The Mystery of the Russian Soul
By Michele A. Berdy
Загадка русской души: the mystery of the Russian soul
The Russian soul is a mystery indeed. You start with a few soulful expressions of love and intimacy, and before you know it, you've moved into the realm of economics and murder.That is to say, душа (soul) has many shadings of meaning and is the source of a great many idiomatic expressions. When you love someone profoundly, you can say: Я любила его душой и телом. (I loved him body and soul.)
When you want to express your heartfelt generosity, you can say, Ешь сколько душе угодно. (Eat to your heart's content, literally, eat as much as your soul wishes.) Душа can also be a stand-in for "conscience": Я покривила душой (I went against my conscience, or I went against my heart.) If you are feeling anxious and ill at ease, you can say, У меня на душе кошки скребут, literally, "cats are scratching at my soul." And if you are terrified, you can say, Душа в пятки ушла! Out of fear, the soul departs the body through its homophone: The expression is literally "my soul left my body through the soles of my feet." In English we usually say, "I was scared to death!" or "I was scared stiff!"When you want to describe a tear-jerker, "a weepie," or "a three-hankie movie," you call it душещипательный фильм.
When something is heartrending, in Russian it's "душераздирающий" as in the phrase, Их прощание было душераздирающим. (Their parting was heartrending; their parting tore at my heartstrings.) Someone who is mentally ill in Russian is душевнобольной, literally, "ailing in his soul," which has always seemed to me to be a profound and compassionate way to describe a troubled individual. However, when you say, болит душа, (literally "my soul aches"), you mean that you are very disturbed by something, or, with the phrase болит душа за него, you feel deep compassion ("my heart goes out to him").Душа also means "a soul" in the sense of "a living being." Там не было ни живой души. (There wasn't a soul there.) It can also be used in the economic sense of "per head" or "per capita": Доходы на душу населения растут. (Per capita income is growing.) In the old days, before the great emancipation, душа could also refer to a serf.
Gogol's Мёртвые Души (Dead Souls) referred to a good old Russian scam of buying up dead serfs and somehow making a profit on the deal. (And once again I maintain that you needn't blame the Wicked West for post-Soviet scams and cons; all you have to do is open a few Russian classics to see where people got their ideas.)If we go back even further in time, to when the Russian language was being codified, душа and дух (spirit) were one word that conveyed the sense of "spirit," "breath," or "life's breath."
Over time, many concepts of breathing evolved along the дух line, but some still remain in the душа branch. Душить is "to strangle" (to squeeze the breath out of someone), although it can also be translated as "smother" in the lovely phrase Он душил меня в объятиях. (He smothered me with hugs.) Or it can have a more sinister meaning in the phrase Его душил гнев (he was choked with rage). Perfume in Russian is духи, but to wear perfume is душиться. Моя мать всегда душилась духами "Красная Москва." (My mother always wore Red Moscow perfume.) Душно means "stifling" or "stuffy" (i.e., when you can't breathe): В трамвае было так душно, что я чуть не упала в обморок. (It was so stuffy in the tram, I almost fainted.) Душок can be a bad smell or a "tinge" of something in the figurative sense: Он пишет для газеты с правым душком. (He writes for a right-wing newspaper.)
Jumping from love to serfs to economics to asphyxiation can be wearying to us poor foreign souls, trying to make sense of Russia and Russians. Whenever you are totally at a loss, you can always say, Это загадка русской души! (It's the mystery of the Russian soul.)
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator.
