Lyudmila Petrushevskaya linguistics. “Battered Pussy” - a cycle of “linguistic fairy tales” by L.S.
On the anniversary of the wonderful writer Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, the RG expert reflects on whether the original texts of the “living classic” are suitable for teaching Russian to foreigners.
Natalya Kulibina, Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences, author of the online course "Reading Lessons - a holiday that is always with you", professor at the Pushkin State Institute of Russian Language:
In the methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language, teaching Russian as a second native language, and even for native speakers, there is always a need to select authentic texts of small volume. Unfortunately, in our literature, searching for small text is a big problem. Our writers gravitate toward novels, stories, and epics.
For quite a long time in my practice, I got out of the situation using poetic texts. Fortunately, we have both Tyutchev’s four lines and eight lines, which are a special form for Russian poetry. Like Pasternak, “I would write eight lines about the properties of passion...” But, of course, we must teach to read not only poetic texts, but also prose. The story should be very short, especially when it comes to teaching foreigners.
In the 1990s, I even wrote to some contemporary writers, including Boris Akunin and Alexandra Marinina. She offered to become a “Russian Simenon” and a “Russian Agatha Christie.” They took the bait and asked: what needs to be done for this? I answered: write short stories - then your texts will teach the Russian language all over the world. They told me that this is an interesting idea, but there are obligations to publishing houses, and as soon as they are fulfilled, we will write immediately. But I didn’t wait for the short texts.
Quite recently, there was a discussion in a professional group of teachers of Russian as a foreign language on Facebook: the moderator suggested using translated literature to teach children to read. I couldn’t stand it and wrote that it was very strange. For what? When studying the translated text, training in speech etiquette, samples of Russian speech, and linguistic and cultural objects will be missed.
Therefore, my interest in the fairy tales of Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya is understandable: on the one hand, short texts are needed, and she has very short linguistic fairy tales. On the other hand, they wonderfully illustrate my thesis that a person can understand a text in which he does not know a single word if he knows Russian grammar and can recognize this situation.
I first heard the performance of Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya about 20 years ago, on TV, when she read her first linguistic fairy tale, “Battered Pussies”: “Kalusha and Kalushaty grabbed the fur. And she took Butyavka, and howled: - Kalushata! Kalushatochki! Butyavka! and they shook off Butyavka. And they got drunk..."
And I realized that this is the egg that is for Christ’s day.
At that time, I was writing my first methodological manual for teachers of Russian as a foreign language, “Why, what and how to read in class.” And there I explained that a person can understand a text in which he does not know a word, provided that he knows the grammar. And I really needed Lyudmila Stefanovna’s fairy tales to demonstrate this. We do not know a single word from these fairy tales, but they have very correct grammatical forms, ideal and correct syntactic structures. All together, combined with the plot, which is a description of an easily recognizable situation, gives a stunning effect.
When reading Petrushevskaya’s fairy tales, we cannot look in dictionaries, and this is a great happiness. Often the dictionary may give the wrong meaning. I believe that the dictionary kills the work with the text when you look at every second word.
We sometimes underestimate the capabilities of students; it seems to us that if they do not know all the words of the language, they will not understand the text. They will even understand, and they will understand better! And when we individually begin to parse unfamiliar words, we do a disservice to our students, because the picture in their heads falls apart.
I remember once at the Pushkin Institute I was asked to teach a class for foreign students. When I entered the assembly hall, it was possible to study geography: 350 students from Asia, Africa, and Europe. I handed them the pieces of paper and we started reading. It was very funny. “Kalusha and the Kalushats hit the ground.” Who is Kalusha? She hit the fluff, that is, the idea of movement, which means it is an animated being, and of the feminine gender. Syapala is a verb of movement, wandered or walked. And we even know where this happened - by the fringe, that is, by some space. And she took Butyavka away. “Butyavka” is also capitalized, another character appears. “Uvazila” is a transitive verb, that is, saw. And after that she “wills”, followed by a colon. And then there is direct speech, that is, “volit” is a verb of speech. And the Kalushata-Kalushatochki are the children of Kalushi.
