One of the hardest aspects of second-language acquisition is when a word in the new language is actually a concept that simply doesn't exist in your native language. Because your brain doesn't, in the first place, contain the THOUGHT, you naturally cannot make sense of the WORD, the way people are using it, what they mean, have in mind, why they're utilizing and applying it....
It can be maddening. Especially when you take a leap and end up using it wrong and get all sorts of perplexed stares in return.
Often you discover, after you've finally nailed down just what they're TALKING about (which, since there's no single word in your language for it, needs to be explained with a whole sentence), that indeed the concept USED to exist in the sociocultural context from which your own language springs, but for any number of reasons the concept, the notion, the convention, passed away and therefore there's no word that conveys it anymore. Since the THING is gone, no WORD expresses it anymore.
Often, accompanying such a discovery is (at last!) the revelation of WHICH word in your own language USED TO mean the same thing, and why its connotation changed.
One such word in Russian that has long been a personal hobgoblin of mine is "torzhestvó" along with its adjectival form "torzhéstvenniy." I perceived early on that it was connected with the idea of special events or celebrations or...wait, funerals? I'd hear it applied to happy and sad occasions equally, so that its connotation rather escaped me, beyond the obvious that it related to the ceremonial, the official, the occasion of elevated, formalized observances and quasi-ritualistic motions and manners (manners that sometimes struck me as phony, pompous, pretentious, childishly affected, but more on that below...). The words "solemn" and "celebratory" each seemed to fit at different times, but never simultaneously, since they mean such different things to us in English.
And it wasn't just a matter of understanding a WORD. There seemed to be a cultural SECRET hiding behind this word, something you only understood if you were born to it.
Every culture, every people with a history, a shared experience, harbors its secrets. Just like every marriage does. Not out of an overt intention to be secretive but because there will be, inevitably, things you understand only because you are part of it, IN it. Indeed, the "secrets" are often flagrantly out there, exposed to view...like Russian-speakers using "torzhestvo"...yet they REMAIN "secrets" because you simply cannot penetrate what on earth they're TALKING about. And though they'd like to explain it to you, they can't. That's the secret of it: "I don't know how to explain it to you; we just...KNOW it, automatically."
Yes, every people contains such secrets, like every marriage, every family. Indeed, it's what makes them a family. It's a good thing, not a bad thing.
With time, though, you do begin to penetrate the secrets, and suddenly a whole dimension of the "family" opens up to you, and with it a dimension of yourself you didn't realize was there--since, after all, there are no dimensions of human experience that are excluded by arbitrary rule or national identity from any of us. If they are excluded, it's merely by time, distance and the limitations of our opportunities, interest or imagination. No one has enough time in life, after all, to be member, an "insider", of ALL the "families".
But to the extent that one is privileged to so penetrate the secrets of another "family" and thereby blend into it, one discovers more dimensions of oneself, because all human experience resonates finally with something in all humans.
I find, by the way, that because of the inrush of Western, particularly American, sociocultural manners and assumptions, the Ukrainian people are rapidly abandoning "secrets" that used to define them, the things you and I as Americans found enigmatic, bewildering, inexplicable, sometimes even annoying and maddening (which didn't make them wrong).
The younger generation in particular is embracing the patterns, forms, poses and affectations of the West with an alacrity bordering on compulsive delirium. I can hardly blame them, considering the historico-cultural vacuum life presented them with after the crash of the Soviet Union. Still, though, I can't help wondering what, of any inner substance, all these borrowings and assimilations can produce when the "family secrets" have been jettisoned into the void.
From what we are witnessing in America, the prospect isn't encouraging.
But to get back to "torzhestvó," the following passage from C.S. Lewis's "A Preface to Paradise Lost" both confirmed what I had fundamentally concluded about it and threw new light on the matter from the perspective of my own English-speaking "culture" as it extends way, way back. In fact, Lewis is explaining how English once KNEW the concept "torzhestvó".
English once thought this thought, saw this dimension of life. Now it doesn't.
If you come away from Lewis's text understanding, feeling, why "pompous" was once upon a time a word summoning pleasant or romantic associations, you got it. If you come away thinking, "Well, that's absurd--why would anybody ever want to be pompous?", you didn't get it.
(To show where Lewis uses italics I will enclose the word or phrase in asterisks, like *this*. My occasional remarks will be in brackets, like [this].)
