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University of Toronto · Academic Electronic Journal in Slavic Studies

Toronto Slavic Quarterly

Donna Tussing Orwin.
Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. xv + 238 pp. Cloth.


With her first book, Tolstoy's Art and Thought, 1847-1880 (1993), Donna Tussing Orwin established herself as one of the leading Western scholars and interpreters of Russian nineteenth-century prose fiction. She displayed the talents of a sensitive and discriminating literary critic, adept at uncovering and explicating both the inner workings and the broader implications of the classic Tolstoyan texts. The word "thought" in her title, however, calls attention to yet another of her areas of competence. She is exceptionally well versed in European intellectual history and philosophy and was able authoritatively to assess Tolstoy as thinker as well as artist, situating him within the larger stream of European thought in his time.

In her new book Orwin has widened her grasp to take in, along with her beloved Tolstoy, the two other major Russian novelists: Dostoevsky, about whom she has also written extensively, and Turgenev, a newcomer to her stable, about whom she demonstrates equal mastery. Orwin's basic idea is that the three Russian giants leaped ahead of the European masters of their era, putting the fiction produced in this backward and seemingly benighted country in the absolute first rank among European literatures. Her thesis is that they did this by learning, partly from one another, how to represent interiority, the subjective aspect of human experience: not just what is said and done, but how it feels. Feeling, of course, had always been the chief focus of lyric poetry, expressive of the experiencing poet. But fiction involves the creation and representation of the other, of non-self characters. Yet how can we know, really, deeply, know, how someone else feels? Perhaps we can't; we only know ourselves. Orwin therefore believes that the great Russians necessarily began with introspection, self-scrutiny, later learning to project onto invented characters the knowledge thus derived, disguising its source in various ways.

The pioneer in this enterprise was Turgenev, the oldest of the three and the first to enter the literary arena, but before we get to him Orwin takes us on a hurried excursion among his predecessors, Karamzin, Pushkin and Lermontov. Orwin has shrewd things to say about all of them, but one feels some disappointment at the extreme brevity of her treatment.  Turning quickly to Turgenev, Orwin first takes up the topic, already adumbrated in the Pushkin excursus, of foreign models as formative influences on characters, for instance the supposedly damaging Anglophile upbringing of Lavretsky in Nest of Gentlefolk.[1] Whatever the damage, it does not seem to me at all clear, or even implied by Turgenev, that faulty education was responsible for Lavretsky's most ruinous mistake, making an utterly inappropriate, indeed disastrous marriage. More likely, something much more primitive, like lust, was responsible.

Dostoevsky was likewise concerned with the loss of Russian identity to foreign models. The clearest example is the Underground Man, whose crippling "heightened self-consciousness" Orwin attributes at least partly to his "reading of Western literature and philosophy." No doubt he was indeed led away from traditional Russian values, especially religion, by his reading of Western radicals or of the Russians who imitated them. But I can't help feeling, as I did about Lavretsky, that his alienation, self-isolation, and sado-masochism have deeper roots in his psyche than any areas reached by his readings. But he certainly is a victim of reflektsiia, that dread disease already well exemplified in Lermontov's Pechorin. (The cognate translation "reflection" needs a lot of explanation, which Orwin duly provides, if it is to be used.) Reflektsiia in its worst form involved obsessive inward contemplation so extreme that the victim is unable to engage effectively with the world at all.

As Orwin correctly observes, Tolstoy never entertained any notion that readings make the man. Quite the opposite: for him books are knizhki, generally to be scorned in favor of "life." But his characters do read, and Orwin deftly interprets the contrast between the safely circumscribed lives of the characters in the English novel Anna Karenina peruses on the train and her own more daring, even reckless behavior.[2]

After a brief but revealing discussion of transcendentalism among the Russians, Orwin returns to take up each of her three heroes at greater length as pioneers of subjectivity. The abstemious Turgenev, it turns out, goes only half way. Like his idol Pushkin, he prefers to limit himself to external evidence of his characters' mental states, avoiding views from the inside. Orwin illustrates this observation with extended commentaries on a sampling of texts, among them stories from Sportsman's Sketches.[3]  Turgenev's great achievement in this first major book, as Orwin notes, was to create vivid images of concrete Russian characters, peasants as well as gentry, based on real observation. True, the book had an immediate political purpose, exposure of the evils of serfdom; but its images are so keenly observed that, as Orwin notes, the book is "a work of art still read for pleasure and profit today" (p. 39). Orwin's close readings are generally excellent, but I did find myself dissenting from some of what she says about "My Neighbor Radilov." She describes Radilov's estate as "run-down" and its kitchen garden "neglected"; yet somehow this neglected garden has produced a bumper crop of cucumbers and pumpkins. An atmosphere of "sadness and decay" is said to prevail, but in fact, as the hunter discovers afterwards, an intense love affair, neither sad nor decaying, was in progress between Radilov and his sister-in-law. Appearances did not match realities.

