Found in non-translation: English language in the American travelogues of Russian writers (1890s - 1930s) Текст научной статьи по специальности «Языкознание и литературоведение»

УДК 821.111, 821.112.2

DOI 10.22455/2541-7894-2019-6-187-219

Людмила ФЕДОРОВА

ПРЕИМУЩЕСТВА НЕПЕРЕВОДА: АНГЛИЙСКИЙ ЯЗЫК В АМЕРИКАНСКИХ ТРАВЕЛОГАХ РУССКИХ ПИСАТЕЛЕЙ (1890-х - 1930-х гг.)

Аннотация: На материале американских травелогов русских писателей 1890-х - 1930-х статья исследует языковую политику авторов - их отношение к языку наблюдаемой страны и использование англоязычной лексики и идиоматики в качестве риторического инструмента. Владимир Короленко, Владимир Тан (Богораз), Максим Горький, Сергей Есенин, Владимир Маяковский, Илья Ильф и Евгений Петров - авторы знаменитых литературных травелогов - не знали английского языка и путешествовали в компании переводчиков, так что Америка, которую они наблюдали и описывали, неизбежно преломлялась через призму перевода. Традиционно в XVIII - XIX веках в текстах об иностранных путешествиях английский язык изображается как неблагозвучный, нелогичный, непонятный. Для советских писателей стало особенно существенным противопоставление русского - языка революции и английского (американского) - языка страны концентрированного капитализма. Объектом иронии в травелогах часто являются эмигранты, говорящие на смеси языков. Почему же тогда сами авторы-путешественники так часто используют в своих текстах английские фразы и выражения, не ассимилируя их? В статье рассматриваются разные семантические группы иноязычных заимствований: повседневная жизнь путешественника, феномены, относящиеся к инфраструктуре города и страны, технология, социальная и экономическая жизнь.Заимствование английских слов для обозначения реалий, не существующих в России или непривычных для российских путешественников, можно считать нейтральными - даже при том, что они лингвистически подчеркивают экзотичность другой страны. Однако использование англицизмов в случаях, где в русском, на первый взгляд, существует эквивалент, несет большую смысловую нагрузку. Так, Пильняк использует «гипокритство» вместо «лицемерие», а Маяковский - «моней» и «джоб» вместо «деньги» и «работа», с тем, чтобы акцентировать особенность их функционирования именно в американском сознании и в американской социокультурной реальности, чтобы избежать автоматического отождествления этих понятий с привычными советскому читателю. Использование английского языка в данном случае является частью социальной критики. В статье приводится классификация различных способов и степеней интеграции англицизмов в травелогах разных авторов.

Ключевые слова: американские травелоги, языковая политика, англицизмы, заимствования, Пильняк, Маяковский.

© 2019 Людмила Григорьевна Федорова (к.ф.н., ассоциированный профессор, Джорджтаунский университет, Вашингтон, США) lf85@georgetown.edu

UDC 821.111, 821.112.2

DOI 10.22455/2541-7894-2019-6-187-219

Lioudmila FEDOROVA

FOUND IN NON-TRANSLATION: ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE AMERICAN TRAVELOGUES OF RUSSIAN WRITERS (1890s - 1930s)

Abstract: The present study of Russian writers' American travelogues (1890s - 1930s) focuses on their "language politics" - the presence of the English language in these texts and deliberate word-choices the authors made while portraying foreign reality in Russian. Vladimir Korolenko, Vladimir Tan (Bogoraz) and Maxim Gorky who visited the United States in 1890s - 1900s, Sergei Esenin and Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1920s, Ilia Ilf and Evgenii Petrov and Boris Pilniak in 1930s had a very limited knowledge of English and experienced America in translation, which inevitably influenced their perception of the country. Typically, the traveling Russians projected their frustration towards the foreign language onto the language itself and blamed it for its incomprehensibility and irrationality. In the Soviet era, the English language of America acquired additional negative connotations in the texts of Russian travelers, determined by their political agenda: while they perceived Russian as the language of the Revolution, English was associated with capitalism. Thus, they constructed America's ideological alterity through linguistic as well as other means. The speech of the Russian immigrants served as a constant object of irony for many of the traveling writers. At the same time, they constantly used Anglicisms in various degrees of assimilation in their own texts. This study breaks the borrowings into several thematic groups in order to study their semantic and emotional load: the daily life of a traveler, technology, economic and social life. While borrowings for previously unencountered realia are generally emotionally and axiologically neutral, those that refer to concepts that do exist in Russia but for which the writers nevertheless prefer English words, like Pilniak's "gipokritstvo" (hypocrisy) or Mayakovsky's "dzhab" (job) and "monei" (money), are semantically and emotionally charged. When they occur, the American word and its Russian counterpart have a difference in meaning that is essential for the writers to underscore. This is how they establish the difference between the Russian (Soviet) and the American on the linguistic level. The article reviews various degrees of adaptation of English borrowings into the Russian texts of the travelogues.

