Canadian Slavonic Papers: Dizionario delle parole russe che si incontrano in italiano

Giorgio Maria Nicolai. Dizionario delle parole russe che si incontrano in italiano. Biblioteca di cultura. Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 2003. Index. 529 pp. euro30,00.

It should be mentioned in the first place that the Dizionario delle parole russe ehe s'incontrano in italiano by Giorgio Maria Nicolai (henceforth: Dizionario) is a hybrid work that brings together under the general heading of "Russisms" entries of heterogeneous nature with a largely varying frequency of use within the Italian lexicon. Upon close examination the Dizionario appears to be more of an encyclopaedic manual intended for a public consisting of Italian readers who have little knowledge of Russian language and culture, who need a means of consultation that can provide synthetic, but at the same time clear and exhaustive information on historical, social, and traditional phenomena that are often mentioned in Italian texts (translations, historical works, newspaper articles, travel notes etc.)

The Dizionario is a substantial enlargement and update of previous works by Nicolai (Le parole russe, Roma, Bulzoni 1982 e Viaggio lessicale nel Paese dei Soviet, Roma, Bulzoni 1994), but at least about a hundred entries are here taken into consideration for the first time. In my opinion, the principal value of this work consists in the copious bibliographical references, mainly to travel literature and journalistic publications, the result of extensive research carried out for more than twenty years by the author, who is a passionate student of the history of the Russian language. On the other hand, the treatment of the pronunciation of Russian terms is not completely satisfying to me. One of the main difficulties that must be tackled when using a foreign word is pronunciation, especially when this word originates from Russian. This problem is to a large degree caused by different procedures of transliterating the Cyrillic alphabet in Latin and the uncertainties of pronunciation of non-adapted loans that result from this. Alas, a phonetic transcription of the individual terms, an instrument that in my opinion is indispensable in a dictionary with the characteristics and aims set out in the work by Nicolai, is absent in this work. Although the author states that he has followed the scientific transcription that has established itself in Italy for some time now, in the introductory notes "Pronuncia delle parole russe" (pp. 17-18) he restricts himself to a short and unfortunately not always understandable presentation of the main phonetic characteristics of Russian, committing some grave errors in the process (e.g. the diacritic ["] does not always have the function of indicating a palatalized consonant, like in [s] and [z]).

Russian is among the languages that have made a conspicuous contribution to the creation of the Italian lexicon. (Among the Slavonic languages it is the foremost language in this respect.) In a classification of loans that have enriched Italian most it is surmised that Russisms occupy the fifth or sixth position, after Anglicisms, Gallicisms, Germanisms, Hispanisms, and Arabisms (p. 11 ). The vast majority of the words that are analyzed in the Dizionario belong to the specific lexical category of "necessity loans," i.e. connected to things and institutions typically Russian (a concept that is in Russian referred to by the term realija), that are untranslatable because they do not have an equivalent in Italian culture or in the culture of other European languages. On the basis of this preliminary consideration the author does not discuss, even where this in my opinion would have been possible and desirable, the not unimportant problem of translation, i.e. the search for one or two ternis that offer a satisfying equivalent in Italian. The problem of translation is discussed only incidentally and only in a few cases, like for typically Russian melioratives and appellatives (golúbuska, batjuska, matuska), for some types of clothing (kaftan) and for the nobility rank of knjaz',

The introduction in the European languages of "necessity loans" from Russian, had already started in the age of Old Russian (in the 11th-13th centuries, especially from German, as a consequence of commercial contacts that Europe maintained with Rus'), and became more intense at the beginning of the Modem Era, as correspondences and travelling accounts grew in number, the authors of which were often Italian travellers and diplomats (and, in more recent times, journalists or simply tourists). As is known, from the second half of the 19th century an exponential increase in the number of Russisms in European languages took place, in the first instance caused by the translation of the great classical Russian novels and, after the year 1917, Sovietisms were introduced, the linguistic contribution of which has largely influenced the socio-political lexicon of western languages. It should be borne in mind that a considerable number of Russisms entered Italian by the mediation of French, English, and German.

The Dizionario registers just over 300 entries, but it should be noted, however, that the "Indice dei russismi" at the end of the work (pp. 519-529) actually contains many more: not only derivatives, especially numerous among geographical and historico-political ternis, but also various other Russian terms, which are cited within the entries, have been indexed. In the recent dictionary by Tullio De Mauro & Marco Mancini, Parole straniere nella lingua italiana, Milano, Garzanti 2003, the foreign words of Russian origin amount to only 135 (although a further 69 entries that come from Russian are to be found in Appendix I, where words that have been Italianized as regards their morphology, orthography, and pronunciation, have been adduced). The considerable numerical discrepancy between the Russisms collected in these two works seems to be justified by the original selection criteria used in the Dizionario by Nicolai. As a matter of fact, in the "Introduzione" to his own volume the author states that he has used the critérium of "frequency," also for shorter historical periods and/or within specialist fields, to determine his selection (p. 12). This explains the presence of many entries that were actively used in the 19th and 20th centuries (mugico, for which nowadays the non-adapted form muzik is preferred), but that are only rarely or never used in contemporary Italian, or of terms that are related to very restricted spheres of use, limited as they are to written sources that are historically very remote from the present. Thus, the markedly diachronic perspective in the work by Nicolai, preponderantly orientated on the history of the language instead of on its contemporary usage, is confirmed.