As for Dostoevsky, Orwin thinks that he may have learned from Turgenev how to distance himself from his characters, keeping the authorial presence carefully hidden. "Poor Folk," for example, is presented in the form of letters, an old illusionistic device going back to Richardson, with the text itself thus given fictional reality, but with the added bonus, for Dostoevsky, of appearing to absolve the author of any responsibility for these documents. Each writer is allowed his or her individuality. Nevertheless, the author remains present, even in a "polyphonic" novel. Orwin skillfully shows how from the weaknesses and contradictions in both Makar Devushkin's and Varvara Dobroselova's arguments we can deduce the author's truth.

Orwin has interesting observations on Dostoevsky's indebtedness to Vladimir Odoevsky, who served as a conduit to Romantic philosophy, especially Schelling. Thus the disappearance of any author's voice in Poor Folk is seen as part of Dostoevsky's implementation of Schellingian irrationalist idealism, learned via Odoevsky. The objectively perceived letters between Makar and Varya enable us readers to sympathize fully with each character, while at the same time recognizing their mistakes and limitations. We must, as Orwin vividly puts it, "keep thinking – with the author—to the bitter end" (p. 55). This point seems to me successfully demonstrated in her sensitive reading of the story. However, she goes on to assert that "to create characters whose inner lives are even partially accessible, he [the author] must infuse them with a distillation of his own personal experience and personality" (p. 56).  The statement may well be true, but it does not seem to me to follow from what has gone before, which says nothing at all about Dostoevsky's "personal experience and personality."

The claim that authors base most of their revelations of characters' inner life on introspection would be easier to demonstrate in the case of Tolstoy, but Orwin turns first to another Tolstoyan topic, the author speaking directly to the reader in his own voice. For this she evokes the story "Lucerne." Via its hero, Prince Dmitry Nekhliudov (always an alter ego name in Tolstoy) the author can rant about the heartlessness of Western civilization, demonstrated by the cold indifference of British aristocrats to the playing of an itinerant Italian musician the prince had befriended. But Orwin rightly shows that after this outburst Nekhliudov's honesty takes him another, harder step, into self-awareness, to recognition that the musician had never asked for his intervention and that he had used the Italian for his own emotional needs. It is true, as Orwin notes, that Tolstoy later disliked "Lucerne." Her explanation for the aversion, however ("He recognized the contradiction between the intent of the closing diatribe and the didactic role it plays in the drama," p. 59) seems to me contrived. It would seem simpler to say that the sweeping generalizations were not justified by the rather minor episode on which they were based, as was noted by contemporary critics.

Orwin then proceeds to an extended discussion of Tolstoy's indebtedness to Plato. She draws interesting connections between Tolstoy's Platonic readings of the early 1850s and "The Raid" (the nature of courage). She also elaborates on the direct echoes of "Symposium" in Anna Karenina. She also sees in Tolstoy's modus operandi a direct influence of Plato's dramatic dialogues, especially Tolstoy's insistence on protecting "the contradictions and irrationality of human subjectivity from reason's dissecting eye," even though he does generalize and appeal to reason (p. 66). What is left of the principle after this qualification is not entirely clear. Likewise somewhat unclear is Orwin's interpretation of Stiva Oblonsky as a demonstration case of the totally self-sufficient, self-contented personality, complete devoid of reflektsiia. In the opening scene, according to Orwin, "the reader feels his [Stiva's] discomfort, his repentance, and his certainty that what has happened is not his fault" (p. 67). But, one asks, what is he repenting for if he does not feel himself at fault?