Keywords: American travelogues, language politics, Anglicisms, borrowings, Pilniak, Mayakovsky.

© 2019 Lioudmila Fedorova (Ph.D., Associate Professor, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA) lf85@georgetown.edu

The American texts of Russian writers who visited the United States of America in the 1890s - 1930s (Vladimir Korolenko, Vladimir Tan-Bogoraz and Maxim Gorky in the 1890s - 1900s, Sergei Esenin and Vladimir Mayakovsky in the 1920s, Ilia Ilf and Evgenii Petrov and Boris Pilniak1 in the 1930s) capture a "myth of America as the Other World at the moment of transition from its Russian to its Soviet version" [Fedorova 2013: 4]. While these texts have attracted significant scholarly attention, only a few studies focused on the writers' "language politics": the presence of the English language in their texts and deliberate word-choices they made while portraying foreign reality in Russian. All the aforementioned writers had a very limited knowledge of English and experienced America in translation, which inevitably influenced their perception of the country. All of them were traveling in the company of interpreters; in Pilniak's and Ilf and Petrov's cases the interpreters were American, in all others - Russian. (However, only Ilf and Petrov in their One-Storied America developed the images of their companions/interpreters - Mr. and Mrs. Adams, whose prototypes were engineer Solomon Throne and his wife Florence, a couple sympathetic to the Soviet cause). At the same time, as their profession dictated, the traveling writers were extremely sensitive to the linguistic aspect of their journey: their travelogues present valuable accounts of their estranged perception of the foreign language, commentaries on the multi-lingual reality of the country and observations on how this reality affects the speech of emigrants. Moreover, the language of most of the travelogues was not indifferent to this foreign reality, and incorporated English words and constructions.

There was a bitter irony in the fact that the writers, whose very craft relied on the means of verbal expression, virtually found themselves, like the protagonist of Korolenko's eponymous novella, "without a tongue" in America. In Esenin's case, this torturing muteness significantly contributed to his negative experience of the country - but to some degree it must have influenced all of the writers, revealing a certain linguistic chauvinism and, at

1 In transliterating Cyrillic into Latin, I have followed the Library of Congress system, simplified form (as in SEEJ). Soft signs in proper names have been omitted.

I have used a modified transliteration system, reflecting common usage, for the names of well-known authors. Thus, Gor'kii appears as Gorky, Maiakovskii as Mayakovsky, Pil'niak as Pilniak, etc. When quoting secondary sources, I use their transliteration.

Unless otherwise noted, the references to Mayakovsky's texts in Russian come from [Mayakovsky 1957]; references to Pilniak come from [Pilniak 1976], to the Russian text of Ilf and Petrov's Odnoetazhnaia Amerika - from [Ilf, Petrov 2007], and to its English translation - from [Ilf, Petrov 1974]. These sources are quoted in the text parenthetically by page number.

the same time, insecurity. Pilniak in his novel O'kei takes a small revenge, indulging his feeling of linguistic superiority, when he mocks a note he finds in the American consulate in Moscow written in fractured Russian [443].

