The expression Hamburg account appeared to me. What does the expression “according to the Hamburg account” mean? Viktor Shklovsky on the etymology of the expression “Hamburg score”

0 Today people use expressions and phraseological units without thinking at all about their origin. It gets to the point where you have to scour the Internet in search of the proper answer. It is for this reason that the site was created, a site in which we constantly explain the meaning and meaning of various words and expressions. Today we'll talk about pretty famous phrase, This Hamburg account, you will be able to discover the meaning of the phraseological unit a little later.
However, before continuing, I would like to show you several informative articles on the meaning of proverbs and sayings. For example, what does it mean to cheat yourself; how to understand Bursting at the seams; what does Set Bath mean? who is called Versta Kolomenskaya, etc.
So let's continue Hamburg score meaning phraseology?

Hamburg account- this is an assessment of something without any concessions or discounts, with extreme accuracy and exactingness

Hamburg account- means something fair and honest, which is judged without falsehood and fraud

Example:

You bastard will still answer me about the Hamburg account!

This guy is a novice specialist, but in Hamburg terms, will he be able to withstand the fierce competition in this field of activity?

Wrestling was popular in Germany at one time, and many spectators came to watch two sweaty men wrestle each other around the arena. Cunning coaches and entrepreneurs have learned to benefit from such spectacular competitions. They distributed roles between the wrestlers in advance, said how the competition should take place, and who should ultimately become the winner and who would lose. In fact, from beginning to end, these were fixed fights, and many spectators did not even suspect it.

However, the wrestlers themselves were wondering which of them was actually the strongest and most dexterous. Therefore, once they all got together, they decided to hold fights with each other once a year to find out the strength of each athlete.
For this, they chose one small tavern, which was located in Hamburg. In this place, the fight was extremely fair and honest, but almost no one knew about the results of these fights.

True, if you dig a little deeper, you will find out that no one in Hamburg had ever heard of this mysterious tavern or the fights taking place in it. More likely Shklovsky, and it was through him that everyone learned this beautiful story, used false information, or simply lied for the sake of a nice word.

After reading this insightful article, you learned the meaning of the expression according to the Hamburg account, and now you won’t get caught

Unified State Examination - 2017 “HAMBURG ACCOUNT” AND IN THE BIG SCORE

(1) The expression “Hamburg account” came to me like this.
(2) In the 20s, the Writers' Union in its old composition, as one of the writers' organizations, was located in the Herzen House according to Tverskoy Boulevard. (3) It was summer. (4) A large awning opened onto the first floor directly into the garden: under the awning there was a restaurant, and the entire first floor was also a restaurant.
(5) The cook of the restaurant was a man whose last name I forgot; I know that by his previous profession he was a circus wrestler.
(6) Large, elderly people came to him, they sat heavily on chairs and, as I remember, sometimes deliberately broke them.
(7) The chef prepared a vinaigrette for his friends; portions were served in large, specially purchased wash basins. (8) After such a snack, people ate lunch.
(9) Once a man came, less heavy than the others, but larger than everyone else. (10) A retinue immediately formed around him, arranged according to rank: this was Ivan Poddubny. (11) He came from a fight: they fought in the Chapiteau circus. (12) Poddubny was then 70 years old. (13) He was asked to come out to fight. (14) He spoke about this calmly:
“It’s impossible to fight at 70 years old,” said Poddubny, “but you can show how they fight.” (15) And everyone knew that I couldn’t be put down based on my rank. (16) It’s not good to suddenly take a 70-year-old man and put him on his shoulder.
(17) - I’m demonstrating a roll and suddenly I feel that my young partner wants to squeeze me, instead of letting me show the classic bridge.
(18) Then I tell you exactly:

(19) - You can’t wrestle at 70 years old, but for two minutes or one minute I can be as strong as another wrestler. (20) But I never pushed. (21) If we had pushed, there would have been no survivors. (22) And then I pushed him; he was carried away on a board.
(23) To which the chef said calmly:
- Let him remember the Hamburg score!
(24) I asked what the Hamburg score was, and they explained to me that it is a score without conventions, without playing. (25) In the old days it was installed in Hamburg in closed competitions - without an audience.
(26) I wrote about Poddubny and the Hamburg account and, when publishing the book, included this story there. (27) The publishing house advised me to put this title on the cover. (28) It was in 1924.
(29) 25 years later, Konstantin Simonov, during the fight against cosmopolitanism, recalled this story of mine and pinned me down for many years.
(30) As Alexander Fadeev told me, I “should not have been mentioned” in the discussion.