I was more persuaded by Orwin's case for Tolstoy's early apprenticeship to Turgenev. For this she has the authority of Tolstoy himself, who dedicated "The Woodcutting," his only dedicated story, to the older writer, acknowledging that he found in it "involuntary imitation" of Turgenev's narrative methods. Orwin wisely chooses to focus on the impact of  Sportsman's Sketches, which Tolstoy especially admired, on "A Landlord's Morning" and "The Cossacks." But very soon the differences between the two writers became manifest. Turgenev was deeply committed to the belief that a writer of fiction may draw conclusions only from what he has actually shown, not imposing on the text opinions arrived at independently. Tolstoy made some effort to follow this advice, apparent in "A Landowner's Morning," which won Turgenev's approval for its "almost total freedom of viewpoint." But Tolstoy was not for long willing to impose such clamps on his convictions and didactic purposes. Orwin's second example, "The Cossacks," seemed to me to be treated too cursorily to establish the linkage she postulates to Turgenev. However, quite apart from the Turgenev connection, Orwin makes some very discerning observations about narrative technique in that story.

We now go back to Turgenev for a whole chapter on his "romantic longing," designed to demonstrate Orwin's thesis that "Russian psychological realism rests on certain romantic philosophical premises" (p. 76). After briefly summarizing some of Turgenev's early poems, where the romantic basis is open and clear, Orwin traces the romantic longing through a series of characters in his later fiction, where the ultimate "longing for the All" is reduced to desires of a more limited scope, like Lavretsky's love for Liza in "Nest of Gentlefolk." She situates the Russian philosophical yearning for wholeness within a tradition stretching from Descartes to Kant and Schelling via Rousseau, specific Russian features being partly an accident of the timing of the Russian entry into the European philosophical stream. Actually trained in philosophy in Berlin, Turgenev was one of its principal conduits. True, he later turned away from metaphysics, but Orwin thinks that the influence of philosophy remains embedded in his later writings.

We then return to Sportsman's Sketches to demonstrate this development.  Orwin is clearly right in finding that Turgenev's romantic longing is manifest in his characters' yearning for union with nature. She takes "Ermolai and the Miller's Wife" as her specimen case. However, in my opinion she partly misreads the story. In my view Ermolai and the miller's wife, Arina, act out together an eminently natural sexual impulse. Orwin, however, disapproves, believing that there is something "subhuman" in Ermolai (p. 81), who "casually takes sexual advantage of a woman who is in a loveless marriage." But the thrust of the story is not Ermolai's casual animality, but the cruelty of Arina's former owner, who refused to let her marry the man she loved. The miller had bought her out of serfdom, perhaps from sexual attraction, but also perhaps because she was literate and could be useful. She had never loved him. Ermolai was an old friend. Perhaps her sexual encounters with him were one of the bright spots in her sad, unfulfilled life. The narrator's refusal to condemn Ermolai may signal his belief that Ermolai and Arina were simply obeying the call of nature, against which human institutions have erected too many barriers.

Orwin now moves to an extended, very revealing analysis of the early short story "Andrei Kolosov." The title character represents the "natural man," completely at ease with himself and free of reflektsiia. He courts a young woman and then drops her quite easily and without guilt: he just fell out of love, and that was that. But his story is told by a much more complicated, tormented individual who then makes the same identical moves as Kolosov, but remains full of self-doubt, ambivalence, and remorse for his cowardice in jilting the woman without final visit or explanation. Orwin leads us through all this with a sure step.

The next chapter takes up Dostoevsky's response to Turgenev's story, which he admired, very questionably seeing the author himself portrayed in the eponymous hero. At that moment Turgenev seemed to Dostoevsky the very epitome of success in life: "a poet, talented, an aristocrat, handsome, rich, intelligent, educated, 25 years old." Dostoevsky was flattered and pleased by Turgenev's gestures of friendship, with feelings analogous to those of the narrator of "Andrei Kolosov" toward the title hero. As Orwin observes, it was "the beginning of a lifelong tangled personal relationship […] in which love, hatred, and envy mingle" (p. 93).

In this early phase, Orwin believes, both writers saw themselves as "sentimental poets afflicted with romantic longing in the Schillerian sense" (p. 95). Turgenev, however, was willing to allow reason a fundamental place in the human personality, and from reason inevitably comes reflektsiia, the ability "to ponder our own feelings" (p. 97). Orwin draws heavily on a review by Turgenev of a translation of Faust, arguing that both Faust and Mephistopheles were derived from Goethe's own personality, the former from his "passionate melancholy," the latter from his capacity for cold "reflection" on his own emotions.

