"Who, whom?"

[Alina Israeli]

Кто кого is the phrase meaning 'who will win in a fight, in a  
competition', it is not about influence.

One of the earlier examples in the corpus is from 1850, and it does  
not look like it's been coined at that moment, so it must have existed  
before:

― А теперь за тобой очередь, Яша:  
смотри, не сробей. Посмотрим, кто кого,  
посмотрим… А хорошо поёт рядчик, ей- 
богу хорошо. [И. С. Тургенев. Певцы (1850)]

Russian being Russian, there are several examples of кто кого  
перепьет, with the earliest in 1836 (although we remember the  
competition even earlier, Сильвио перепил Бурцова):

Зато поднеси мне водки не только ваш  
брат горец, а просто солдатский  
поросенок ― посмотрел бы ты, кто кого  
перепьет! [А. А. Бестужев-Марлинский.  
Мулла-Нур (1836)]


>
>
>
> I have come across this famous phrase ("Kto kogo") in Vasily  
> Sleptsov's novel Trudnoe vremya (1865). In searching it, I find the  
> phrase in Gogol's Revizor and the fact that Lenin adopted it as a  
> Bolshevik slogan to explain the fundamental question of politics,  
> who will dominate whom.
>
> Tom Friedman's recent column in the New York Times was entitled "Who  
> will Influence Whom?"
>
> Does anyone know where and when the phrase first appears? Was Gogol  
> the first? Did it then become common? Inquiring minds want to know….
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Michael Katz
> Middlebury College
> mkatz at middlebury.eduфоунд тче пчрасе ин Гогол'с
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Use your web browser to search the archives, control your  
> subscription
>  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
>                        http://seelangs.wix.com/seelangs
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Use your web browser to search the archives, control your  
> subscription
>  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
>                        http://seelangs.wix.com/seelangs
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alina Israeli
Associate Professor of Russian
WLC, American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave.
Washington DC 20016
(202) 885-2387 	fax (202) 885-1076
aisrael at american.edu






-------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                        http://seelangs.wix.com/seelangs
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/seelang/attachments/20140430/a6fbef91/attachment.html>