Tolstoy and stenography

[Alfred Cramer]

Some months ago I sent out a query about a famous Tolstoy quotation. It's about time I got back with a report on what I learned. I also have a followup question. Tolstoy calls music the stenography of feelings in two places:

1) a letter to Sophia Andreevna (his wife), January 16, 1905 (Jubilee edition, v. 84)

2) a diary entry, January 20, 1905 (v. 55)

Both passages say more or less the same thing:

"Music is the stenography of feelings [stenografia chuvstv]. When we speak, we raise, lower, strengthen, accelerate or decelerate the sequence of sounds in order to express the feelings that accompany what we say?the thoughts, images, and events we narrate in words. Music conveys just the combinations and sequences of feelings without thoughts, images, and events."

Thanks to everyone who helped me get this far, especially my colleague Konstantine Klioutchkine for help with the translation.

What Tolstoy says about music expressing feelings without thoughts, images, or events is pretty common in discussions of music (and of language) is straightforward. It's not clear from the passages, though, why the connection of music to shorthand. I don't think it's just a poetic figure of speech. I have an idea that Tolstoy is alluding to German shorthand systems such as the one invented by F. X. Gabelsberger (published 1834) that economized by blending the symbols representing consonants with the symbols representing the vowels: press hard with the pen while writing the symbol for "m" and you have "am", because a heavy stroke is the symbol for "a"; take more horizontal space with the symbol for "m" and you get "em" because a broad stroke is the symbol for "e", and so forth. Now if you take the Rousseauian or Romantic view that vowels express (or originally expressed) emotion and consonants rein in the vowels to give linguistic specificity, that might provide a connection between feelings and stenography that could explain Tolstoy's analogy.

Some histories of shorthand say that an adaptation of Gabelsberger's system was the main Russian system through the early twentieth century. I'm not really equipped to evaluate this claim.

Hence the further question: has anyone encountered anything relating to stenography (shorthand) in Russia in the 19th and early twentieth centuries?

Thanks--

Alfred Cramer


--

Alfred W. Cramer
Pomona College Music Department
340 College Avenue
Claremont, CA 91711

Office (909)607-2455
Fax (909)621-8645

acramer at pomona.edu
awc04747 at pomona.edu
alfred.cramer at pomona.edu

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