Kotlovan: such'ya zazhimka

[David Powelstock]

Edward, there is a lot of supposition in your argument.  First, we have no
evidence that either masculine or feminine form was *ever used at all* in
spoken language. Platonov (and his characters) use a lot of expressions that
are, frankly, made up. And we have no attestation of zazhim or zazhimka ever
being used in reference to a person. Second, of course there are plenty of
grammatically feminine nouns that can be applied to men. (I thought I made
this clear in my post.) But those are words whose usage in this way is
attested. If indeed this is something that the character Zhachev has made
up, one wonders (or ought to wonder) why he uses the feminine. Third, you
suppose that you know what Russians in rural areas in the 1920s knew about
canine copulation. Frankly, I don't think you do. I grew up in the suburbs
of New Jersey, where dogs copulated in private, but I can assure you that
the phenomenon in question was part of the lore of every 14-year-old boy.

As for elki-palki, you presume a kind of normative rule of punctuation that
simply does not exist, and even if it did, inventive authors such as
Platonov would make it their business to break it. Russians string together
muliple complete (optional subject)+predicate structures with commas all the
time. Moreover, if Platonov had written his single sentence as two
("...svoloch'! Such'ia zazhimka!") we still wouldn't know whether Such'ia
zazhimka applies to the same (human) referent as svoloch' (Svoloch'! Such'ia
zazhimka!) or is a generalized exclamation pertaining to the situation. I'll
stick by my initial point on this one: the comma may indicate apposition, it
may not.

Cheers,
David P.


-----Original Message-----
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list
[mailto:SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Edward M Dumanis
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2008 3:16 PM
To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Kotlovan: such'ya zazhimka

On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, David Powelstock wrote:
.........../snip/............

> The usage of zazhimka attested by Kuznetsov, which I reproduced in my 
> last post, seems to make more sense in the context than an unattested 
> usage of zazhimka as referring to the person, especially if one takes 
> into account the unexplained (but, again, not impossible) use of the 
> feminine noun to apply to a man, when there exists a perfectly 
> synonymous masculine variant, "zazhim."

The reason is very simple: while one can construct the gramatically perfect
masculine version, it does not mean that this version was used in spoken
language for this type of context. Please take into account that many of the
words that might be addressed to the same person do not have any masculine
gender, e.g, svoloch', zhadina, suka (kobel' - would carry quite a different
meaning). So, "such'ja zazhimka" would perfectly fit the meaning of a nasty
greedy person (where one would derive the meaning without any knowledge of
dogs' sexual life - I do not think such knowledge was widespread, or, at
least, suggestive even in the rural areas
- from zazhimat' in the sense of "be greedy").


> Let me give an example of why one shouldn't be too hasty in assuming 
> that zazhimka applies to the person. Imagine that you were not 
> familiar with the expression, "elki-palki." You encounter the 
> following sentence: "Ia tak i znal, chto oni svolochi,elki-palki!" It 
> would be plausible to infer that "elki-palki" had the same referent as 
> "svolochi," but in this case the inference would be wrong. 
> "Elki-palki" is a generalized The situation at hand is analogous. The 
> position of such'ia zazhimka in Platonov's sentence tells us little, if
anything, about its referent.
>

Yes, "elki-palki" in this text could be a characteristic of a person if we
knew such a meaning. To avoid the ambiguity, one would write "Ia tak i znal,
chto oni svolochi. Elki-palki!" 
However, if you want to use it as a description of a person, you have no
choice but to use a comma.

Sincerely,

Edward Dumanis <dumanis at buffalo.edu>

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