Mayakovsky, with a certain amount of self-irony, conveys his suffering in the face of his inability to express himself at an American tea party in the anecdote "Kak ia ee rassmeshil" ("How I Made Her Laugh") written after his return from the voyage. The sketch's autobiographical character is bound to repeat the only phrase he knows: "Giv mi pliz sem ti" "Give me please some tea" [Mayakovsky 1957: 360]. If we look closely at the text, we will see that Mayakovsky easily re-channels the irony from himself onto the Americans around him who, as he thinks, do not realize the reason for his silence. The poet presents his own figure as it must have emerged in his imagination in the minds of the Americans at the party: a Russian genius whose mystery is especially intriguing since he is silent.2 The poet, like a giant enchained in muteness, "is lifting up his tongue like a hoop-stick" and carefully stringing on it a whole lot of O's and V's" [McLean 1956: 336], and dreams of revenge. He longs to "nail" his listeners by linguistic means - if only they understood Russian. Symptomatically, he dismisses another possibility - if only he mastered English. In the poem "Baryshnia i Vul'vort" ("The Lady and Woolworths"), however, Mayakovsky manages to turn even the incapacity of people with different languages for understanding each other into a powerful artistic technique - using macaronic speech.

Typically, the traveling Russians projected their frustration towards the foreign language onto the language itself: they "blamed the language they were unable to master for its incomprehensibility and irrationality" [Fedorova 2013: 18]. To the ear of a non-understanding alien, English sounds rough, even non-human. A hundred years earlier, while traveling in England, Karamzin found the English speech rough and unpleasant, since he could only read English but had not learned to speak it. V. Kiparsky notes that in the nineteenth century, the prevailing image of English in the Russian mind was "bird language" [Kiparsky 1964: 178]. The American travelogues of Russian writers in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, demonstrate a similar sentiment towards the American English language. For example, the narrator in Tan-Bogoraz's "Black Student" discovers on his way across America that, however familiar looking some people may

2 Mayakovsky's anecdote perhaps unveils some of the origins of the Western myth of the mysterious Russian soul - is it incomprehensible because it is uncomprehending, because of the language barrier?

be, they cannot speak the language: "I would be on the verge of speaking to others in my native tongue when, screwing up their mouths, they emitted not broad, rich Russian but those dull indeterminate Anglo-Saxon sounds which resemble the wheezing of a broken barrel organ, and I would fall silent and walk past them" [Bogoraz 1988: 113]. Gorky, struggling with English at an Adirondack estate, laments the contrast between the irrationality of the language and rationality of its speakers. In a reversal of the accepted stereotype, Mayakovsky finds Americans "not very talkative" - just as Russians called Germans "nemtsy" or "mutes."

In the Soviet era, the English language of America acquires additional negative connotations in the texts of Russian travelers determined by their political agenda: while they perceive Russian as the language of the Revolution, English is associated with capitalism. Mayakovsky stresses the role of English as a tool of capitalist oppression especially poignantly. In his macaronic poem "The Lady and Woolworths," his lyrical hero gives a lesson in social consciousness in Russian to a salesgirl in the department store through the window glass. However, his interlocutor who cannot hear him but reads his lips, misinterprets the poet's passionate revolutionary speech as declaration of love, because she perceives it in English. Similarly, in Mayakovsky's prosaic travelogue, English, which is "prone to euphemisms that disguise the truth, is [...] contrasted to Russian, the truthful language, which directly reflects the meaning of reality" [Fedorova 2013: 66].

In her article "Imagining America: Ilf and Petrov's Odnoetazhnaia Amerika and Ideological Alterity," K. Ryan suggests that even Ilf and Petrov, despite their surprisingly positive attitude to America, construct its ideological alterity through linguistic as well as other means: their American characters who support the idea of socialism speak perfect Russian - "presumably through an interpreter" [Ryan 2002: 274]. This interesting observation is, however, a matter of dispute: in the travelogue we can find both characters who are sympathetic towards the new Soviet country and those who criticize America but nevertheless speak pidgin Russian (a pop-corn seller), as well as those who are sincere supporters of capitalism but speak Russian decently -at least in Mr. Adams's translation.

The authors of the travelogues pay special attention to the middle stages of the transition from Russian to English: they observe and register multiple examples of Russian immigrants speaking a hybrid English-Russian language. The writers seem to have transferred their resentment of emigration from Russia onto linguistic phenomena. This especially concerns Mayakovsky, Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov, who visited America when the

first wave of emigration had already settled and begun to acquire English3. Usually these immigrant characters and their speech become the objects of authorial irony. However coarse or illogical the English language might seem to the travelers, in their hierarchy of linguistic values, the creolized language of Russian immigrants is located much lower.

