The Great Russian Language/Turgenev

[Olga Zaslavsky]

Dear Alexandra,
We had to memorize the passage about "velikiy i moguchiy russkiy yazyk" in elementary school; it's firmly ingraned in my memory.
I was trying to suggest that the verb разбушевался was not a linguistic experimentation, but a sarcastic reference, evoking
a cross cultural cliché.
Best,
Olga.

> Dear Olga,
> 
> I guess that the allusion to Turgenev's 1882 prose poem  was meant to  
> be funny and was meant to suggest that Turgenev was right in his  
> assessment of the creative potential of the Russian language. See the  
> whole poem here:http://ilibrary.ru/text/1378/p.51/index.html
> It defines Russian language as velikii and moguchii...
> 
> Yet if we bear in mind that Turgenev's poem was included into his book  
> of prose poems  titled SENILIA (Starcheskoe)and that this book  has  
> very strong melancholic overtones evoking Arthur Shopenhauer's cycle  
> of philosophical fragments "Senilia" (as well as Baudelaire's "Petits  
> poemes en prose"), then the poem on the Russian language appears to be  
> much more philosophical than the allusion to the poem suggests.
> 
> All best,
> Sasha Smith
> 
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