"This quality will be understood by any one who really understands the meaning of the Middle English word *solempne*. This means something different, but not quite different, from modern English *solemn*. Like *solemn* it implies the opposite of what is familiar, free and easy, or ordinary. But unlike *solemn* it does not suggest gloom, oppression, or austerity. The ball in the first act of *Romeo and Juliet* was a 'solemnity'. The feast at the beginning of *Gawain and the Green Knight* is very much of a solemnity. A great mass by Mozart or Beethoven is as much a solemnity in its hilarious *gloria* as in its poignant *crucifixus est*. Feasts are, in this sense, *more* solemn than fasts. Easter is *solempne*, Good Friday is not. [That is worth reading twice!] The *Solempne* is the festal which is also the stately and the ceremonial, the proper occasion for *pomp*--and the very fact that *pompous* is now used only in a bad sense measures the degree to which we have lost the old idea of a 'solemnity'. To recover it you must think of a court ball, or a coronation, or a victory march, as these things appear to people who *enjoy* them; in an age when every one puts on his oldest clothes to be happy in [to think Lewis wrote this in the 1940s!], you must re-awake the simpler state of mind in which people put on gold and scarlet to be happy in [in a world where "happy" was a rare, glorious occasion that called for dressing up!]. Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a wide-spread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connexion with vanity or self-conceit. A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a major-domo preceding the boar's head at a Christmas feast--all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. This does not mean that they are vain, but that they are obedient; they are obeying the *hoc age* ["hoke A-geh"--"this is how it goes"] which presides over every solemnity. The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual."
From "Above all, you must be rid of..." I find here the most piercing judgment upon our present age.
Yes, indeed, we ARE so hooked on our knee-jerk, defensive individualism that we lash out at anything that even faintly hints at formality or a diminution of gratuitous self-assertion.
We're so-o-o-o....AFRAID. The fear is all dressed up in a Halloween mask of In-Your-Faceness, as if shrieking and giving the finger to a news camera, or at a policeman who you know can't respond, were a symptom of substance, character, mindfulness, heroism. That is perhaps THE lie most corroding, shredding, the conceptual structures without which a society plummets into savagery.
If you're old enough, you may remember how in the old news clips we'd see from the USSR, say, when Nixon was visiting Moscow, we couldn't help but sense their different way of "being" on such formal occasions. It all seemed (to me, at least) rather childishly, woodenly formal and pretentious, overtly and self-consciously ritualistic, as if telegraphing: "Look how perfectly I stand at attention; see how ceremoniously I pass him this cup; watch me now as I OFFICIALLY walk from spot A to spot B...."
And to us in the West there was something rather comical and embarrassing about it. "Why don't they just act normal?"
Even when I arrived here, long after the USSR's heyday, I noted this "pompous" approach to events in both secular and ecclesiastical contexts--how suddenly everyone would adopt a pose, an air, a somewhat cringeworthy "officialness", a weird sort of pasted-on "official" smile, chins raised, shoulders back.... You half-expected Brezhnev to walk in and start pinning medals on people. To me it was always excruciating: the obligatory, extremely formulaic speeches, the awkward pauses, the uncertainty over how to wrap it up. When Americans, including myself, were part of the proceedings, we were always polite, but we were generally dying for it all to be over. You know, so we could get back to the "real" and "important" stuff. Americans usually exited such occasions with a barely concealed sigh of relief. Ukrainians exited, beaming. (Much as I remember many theatre casts I was in beaming after a great opening night.)
Now, as I look back, and in light of two things: a) the changes since, in both myself AND the local scene, and, b) what Lewis discusses above, I see what I couldn't see then. These things were part of the "family secrets." This was their "torzhestvó", their "Solempne"--something we abandoned long ago in the West. It wasn't pompous, as we use the word in English now, precisely because it WAS "pompous" in the old sense, a sense that this people treasured, part of the very contours of their identity and aspirations. There was nothing WRONG with being, for a few moments, "artificial", if you must call it that, and giving yourself to a moment that WASN'T all about you, or anyone else in particular, but about the shared meaning, even to the point of obeying the "hoc age" and transparently, without apology, playing your assigned role according to the script--the ancient, sacred script. For just a moment, we're all part of something wonderful. And we treasure that moment in our hearts, maybe with the help of photos on the book shelf, back in our "real" lives.
There is, far from a pretentious haughtiness, actually a simplicity and innocence in it. And a joy--perhaps a salutary joy in the midst of a life pervaded with hardship, grief and hopelessness. A life in which your dress--the dress that some might ridicule as tackily gaudy or tastelessly garish--is the single "good" dress you own and you save it just for special events like this, to do your part, to live up to the occasion and not let the team down. As soon as you get home, it goes straight back into the closet again for the next time, if, please God, there'll be a next time.
According to the kind of "solempne" Lewis discusses above, the most unpretentious soul could be decked out in the world's most precious, priceless jewels, delight in the moment's glory and remain as humble and simple as ever.
The one line in Lewis's text that best expresses just how much our English sense of "solemnity" has departed from the old sense is where Lewis says that, according to the old meaning, Easter is "solemn" but Good Friday is NOT.
If you can grasp what he's getting at there, then you get it. And if you get it, then you likely glimpse, a searing glimpse, precisely why Good Friday, the Cross, is not "torzhestvó".
