Beardobibliography / Бородобиблиография
Dear readers! I’m taking a few moments from my busy schedule as a relatively obscure supervillain to respond to your kind and interesting comments to the post from 12/10. To Evan of Duck Beater: I, too, find beards to be a more useful conceptual category than bells. In fact my original pitch to the New Yorker was for a piece about "Giant Russian Beards." The many fine Web resources on this subject include: "The Russian Beard! What a History!!!"; the detailed note on beards in Pavel Florensky’s Essay in Orthodox Theodicy; and, for Russian readers, the beard sites Borodka.ru and Borodatyh.net. As for the image of Gen.-Lt. A. I. Kosich (below), it’s from the Russian Wikipedia entry for beard.
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| Gen.-Lt. A. I. Kosich Russian Imperial Army |
"Russian Beard" Valeriia Strunnikova |
Pursuing the subject of bearded Russians, thanks to Grisha of the Slavic Department for setting the record straight about Alexei II… I can’t believe we have to wait 50 years for him to be canonized!! And I share with Peter my favorite picture so far from the funeral, which I believe shows Medvedev vampirishly draining the last drops of the patriarch’s life force.
As for the non-bearded New Yorker editors, SW Fosca is correct in assuming that they aren’t Rushin either. This comment reminded me of an entertaining scene from P. G. Wodehouse’s The Mating Season, in which Catsmeat and Gussie, both in the throes of horrible depression, have to put on a Pat-and-Mike slapstick routine to raise money for a village Church Organ:
"My sister’s in the ballet," said Catsmeat despondently.
There was a pause here, because Gussie had fallen into a sort of trance and was standing staring silently before him as if the Church Organ had really got him down at last, and Catsmeat, realizing that only moral support, if that, was to be expected from this quarter, was obliged to carry on the conversation by himself… "You say your sister’s in the ballet?" said Catsmeat with a catch in his voice. "Yes, begorrah, my sister’s in the ballet. What does your sister do in the ballet?" he went on… "She comes rushin’ in and she goes rushin’ out. What does she have to rush like that for?" asked Catsmeat with a stifled sob. "Faith and begob, because it’s a Rushin’ ballet."
And, too broken in spirit to hit Gussie with his umbrella, he took him by the elbow and directed him to the exit.
Nonetheless I am happy to relate that the non-Rushin’ editors finally assigned a tentative publication date for the story of the bells (in January)! I guess it just took the removal of Alexei II to get the ball rolling again. As a relatively obscure super-villain, I am wondering who has to die before they will run my 16-month-old piece on comedy traffic school…
A propos of Russians, and vampires, and beards, I’m also really happy that my interview of the famous and super-interesting director Timur Bekmambetov, who made the Russian vampire blockbusters Night Watch (2004) and Day Watch (2006), and who also has a beard, is coming out in the next issue of Snob magazine. Inconveniently for many of my dear readers, it’s a magazine for Russian-language snobs. But please stay tuned for future installments of My Life and Thoughts, in which I will post some of the editorial out-takes in English.
P.S. As I was posting this it occurred to me that, although many of the creators of vampires have beards, the vampires themselves seem not to. Why is this? According to WikiAnswers, it’s because "they get you when your asleep!If they did have beards(which they dont) the blood would get caught in the beards." According to other sources, however, vampires are even etymologically related to beards—what can I say. I wash my hands of the matter. See here for vampire shaving tips.
Tags: beards, publications, religion, Russia, vampires
December 31st, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Хороший журнал, этот “Сноб” … Жаль, что в Америке его приобрести нельзя … И пожалуйста, не забудьте “Сумеречный дозор”
December 31st, 2008 at 3:42 pm
honoured that a wodehousian antecedent has been adduced in the matter of my light jeux-de-mots. On that of Russian beards: the late professor lyndsey hughes wrote on this subject, I believe in a festschrift for Paul Dukes but i can’t be sure.
January 2nd, 2009 at 7:22 pm
Heh. Actually, it’s the Slavic word for ‘boundary’ that’s related to an Old Irish word for ‘beard,’ but don’t let me spoil the joke!