Mayakovsky, for example, claims that it is easier for him, without a knowledge of English, to understand a "word-stingy American" ("skuposlovogo amerikantsa") than a Russian who sprinkles his speech with hybrid words.4 The typical features of this speech that Mayakovsky registers and mocks are the adoption and grammatical assimilation of English words, as well as the borrowing of entire phrases:5

Russkii nazyvaet: tramvai - stritkaroi, ugol - kornerom, kvartal - blokom, kvartiranta - borderom, bilet - tiketom; a vyrazhaetsia tak: "Vy poedete bez menianiia peresiadok." Eto znachit, chto u vas besperesadochnyi bilet" [116]. (A Russian inserts into his Russian conversation the English words for streetcar, corner, block, lodger, and ticket and will express himself thus: "You will travel without the changing of stops") [328].

Most of the phrases that he pokes fun at in his prosaic sketch appear in the poem "The American Russians" ("Amerikanskie russkie"), where Mayakovsky creates an exaggerated image of émigré speech and compares the language of Russian immigrants with a train-crash.6 The linguistic situation portrayed in the poem is complicated by the fact that at least one of the interlocutors is Jewish (Kaplan), and it is implied that the characters are from Odessa. In the Russian segments of their conversation, they use colloquial forms typical for southern regions such as "todoi" and "siudoi" instead of "tuda" and "siuda," 'there' and 'here.' As the poet mockingly concludes, "If

3 Preservation of the Russian language was a matter of great importance for the educated immigrants of the first wave (see, for example, [Granovskaia 1995]). But the travelers choose to report about their communications with quite different interlocutors.

4 It is worth-mentioning here that by "American language" Mayakovsky does not always mean English: he defines American as a Babylon mix of languages, which can be understood by anyone, except the actual English-speaking people. But in this particular context he has an English-speaking American in mind.

5 Such borrowings are called "loan translations:" in them "all elements of the phrase are reproduced according to the model of donor language." [Andrews 1999: 30]

6 H.McLean calls the incorporation of the same limited number of English words into Mayakovsky's prose sketches and poems "a peculiar sort of artistic economy." [McLean 1964: 337]

Odessa is Odessa-mother," then New York is Odessa-father," suggesting that both Odessa and New York have contributed to the immigrants' distorted speech, which is neither Russian nor English.

Pilniak's accounts, written eight years later, quite predictably show that émigré Russian had not become any purer:

Edu na kare, priparkovalsia po vsem pravilam okolo svoei plantatsii i vdrug vizhu, idet moia Marfa s kolernym, spikaiut" [488]. (I drive a car, park according to the rules near my own plantation, and suddenly see my Marfa walking with a colored person and speaking.)

Pilniak gives elaborated and funny examples of the speech of Russian emigrants built, in Mayakovsky's manner, on bilingual puns. For example, a worker's wife threatens him with divorce after he tells her the following story: "...a eshche u menia byl 'eksidant,' zarvalsia na 'kurve' i poluchil 'tiket' ot polismena na treshnitsu" [478]. ("I had another 'accident:' I went too far on the 'curve' and got a ticket from the policeman for three bucks"). The misunderstanding appearing as a bi-lingual pun in Pilniak's text, is caused by homophony - in Russian pronunciation - of the English "curve" declined as a Russian masculine noun [pronounced as "kurve"], and the prepositional case of the Russian noun of feminine gender "kurva" ("slut"). Thus, "zarvalsia na kurve" by which the speaker means "overdid it (was caught by the policeman) on the curve" has been interpreted by his wife as "went too far (overreached myself) while on top of a broad").

Ilf and Petrov not only dwell on puns but they also ironically note multiple adapted borrowings of English in emigrant speech:

My vnezapno uslyshali v temnote gromko proiznesennuiu frazu: "Mania, ia zhe tebe govoril, chto na etot pikcher ne nado bylo khodit'" [133] (At the cinema we suddenly heard in the darkness this phrase spoken out loud: 'Mania, I told you that we should not have come to this 'pikcher' [picture]').