(31) I’m not going to push myself now, but I will say that Simonov’s speech was published by the central newspaper Pravda in 1949. (32) Since then, no magazine has accepted my stories.

(33) And a year later, in one of the essays about the life of the village, in a conversation between collective farmers, I read: “But now we’ll give him a Hamburg score.” (34) This was said, as far as I remember, about a neighbor who lived dishonestly and was engaged in showing off.
(35) So these people read my story simple people, if they remember both the expression itself and its meaning.
(36) In sports there is an Olympic score, which, due to the significance of the competition, is a true score because it has indicators that can be verified.
(370In art, the rules of counting are sometimes violated and a person declared a champion suddenly appears on a tray of discounted books. (38) So, it means that the Hamburg counting, without show, without deception, is also in literature.

(According to V. Shklovsky)

Essay by a student of class 11 “A” Byankina Natalia

Is it really possible to observe the triumph of justice in life? This is the question that V. Shklovsky discusses.

I guess, that this problem always relevant. Unfortunately, human morality is imperfect. In small and large actions we are sometimes dishonest and selfish. A sense of justice is the norm to which a person should strive.

Reflecting on this problem, the author starts from real story with Ivan Poddubny, who was a very authoritative person at the beginning of the 20th century, so his words and actions carried great weight. Shklovsky relies on the wrestler’s statement about the “Hamburg score”, main idea which is justice in all actions.

The story about Ivan Poddubny became fateful for the critic. The second part of the text is devoted not only to dramatic events from the writer’s life, but also to serious conclusions about justice in art.

The text is written in the form of memories. The first-person narration gives it a confidential intonation. The narrator’s emotionality is conveyed to the reader.

It is impossible to disagree with the author's position. Both in life and in literature one can find many examples of injustice. For example, in M.A. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita,” envious writers and critics “mixed with mud” the Master’s novel about Pontius Pilate. The dishonest and unfair accusations rained down on the main character deprived his life of meaning. This led to him burning his work, breaking off relations with Margarita and hiding from reality in a madhouse.

If in the time of V.B. Shklovsky sport was fair, and the “Olympic score” was the “true score,” then in our time the situation is different. Unfortunately, we know from the means mass media that the results of the Olympiads are not always fair.

There is a well-known story about doping, which was fabricated by the enemies of our country. Everyone was very offended by the fact that Russian Paralympians were banned from participating in the Winter Olympics. But we believe that justice will definitely prevail and our athletes will be the best.

Shklovsky's text is very interesting in content. He allowed us to think about the fact that most often justice is better known through injustice. And that a person needs to establish the truth.

What would that mean?

“The expression “Hamburg score” came to me like this.
The Writers' Union in its old composition, as one of the writers' organizations, was located in the Herzen House on Tverskoy Boulevard. It was summer. A large awning opened onto the first floor directly into the garden: under the awning there was a restaurant, and the entire first floor was also a restaurant. The cook of the restaurant was a man whose last name I have forgotten; I know that by his previous profession he was a circus wrestler. Large, middle-aged people came to him, they sat heavily on chairs and, as I remember, sometimes broke them on purpose. The chef prepared a vinaigrette for his friends; portions were served in large, specially purchased wash basins. After such a snack, people ate lunch. One day a man came, less heavy than the others, but larger than everyone else. A retinue immediately formed around him, arranged according to rank: this was Ivan Poddubny. He came from a fight: they fought at the Chapiteau circus. Poddubny was then 70 years old. He was asked to come out to fight. He spoke about this calmly:
“It’s impossible to fight at seventy years old,” said Poddubny, “but you can show how they fight.” And everyone knew that I couldn’t be put down based on my rank. It’s not good to suddenly take a seventy-year-old man and put him on his shoulder.
(I’m retelling all this 40 years later, so you don’t treat the quotes as quoting documents that are on my desk. I continue to tell.)
“I’m demonstrating a roll and suddenly I feel that my young partner wants to squeeze me, instead of letting me show the classic bridge.
Then I tell you exactly: “You can’t fight at seventy years old, but for two minutes or one minute I can be as strong as another wrestler. But I never pushed. If we had pushed, there would have been no survivors. Then I pushed him; he was carried away on a board. Here the chef said calmly:
“Let him remember the Hamburg score!”
I asked what the Hamburg score was, and they explained to me that it is a score without conventions, without playing. In the old days it was installed in Hamburg in closed competitions - without an audience.
When I published the book, I wrote about the Hamburg account. I was advised to put this title on the cover. It was in 1924"
(memoirs of V. Shklovsky in a retelling of the writer V. Konetsky)