The problem that both Turgenev and Dostoevsky agonize over, according to Orwin, is how we can enjoy both freedom and love. She claims that Andrei Kolosov accomplishes this feat, but of course in fact he does so only in succession, not at the same time. Her assertion that Liza in Nest of Gentlefolk "achieves freedom" by becoming a nun (and refusing to join Lavretsky in an extramarital relationship) is open to question: what sort of freedom does she find in the convent?

Orwin next analyzes in detail the actual appearance, in The Demons, of a Turgenev caricature, Karmazinov. She traces this figure through the drafts, showing that the sketched Great Writer only crystallized as Turgenev at quite a late stage, always associated as a kind of double of Stepan Trofimovich, but more outspokenly a Westernizer than he, a nihilist-atheist, Russophobe and Germanophile. However—and this is Orwin's important contribution—she shows that however hostile to Turgenev the man, Dostoevsky retained a deep, though not uncritical, admiration for Turgenev the artist. In particular, Dostoevsky takes the image of Bazarov, especially Bazarov as interpreted by Dmitry Pisarev, as one of the ingredients in the characterization of Pyotr Verkhovensky, along with the all too real Nechaev. However, Orwin's summary image of Pisarev's Bazarov seems to me somewhat distorted ("a man who lived only for himself and for pleasure," p. 106). Bazarov, it seems to me, did indeed live a totally self-sufficient life, but he was no hedonist. He was dedicated to scientific research and, Pisarev adds, if the desired changes were to take place in the life of society, he would be ready to assume a more active social role. This was to say, to translate from words designed to escape the censor's blue pencil, that Bazarov was a potential revolutionary. But to identify Pyotr Verkhovensky with Pisarev's Bazarov seems to me a big stretch, though perhaps Dostoevsky was capable of it. The real Nechaev would seem to be a more crucial ingredient of this characterization. Perhaps more convincing is the possible linkage of Bazarov with Stavrogin, but, as Orwin shrewdly adds, there is also a bizarre further admixture of Nozdryov and Byron. The "Byronic branch" in particular renders him a tragic figure, unlike Karmazinov, who is merely absurd.

Orwin adduces evidence that Dostoevsky's conception of Turgenev as man and artist was deeply influenced by an article by Nikolai Strakhov, who drew a sharp line between Turgenev the "poet," who saw the world from a perspective far higher and more detached than that of his characters, and Turgenev the craven author of the essay "Concerning Fathers and Children," in which, in an effort to appease the radical critics, he claimed that he sympathized with Bazarov in everything save his views on art.[4]

Orwin's concluding sentences in this chapter are so well formulated that I cannot resist quoting them in full (p. 112):

Dostoevsky is both more modern (in his radical psychology of the godless man) and more traditional, even medieval (in his Christianity) than Turgenev. Turgenev resembles the ancient writers in his stoicism toward a godless universe; but this makes him modern too. In different ways, he and Dostoevsky are like the Roman god Janus, who faces both the future and the past.

In her next chapter Orwin focuses directly on reflektsiia, now straightforwardly translated as "reflection" and given a respectable philosophical ancestry. It is this reflection, and not external observation, that is the source of the deep understanding of human nature that both writers, and especially Dostoevsky, attained. Strakhov had perceived that "all his [Dostoevsky's] characters are autobiographical" (p. 116). As her primary evidence Orwin chooses Notes from the House of the Dead, where the relation between autobiography and fiction is especially problematic. Dostoevsky tells the story via a narrator, Goryanchikov, whose crime and mentality were very different from his own; but he nevertheless conveys through him his own deep feelings about the peasant convicts he had known in Siberia, just as Turgenev's hunter had done with the peasant characters in Sportsman's Sketches. Orwin traces in detail the stages in Goryanchikov's adjustment to prison life and his evolving perception of his cell mates, primarily based on his eventual recognition of the similarity between their sensations and his own. She explores the contradiction between the perceptions of peasant criminals as recorded in Notes from the House of the Dead and those Dostoevsky later put forward as his own in his more politically slanted writings. In the earlier text peasant ex-serfs feel no remorse at all for their crimes, especially crimes committed against the ruling classes, a fact that makes any prospect of eventual class reconciliation and harmony seem most unlikely. In later times, however, Dostoevsky states categorically that peasants do repent their evil deeds. In general, the exposition of Notes from the House of the Dead is one of the best parts of this book, perhaps because Orwin gave herself enough space to do a thorough job. Elsewhere she sometimes seems cramped.[5]

