Category Archives: language

by | 20 July 2026 · 5:19 pm

Furneaux’s Adventure in New Zealand

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 91-92:

After losing sight of the Resolution among the Antarctic icebergs, Captain Furneaux had sailed the Adventure to Tasmania, a large island about 150 miles south of Australia which the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had sighted and visited in 1642. The French had landed there in 1772, but the Adventure was the first British ship to anchor. For a few days they charted parts of the eastern coast, stopping briefly to fill up their water stores. They saw some abandoned huts and overgrown pathways but didn’t encounter any inhabitants. From there the Adventure sailed east to New Zealand’s Queen Charlotte Sound, where they arrived in early April 1773, two months after their separation from the Resolution.

Like a vast river estuary, the opening of Queen Charlotte Sound was eight miles wide but narrowed as it stretched inland. Sheltered by mountains, the waters within were calm. Steep ravines, rocky headlands and densely forested ridges serrated the coastline where some of the mountains dropped in perpendicular cliffs into the sound, and others sloped down towards long beaches. The water was dark with thin azure bands along the shallow edges. When the Adventure reached the rendezvous point at Ship Cove, a natural harbour with a wide sandy beach and a freshwater stream, they discovered trees carved with the names of the Endeavour’s crew but no sign of the Resolution. Over the next six weeks, Furneaux’s men repaired their ship, took on supplies, and also met a great number of Māori who lived in nearby settlements.

The Māori had carefully approached the Adventure in canoes. ‘Tobia Tobia,’ they called out, using their name for Tupaia—the high priest and navigator from Raiatea, an island near Tahiti—who had joined Cook on his previous voyage and travelled with the Endeavour to New Zealand in 1770. As Māori and Tahitian were related languages, Tupaia had not only assisted Cook with his navigation but also acted as the Endeavour’s translator. In Māori tradition, Raiatea was also their ancestral homeland so they felt a reverence for Tupaia. Having seen him work as interpreter, guide and navigator, most of the Māori had regarded Tupaia as the Europeans’ leader. In the intervening three years, stories about Tupaia, and the Endeavour’s thundering cannons and her pale-skinned crew, had been recounted by the Māori across New Zealand. And so they asked the Adventure crew—some of whom understood a few Māori words because they had been part of Cook’s first expedition—about Tupaia and were saddened to hear that he had died during the Endeavour voyage.

…

The next morning, at 5 a.m., the Resolution turned into Queen Charlotte Sound. Once past the entrance Cook fired a cannon and to their delight another answered. A few hours later, they saw the Adventure in Ship Cove. That evening the two ships anchored next to each other and the men celebrated their reunion.

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Filed under Britain, language, migration, New Zealand, Polynesia, travel

by | 19 July 2026 · 8:44 am

Translating for the Royal Society

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 51-53:

At the end of 1770, the Forsters moved back to London, taking lodgings next to Reinhold’s old school friend Woide, who had moved to Somerset House Stable Yard near the Thames. On 13 December, three days after their arrival, father and son went to the Royal Society, the nexus of British scientific enquiry where, since its foundation in the 1660s, fellows met to learn about new scientistic discoveries and exchange ideas with like-minded men. Reinhold Forster knew the Royal Society well, having attended the weekly meetings during their first stay in London. But now he wanted to introduce his son and present George’s translations (though Reinhold’s name was on their covers). So they made their way to Crane Court, a short fifteen-minute walk from their lodgings in a little cul-de-sac off Fleet Street, where the fellows met every Thursday. The president directed the meetings from a large armchair at one end of a long table, with a bust of the Society’s first royal patron, King Charles II, behind him, while the fellows sat on green-upholstered benches around the table.

At only sixteen George now found himself in the same room with some of the greatest minds in England. Almost every Thursday he accompanied his father to the Royal Society, where he sat under the watchful eyes of the portraits of illustrious previous fellows: the periwigged former president and mathematician Isaac Newton; the philosopher Francis Bacon in a lace ruff and embroidered velvet coat; and the architect Christopher Wren, who rebuilt London after the Great Fire of 1666. At these meetings George heard scholars talk about the physics of light, rare birds in the East Indies, new comets, the latest telescopes, tumours in pregnant women and subterranean geological formations. He saw animals preserved in spirits, pinned insects, a stuffed sea lion and a 24-foot snake, as well as the skeletons of a crocodile and an ostrich. He was receiving instructions unlike any other sixteen-year-old. As father and son attended the weekly meetings and published translations, their names soon spread across the scholarly world. Then, in February 1772, a little more than a year after their return to London, Reinhold was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and became officially part of the British scientific establishment.