“The Hamburg Account” is a collection of articles, memoirs, essays, published by Shklovsky in 1928

— The modernism of Pilnyak’s form is purely external, very convenient for copying, but he himself is not a thick, not rich writer.
The elementary nature of the basic technique makes Pilnyak easy to copy, which probably explains his infectiousness for young writers.”.
— About K. Fedin’s novel “Cities and Years.” “The novel contains interesting newspaper material, but it is clumsily connected, and all the characters in a troupe walk from Germany to the Mordovians. The novel is quotable, the descriptions consist of enumerations, the characters are not needed, there is no plot, and the plot difficulty is therefore replaced by a temporary rearrangement.”
— About Babel. “A foreigner from Paris, only Paris without London, Babel saw Russia as a French writer seconded to Napoleon’s army could see it. The meaning of Babel’s technique is that he speaks in one voice about both the stars and the clap.”
— About V. Kataev. “Embezzlers” are the fish in the mirror. You cannot dive into this shiny surface."
— About Tynyanov’s “Wax Person” - that even the era of Peter the Great “does not consist of only amazing things” and is not “just a cabinet of curiosities in alcohol”

Synonyms of the phraseological unit “Hamburg score”

• no fools
• exactingly
• seriously
• without going into details
• strictly
• demanding
• by and large

Application of the expression in literature

— « The very existence of such a company, where frank conversations took place about literature and politics, conversations about the Hamburg account, conversations that we called — “outright Marxism” could have ended badly at that time"(David Samoilov "General Diary")
— « In our fatherland in those years, criticism turned into journalism - to gouge or promote - one yearned for textual analysis, for the Hamburg account"(Andrey Voznesensky “On the virtual wind”)
— « It’s too early to play, but whoever reads Gogol’s text is an application for a competition “on the Hamburg score"(Sergey Yursky "Flashes")
— « So, not by official position, titles and awards, and according to the Hamburg account, Nikolai Nikolaevich Urvantsev was a great polar explorer and traveler"(Vladimir Sanin “Don’t say goodbye to the Arctic”)
— « But to be honest, according to Hamburg standards, why should he take this hundred from a poor student?"(Yu. V. Trifonov “Time and Place”)

Linguists classify the expression “Hamburg count”, or “according to Hamburg count”, as phraseological units whose meaning is not equal to the sum of the meanings of the words. In other words, knowing what a “Hamburg” is and what a “count” is will not shed any light on the meaning of this phrase.

Intuitive understanding of expression based on context

However, the expression “Hamburg account”, or “according to the Hamburg account”, is usually intuitive from the context and is often equated with the phraseological unit “by and large”. In general, this is true, but only an intuitive understanding of a phraseological unit usually does not make it possible to freely use it in one’s own speech, since the boundaries of the meaning are not entirely clear, and secondly, there is always doubt about whether it is understood correctly and what it has relation to the city of Hamburg.

Knowledge of what a “Hamburg count” is, as well as the history of the origin of the phraseological unit, will help you understand the nuances of meaning and the specifics of using this expression.

Viktor Shklovsky on the etymology of the expression “Hamburg score”

The origin of phraseological units is closely connected with the name of the famous literary scholar and critic Viktor Shklovsky. His book is called “The Hamburg Account”. The meaning of the phraseological unit becomes clear after getting acquainted with the parable told by Shklovsky and explaining the title of the book.

The parable says that professional sports wrestlers never fight honestly, their task is to perform as ordered. They must lose (lie down) when the entrepreneur tells them to. This scam is for making money. However, every year in one of the taverns in Hamburg, wrestlers gather for a fair fight. Their fight takes place without spectators, from whom both the fight itself and how long, unaesthetic and difficult it really is for the wrestlers are hidden. At this non-spectacular event, it becomes clear which of the wrestlers is stronger and which is weaker.

This is done in order to find out the real value of each wrestler, regardless of where he occupies in the open arena.

"Hamburg Account" in literature

It is this struggle, hidden from everyone, in which official titles and titles are not important, that Shklovsky calls the “Hamburg score.” important in relation to literature, or more precisely, to what place a particular writer occupies in the literary arena. What the phraseological unit “Hamburg account” means for Viktor Shklovsky becomes clear from the use of the expression “according to the Hamburg account” in the text of his short article. “According to the Hamburg account, Serafi-movich and Veresa-ev are not there. They don’t make it to the city,” the author writes and then continues his allegory, saying that in Hamburg, that is, at hidden competitions where the true strength of a wrestler is revealed, Bulgakov would have found himself at the mat, Isaac Babel would act as a lightweight wrestler, the strength of Maxim Gorky would be questionable, since this “athlete” is not always in shape, but Velimir Khlebnikov would be a champion.