However, there remains a final paradox that seems to me unresolved. Dostoevsky, Orwin asserts, does not assume that he can completely illuminate the inner life of others. Despite all his insight into human souls, "the subjectivity of others ultimately remains a mystery in his fiction" (p. 131). But what, one asks, if those "others" are not real people, but characters the author invented? Why can't he know at least them completely?

Orwin concludes the chapter with an illuminating discussion of "confession" as a form of self-revelation—its ambiguities and evasions, of course focusing especially on Rousseau. She finds, convincingly, that all her three authors owed a great deal to Rousseau "for insights into human consciousness and also for the revelation of even its shameful secrets" (p. 138).

In her next chapter Orwin turns to depiction of childhood, adding Dickens to her roster of sources and eliminating Turgenev, who showed little interest in the topic of childhood, though allegedly sharing his confreres' belief in "the natural goodness of children.[6] Orwin is no doubt right that Tolstoy believed children innocent and guiltless, especially because they are still free from the demands of sexuality. But the innocence is already under strain. As she shows later, even in Childhood Nikolenka's grief for his dead mother is contaminated by feelings of vanity, awareness that others are watching and admiring him. Emotions are seldom pure, even in childhood. And Dostoevsky, as Orwin rightly points out, never believed children, except very little ones, totally immune to the "breath of corruption."

Orwin adduces many examples from both Dickens and Dostoevsky of children who manage to remain untainted by evil, even when it is oppressively present in their surroundings, such as Oliver Twist or Sonya Marmeladova. I found all her examples convincing except one, Smerdyakov from The Karamazov Brothers, who is said "to have been born innocent if not beautiful" (p. 145). How then did he develop his penchant for hanging cats and his total immunity to all Grigorii's moral teachings?

Orwin then takes up Tolstoy's indebtedness to Dickens, showing in particular that the semi-autobiographical trilogy was partly modeled on the semi-autobiographical David Copperfield. However, her description of David's childhood as "happy, healthy" (p. 145) seems to me wide of the mark. What about the trauma of his widowed mother's marriage to Mr. Murdstone, Murdstone's attempt to flog David, and his eventual escape to the rescuing arms of Aunt Betsy Trotwood? But her assertion of David's psychological complexity as a model for Nikolenka's seems well established. Orwin's account of the stages in Nikolenka's maturation process is handled with sure perceptiveness, especially the "growing self-consciousness that threatens sincerity" (p. 147), anticipating "the adult drama of pride and vanity" (p. 148).

Orwin now brings forward clear evidence of the direct influence of Tolstoy's trilogy on The Insulted and Injured, which she follows with a detailed account, full of insight, of various Dostoevskian children in that novel as well as in "The Little Hero" and "Netochka Nezvanova." Her final example is Kolya Krasotkin (misspelled Karasotkin, p, 157) in The Karamazov Brothers, who is "all potential," wavering between the noxious influence of Rakitin and the benign one of Alyosha. Orwin pairs him with Petya Rostov from War and Peace, about whom she writes a very odd sentence: "…despite his mother's best efforts he perishes at full gallop in the intoxication of battle" (p. 157). Was his mother there, trying to cool his ardor?

Orwin's final chapter offers an extended discussion of the psychology of evil in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, including a revealing analysis of the hidden interaction between these two giants who never met face to face. Dostoevsky, as noted, was much impressed by the trilogy and also by the war stories of the 1850s, with their classification of soldiers' responses to danger and death. In Adolescence Tolstoy writes of Nikolenka's fantasies of violence, of crimes committed without murderous intent, out of "curiosity," a pattern Dostoevsky later developed to the limit in Stavrogin. Dostoevsky had already encountered among convicts in Siberia individuals who had committed their crimes on sudden impulses of this kind. Orwin notes in both writers' psychological observations the phenomenon of "desperation" (otchaiannost'), when all restraints are cast away.[7] Orwin finds many interesting parallels between the psychologies of Tolstoy's soldiers and Dostoevsky's criminals, with Dostoevsky drawing insights from Tolstoy.