George continued to work, translating eight volumes in total, while his father wrote and published numerous essays on botany, insects, zoology, antiquities, geography and mineralogy. ‘If I didn’t have a son of seventeen who helped me with translating,’ Reinhold admitted, ‘I couldn’t possibly do all this work.’ George began to feel like a ‘translation-machine’, but the reviews were glowing. ‘He writes our language,’ the Critical Review applauded (praising Reinhold, since only he was credited), ‘with propriety; always with perspicuity, the great requisite in the communication of scientific learning’. Another critic even declared George’s translation of Bougainville’s A Voyage Round the World ‘superior to the original’.

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Filed under Britain, education, language, science, travel

by | 18 July 2026 · 8:15 pm

George Forster’s Early Youth

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 27-28:

George Forster was ten when he went on his first expedition.

He was a slender boy, small for his age, but what he lacked in physical strength he made up for in tenacity during the five months that he and his father travelled through Russia. In charge of collecting and identifying plants, the ten-year-old would wander off alone, eyes wide open, searching for new discoveries—sometimes climbing trees, at others keeping his head near the ground to study the vegetation with a magnifying glass. When he returned to the tent with full bags, he would press the samples he had found between paper, carefully arranging blossoms and leaves so that he could classify them later. Soon his collection had risen to 700 specimens.

While other children sat on hard benches in orderly rows at school, learning by rod and rote, George found himself galloping on small Kalmyk horses across the Russian steppes and wading through marshes on the banks of the Volga river. He watched a violent wildfire race across the vast grasslands to the east, its ravenous flames consuming everything in its path. He remembered the terror he felt that day for the rest of his life. Instead of studying arithmetic or conjugating Latin verbs, he observed flocks of black herons, wild boars and wolves, and huge Bactrian camels used by the nomadic Kalmyks as pack animals, which evoked the stories of the Arabian Nights and Ali Baba. He met Muslim Tatar traders along the Volga, fierce Cossack warriors from the open steppes to the east who wore sheepskin hats, baggy trousers and colourful caftans, and German settlers so destitute that they lived in earth dugouts in the ground. Near today’s Russian border with Kazakhstan, he marvelled at Lake Elton, a huge shallow salt lake with a shoreline encrusted in a thick white layer like snow, against water which algae had turned blood red. And in the Ryn Desert just north of the Caspian Sea, he felt piercing winds whip across the dunes, as wild as the land itself.

Russia was on a different scale from the flat gentle countryside where George had been raised near Gdansk, in today’s Poland. Everything here was vaster and emptier. The skies, lakes and land were bigger, the distances immense, and the weather extreme. He feasted his eyes and tasted new foods. He ate wild asparagus, drank fermented mare’s milk—‘of a nauseous or disagreeable Taste’—and enjoyed the refreshing juice of bog cranberries mixed with water and honey after the long dusty days on horseback.

This was not like learning from the books he loved. He could see, smell and feel that he had entered another world. The food had a different flavour, the languages were unfamiliar, and the people looked nothing like those at home. In Russia, he absorbed a new and very foreign country for the first time. At the age of ten, he became a traveller.

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Filed under education, Germany, language, migration, Russia, science, travel, Ukraine

by | 17 July 2026 · 3:02 pm

How Much Polish in Esperanto?

This week’s newsletter from Culture.pl contains several articles on language, one of which, by Mikołaj Gliński, answers How much Polish is there in Esperanto? Here are some excerpts:

The Slavic Esperanto lexicon is generally considered to derive from two Slavic languages, both of which Zamenhof knew very well – Russian and Polish. While Russian, as he later recalled, was his favourite during his early days, as well as the language of the larger part of his linguistic output, Polish was the language spoken in Warsaw, where Zamenhof would eventually spend most of his life. And it’s actually these two languages that make up the 1% of Slavic in Esperanto vocabulary. The problem is that sometimes identifying the original language is very hard if not simply impossible.

While Esperanto words like barakti (to flounder, from барахтаться barahtat’sja), gladi (to iron, from гладить gladit’), krom (except, from кроме krome), or vosto (a tail, from хвост) are easy to identify as of Russian origin (they simply don’t appear in Polish), and others like kolbaso can be considered as coming from Russian based on their phonetic build-up (Rus. kolbasa, compare Pol. kiełbasa), there are also some that can be really problematic. This goes for words like celo (aim), bulko (bun), klopodo (effort), kaĉo (porridge, from kasza / каша kaša), prava (right [in opinion], from prawy / правый pravyj), or svati (to matchmake, from swat / сват svat). Due to their almost identical forms in both languages, it seems hardly possible to tell from which language Zamenhof took the original root.

…

And yet the group of Esperanto words which are usually identified as Polish loan words is significant. It includes such words as:

  • barĉo – borscht (from barszcz),
  • ĉu – whether (from czy),
  • krado – a grating (from krata),
  • luti – to solder (from lutować)
  • pilko – a ball (Polish piłka)
  • ŝelko – suspenders (from szelki)
  • [via] moŝto – [your] highness (from Polish mość),

While this is a rather diverse bunch, comprising elements of clothing, sport items, local food, and a grammatical particle, some of these words can be more interesting than others, and actually instructive in telling us something about how Zamenhof saw the component languages of Esperanto, in this case Polish.