As in Mayakovsky, the speakers of fractured Russian in Ilf and Petrov are often nationally marginal: for example, the pop-corn seller from Volynia (on the border of Ukraine and Poland), whom Ilf and Petrov meet in Schenectady, in fact speaks a mix of Ukrainian, Russian and English:

Tak, tak, - skazal on, - smotrite, iak u nas, v Iunaited Steits, idut dela?... Na diner ne khvataet. Goloduiu. Odezhda, sami vidite, kakaia. Ne v chem na

strit vyiti [107] (I see, I see. Just taking a look at how things are going in our United States?... I have not enough money for dinner. I'm starving. My clothes - you can see for yourself what they are like. I haven't anything to wear for going out into the street) [93-94].

It may seem paradoxical that, while constantly poking fun at emigrants' speech and defending the purity of the Russian language, the writers widely practice in their own narrative those very features they mock in immigrants. Of course, there is a crucial difference between the immigrants who are becoming familiar with their new homeland and the travelers. For the former, showing some knowledge of English and occasionally dispersing it in their speech is a mark of adapting to the foreign reality, and it usually occurs subconsciously. But the latter obviously use English words and idioms on purpose: their borrowings occur not in spoken but rather in written speech; they are usually graphically explicated; and, moreover, very often the writers immediately explain them with Russian equivalents7.

So, what is the purpose of including Anglicisms in American travelogues? Sometimes the writers explicitly try to emulate émigré speech simply to satirize it. In the abovementioned poem "The American Russians," Mayakovsky writes: "Mister Petrov poshel na Vest, a mister Kaplan - na Ist." ("Mister Petrov departed to the West, and Mister Kaplan to the East"). Here he obviously uses "Vest" and "Ist" ironically, as the Other's speech. But parodying the emigrants' hybrids hardly exhausts the problem of Anglicisms in the travelogues of Russian writers. Now I will turn to an analysis of what exactly is being borrowed in the travelogues, of the semantic reasons for these borrowings, of their ideological purpose, and of the artistic effect of the usage of Anglicisms. Additionally, I will study the kinds of borrowings different writers prefer and their individual ways of incorporating English structures into their narrative.

7 The difference in the usage of Anglicisms in Ilf and Petrov's travelogue and their letters home provides proof that in fiction they use borrowings as a trope. For example, in chapter 17th of One-Storied America, discussing the advantages of camps and tourist houses, they use English words: "My nochevali v kempakh ili turist-gauzah, to est' obyknovennyh obyvatel'skih domikakh" [143] ("We spent nights in camps or in tourist-houses, in other words, in the usual suburban (philistine) houses"). Later in the text they refer to them both as "domiki" and "turist-gauzy." But in a letter home reporting the same events Petrov does not use Anglicisms but explains to his wife that at night they stayed in "turistskie doma" ("tourist houses" - and explains what that means ([Ilf, Petrov, 2007: 447]; Letter from Nov. 12, 1935, Dearborn). So, in a personal letter he chooses not to include alien speech, which would have seemed artificial.

It is productive to divide borrowings into several thematic groups in order to study their semantic and emotional load: the daily life of a traveler, technology, economic and social life.8 Within each of these groups we can distinguish borrowings used in order to denote realia absent in Russian -like, for example, "servis-steishens" ("service stations") or "turist-gauzy" ("tourist houses").9

Enumerating such examples in Ilf and Petrov's travelogue, Ryan states that they "disrupt the linearity of the text and call attention to the strangeness of the culture they represent" [Ryan 2002: 273], portraying it as exotic. However, one may argue that the incorporation of Anglicisms designating new realia is justified by the writers' goal - to give an account of the unique features of their foreign experience. Since the described realia were indeed unfamiliar to Russian readers, the alternative strategy for the authors would be to give detailed explanations in Russian (which they sometimes do) - and such long explanatory paraphrases also seem artificial and gravitate toward estrangement: see, for example, Pilniak's de-familiarizing paraphrase for an exercise machine: "elektricheskaia baba dlia rastriaseniia zhira" ("electric ram for shaking fat") [445-446]. Thus, the significant absence of Anglicisms can also facilitate constructing alterity.

