Platonov: kak na tesnom dvore

[Olga Meerson]

Robertjan,
Tim has a point, however: zhivnost' per se  does not idiomatically refer to one's life resources. Zhivnost' and zhivost' (let alone zhiznennye sily etc.) are not interchangeable. Admittedly, Platonov often makes non-interchangeable things interchange but not here. The reference to one's own life. or its "stock" cannot be primary. The possessive svoia does not help any, in fact only further alienating this zhivnost' from anything as ontological as the stock of one's own life. But you know all about these paradoxically alienating properties of Russian possessive pronouns. What tim is right about is that the Russian original, here (NOT elsewhere in the book!) does not refer to these peasants own lives at all. In "livestock" the distribution between the idiomatic meaning and the very subliminal allusion of the root is much closer to the Russian zhivnost'. The question is not about this very sentence (here Tim just happens to be factually right) but about your insistence on compe!
 ns!
ating for other spots in the book. With this question, the choice is entirely yours--since the one responsible for the project is also the one making decisions about such choices. I personally would make Tim's choice--in order not to reverse the idiomatic denotations and the covert  connotations--but in practical matters, after I say and do everything that depends on me, I always leave the choice to you: English is your language, not mine. As a rule, your compensations have worked (wonders!). But I have no right to say anything about compensations as such--merely about what impossible things are actually happening in Platonov's Russian.
o

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