One of the areas where the expression “Hamburg account” is used is economic. The etymology and meaning of the phraseological unit are such that it can be used in the sense that they are built on honest, open principles, when all parties to the contract are equal both formally and in essence.

"The Hamburg Account" in literary criticism

As can be seen from the retelling of Shklovsky’s short article, the Hamburg score is important in literature, as in sports. The meaning of phraseological units in context literary criticism is that in literature, as in wrestling, any figure can be evaluated according to two systems. For the first, the official “alignment” of forces is important, and for the second, the real one. In the first case, formal indicators of the success of the author and work are important in literature, and in the second, his real scale of talent is important.

Of course, in literature it is much more difficult to find out which writers “don’t make it to the city” and who is the champion than in sports. Ultimately, according to the Hamburg account, only time can evaluate a writer and a work, but what is meant is that when evaluating a literary phenomenon, it is important not to follow momentary criteria, but to look at it as if it existed outside of time.

"Hamburg Account" in various fields of culture and art

Since the time of Shklovsky (and his book was written in 1928), in many spheres of culture it has become familiar expression"Hamburg account" The meaning of phraseological units has expanded. Most often, an assessment “according to the Hamburg account” means an assessment cultural phenomenon or a cultural figure, regardless of any opinions, official recognition, awards, prizes awarded, popularity and fame.

Thus, a scientist, by coincidence of circumstances, may not have a high scientific title - not be an academician, or even a professor, but just an associate professor, not occupy leadership positions, not participate in official events, but “according to the Hamburg account,” that is, in reality , to be an interesting scientist, whose thoughts, works and achievements are truly important for science.

This approach to evaluation is possible not only in relation to a person, but also, for example, to a book. One book can be published by a major publishing house with a circulation of ten thousand copies, widely known among readers, have a lot of fans, and a TV series can be made based on it, but according to the Hamburg account, this is just a commercial project or a temporary, momentary phenomenon. Another book may be published in a small provincial publishing house with a circulation of five hundred copies and known only to a small circle of readers, receiving negative reviews from critics, but by Hamburg standards it may turn out to be a truly talented work.

Allegorical meaning of the expression “Hamburg score”

However, these are not all possible meanings of the expression “Hamburg score”. The meaning of phraseological units in modern language even wider. It is used when they want to talk about the real, honest price of something, about true position of things. You can judge and evaluate according to the Hamburg score not only phenomena and cultural figures, but also your actions, relationships in the family, relationships between people, events in the country, etc. - in a word, everything that can have a formal, official side and an actual, true.

Examples of the use of the expression “Hamburg bill”

The specificity of a phraseological unit is such that even with a clear understanding of its meaning, its use can cause problems, since examples of grammatical “fitting” of an expression into a phrase are needed. There really aren’t many grammatical and syntactic options:

• Pelevin is a strong satirist and a very successful commercial project, a successful writer, but, according to the Hamburg account, then this is emptiness, like all the phenomena of postmodernism.
• He is very willing to talk in the most different topics, but in front of Ivan Ivanovich he becomes silent: he understands that, according to the Hamburg account, all his knowledge is superficial.
• I trust this vet. He will never say too much or give advice if he does not understand the situation. He works according to the Hamburg account, his goal is not to pretend that he understands everything, but to save the animal and not harm it.
• Of course, they won this match. But, according to the Hamburg account, they played poorly. They were just lucky. This was their day.

Appropriate and inappropriate contexts

A phraseological unit is one that, if its meaning is transparent, is used freely and promptly in its use. The same thing happens with the expression “Hamburg score”: the origin and meaning of the words are transparent. This means that you can safely experiment. However, in in this case you should beware of using the expression even in cases where it is well understood what a Hamburg account is.

The fact is that this expression itself is intended for conversation “according to the Hamburg account” and resists ordinary, everyday, unimportant topics and contexts. It will be inappropriate when talking about whether the birthday party went well, whether the cake was a success, or what level of service was in the cafe. In these situations, the expression “Hamburg score” is not redundant only if everyday events for some reason are important in someone’s life or are significant for the life of a city or country.