Of special interest for us are borrowings that refer to concepts that do exist in Russia but for which the writers nevertheless prefer English words, like "prosperiti" ("prosperity") or "publisiti" ("publicity"). It should be noted that they designate concepts that Russians associate with America in the first place. But if borrowings for previously un-encountered realia are generally emotionally and axiologically neutral, this second type of borrowing is semantically and emotionally charged. When they occur, the American word and its Russian counterpart have a difference in meaning that is essential for the writers to underscore. This is how they establish the difference between the Russian and the American on the linguistic level.

Such borrowings posit a challenge for a translator into English: how can (should) the Anglicisms be translated, how can the foreignness of a concept for the Russian traveler and his reader be accentuated? In existing translations, the problem is, unfortunately, often dismissed. I have tried to preserve the Englishness of the borrowings in the translation of the examples

8 I have borrowed some of the groups from David Andrews's study of émigré borrowings [Andrews 1999] but have adjusted them to take into account Anglicisms used in semi-fictional narratives.

9 Emigrants usually adopt these words and incorporate them into their speech in the early stages of their life in the new country.

I treat below . Thus, although I have used already existing literary translations as a model, I have transformed them where needed.

1. The Daily Life of a Traveler

This rubric includes phenomena and objects the travelers encountered on a daily basis during their journeys. These borrowings are determined by American reality with its specific referents that were absent in Russia. Travelers often borrow American words for denoting American currency (besides the obvious "dollar"):

Ilf, Petrov: "Shchel' dlia opuskaniia 'nikelia'" (piatitcentovoi mone-ty) [40] ("a slit for dropping a 'nickel'" (a five-cent coin) [28].

Similarly, the logistics of transportation is also often addressed with the help of English words: Mayakovsky: "Vy berete mestnyi (lokal) do sed'mogo" [302]. ("You take a local to the seventh [train]"). Here he uses not only an English word for "local" but also a typical emigrant loan translation of the phrase "to take a train." In the poem "The American Russians," May-akovsky reproduces this double loan - an Anglicism in the English phrase structure: "Mozhete vziat' podzemnyi tren" ("You can take an underground train"). In these two examples the English words are purposefully used for the creation of local flavor: the translation is immediately given; there are no new social or ethical connotations added.

In the course of their automobile trip through America, Ilf and Petrov encounter many "hich-khaikery" ("hitchhikers"). They use the word in quotation marks for the first time, explain its meaning, and continue using it as a term:

My... uvideli novogo "hich-khaikera" s podniatym kverkhu bol'shim pal'tsem ruki. "Hich-khaikerami" nazyvaiut v Amerike liudei, kotorye prosiat ikh podvezti. [180] (We ... saw a new hitchhiker with thumb up. In America hitchhikers are people who ask for a ride) [167].

Later the word, declined like a regular masculine noun, is used without quotation marks, which marks a more advanced degree of assimilation: "Pochti kazhdyi den' my brali v avtomobil' hich-khaikerov" [189] ("Almost every day we picked up hitchhikers into our car") [173].

Another new concept for Ilf and Petrov involves places of accommodation: "My nochevali v kempakh ili turist-gauzakh" ("We overnighted in camps or tourist houses"). The concept of tourist houses,

where owners rented rooms for the night, was unfamiliar to them: in order to relay it Russian they would have needed a lengthy description. So, they prefer an Anglicism corresponding to the Russian expression "turistskii domik," which they create to explain the new phenomenon.

1.1 Food

Anglicisms referring to food also belong in the thematic category of travelers' daily life, and it is reasonable to unite them into one subcategory. An item that virtually none of the writers fails to comment on is chewing gum. It is perceived as characteristically American, and therefore the borrowed word is used. Different writers have their idiosyncratic ways of rendering it: it appears as "chuingvam" in Mayakovsky ("Ostaetsia bezmolvno zhevat' amerikanskuiu zhvachku, chuingvam" [301] ("All that is left is to chew the American chaw, chewing gum"), and "chuing-gom" in Pilniak. Apparently, Mayakovsky's form "chuingvam" accentuates the foreignness of the object (containing the form of the second person plural pronoun in the dative -"vam" "to you": the object is yours, not ours). Ilf and Petrov, however, use the word "Chuingam" only as a proper name - "Chuingam Rigli" ("Chewing gum Wrigley"); in other cases, they refer to it by a paraphrases "rezinovaia zhvachka" (literally - "chewing rubber") [72].