…

One of these words is moŝto. It certainly isn’t a word of particular prominence or frequency in contemporary Esperanto. In fact, it’s a word you’re not likely to use at all, unless you’re addressing high authority, or… a king. The latter was Zamenhof’s case – he used the word (precisely: Lia reĝa moŝto) when addressing the king of Spain Alfonso XIII speaking at the Esperanto Congress in Barcelona in 1909. Yet it is this word that also happens to offer interesting insights into the role of Polish in the Esperanto system.

The word goes back to the Polish word mość, one of many honorific lexemes used (historically) in Polish. In early modern Poland, the phrase was required as an obligatory form of address between and to members of the Polish nobility (szlachta). Used and abused, this linguistic habit was part of the more widespread social and cultural phenomenon known as szlachtomania (nobility-mania), a real scourge of early-modern Polish society.

…

While Zamenhof on the one hand made sure that addressing people in Esperanto would be as democratic as possible (Esperantists address each other by a simple vi (you), much like in contemporary English, and unlike in Polish), he also reserved a mode of speaking when addressing the highest royal authority. In finding the right word he somewhat naturally turned to Polish. A choice well justified, as Polish is perhaps the only Slavic language (along with Czech) to have developed an elaborate honorific system that distinguishes between who you’re talking to, based on your age and social status (historically, class of society).

That Polish is at the core of Esperanto honorific usage is best exemplified in the phrase via reĝa moŝto, which translates as Your Majesty, and can be seen as quite a direct calque from the Polish: wasza królewska mość…

Is Ĉu Polish?

But perhaps the most interesting and telling case of a Polish Slavic influence on Esperanto is the particle ĉu (whether, if). This little but important word goes most likely back to the Polish czy, otherwise it comes up only in Belarusian (ці/tsi) and is not used in other Slavic languages. Interestingly the same particle (צי, tsi) surfaces also in Yiddish, a language Zamenhof was surely familiar with.

Much the same as in Polish, ĉu in Esperanto is used primarily to introduce a question. Like in this example:

Imagine you find yourself somewhere in Eastern Europe. But is it Russia or Belarus, Poland or Croatia, Slovenia or Slovakia? Find out how much you know about Slavic languages and we’ll see if you’re able to make your way through Slavic Europe.

Ĉu li aŭ ŝi amas min? [Does he or she love me?]

Whereas in French or English, asking a question involves inverting the word order and/or inserting an auxiliary particle, which as many struggling language learners surely know, can be quite complicated, Esperanto simply puts ĉu in front of the phrase or subordinate clause, the sentence basically stays the same. This is exactly how ‘czy’ operates in Polish and Yiddish.

But ĉu is also interesting because it opens us on the issues of syntax – as most structuralists would tell you, language is not really about vocabulary. This helps to pinpoint the more thorough impact of Slavic, and Polish in particular, on the fundamental grammatical structures in Esperanto. Like say, the accusative…

Is Esperanto’s accusative Slavic?

Esperanto is somewhat notorious for its rather free word order. This goes for noun + adjective order (adjective noun) but also, and more importantly, the structural order of subject, object and verb in a sentence. The latter in Esperanto is very flexible, even if the word order which is usually recommended is SVO. This flexibility, which allows for great liberty in constructing Esperanto sentence, is actually facilitated through the presence of the accusative. Compare these examples:

The boy bit the dog

La knabo mordis la hundon

La knabo la hundon mordis

La hundon la knabo mordis

La hundon mordis la knabo

Mordis la hundon la knabo

Mordis la knabo la hundon

The presence of the accusative case (marked by the -n ending) was a bone of contention in early discussions among Esperantists (and partially led to a schism in the early Esperanto movement, see Ido). But Zamenhof always remained a strong advocate of the accusative. As Professor Żelazny explains, he thought it was a key tool in allowing bigger flexibility for Esperanto sentences, which was particularly important in poetry, which Zamenhof admired so much. The accusative affix allowed for greater flexibility in the Esperanto word order and thus multiplied the rhyming potential of it, which otherwise would be very limited.

As a result, Esperanto’s word order is very fluid (although naturally some positions are preferred by users) just like it is in Slavic languages. And while it’s obviously impossible to trace back the invention to Polish or Russian (German also has the accusative,) the Esperanto sentence shares a general similarity with the rather free syntax of Slavic sentence.

This is showcased in the early translation of The Pharaoh by Bolesław Prus. As Walter Żelazny notes, it was La Faraono, translated by Kazimierz Bein, that became a kind of model for much of the literature later written in Esperanto.

…

Semantic calques

A more subtle influence of Slavic languages on the structure of Esperanto, and more precisely its morphology, can be traced in the semantic build-up of Esperanto word formations, like senanima, senforta, or senfunda. While all these words are built from Esperanto (sen-) and Romance elements, they are actually semantic calques from Slavic languages, but again telling whether it’s Polish or Russian may be next to impossible.