Orwin then shows that later the direction of influence was reversed, with Tolstoy drawing heavily on Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead for his representation of convict life in Resurrection. A Dostoevsky influence is also discovered in "The Kreutzer Sonata,: whose hero, Pozdnyshev, felt himself impelled by a "strange and vital force" to commit his monstrous deed. In such individuals there is "a split between the contemplative and the active self" (p. 171), an observation that Orwin also connects with Tolstoy's readings of Schopenhauer. Nevertheless, Pozdnyshev while committing his crime was at every moment fully conscious of what he was doing, and he experienced flashes of "reasonable consciousness" that might possibly have restrained him.

As her final case history, Orwin returns to the figure of Stavrogin as depicted in the suppressed chapter of The Demons, his confession. Her analysis of this encounter is full of acute perceptions, too specific to summarize. Especially striking is Dostoevsky's recognition of the "essential eroticism of the soul" and beyond that, "a need to be part of the human community," which perversely becomes Pyotr Verkhovensky's goal of a "universal tyranny" (p, 177).

In a brief, but far-reaching Conclusion Orwin assesses the impact of the great Russians on us, i.e., on Western consciousness and Western literature.  All her three authors, she maintains, though so different in many respects, agree on the "radical incompleteness and consequent neediness" of the human soul. The atheist Turgenev sees this as an inescapable part of the "tragic human condition." We may, he says, find some consolation in the harmony and beauty of nature, but nature is fundamentally indifferent (Pushkin's word, invoked at the end of Fathers and Children) to us. For Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, however, "part of the human soul is divine" (p. 182), and the individual must forever struggle with the evil within himself. As Orwin sees it, in our post-Nietzschean world pure subjectivity has come to be associated with amorality (p. 184). We therefore turn to the nineteenth-century Russian authors "because they seem moral without naiveté or hypocrisy." For us "Russian novels are still revealing the consequences of consciousness in unexpected ways" (p. 185). We can learn a great deal about how this is accomplished in Donna Orwin's fine book.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Hugh McLean
                                                                                                                                                                                                                    University of California, Berkeley


  1. Orwin is of two minds about how the title of this novel is to be translated. Are the denizens of the nest "gentlefolk" or "gentryfolk"? Both versions even appear on the same page (23).
  2. Orwin thinks that both Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary "are loved by their creator" (p. 10). I will grant Tolstoy's love for Anna, but I do not think Flaubert loved Emma at all; he despised her. True, he said "Mme Bovary, c'est moi," but it was a side of himself he especially disliked, the provincial bourgeois, and via Emma  he also mocked the romantic illusions he continued to cherish, in her case reduced to tawdry vulgarization.
  3. Orwin uses Constance Garnett's translation of the title, which was no doubt appropriate in nineteenth-century England, but I have encountered American students who think 'sportsman' must be an odd synonym for 'athlete,' and are surprised when he turn out to be a hunter.
  4. Here Orwin cites a puzzling passage in which Karmazinov is said to utter a "nasty quip" which Pyotr Verkhovensky does not understand. Orwin quotes it in full in Russian on p. 205. The joke seems to have something to do with the word "um" and "umnyi" and "bez uma," also "ostroumie," but somehow I cannot grasp what was so "nasty" in this witticism. My vanity is somewhat mollified by the information that Joseph Frank did not understand it either.
  5. I have one minor objection. Orwin remarks how Alyosha Karamazov feels "as he leaves his father's house after Dmitrii has tried to kill the old man" (p. 130). In my view Dmitrii had no murderous intent at that time. His furious beating of his father was simply an expression of overpowering rage and hatred—the unrestrained impulsiveness that was one of his basic traits.
  6. One might question this statement by citing "The Singers" from A Sportsman's Sketches. In the finale of this story Turgenev shows the malicious joys of Schadenfreude already present in children. A boy is heard repeatedly calling his brother Antropka to come home. When Antropka finally answers, the caller "with joyful malice" (s radostnym ozlobleniem) replies, "Because Papa wants to whip you."
  7. Orwin is very good on citing and elucidating etymologies, of this word and many other names and crucial terms. It is a pity, however, that the name of the distinguished German etymologist and lexicographer, Max Vasmer, by translation and error is transformed by Orwin into Mark Fasmer.
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