Coca-cola is another "culinary" epitome of America. Although it is a proper noun, in Pilniak it is adapted and sometimes appears as a common one. Pilniak interchangeably uses it as declinable and indeclinable.

"Hotdogs" are a recurrent target of the travelers' irony - due both to their quality and their etymology. Pilniak mentions this food in a specifically non-culinary context, stressing how artificial it is: "Pakhnet benzinom, kraskoi i goriachimi sosiskami (nazyvaemymi 'khat-dogs'ami') million liudei... na khodu est khatdogs'y" [463]. ("It smells like gas, paint and hot sausages [called 'hatdogs']; million of people eat hutdogses on the go)". He declines the Anglicism, adding the plural Russian ending to the already plural English form.10

In order to stress that the way a dish is cooked and served is different from how it would be in Russia, the writers also prefer borrowings: Ilf and Petrov report that their usual breakfast is "gem end egg" "ham and egg," and give a Russian equivalent ("iaichnitsa s kuskom vetchiny"[145] - "fried

10 This is a regular phenomenon in assimilated English words: e.g. "dzhinsy," "rel'sy."

eggs with a slice of ham"). Sometimes, explaining to the reader what a dish with an English name consists of, they use rather alienating description of it: "Bliudo pod nazvaniem 'kantri sosidzh' sostoit iz trekh obrublennykh sosisok" ("a dish called 'country sausage': consists of three chopped off sausages").

It might seem strange to a contemporary reader that the writers choose to borrow the English name for "orange juice," especially since they immediately translate it into Russian: "trebuiia k sebe v kaiutu orandzh-dzhus - apel'sinovyi sok" [446] ("ordering 'orandzh-dzhus' - orange juice - to their cabins"). But for Russians in the thirties, fruit juices were an exotic item. For example, Ilf and Petrov dedicate an extensive passage to introducing fruit and vegetable juices and discuss at length their acquired habit of consuming them. In Pilniak's example, the fact that the juice should be ordered to the cabin - an excessive luxury from the point of view of the Soviet citizen - adds alien connotations to the phrase.

Mayakovsky, Pilniak, and Ilf - Petrov in their travelogues use the anglicized names of their meals - "brekfast" ("breakfast"), "lonch" or "lanch" ("lunch") and "diner" ("dinner"). These names, reflecting the specifics of American eating habits, serve as a mark of the American style of life. Pilniak uses clusters of these words and derivatives from them when he pictures the daily schedule of "the American individualist;" he stresses that these meals are part of the social - public rather than home - life:

Doma oni ediat tol'ko brekfest, utrenii zavtrak, loncha (zavtrakaia) okolo raboty i dinneria (obedaia) v poriadke amiuzmenta [474] (At home they only eat "morning breakfast," lunching (having second breakfast) and dinnering as an amusement").

Lonchit i dinnerit individualist v gorode [Ibid.] (Lunch and dinner the individualist takes in the city.)

When Pilniak derives these verbs ("lonchit'", "dinnerit'") from nouns, he simply adds Russian verbal endings, probably following the principles of the English language where the same words can function as nouns and as verbs.

In the story "Tonia," Ilf and Petrov choose the word "brekfast" instead of the Russian "zavtrak" when they want to stress that the heroine has become Americanized - or, at least, feels this way at first when she is satisfied with her comfortable daily routine: "ona gotovit Koste brekfast"

("She cooks 'breakfast' for Kostia"). To strengthen the effect, they mention that she looks "genuinely American" ("sovsem amerikanka") in her rubber apron. In Ilf and Petrov's Odnoetazhnaia Amerika, the Anglicisms "brekfast" and "dinner" also have a meaning of standardized meals of poor taste: "diner nambr uan, diner nambr tu" (dinner number one, dinner number two.) The travelers are surprised to discover that "dinner number two" is merely bigger than "number one" but does not exceed it in quality.