  • senanima – heartless, callous [calque of Rus. бeздyшный or Pol. bezduszny]
  • senfunda– bottomless [calque of Rus. бeздoнный, Pol. bezdenny]
  • senforta – powerless [calque of Rus. бессильный / Pol. bezsilny]

A similar ‘subliminal’ influence of Slavic semantics can be seen in the meaning and functioning of some words. One oft-cited example is the Esperanto word plena ‘full, complete’, which looks Latinate in form (French plein(e), Latin plen- ‘full’), but has the semantic range of Russian полный polnyi ‘full, complete’, as can be seen in the phrase plena vortaro ‘a complete dictionary’, a usage not possible with the French or Latin words. And one could add that it’s also how the word pełny is also used in Polish.

Phonetics

Another area of a possible Slavic influence is phonology. As Walter Żelazny explains: “The Esperanto phonological system is almost entirely Polish.” That’s why, as Żelazny claims, the majority of Poles, as the majority of Slavs, should not have to learn any vowels. In fact, all the sounds which you can find in Esperanto are also in Polish, including diacriticical signs: ĉ (Polish cz), ĝ (dż), Ĵ (ż), Ŝ (sz), ŭ (ł).

Alphabet

A bit surprisingly, Polish influence is also traceable in the Esperanto alphabet and orthography. The Esperanto alphabet consists of 28 letters, with each letter standing for one sound. Apart from diacritical letters, its peculiarities include the letters C and J. Pronounced as ‘ts’ and ‘y’, respectively, they may at first seem a bit counter-intuitive for many Esperanto learners, but they are best explained on the grounds of the Polish alphabet. It is a common experience of many Polish learners that these letters to the English eye are false friends. (As to further Slavic influence in the Esperanto alphabet, compare the letter ŭ in Esperanto and Belarusian).

…

Accent

But perhaps the best and most convincing example of the overall influence of Polish – and not Slavic languages – on the shape of Esperanto is its accent. The accent rule was included already in the first edition of Unua Libro, the first Esperanto handbook, published by Zamenhof in Warsaw in 1887. Among the 16 cardinal principles of Esperanto the one No. 10 reads:

The accent falls on the last syllable but one (penultimate).

The penultimate accent just happens to be one of the characteristic features of Polish, differentiating it sharply from other local Slavic languages, like Russian (which has unpredictable stress) or Czech (initial accent) as well as from French, which accents the last syllable pronounced. That’s why some practitioners of Esperanto claim that Polish pronunciation of Esperanto is the most natural and closest to the Esperanto standard. But this is of course rather a matter of individual taste.

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Filed under language, Poland, Russia

by | 14 July 2026 · 8:23 pm

Russia Boosts Ukrainian Nationalism

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 131-134:

The eight years of hybrid warfare that Russia had waged against Ukraine in the Donbas, divided by the Minsk agreements, turned Ukraine into a different country and society from those of 2014. A country divided by issues of history, culture, and identity when the Crimea was annexed was now united by the desire to defend its sovereignty, democratic order, and way of life at almost any price.

The war had changed the electoral map of Ukraine. The first wartime presidential elections, held in May 2014, yielded unprecedented results: Petro Poroshenko won in the first round with 55 percent of the vote—the first time this had happened since 1991. Even more important, Poroshenko carried 187 precincts out of 188 remaining under Ukrainian control. The dividing line of the previous presidential elections, which had split Ukraine in half between pro-European and pro-Russian candidates, was now gone. The war had produced a much more homogenous country.

Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and takeover of significant portions of Ukraine’s Donbas removed the traditionally most pro-Russian areas, with the greatest number of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine, from Ukrainian political and cultural space. Those areas had also served as bases for Russia-friendly political parties. Russia did its utmost to support former allies of the ousted president, Viktor Yanukovych, but they were divided and weak after losing a significant part of their electoral base. The forces led by the Ukrainian businessman and politician Viktor Medvedchuk, who was close to Putin, also remained weak despite the support of television channels and newspapers funded with Russian assistance.

The growth of Ukrainian political identity began with the rejection of symbols of the Soviet past. The Maidan protests of 2014 unleashed a wave of demolition of monuments to Vladimir Lenin, the main symbol of communist and, in the eyes of many, Russian domination of Ukraine. More than 500 such monuments were toppled by anti-communist activists in the first half of 2014, mostly in the center of the country. The rest, more than 1,500 that remained in the regions of southeastern Ukraine controlled by Kyiv, were removed in the course of the next few years by decision of parliament, which adopted the so-called “decommunization laws” prohibiting the public display of communist symbols.

