Self-repetition, the mother of all tedium

Anyone who writes regularly is bound to repeat himself now and then. After all, few people have enough new and original thoughts to fill thousands of articles and the odd book.

Some writers repeat other writers, which is called homage if attributed and plagiarism if not. And all fecund writers repeat themselves, but, and here’s the rub, sometimes they do so unwittingly.

I found yet another proof of this observation this morning, when sitting down to write a follow-up to my yesterday‘s reflections on language. Having collected my thoughts, I began to jot them down, but every statement looked oddly familiar.

A quick search confirmed that impression: I was writing a piece I had already written almost seven years ago. Now, I seldom look at my old work, and, when I do, I usually hate it. This stands to reason.

A mind is always work in progress, with old thoughts sharpened, modified, qualified or – as often as not – discarded. That old piece, however, is different. I could change it here and there, paraphrase a thought or two, but I couldn’t improve it. Pre-empting an accusation of conceit, I’m not suggesting that it can’t be improved, only that I can’t do it.

However, that old article complements my yesterday’s piece so naturally that the only sensible thing to do is re-run it, even at the risk of boring my regular readers blessed with retentive memory. So here it is, slightly shortened: Nobody in Europe Speaks English.

This statement is probably an exaggeration. But not nearly as much as its oft-used opposite, starting with ‘Everybody’.

Britons who say it mean that it’s now possible to exchange basic Anglophone units of information with French waiters, Italian shopkeepers and Spanish museum guides. Language is just a communication tool, isn’t it? So that’s it: a communication occurred, job done.

Yet I question the premise. Yes, language is a means of communication. But it’s not just that.

If we bring down to earth the Biblical statement about the Word that was in the beginning, perhaps language is what creates and defines a nation. And if we believe the Babel story, then language is definitely what separates one nation from another – and not just linguistically.

English and Russian, for example, are different in exactly the same ways as the English and the Russians are different. One example: an English sentence is based on the verb, the action word, whereas the centre of a Russian sentence is the noun, surrounded by numerous modifiers.

A Russian sentence can function without a verb – possibly because a Russian man can function without doing anything much.

Hence classical Russian literature, from Pushkin to Goncharov, from Gogol to Tolstoy, abounds in indolent layabouts who talk much and do little. On the other hand, Russian boasts a vast variety of affixation, ideally suited to conveying the shades of emotions in which the layabouts endlessly indulge.

English grammar is formally rigorous, which reflects (creates?) a propensity for sequential logic and rational thought, just as its reliance on the verb reflects action-oriented pragmatism. The set word order of an English sentence can only be violated for stylistic effect, while Russian word order follows no rules whatsoever and is entirely stylistic.

That stands to reason. For the Russians despise rigid forms into which their much-vaunted spirituality can be squeezed. Hence they’ve so far been unable to come up with stable statehood or reasonable legality.

Characteristically, Nikolai Lossky’s History of Russian Philosophy devotes 57 pages to the mystical thinker Soloviov and only two to all the Russian philosophers of law combined. Justice – defined as a set of codified laws, not arbitrary feelings – has never interested the Russians much.

According to Lossky (d. 1965), this disdain for form even penetrated the Russians’ gene pool, producing ill-defined facial features so different, say, from the chiselled North European profile. It’s as if, having drawn a sketch of a Russian face, God then went over it, smudging every line with his thumb.

Lossky’s observation may be too sweeping, but it’s certainly evident that the Russians’ amorphousness extends to the way they treat every public institution, political, legal or religious.

Fr. Pavel Florensky, the polymath thinker murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1937, commented on the Russian character in essentially the same way: “There is no sun in the Slavs, no transparency, no definition! Clarity and serenity are lacking… It seems to me that this is meaningfully related to their failure… to find the sublime in the here and now and not strain to seek it in the nonexistent or the far-away.”

All this explains why the genre of the rigorously argued philosophical essay is as alien to the Russians as it’s natural to the English. The English vocabulary is three times the size of Russian, which makes the language more precise: a concept can be fractured into many fragments, each conveying its own nuance.

Russian, on the other hand, is ideally suited to poetic expression. Poetry imposes discipline on the Russians willy-nilly, while the loose grammar and practically endless morphology of their language open up infinite poetic possibilities.

The morphology of Russian words is so rich phonetically that Russian poets don’t have to rely on consonant endings to produce rhymes: they can find them in the words’ roots themselves. That’s why rhyming patterns are more interesting and less obvious in Russian, and vers libre, though not nonexistent, is rare there. By contrast, rhymed English poetry can easily sound like doggerel.

To be sure, the English have produced more than their fair share of great poets (including the greatest of all, Shakespeare), but one almost has to be that to write superb verse in English. By contrast, Russian poets of even modest talents can often produce excellent poems – their language does much of the work by itself.

Because their language and therefore their mentality don’t encourage philosophical self-expression, Russian thinkers often seek refuge in literature, either poetry or prose.

Dostoyevsky’s novels, for example, are basically philosophy minus the intellectual discipline of the essay. And Tolstoy, possibly the greatest artist among world novelists, often indulged in tedious philosophical asides of the kind that would have destroyed the prose of a lesser artist.

The Russians welcome that sort of mongrelisation – it capitalises on their strength, poetic language, while downplaying their weakness, intellectual amorphousness. But Tolstoy’s Western contemporaries reacted differently. For example, Flaubert, having read the first French translation of War and Peace, exclaimed indignantly, “Il se répète! Il philosophise!”

So yes, an increasing number of Europeans are now able to communicate in English, after a fashion. But to speak English for real one has to have the mental, emotional and spiritual makeup the language reflects or even, arguably, creates.

Some – I’d like to suggest self-servingly – may perhaps be able to achieve this without being raised in an English-speaking country. A certain intellectual and emotional predisposition developed by lifelong study and decades of using English almost exclusively may see to that.

But such cases apart, I stand by the title above. If you juxtapose two sentences, “Everybody in Europe speaks English” and “Nobody in Europe speaks English”, neither is quite true, but the second is closer to the truth.