Feb 2, 2020, 6:52 PM
(context: how propertarianism is difficult to translate because the anglo saxon conversion of family bias to commons bias and common ownership never occurred elsehwere.)
—“Has Russia always been that way? Or did they have a “golden age” so to speak where either the language was different, the ideas were different, or both?”—Bradley Morgan
Every language retains embellishments and scars, every literature and culture embellishments and scars, and every people’s self imiage retains embellishments and scars.
Russia emerged into modernity behind the rest of christendom simply because (a) distance from the core of commerce, (b) missing out on early adaptation to returns on atlantic trade, the renaissance, the british empirical revolution, the reformation, the continental enlightenment, and (c) having the legacy of mongol conquest, and (d) a long history of serfdom – the boyars were far worse than european feudal lords, and nothing close to west germanic (anglo-scandianvian) free men. In other words, they were just more removed from the center of the european restoration after the exit of the semitic dark ages.
And Russian Literature was and remains the high point of literature in Christendom. And it occurred partly – as did germany – in response to the terrors of france (napoleon’s conquests).
There was nothing wrong with Russia that the first world war did not create. It had nowhere near the problems of say Italy. And was closest to following the german unification. Germany at the time included most of what we consider Poland. And german influence was across the entire holy roman empire other than France and Spain. Russia had used her new freedoms to replace the mongols and conquer all of Eurasia from the borders of eastern Europe to Canada, and if they hadn’t been stopped (wrongly) by the British they would have retaken Constantinople from the turks and reversed all the costs of the dark ages.
The problems of Russia, like the problems of Germay, like the present problem in america, is the result of the jewish bolshevik seizure of power in the unstable period at the end of WW1.
The Russian language is part of the slavic family of languages that is indeed indo european but went through a strange phonetic rotation, which I am not skilled enough to explain but was the result of moving the glottal sounds backward and then due to that cost, losing the soft vowels, leading to counter- intuitive pairs of consonants without interstitial vowels we expect in wester civilization.
The structure of Russian language (a category iv language – meaning hard to learn) does not require word order organization like english, and still relies on many (many) suffixes that can be overwhelming.
However, this means there is as great an art in manipulating the russian language to all softs of parallels and suggestions and subtle meanings as there is an art of doing the same with our huge english vocabulary. And much of russian humor is dependent upon those who are cunning with their language in this form.
It is also very… beautiful … in that it’s still a heroic language, a language of people on the farm, who are dependent upon community, who will suffer anything and survive, and are very proud of their heroism of endurance
.
So this is why Russian literature and culture is ‘deep’
Because it is deep.
As deep as americans are shallow.