Folk aesthetics is an area that has attracted limited scholarly attention. By folk aesthetics I understand the conceptualisation of aesthetics embedded in language and shared by speakers of that language (cf. Apresjan 1992). Aesthetics reflects norms about what is ‘beautiful’ and applies to numerous aspects of life – what people see, do, how they move, speak, what they eat. Overall, aesthetics is about identifying pleasing aspects of living.
The ideals of aesthetics vary from culture to culture, from epoch from epoch and from language to language. People with an interest in history might be aware that the ideals of beauty have changed across time and countries. Yet the knowledge about variation in language regarding the ideals of ‘beauty’ are not that widely known and understood. However, this is an area which is also worth exploring and comparative analysis of words relating to ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ across languages is an emerging and promising area in contemporary linguistics (Gladkova and Romero-Trillo 2021, Gladkova 2021). In this short article I will briefly introduce several Russian concepts relating to the understanding of ‘beauty’ and will provide a brief explanation how they could be connected to broader cultural ideas. I will also identify areas that comparative folk aesthetics might relate to.
To start with, it is worth noting that in Russian the word for ‘beautiful’ is krasivyj and it is derivationally related to the word krasnyj, which means ‘red’. The meaning of ‘beautiful’ is primary here and it further developed to mean ‘red’ as a colour term and replaced the older form červonnyj, which meant red or scarlet. This proximity of meaning between ‘beautiful’ and ‘red’ signifies a special status of the red colour for Russian culture, which was used for festive occasions, and especially for wedding clothes.
A historical perspective on Russian terms relating to aesthetics identifies the existence of conceptualizations different from the ones embedded in modern language. Makeeva (2004) and Vendina (2004) report that in Old Russian there existed several words relating to ‘beauty’ – lepota, blagaja lepota, dobrota, krasota. Lepota is out of use today, but importantly, these words related to the ideas of ‘goodness’ and the word dobrota in current use means ‘kindness’. At the same time, in Old Russian there were no words close in meaning to something like ‘ugly’. Vendina (2004:143) explains this phenomenon by the medieval conception in which the world and people were regarded God’s creations and, therefore, the characteristics of ‘ugliness’ could not be applicable to them. At the same time, ‘beauty’ was conceptualized within the dichotomy ‘Godly’ vs ‘earthly’ and this distinction was embedded in the semantics of the relevant words.
Here I would also like to talk about two Russian verbs expressing visual aesthetic appreciation – nagljadet’sja ‘to look at someone/something to complete satisfaction/feast one’s eyes on’ and ljubovat’sja ‘to admire/feast one’s eyes on’. These verbs provide a key to understanding folk aesthetics because they capture the desire and longing for something through looking – the primary sense of appreciation of what is considered ‘beautiful’ (Gladkova 2021).
Nagljadet’sja belongs to a group of Russian verbs which share structural similarity (prefix na- and reflexive suffix –sja) as well the meaning ‘to do something to the degree of complete satisfaction’ (cf. napit’sja ‘to drink enough’, naest’sja ‘to eat enough’, naguljat’sja ‘to walk enough’, etc.).
For nagljadet’sja, as well as other verbs in this group, it is difficult to identify equivalent verbs with exact meanings in English, which express completeness of an action as well as a degree of satisfaction on the part of the actor. Nagljadet’sja expresses satisfaction from looking at something. In this regard, it is notable that the verbs expressing ‘seeing’ or ‘looking’ fall within the same group of verbs as ‘eating’, ‘drinking’, ‘walking’, ‘crying’, ‘laughing’, and ‘reading’. These verbs present activities that a person might want to do for existential need or pleasure and might want to do it for some time and achieve a degree of satisfaction from doing it. This fact emphasises the role of ‘seeing’ in human perception.
The use of nagljadet’sja can be illustrated with the lines of the following Russian folk song:
Ty postoj, postoj, krasavica moja,
Daj mne nagljadet’sja, radost’ na tebja.
‘Wait, wait, my beauty,
Let me feast my eyes on you, my joy!’
Here I chose to translate the verb nagljadet’sja with the expression ‘to feast one’s eyes on something/someone’, but it does not fully render the meaning of the Russian verb. Nagljadet’sja is commonly used in constructions expressing modality:
dat’ nagljadet’sja ‘let (someone) nagljadet’sja’ (as in the song quoted in the epigraph)
ne moč’ nagljadet’sja ‘can not nagljadet’sja’
ne nagljadet’sja ‘not nagljadet’sja’ ‘not be able to nagljadet’sja’
nevozmožno nagljadet’sja ‘impossible to nagljadet’sja’.
In modal frames, the verb tends to be used with people and landscape or creations of nature as objects. It can also be used with objects created by people. In all cases, these objects are characterised by some special beauty or they are of particular value to the observer. This frame of use involves a prolonged process of looking at something or someone and also a desire to do it more. This desire is associated with inherent pleasure acquired from this process.