Ukrainians survived the Russian onslaught during the first stage of the war, in 2014–15, by uniting across ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural lines. The war itself also promoted popular identification with the Ukrainian language and culture. Since Putin’s official rationale for invading Ukraine was the defense of Russian speakers, many Ukrainians and Russians who knew Ukrainian but used Russian as their language of preference began to switch to Ukrainian as an act of defiance. The number of those self-reporting their use of Ukrainian at home and at work spiked in 2014–15. That number returned to the previous norm once the immediate danger of all-out invasion passed, but readiness to adopt Ukrainian as the dominant language of government and education remained. In 2019, parliament adopted a new law making the Ukrainian language mandatory for government officials and public-sector employees. The Russian Foreign Ministry protested, claiming that the law would deepen divisions in Ukrainian society. That did not prove to be the case.

City and village bookstores were flooded with Ukrainian-language books, reducing Russian-language publications to secondary status. Works on Ukrainian history and culture began to top bestseller lists. Before the war, the government had spent little or no money on the promotion of Ukrainian culture abroad; now it created a special Ukrainian Institute under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Its task was to emulate Germany’s Goethe Institute and similar agencies in other countries, familiarizing foreign countries with the Ukrainian language and culture. At home, the Ukrainian Cultural Fund and the Ukrainian Book Institute were charged with supporting cultural events and promoting Ukrainian publications.

In 2018 the government provided strong support for the unification of the two branches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that were independent of the Moscow Patriarchate, which still dominated Orthodoxy in Ukraine, while striving to restrain competition between them. President Poroshenko attended the unification council of the two churches, which were placed under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople—a major blow to the prospect of continuing Russian Orthodox hegemony. Moscow protested and severed ties with the Patriarch of Constantinople but could do little more to maintain its position. The newly united Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) had mass popular support, and, given the ongoing if undeclared war with Russia, many Orthodox Ukrainians preferred a church independent of Moscow. The transfer of parishes from the Moscow Patriarchate to the OCU began in the first months of 2019.

Active government involvement in matters of language, memory politics, and religion met with substantial criticism not only from traditionally pro-Russian political forces but also from part of the country’s liberal establishment. Nevertheless, it was either supported or accepted by the population at large. After Russia’s aggressive weaponization of issues of culture and history in 2014–15, much of the population agreed that the new laws and policies were necessary elements of nation-building, designed to prevent further Russian aggression.

The new Ukrainian government fulfilled the promise of the Revolution of Dignity by moving closer to the European Union and Euro-Atlantic institutions, including NATO. The association agreement that had triggered the Maidan protests in 2017 was signed in June 2014. In March 2017 the European Union Council granted Ukrainians visa-free travel to the EU. The EU member nations provided badly needed financial assistance, altogether up to $14 billion, to help Ukraine deal with its losses of territory, population, and economic assets. An additional $2.2 billion came from the United States. Washington became the main sponsor of reform in the Ukrainian security sector, providing $1.6 billion for that purpose alone. Ukraine was rapidly acquiring a new professional army, and the government placed NATO membership back on its agenda by including it in the Ukrainian constitution.

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Filed under democracy, Europe, language, military, nationalism, religion, Russia, U.S., Ukraine, war

by | 12 July 2026 · 5:15 am

Reviving Russian Slavic Eurasianism

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 102-104:

Putin adopted many elements of traditional and revived Eurasianism as parts of his world view. In his official pronouncements he spoke repeatedly of Russia as a unique multiethnic civilization not only different from the West but opposed to it in history, culture, and values. But he also embraced with equal if not greater enthusiasm the ideas of a different group of Russian thinkers who juxtaposed Russia to the West predominantly as a Eurasian Slavic or Russian civilization. That trend of thought, represented by such figures as Aleksei Khomiakov, Ivan Kirievsky, and Konstantin Aksakov, predated Eurasianism, going back to the first decades of the nineteenth century, which produced one of the most consequential schisms in Russian intellectual history, that between Westernizers and Slavophiles. The former insisted that Russia’s destiny lay with the West, while the latter emphasized Russian uniqueness, rooted in history, language, culture, and nationality.

The nationality that the Slavophiles called Russian was in fact East Slavic. In imperial Russian terminology, it consisted of Great Russians, or Russians per se, Little Russians or Ukrainians, and White Russians or Belarusians. The model of a tripartite Russian nation, which the Russian historian Alexei Miller calls a “big Russian nation,” was adopted by the imperial elites in the second half of the nineteenth century and became part of the ideological credo and personal belief, as well as identity, of many of the country’s political, religious, and military leaders. The Russian Revolution put an end to the dominance of the tripartite nation in Russian political and ethnonational thought. In 1922, Lenin resisted Joseph Stalin’s attempts to incorporate non-Russian republics into the Russian Federation and insisted on the creation of a Union state in which those republics would be distinct polities with rights equal to those of Russia.

The idea of a big Russian nation went into the Russian emigration along with the White Guard generals defeated by the Bolshevik Red Army and the intellectuals who supported their vision of Russia, one and indivisible. Among the émigrés was General Anton Denikin, whose memoirs would make a strong impression on Vladimir Putin, and the philosopher Ivan Ilyin, an admirer of fascism, whose article, “What the Dismemberment of Russia Promises the World,” would become a frequently quoted source in the speeches and pronouncements of Putin and other Russian officials. Ilyin argued that one day Russia would gather its lands back under its tutelage.

