BUFFALO.EDU> wrote: 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 

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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