Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 22 – Russians
today have an “ambiguous” attitude toward obscenities, a specialist on the
Russian language says. “On the one hand, there is an official prohibition of
their use” in the media and even a fine for cursing in public. But on the
other, many public figures and even more ordinary Russians use such terms on a
regular basis.
Snezhana Petrova notes that Russians
have been using obscenities and vile language for centuries but that there is
no agreement on how they began doing so or why they have continued. Some blame
the Mongol conquest but that is unlikely as traveler reports show that the
Mongols didn’t use obscenities (diletant.media/articles/27886759/).
Others, drawing on the birch bark
records of that period, say that Russians came up with these terms on their
own. And still others root the Russian use of obscenities in a more general
Slavic inclination to employ such terms, something that also shifts
responsibility away from the Mongols.
Petrova for her part clearly favors
the last explanation and says that obscenities or filthy language (“mat”) are
an inalienable part of Slavic culture and arose from words designating male or
female sex organs or sexual acts.
According to one hypothesis, these became curse words as a way of
expressing anger; according to another, they arose from a first use by witches.
As Christianity spread in Russia,
the often phallic statues of pre-Christian divinities were destroyed, and the
vocabulary associated with them was declared “taboo. But as is said, you can’t
take words out of a song and the people continued to curse. The church in response struggled with those
who used such curses.”
Petrova points out that it should
not be forgotten that “those words which [Russians] today consider curses were
not so conceived in [earlier] times.” That
is shown by the fact that even Orthodox priests sometimes used some of these
words in their homilies and texts about “women of easy virtue.”
“Only relatively recently, beginning
with the 18th century, did today’s vile language become such. Before
that, these words designated either physiological characteristics of the human
body or in general were quite ordinary words.”
But in the second half of that century, a sharp distinction emerged
between the literary lexicon and ordinary speech, as a result of the rise of
printing and the prohibition of the use of certain words in printed matter.
That pattern continued “until the
end of the 20th century,” Petrova continues, but many poets and
writers as well as others continued to use obscenities in their “’unofficial’”
productions. Today, the attitude of
Russians toward obscenities is “ambiguous,” with some official prohibitions
remaining in place but increasingly ignored by various public figures.
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