The key figure who linked the imperial thinking of the past with a plan for dealing with post-Soviet Russian challenges and realities was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In his essay of 1990, Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals, Solzhenitsyn called for the separation of the eastern Slavs from the non-Slavic republics of the Soviet Union and the formation of a “Russian Union” consisting of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and northern Kazakhstan. If one followed Ernest Gellner’s definition of nationalism as the establishment of congruence between political and ethnonational borders, then Solzhenitsyn’s “reconstructed” Russia was to become quadripartite. But his plan never materialized, and several years later Solzhenitsyn went on to question the legitimacy of the Ukrainian borders. In his essay Russia in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn argued for the annexation of eastern and southern Ukraine, denouncing its “inordinate expansion onto territory that was never Ukraine until Lenin: the two Donets provinces, and the whole southern belt of New Russia (Melitopol–Kherson–Odesa) and the Crimea.”

Putin was an admirer of all these writers and shared many of their ideas. In May 2009, less than a year after the invasion of Georgia, he made a public show of his admiration for imperial Russian thinkers. Despite rainy weather, he showed up in the company of numerous reporters at the cemetery of the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow to lay flowers on the graves of General Denikin and his wife, along with the grave of Ivan Ilyin and that of Ivan Shmelev, another Russian émigré writer whose remains had been returned to Russia. Putin also laid flowers on the grave of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had died in Moscow the previous year.

Referring to General Denikin, whose grave he honored first, Putin encouraged one of the reporters accompanying him at the ceremony to read Denikin’s memoirs. “Denikin discusses Great and Little Russia, Ukraine,” said Putin. “He writes that no one may meddle in relations between us; that has always been the business of Russia itself.” Denikin was in fact following Aleksandr Pushkin, who had attacked the West for criticizing Russia’s assault on Poland after it rebelled against the empire in 1830. If Pushkin referred to Russo-Polish relations, Denikin referred to those between Russia and Ukraine. In Putin’s view, it was up to Russia to decide how to conduct its relations with a weaker neighbor. The Slavic roots of the two peoples became his excuse to condemn any Western support for Ukraine.

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Filed under Belarus, language, migration, military, nationalism, philosophy, Poland, Russia, Ukraine

by | 5 July 2026 · 2:45 pm

Romanian Realia: Online Investing

This flyer is from a bank in Moldova:

Ai Grijă unde investești ONLINE!
Take care where you invest ONLINE!
Nu te lăsa păcălit de promisiuni false.
Don’t let yourself be fooled by false promises.

STOP investițiilor false
Stop false investments

STOP! Informează-te înainte să accepți oferte “atractive” de învestiții online.
Stop! Inform yourself before accepting “attractive” offers of online investment.

Cănd sună prea frumos să fie adevărat, e momentul să te OPREȘTI.
If it sounds too attractive to be true, it’s the moment to STOP.

VERIFICĂ! Dacă ai dubii, consultă o persoană de încredere sau un angajat bancar.
Verify! If you have doubts, consult a trusted person or a bank employee.

EVITĂ completarea sondajelor care cer informații sensibile și nu oferi datele tale personale sau bancare pe site-uri necunoscute.
Avoid completing surveys that ask for sensitive information and don’t offer personal or bank data on unfamiliar sites.

Ferește-te de “juriștii” de pe internet care promit că îți recuperează banii rapid. În realitate, poate fi doar o altă înșelătorie.
Protect yourself from “lawyers” on the internet who promise that you can quickly recover your money. In reality, it may be just another scam.

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Filed under economics, education, language, Moldova, Romania

by | 3 July 2026 · 12:10 am

Ukraine in 1917

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 15-16:

On the eve of his all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Vladimir Putin would claim that it was the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin in particular, who had created a Ukrainian state and, indeed, modern Ukraine itself. Even a cursory acquaintance with the history of the Russian Revolution and the concomitant fall of the Russian Empire indicates that the modern Ukrainian state came into existence not thanks to Lenin but against his wishes.

In May 1917, soon after the fall of monarchy, the Central Rada (Council), the revolutionary Ukrainian parliament, created in Kyiv and led by historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, proclaimed Ukraine’s autonomy within a future Russian republic. But it was only after the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd in the fall of 1917 that the Central Rada declared the creation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, which encompassed most of present-day Ukrainian territory within the borders of the Russian Empire, including the mining region of the Donbas. The new state wanted to maintain federal ties with Russia, but the Bolshevik invasion of January 1918 made that impossible.

