The Gulag Archipelago Vol. 2 An Experiment in Literary Investigation - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Zeks as a Nation I 531
Many of these words, one must admit, possess precision, vividness,
even a general comprelu:nsibility. Their crowning glory,
however, is the shout "Na tsirlakh!" This can be translated into
RUssian onlyby a complex description. To run J'r to serve sometJting
!'na tsirlakh" means: "on tiptoe, and headlong, and with
heartfelt zeal and eagerness"-and all of it simultaneously.
Now it seems clear to us that the contemporary Russian language
is in real need of this expression-particularly because
action of that kind is often encountered in life.
But such concern . . . is already, in fact, superfluous. The
author of these lines, having completed his lengthy scientific
journey through the Archipelago, was extremely worried about
being able to return to his teaching in the ethnographic institut.e
-not merely as regards his security clearance, but also as to
whether he had fallen behind contemporary Russian language
and whether the students' would understand him all right. And
suddenly, then and there, with astonishment and delight, he
heard from the first-year students the very same expressions his
ears had grown used to in the Archipelago and in which the
Russian language had been so deficient till now:"s khodu,"
gnina~m "right away" or "with a rush". or "crashing on";
"vsyu dorogu," meaning "all the'way, all the time"; "po novoy,"
meaning "once again"; "raskurochit," meaning "to rob, to clean
out"; "zanachit," meaning "to stash, to swipe"; "frayer," meaning
"a sucker" or "anyone not belonging to the thieves', law";
"durak i ushi kholodnye,". meaning literally "a fool with cold
ears-a. hundred percent fool"; "ona s- parnyami shyotsya,"
meaning literally "she gets herself sewed up with the boys, she
makes out with the boys"; and many, many others!
What this indicates is the great energy of the zek language,
which helps it to filter inexplicably into our country and first
of all into the language of our young people. This offers the hope
that in the future the process will accelerate and that all the
words enumerated previously will also flow into the Russian
language and will perhaps even be an ornament to it.
But this makes the task of the researcher even more difficult:
to separate the Russian language and the uk ,language.
And then, too, conscientiousnesS prevents our bypassing a
fourth difficulty: some primary and sort of prehistoric influence
of the Russian language itself on the zek language, and even on
the language of the cannibals (although now such an influence
532 THB GULAG ARCHIPBLAGO
cannot be observed). How otherWise can it be explained that we
find in Dal'~ dictionary analogie$ to such specifically Archipelago
expressions: '" .
"zflit zakonom": literally "to live in the law," and meaning (in the
Kostroma district) "to live with a wife" (in the Archipelago: "to
live with her in the law").
"vy,;achit": "to fish out of a pocket," in the Russian peddlers' language.
(And in the Archipelago they switched the prefix: ''zanachit,''
"to steal.") .
"podkhodit" meant "to become impoverished, to become fagged out."
(Compare "dokhodit" in the Archipelago, "to get fagged out to the
p'!int of death, to be a ~ying man, a last-legger.")
Or one can consider the proverbs colljlCted by Dal as well:
''Cabbage SO\lP is good people"-and a whole series of island expressions:
"moroz chelovek," meaning "a frost person," if he is not strong;
"koslyor chelovek," literally "a bonfire person," etc.
And we also find in Dal: "He doesn't catch mice."17
And the word "suka" ("bitch") meant'a "spy" or "stoolie" back
in the times of P. F. Yakubovich. ..' .
And then there is that remarkable expression of the natives
"to dig your horns in" (referring to every kind of work stubbornly
executed and in general to all stubbormiess, to standing
up for yourself). And then too: "to knock his hornS down" or
"to knock his horns of/," which restores to contemporary life
precisely the ancient Russian aad Slavonic meaning of the worp
"homs"-conceit, haughtiness, disdain---despite the phrase borrowed
and translated from the French, "put horns on" someone
---describing a wife's unfaithfulneSS-:-a' phrase which never
caught on among the 'ordinary people and which even the Russian
intelligentsia would have forgotten had it not been bound
up with Pushkin's duel. . .
And all these innumerable difficulties force us for the time
being to put off the linguistic portion of our inquiry.
In conclusion, a few personal lines. The zeks· at first shied
away from th~. author of this 'essay when he' questioned them;
17. Dat, op. cit .. p. 357,