Every philologist knows the classic phrase attributed to Professor Lev Nikolaevich Shcherba. He came up with it when he was demonstrating the power and richness of Russian grammar: “The glokaya kuzdra shteko budlanula bokr and curls the bokrenka.” The grammar of no other language has such explanatory power. Psycholinguists have exploited this phrase mercilessly throughout the second century. They give it to children who can’t even read yet and ask them to draw a picture. And - what a surprise: children do not see the semantic incompleteness of this phrase. They start drawing wonderfully, and their hair is really not white and fluffy, but scary and toothy. A large bokr and a small bokr. It’s clear what the kuzdra did - it knocked the bokra, a one-time movement. As one student told me, “knocked him out.” Absolutely right. But why she knocked him out and what she did with the bokrenok - there is a point that allows for different interpretations. There are two options: some say that she knocked out the bokr, and “curls the bokr”, that is, he was not well either. More humane ones say that bokra does not know how to treat a child, and she “curls” him - nurses him, caresses him.
Children who are native speakers easily illustrate this tricky language because they learn the grammar in a general way. And if this is a foreign speaker who is already familiar with all grammatical categories, except participles and gerunds.
First, I did a lesson on Petrushevskaya's fairy tale "Abvuka". It was developed for the educational complex of schools in Latvia. Why did I choose her? In this story, a mother is trying to teach her children to read and write, but the children are trying to “get into trouble,” that is, they don’t want to do anything. She tries to persuade them, gives various arguments. The diploma is sloppy, “without an abvukka on the fluff it’s not sloppy,” and in general “they don’t pour out kalushas into kalushas.” Everything is very clear, this situation is more than familiar to children. Abvuka is a school plot. Any schoolchild, even in the first grade, will sympathize with the Kalushats; they immediately guess what it is.
Then an online lesson was created on the website “Reading Lessons - a holiday that is always with you.” I wrote to Lyudmila Stefanovna asking for permission to use “Abvuki”. As a result, I received not only permission, but also a request to do another lesson on the fairy tale “I-pyzyava”, which was included in the Russian language textbook in Kazakhstan. There was a powerful protest: people didn’t read the text and decided that it was some kind of gobbledygook. Lyudmila Stefanovna asked me to do a lesson and was going to send it to Astana. I don’t know whether I sent it or not, although we did the lesson.
The story begins like this: “Kalushi has kalushata: Kanna, Manna, Guranna and Kukusya. Butyavka has a little butyavka: Gaga Pryushka. And once and a while the little butyavka Gaga squirted and smacked Kukusya: [email protected].” This is an email correspondence. “And a rant” is an email, “a rant” means he wrote it. And the letter is completely transparent with love content. Gaga Pryushka expressed his smacks, and Kukusya answers him with restraint. And then the mothers come in. First, Kalusha read this correspondence and Gaga said to Pryushka: don’t write. And then Butyavka also answers. The story of Romeo and Juliet.
If something is not clear, then I am guided by the thesis of Boris Mikhailovich Gasparov, who said that native speakers have a very rough idea of many words in their native language. Therefore, it’s okay if something is not clear. And this is correspondence, the story is very transparent and understandable.
In the context of the course work, it is worth highlighting the cycle of “linguistic tales” by L.S. Petrushevskaya’s “Batted Pussy”, written in different years of her work. The first of them, with the same name, was written in 1984 and first published at the same time in Literaturnaya Gazeta.
The author involves the reader in the game, trusting him. Understanding the text is difficult, but there is a key - knowledge of the Russian language. Lyudmila Petrushevskaya is not the first writer to compose a text from made-up words. One such example is the first quatrain of L. Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky,” included in “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” In Russian translation by D.G. Orlovskaya it sounds like this: “ It crept in. Squishy little shorts / They were poking around on the nave, /
And the zelyuks grunted, / Like mumziks in a movie"[Carroll 1979: 22].
Even more similar to Petrushevskaya’s stories is the phrase of the famous linguist L.V. Shcherba, invented in order to more clearly show the meaning of affixes in the Russian language. This phrase is mentioned in the story “About the gnarly bush and bokrenka”:
“And Kalusha wills:
Let's talk about Shcherba.
Yo Scherba? - Biryat Kalushata.
And Shcherba, - Kalusha is birting, - ohdys-yegdys chanted: “The glokaya kuzdra [shteko] kudlanul [in Shcherba - “budlanulla”] the bokr and the curly-tailed bokrenka..."