The Central Rada declared the independence of Ukraine and entered in the anti-Bolshevik alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Bolsheviks waged war on the Ukrainian government under the banner of their own Ukrainian People’s Republic—a fiction created to provide a degree of legitimacy for the Bolshevik takeover of Ukraine. Bolshevik troops massacred the population of Kyiv, killing hundreds if not thousands of its citizens, including Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoiavlensky) of the Orthodox Church. The Bolshevik commander in Kyiv, Mikhail Muraviev, sent Lenin a telegram: “Order has been restored in Kyiv.”

The Central Rada had to leave Kyiv but soon returned, having signed an agreement with Germany and Austria-Hungary, whose troops moved into Ukraine in the spring of 1918 and drove the Bolsheviks out of its territory, including the Donbas. The Germans soon replaced the democratic Central Rada with the authoritarian regime of hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, but the democratic Ukrainian People’s Republic was restored when the Germans withdrew from Ukraine late in 1918. The Bolsheviks moved in once again, this time under the banner of their adversary Ukrainian People’s Republic, formally independent of Russia.

By the time the Bolsheviks reemerged in Ukraine and launched their military campaign to bring the Ukrainian provinces of the former Russian Empire back under central control, Ukrainian national consciousness was so widespread that Vladimir Lenin felt compelled to change his strategy. He concluded that Ukrainian aspirations to independence were so strong, not only among Ukrainians in general but even among the Ukrainian Bolsheviks themselves, as to require the granting of a degree of autonomy and a status equal to that of Russia.

Not only were the Ukrainians recognized as a distinct nationality (as were the Belarusians), no longer a “tribe” of a tripartite Russian nation as in tsarist times, but pro forma recognition of independence was given to a puppet Soviet Ukrainian state, and Ukrainian became its official language.

Realizing that the national movements brought to power by the effects of World War I and the Revolution of 1917 would have to be accommodated, the Bolsheviks strove to gain the cooperation of Ukraine’s new political and cultural elites. This accommodation eventually went beyond issues of language, culture, and the recruitment of local cadres into de facto occupation administrations. It also included the creation of state institutions and recognition of the formal independence of the Bolshevik-controlled puppet states formed to delegitimize the new truly independent states and governments established by the national minorities in the borderlands of the former empire.

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Filed under Austria, democracy, Germany, language, nationalism, Ukraine, USSR, war

by | 30 June 2026 · 12:06 am

Building a Ukrainian National Language

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 215-218:

AMONG THE UKRAINIANS prepared to fight Napoleon with arms in hand was the founder of modern Ukrainian literature, Ivan Kotliarevsky. A native of the Poltava region in the former Hetmanate, he formed a Cossack detachment to join the struggle. The son of a minor official, Kotliarevsky studied in a theological seminary, worked as a tutor of children of the nobility, and served in the Russian imperial army, taking part in the 1806–1812 Russo-Turkish War. In 1798, while on military service, the first part of his poem Eneïda appeared in print, a travesty based on Virgil’s Aeneid, whose main characters were not Greeks but Zaporozhian Cossacks. As one would expect of true Zaporozhians, they spoke vernacular Ukrainian. But the choice of language for the poem seems logical only in retrospect. In late eighteenth century Ukraine, Kotliarevsky was a pioneer—the first to write a major poetical work in the vernacular.

…

Kotliarevsky wrote the first part of Eneïda when the shell of Church Slavonic, which had dominated Russian imperial literature of the previous era, was crumbling and falling apart, allowing literatures based in one way or another on the vernacular to make their way into the public sphere. Russia found its first truly great poet in Alexander Pushkin; Ukraine got its own in the person of Kotliarevsky. Whatever his original motives for using Ukrainian, Kotliarevsky never regretted his choice. There would be five more parts of Eneïda. He would also author the first plays written in Ukrainian, among them Natalka-Poltavka (Natalka from Poltava), a love story set in a Ukrainian village. The language of Kotliarevsky’s homeland, the Poltava region of the former Hetmanate, would become the basis of standard Ukrainian for speakers of numerous Ukrainian dialects from the Dnieper to the Don in the east and to the Carpathians in the west. With Kotliarevsky, a new literature was born. The language received its first grammar in 1818 with the publication of the Grammar of the Little Russian Dialect by Oleksii Pavlovsky. A year later, the first collection of Ukrainian folk songs by Mykola (Nikolai) Tsertelev appeared in print.

…

The birthplace of Ukrainian romanticism was the city of Kharkiv, where the imperial government opened a university in 1805, inviting professors from all over the empire to fill vacant positions. Being a professor at that time often meant taking an interest in local history and folklore, and Kharkiv had a rich tradition. It served as the administrative and cultural center of Sloboda Ukraine, settled by Ukrainian Cossacks and runaway peasants in the times of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this land was often referred to as “Ukraine.”

…

The centrality of the Cossack past to romantic literary interests, already manifested by Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda, was further evidenced by the Kharkiv romantics’ readiness to embrace and popularize by far the most influential Ukrainian historical text of the period, Istoriia rusov (The History of the Rus’).