Another Russian verb expressing aesthetic admiration and appreciation is ljubovat’sja ‘to admire/feast one’s eyes on’. Etymologically it relates to the verb ljubit’ ‘to like/love’, therefore one can interpret its meaning as ‘to like something by looking at it’. As it is the case with nagljadet’sja, ljubovat’sja defies translation into English. The English verb to admire, its closest equivalent, is broader in use. The expressions like I admire your sense of humour or I admire your strength would be more suitable to translate with the verb vosxiščat’sja. Also, to admire can extend to hearing and smell, while ljubovat’sja is strictly limited to seeing. Another possible translation of ljubovat’sja – to feast one’s eyes on – is a metaphoric expression and has more limited use in English than ljubovat’sja does in Russian.
Šmelev (2005a: 454, also 2004) argues that ljubovat’sja occupies a special place in the Russian value system because, overall, the Russian language encodes a negative attitude to gaining and experiencing pleasure. However, ljubovat’sja is an exceptional type of pleasure that is encouraged by public opinion because it is a ‘selfless’ aesthetic pleasure. In this regard, Zalizniak and Šmelev (2004: 210) also note that ljubovat’sja would not be applicable to a person gaining pleasure from looking through a pornographic magazine.
The verbs nagljadet’sja i ljubovat’sja can be related to several Russian cultural themes. To start with, these verbs relate to the general theme of ‘open’ and ‘sincere’ expression of emotion (Wierzbicka 2002, Gladkova 2010). In some regard, the verbs in question denote a desire to look at someone/something as a demonstration of a genuine and spontaneous positive attitude and this desire is openly shown as the conducted analysis suggests. Second, the role of ‘desire’ to look at someone or something for aesthetic pleasure is quite prominent in the semantics of the verbs in question. These elements of meaning can be associated with the theme of a ‘strong’ desire discussed by Wierzbicka in relation to the role of gorjačij ‘hot’ in Russian conceptualisation of feelings and desires (Wierzbicka 2009). Third, the verb nagljadet’sja is an interesting example of encoding an action performed ‘to the full’ which correlates with the cultural theme of ‘doing things to the full or extreme’ (Šmelev 2005b).
With a brief reference to possible English translational equivalents of the verbs in question, we could observe difference in the role of senses in aesthetic appreciation. The Russian verbs under analysis have distinct reference to seeing as a primary source of aesthetic pleasure. The difference in distinction and separation of senses for Russian and English has been observed earlier (Iordanskaja 1979; Wierzbicka 2010) and in particular in relation to aesthetic appreciation (Gladkova and Romero-Trillo 2014). Russian seems to be differentiating more distinctly than English does the role of senses in aesthetic appreciation and assigning ‘seeing’ a particularly prominent role. To put it differently, Russian associates aesthetic pleasure mainly with seeing and hearing, while in English this type of pleasure more easily extends to all senses. This indicates a further need of exploration of the field of aesthetics in relation to different senses. Moreover, there is a need for further investigation in the field of folk aesthetics and understanding how different languages conceptualise human aesthetic experience. The study of visual semantics and in particular aesthetics of visual semantics (Levisen 2019) cannot be exhausted by the study of words as such, but it would require a development of cultural scripts and rules associated with appreciation of ‘beautiful’ and attitudes to ‘ugly’.
References
Apresjan, J. (1992) Lexical Semantics: user’s guide to contemporary Russian vocabulary. [Translation of Apresjan, J. 1974. Leksičeskaja semantika: sinonimičeskie sredstva jazyka.]. Karoma Publishers, Ann Arbor.
Gladkova, Anna (2010). Russkaja kul’turnaja semantika: ėmocii, cennosti, žiznennye ustanovki. [Russian cultural semantics: emotions, values and attitudes.] Moscow: Languages of Slavonic Cultures. [in Russian]
Gladkova, Anna (2020). The semantics of verbs of visual aesthetic appreciation in Russian. In Helen Bromhead and Zhengdao Ye (eds), Meaning, Life and Culture: In Conversation with Anna Wierzbicka. Canberra: ANU Press. 155-171, http://doi.org/10.22459/MLC.2020
Gladkova, Anna (2021). “What is beauty?” Cultural semantics of the Russian folk aesthetics. International Journal of Language and Culture 8 (1). 84-105.
Gladkova, Anna and Jesus Romero-Trillo (2014). Ain’t it beautiful? The conceptualization of beauty from an ethnopragmatic perspective. Journal of Pragmatics 60: 140-159.
Gladkova, Anna and Jesus Romero Trillo (2021). The linguistic conceptualization in folk aesthetics: past, present and future. International Journal of Language and Culture 8 (1). 1-13.
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Levisen, Carsten (2019). “Brightness” in color linguistics: New light from Danish visual semantics. In I. Raffaelli, D. Katunar, B. Kerovec (eds.), Lexicalization Patterns in Color Naming: a cross-linguistic perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 83-108.
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Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). Experience, Evidence, and Sense: The hidden cultural legacy of English. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2011). Arguing in Russian: why Solzhenitsyn’s fictional arguments defy translation. Russian journal of communication 4: 8-37.
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Cover image: ‘Two Russian Beauties’ (ca. 1905). Painting by Filipp Malyavin.
Anna Gladkova is a researcher in the areas of semantics, pragmatics and language and culture interchange. She has a PhD in Linguistics from the Australian National University and has taught in universities in Australia, UK and Russia. She is currently a Professor in Linguistics at HSE University.
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