And the bokrenka is curled up! - Kalusha beats. - Well, come on, isn’t it a bitch when Kanna, Manna and Guranna curl up Kukusya? A? Curled and curled? A?" [Petrushevskaya 2003: 67]. As can be seen from the quote, the Kalushis, Butyavkas and Pyas speak the same language in which the sentence about kuzdra is written. The words kudlanut and kurdyachit easily coexist in one phrase with the words invented by L.S. Petrushevskaya, which means they are no less expressive. Proposal by L.V. Shcherby in “Puski Byatykh” is a skillful hint for competent readers. It helps to understand one of the goals of writing the book: to show the expressiveness of affixes in the Russian language.
The collection “Byatye Pusski” consists of 16 stories that happened to the main characters of the book - Kalusha, Lyapupa, Butyavka and others. The stories are not united by a common plot.
The first thing that attracts attention in the nature of the narrative is the lack of description of the scene of action and the characters; there are no objects. All this is similar to theater - the appearance of the actors is not very important, two or three sets, due to their versatility, are enough to outline the scene of the action. Thus, napushka is a stage from which people descend and ascend, and burdysya is a screen behind which one can hide. The reader is a spectator, and this book is a “Linguistic Comedy.”
Just as little is known about the heroes. On the one hand, both their arms and legs are paws (that is, paws), and the butyavka has 12 paws, 38 ears, 8 eyes. But they are distinguished from insects - centipedes - by human characters, problems, relationships. And such a phenomenon as the edibility of Butyavka can also be understood as a metaphor. Kalush and Butyavkas (like the heroes of “Wild Animal Tales” and “Sea Dust Stories”) know e-mail, emoticons; the words of the boring butyavka “Fyva proldzh” are nothing more than letters read in order from the symbol keys of a computer - in a word, they live just like people. In the caring mother Kalush, the gossip Lyapusha, Butyavka, who is oppressed by everyone and demands to be called by her full name, in the quarreling children the reader easily recognizes her two-eyed, two-armed, two-legged acquaintances.
It is immediately clear that the vocabulary and syntax in “Puski Byatykh” are not the same as in ordinary language, but they are not just made up. Petrushevskaya’s language is more or less understandable to any Russian speaker, despite the fact that most of the words are unfamiliar.
The words of the auxiliary parts of speech were borrowed by Petrushevskaya from the Russian language. She also uses outdated, dialectal, Church Slavonic conjunctions and prepositions: for, inda, kako, yako, nad, ako (from aki), egdy (from egda), etc.
The words of the remaining parts of speech are formed according to several principles. Usually words are created according to the laws of word formation, but with fictitious roots, so affixes convey most of the meaning. Thanks to this feature of Petrushevskaya’s language, it is possible to make a morphological analysis of any word, a syntactic analysis of a sentence: Kalushatochki, don’t get caught up in any mistakes!
1. (To) lyapupam - noun, because denotes an object. The initial form is a lyapupa. Fast. sign - vernacular, soulful, female r., 1st class. Non-post. sign - in plural form. h., in d.p. In a sentence it is an addition. 2. Impellative, exclamatory, simple, one-part, complete, widespread, complicated by appeal.
Sometimes, taking a word from Petrushevskaya’s language, you can find a corresponding one (that is, with the same affixes and with a similar meaning) in the Russian language, for example, shake yourself up - eat up, go crazy - be stunned, but this method of formation is not very common. Much more often, two or three words can be compared with a word from “Pusek Byatykh”. In one of them the prefix matches, in the other the transitivity, in the third the meaning will be very close. In general, it is difficult to talk about any classification, systematization of the words of this strange language according to the methods of their formation, since the boundaries of these methods are blurred.
When coming up with words, L. Petrushevskaya uses another, very common technique, which was loved by V. Khlebnikov and L. Carroll. Futurists call it a root word; Carroll called the words he invented wallets or suitcases. Both children and adults form words in this way. K. Chukovsky writes about this in the book “From Two to Five”: “When two similar words are wedged into one another so that the result is a new one, consisting of two approximately equal parts, this word is called hybrid. An example of such a hybrid is the word dramedy (drama + comedy...). His [Charlie Chaplin's] comedy balances on the brink of tragedy... The appropriate name for this is dramedy" [Chukovsky 1990: 54]. Several examples of such use of words should be given: otbyabyakat = shake off + byaka, turkey = other + all sorts (Petrushevskaya).
Third reception L.S. Petrushevskaya is as follows: in a word from the Russian language, 1-2 letters are replaced. The appearance of the word is preserved, so the meaning is guessed:
rant< - начирикать (написать), бтысь < - здесь. Этот способ наименее сложен, поэтому часто используется.