January 12th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
To the alarmingly knowledgeable SW Foska: many thanks on behalf of all beardophiles, scholars of the “long eighteenth century,” scholars of the “long eighteenth-century beard,” et al.—here is the citation: Lindsey Hughes, “‘A Beard is an Unnecessary Burden’: Peter I’s Laws on Shaving and their Roots in Early Russia,” in Roger Bartlett and Lindsey Hughes, eds., Russian Society and Culture and the Long Eighteenth Century: Essays in Honour of Anthony G. Cross (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2004), 21–34. I think it isn’t available online, but there appears to be lots of good stuff on anti-beard legislation in Hughes’s book on Peter.
Dear Language Hat! You have a wonderful website! You know what my problem is, is that unlike the alarmingly knowledgeable SW Foska, I don’t read German. (I did give it a shot at one point… although somehow when I actually got to Leipzig, all the phrases left my head except for “Entschuldigen Sie Bitte! Können Sie das bitte wiederholen?”, which led to some long but I believe monotonous conversations.) Anyway, so I read that entry too fast, and assumed that Granitz somehow meant both vampire and border, thus validating the ever-burgeoning discourse on liminality and vampires. (Hey, speaking of liminal vampires, arnavut is Turkish for “Albanian”… so maybe the vampire Арнаут Павле, from the border of Ottoman-controlled Serbia, was actually Albanian Pavle?) But I guess the true explanation opens the door to a new discourse of liminality and beards.
Дорогая Анна! Я очень рада узнать, что Сноб уже имеет своих международных энтузиастов! Я тоже рада Вам сообщить, что достаточно сделать один телефонный звонок (+7 (495) 544-22-00… или отправить письмо на podpiska@snob.ru), чтобы подписаться на журнал в любой точке мира (6152 руб./ год).
Насчет “Сумеречного дозора”: в следующим номере, Вы можете читать о том, что этого фильма уже не будет! “‘Для меня “Особо Опасен” стал своеобразным американским дозором,’ отметил Бекмамбетов”… а чем связаны “американский дозор” и русские дозори? Прочитайте Сноб и узнаете!
January 14th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Elif, thank you for getting the full citation for the Hughes article, especially since I had indicated the wrong festschriftee. I have more data both on beards and vampire etymology but my notes are in a mess. Back later!
January 26th, 2009 at 6:17 am
After long delay, my barbological titbit is ready for public unveiling. It concerns the Russian occupation of the Danubian Principalities in 1828-36, a significant phase in the nineteenth-century imperial expansion. The Russian army saw itself as liberating fellow Orthodox Christians from under the Turkish yoke, but at the same time a number of culture clashes occurred with the Moldavian and Wallachian boyars. Among other things, the latter still sported beards, the length and cut of which often denoted rank. Count Pavel Kiselev had great difficulty extirpating this practice, which he saw as barbaric (the Russians themselves having abandoned it over a hundred years previously, as is documented in Professor Hughes’s aforementioned article). In a moment of exasperation he described the bearded boyars as ’surely the most turbulent intriguers of all the bearded creatures thronging under the arch of heaven’. In the original (apud A.P. Zablotskii-Desyatovskii, Graf P.D. Kiselev i ego vremia. 4 vols. St Petersburg, 1882, p. 83), this reads: ‘Je suis a batailler avec les barbus moldaves, qui sont assurement les plus turbulent intrigailleurs de tous les hommes a barbe qui pullulent sous la calotte du ciel’. So now you know where to find such people.
Still haven’t found my vampire-etymology information: when i do, I will post it on the language blog, where the main discussion on that subject took place.
January 26th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Dear SW Foska, thank you for the magnificent quote by Graf Kiselev. That sentence has such vigor! And the word “intriguailleurs” is absolutely awesome – and also a legitimate French word, in spite of what I initially suspected.
February 5th, 2009 at 8:25 am
Imberbe, your glabrous gloss gratifies me greatly. With free francophone fact-checking into the bargain! What more could I ask for? That you explain why the not unbearded character in your avatar, though named Professeur Tournesol in Herge’s original, goes in English by the name of Professor Calculus, when Tournesol doesn’t mean calculus but sunflower.