Among the lexical categories that are present in the Dizionario are geographical and ethnographical terms (abcháso, baschíro, cecéno, circásso, kirghíso, etc.), folklore and mythological terms (domovój, lésij, rusálka, vodjanój, etc.), as well as units of measurement and coins (altýn, arsin, desjatína, grívna, gros, pud, vedró, vérsta, etc.).

Entries related to everyday life and traditions have been treated in a very complete way: clothing (kaftán, lápti, sarafán, tulúp, válenki, etc.), typical dishes and drinks (borsc, galúski, kefir, kisél', kvas, kása, okroska, pelméni, pirog, plov, saslyk, sbiten',sci,seljanka, ucha, zakuska, etc.), housing (banja, isba, etc.), transport (bricka, drozki, kibitka, sani, tarantes, teléga, troica), and traditional peasant institutions (mir, obrok, barscina). Furthermore, numerous terms that refer to musical instruments occur (balalaica, bandura, domra, dudka, gusli, zurna, etc.) Special attention is paid to the description of entries that pertain to dignity, rank, civil and military institutions (cin, druzina, duma, knjaz', etc.). Also numerous are persons from Russian history that have given their proper names to objects and phenomena (kalashnikov, molotov, stacanovista). In the Dizionario are also included the denominations of political movements (breznevismo, gorbaciovismo, kruscevismo, leninismo, stalinisme, trockismo, etc.), of socio-cultural phenomena (oblomovismo, nichilismo. narodnicestvo, etc.) and of artistic trends (acmeismo, ambulanti, costriittivismo, imaginismo, etc.). Furthennore, some terms designating members of religious sects are also mentioned (chlyst, duchoborec, skopéc) for which, however, sufficiently attested translations in Italian do exist, and some Italian polyrhematic expressions, i.e. constructed on the basis of analogous Russian expressions (réalisme socialista, notti bianche, anime morte, cul to delta personalità, giornale murale). Likewise included are entries dedicated to terms widely used in the modern Italian lexicon, like intellighénzia, glasnost', perestrojka.

In the Dizionario some abbreviations have found a place (Chepeu, Enkavedè,' Kaghebè), that have been transcribed in Italian according to the principle of phonetic orthography (like Ceka) and occur exclusively in written texts. Finally, there are some expressions that escape definition and whose pertinence to Russian culture is rather fluid or even completely non-existent (insalala russa, roulette russa, montagne msse).

Every entry in the Dizionario is actually divided into three sections, which I will describe in the following way: 1. the head; 2. the etymon; 3. the sources. In the first section the author gives the dictionary form, apparently in the graphical adaptation most frequently encountered in the sources (as regards this question it is not clear whether the author follows this principle in a coherent way or more often simply prefers transliterating from Russian). Often the head consists of the Italianized adaptation (accompanied by the most important variants), that reflects the phonetic and prosodie characteristics assumed by the term as it was transposed into Italian: bielonisso, cosacco, boiaro (boiardo), copéca (copéco, kopéka, kopéco), zar (czar, tsar, tzar), ukase. In the same section the meaning of the term in Russian is explained, for which, bearing in mind the impossibility of a direct translation, a historico-cultural background is necessarily offered that, although rather brief, appears mostly correct and exhaustive. In the second section of every entry the original -· Russian etymon is given, transliterated with Eatin characters, followed by some brief historico-linguistic information. In this part the author also indicates, when known, the first attestation of the term in Italian. Finally, in the third section of every entry the sources are enumerated in which the author was able to attest the use of the term (generally, more than one source), accompanied by citations.

The Dizionario also touches upon some unusually interesting points, like the semantic drift that a Russian term incorporated into Italian has undergone over time. For instance, the word Cernobil in the metaphorical meaning of "catastrophe," "disaster" that the name of the little Ukrainian town has assumed in Italian following the explosion of the reactor of the nuclear power plant in the spring of 1986. One notes also the term gulag, that in Italian can be attested with an endless series of metaphorical usages generally connected to the idea of isolation and coercion, and likewise the rather frequent figurative usage in contemporary Italian of the term matrioska.

As has already been said, many terms have entered Italian by the way of western languages, especially French, a curious example of which is the origin of the term casacca ('jacket') that, probably by the way of French cosaque, derives from Russian kazak. As regards neologisms, an important phenomenon in present-day Russian, \heDizionario only refers to a single one, sovok ("Soviet Union", "Soviet man"), with zero frequency in Italian, though.

Adalgisa Mingati, University of Padua, Italy