Well, my Kindle app has informed me that I’ve nearly reached the publisher’s limit in copying from the text of this book, and this seems a good place to end this series of excerpts—at the point where a national language begins to develop. So I have decided to buy the latest book by the same prolific author, and begin reading and posting excerpts from The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History (W. W. Norton, 2023), the first chapter of which summarizes many of the highlights that I have excerpted from this book.

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Filed under education, language, literature, nationalism, Russia, Ukraine

by | 28 June 2026 · 12:59 am

Polish Realia: Italian Pizza

Here are some informative paragraphs from the placemats at Tutti Santi, home of “legendary Italian pizza” in Kielce, Poland.

Włosaka pizza to setki lat historii. Na to, jak smakuje, ma wpływ jakość produktów, ale tez wiele lat poszukiwan, odkryc i zaangażowania ludzi, dla których pizza stała się życiową pasją. Zamów swoją ulubioną pizzę i rozsmakuj się w tej wyjątkowej historii.
Italian pizza embodies centuries of history. Its taste is shaped not only by the quality of the ingredients but also by years of exploration, discovery, and the dedication of people for whom pizza has become a lifelong passion. Order your favorite pizza and savor this unique story.

Włoskie Rzemiosło Italian Craftsmanship
Przepis na prawdziwą, włoska pizzę to tajemnica, do której dostęp mają tylko nieliczni. Tutti Santi to jedyna restauracja w Polsce, w której spróbujesz pizzy według receptury Mistrza Włoch i Europy Valerio Valle. Ciasto jego autorstwa jest delikatne, cienkie i lekko chrupiące.
The recipe for authentic Italian pizza is a secret accessible to only a few. Tutti Santi is the only restaurant in Poland where you can taste pizza made according to the recipe of Italian and European Champion Valerio Valle. The dough he created is delicate, thin, and slightly crispy.

Cierpliwość Patience
Ciasto według autorskiej receptury Mistrza Valerio Valle wymaga czasu i cierpliwości. Dojrzewanie ciasta trwa 48 godzin, w tym czasie zachodzą w nim niezbędne procesy, dzięki którym zawsze jest pyszne i lekkostrawne.
The dough, based on Master Valerio Valle’s original recipe, requires time and patience. The dough undergoes a 48-hour maturation process, during which essential changes occur that ensure it is always delicious and easy to digest.

Pomidory Tomatoes
Pomidory nie zostały odkryte we Włoszech, ale to Włosi odkryli ich potencjał i zamienili je w symbol włoskiej kuchni. Nasz sos tworzymy tylko z włoskich pomidorów, które dojrzewają w gorącym słońcu południa, co daje im wyątkową słodycz.
Tomatoes were not discovered in Italy, but it was the Italians who discovered their potential and turned them into a symbol of Italian cuisine. We make our sauce exclusively from Italian tomatoes ripened in the hot southern sun, which gives them exceptional sweetness.

Mąka – Sekret Ciasta Flour – Secret to the Dough
Wyselekcjonowaliśmy specjalny rodzaj włoskiej mąki o odpowiedniej zawartości białka. Mąkę sprowadzamy prosto z włoskich młynów, które od blisko 200 lat należą do jednej rodziny, gdzie przez pokolenia przekazuje się najlepsze tradycje i wielowikowe doświadczenie.
We have selected a special type of Italian flour with the appropriate protein content. We source our flour directly from Italian mills that have belonged to the same family for nearly 200 years—mills where the finest traditions and centuries of experience have been passed down through generations.

Naturalny Ogień Natural Fire
Nasze pizze wypiekamy w specjalnych kopułowych piecach opalanych drewnem. Od czterech pokoleń są one produkowane przez jedną rodzinę Valoriani. Od ponad 100 lat specjalizuje się ona w tradycyjnych piecach chlebowych, wykorzystując moc ognia, właściwości lawy wulkanidznej i widzę na temat rzemieślniczych metod wypieku ciasta.
We bake our pizzas in special wood-fired dome ovens. For four generations, they have been produced by the Valoriani family. For over 100 years, they have specialized in traditional bread ovens, harnessing the power of fire, the properties of volcanic lava, and expertise in artisanal baking methods.

Unikalne Smaki Unique Tastes
Do przygotowania każdej pizzy w Tutti Santi wykorzystujemy selektywnie wybrane produkty, które sprowadzamy bezpośrednio z Włoch od regionalnych, rzemieślniczych producentów. W naszym menu znajdziecie m.in. szlachetną szynkę San Daniele, Mozzarellę di Bufala z mleka bawolego, sery Stracchino, Provolone i wiele innych regionalnych produktów!
To prepare every pizza at Tutti Santi, we use carefully selected products imported directly from Italy from regional, artisanal producers. Our menu features, among other things, premium San Daniele ham, buffalo milk Mozzarella di Bufala, Stracchino and Provolone cheeses, and many other regional products!

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Filed under food, Italy, language, Poland