Onomatopoeia and sound writing are widely used in “Puski Byatikh”. An example of onomatopoeia is the word probambolit, which, like the words balabolka, barbarian, are related to conversation. An example of sound writing is the word poke around (flutter, rush from side to side).
The language of “Pusek Byatykh” differs from Russian not only in vocabulary, but also, for example, in the construction of the phrase. Petrushevskaya’s stories are divided into many small paragraphs (no more than 3 sentences, usually one), most of which begin with the coordinating conjunctions a, and, but and others, and the conjunction a occurs 96 times, and and - 38. In “Puski Byatikh” there are few complex sentences, there are complex ones with causal conjunctions (And the kuzdra is nekuzyavaya, because the kuzdra budlanula bokra), but such sentences are the exception rather than the rule.
In the text of “Pusek Byatikh” we find a large number of interjections, many of which are synonymous, and therefore cause difficulties in translation - interjections in the Russian language are not able to convey all shades of meaning. There are more than 20 interjections in a small collection - many of them are used together with a cognate verb (And Pomik in burdysyah babbles: burly-burly-burly) when they seem to be unnecessary.
Even in “Puski Byatikh” the absence of pronouns is noteworthy. The most difficult thing is to do without personal pronouns, but the author, without inventing complex metaphors to designate each character, simply calls the heroes by their own names, and this does not seem like a tautology, as in the Russian language.
Having remembered the history of the appearance of “Pusek Byatikh” (a fairy tale for a one-year-old daughter, told in her own language), let’s turn to the book “From Two to Five.” “The speech development of children, of course, cannot be reduced to the enrichment of their vocabulary alone,” writes Chukovsky. - This development is also expressed in the fact that their speech becomes more and more coherent over time. At first, the child expresses his thoughts and feelings with separate exclamations, interjections... which are understandable only to those who are in daily and continuous communication with the child... Only a year passes, and at every step we are convinced that the child has already mastered the basic laws of syntax" [Chukovsky 1990 : 62].
Telling a fairy tale in the language of Natasha the Elephant, Petrushevskaya does not forget that language is not only vocabulary, that is, the words themselves with their familiar and unfamiliar roots. Children's speech is simpler than adult speech. Children do not speak in complex (in every sense) sentences. Children have difficulty with pronouns (remember L. Panteleev’s story “The Letter You”). They don’t understand why everyone calls them by name, but they should talk about themselves “I”, just like any other person. But interjections are very simple, so children often use them.
Lyudmila Petrushevskaya set herself the task of writing a large enough work so that most of the words used in it would be seen by readers for the first time and nevertheless understood all or almost all. Readers learn a new language in the process of reading books, gradually beginning to understand something about it. It takes several years for a child to master his native language - it is very difficult. Therefore, the language of “Pusek Byatykh” was created simple; the main thing in it is the meaning, which is conveyed in different ways.
At first, when all the meanings of the work are still unclear, the reader is touched, seeing in the heroes funny little animals that talk like children. But soon the true face of these “cute funny creatures” is revealed, which become not cute, but small and petty. In each story they quarrel, and their swearing takes up half the story. The meaning of life in Kalush, Butyavok, Lyapup is gossip and quarrels. In their vocabulary there are many rude words and expressions: beaten, galivnyuk, galivnyuchka, kadoily, perebiryushka, netyuyny, tresh, nekuzyavy, myrdyavy, syapai in geesa, hakht, from... and I hear, duda shake, etc. Even the name of the collection is “Batye Pussy” - swear word. This title both characterizes the life of the heroes of the work and shows the author’s attitude towards them.
Pusek Byatikh have many paws, ears and eyes, and they speak differently than we do, and this is not by chance. Lyudmila Petrushevskaya deliberately makes her characters unlike people in order to more clearly show their internal similarity. It schematically depicts our world, outlines the characters of people, and this gives us the opportunity to look at ourselves from the outside and be horrified. Tragedy lurks behind words that begin in baby talk. In the little world, which is a model, a smaller copy of the big world, in addition to endless swearing, you can also find unscrupulous police officers, theft, betrayal, drugs... Imperceptibly, children's grievances give way to big problems, towards the end there are more and more quarrels, and the question arises: how to live in such a world? Only the reconciliation of Dog and Psycho in the finale brings hope for happiness and peace.
Language L.S. Petrushevskaya reflects not only the main features of the modern Russian language, but also the character, way of thinking and way of existence of its speakers.