1.2 Everyday Conversations

Standard English greeting phrases appear in the travelogues either as words of the Other, or addressing the Other: "Gau du iu du" ("How do you do", Mayakovsky, 57), "Gud moning" ["Good morning", Ilf and Petrov, 145]. Sometimes such phrases even occur in English: "How do you do!" [Ilf and Petrov, 144]. But in Mayakovsky and Pilniak such non-translated greetings and formal expressions of gratitude are not neutral: they are used mockingly, in situations where specifically American relations are presumably exhibited. Mayakovsky utilizes the English "welcome" as the speech of the explicitly alien Other - racists: "Vel'kom, Ku-Kluks-Klan!" ("Welcome, Ku Klux Clan!") [326]. Similarly, he does not translate the phrase "thank you" when it refers to business relations: "senk'u za khoroshii biznes" ("Thank you for good business") [77]. He claims that Americans are so obsessed with money that a typical American greeting sounds like "Make money?", which he also renders in Cyrillic graphemes: "Mek monei" [56].

Pilniak interposes "thank you" sarcastically, when he reports that the St. Moritz hotel proposes to rent him a room for free, which is profitable, since the writer will contribute to publicizing the hotel. He exclaims with sarcastic reproach: "Dorogoi 'Sent-Morits,' - tank iu!" [456] ("Dear St. Moritz - thank you!"). Thus, greetings and standard phrases appear in Mayakovsky and Pilniak not merely in situations of communication but as emblems of American relations, based on mutually beneficial agreements. Pilniak is very attentive to casual words, formulas - he tries to catch the language on the spot and make it witness against itself. The most obvious example of this principle is the interjection "OK," his idiosyncratic symbol of America, the most frequent Anglicism in his travelogue. Pilniak grants it the grammatical status of a noun and freely declines it and produces the plural form: "istoriia 'o'keia'" ("OK's story").

2. Phenomena Related to the Structure and Infrastructure of Town and Country

To describe the structure of the American city, which is significantly different from the Russian one, English words are utilized especially often. Narratives about New York normally employ English names for different types of streets: "Ulitsy deliatsia na dva vida: prodol'nye - aveniu i poperechnye - strity" [Ilf, Petrov, 36] ("The thoroughfares are divided into two types: the perpendicular ones, or avenues; and the horizontal, or streets") [24]; "Na sever s iuga idut aveniu, Na zapad s vostoka - strity." [Mayakovsky, 55] ("The avenues run from south to north, the streets from east to west").

Pilniak seems to blame Americans for inventing unnecessary words to puzzle and embarrass the Russian traveler, and he offers simple Russian equivalents in quotation marks followed by exclamation marks: "Na Mankhettene desiat' aveniu (aveniu - eto po-russki perevesti - alleia!), idushchikh vdol' goroda, i bez malogo trista strit (po-russki - ulitsa!)" ("In Manhattan there are ten avenues (avenue is, to translate it into Russian - an alley!) stretched along the city, and almost thirty strit (in Russian - streets!)) Ilf and Petrov offer the following: ".. .nash myshinyi11 kar proezzhal po 'rezidenshel-part' ocherednogo malen'kogo gorodka..." [144]. (".our mouse-colored car drove along the residential part of the next small town.") [131]. On the one hand, they could have expressed the meaning in Russian: "zhiloi raion", "residential part" - and sometimes they do employ it along with the borrowing [98], but the structure of a city with a distinctive division into business center and residential part is more typical for an American than for a Russian city. Thus, they address the structure using Anglicisms:

Inogda ta chast' "rezidenshel part" gde zhivut obespechenny liudi proizvodit oglushitel'noe vpechatlenie... A riadom s etim vysshim mirom sovsem blizko pomeshchaetsia surovyi, zheleznyi i kirpichnyi "biznes-tsentr", vsegda strashnovatyi amerikanskii delovoi tsentr [98-99] (At times that section of the residential part where well-to-do people live produces an astonishing impression. But beside this higher world, quite close, is located

11 Possibly, this is a play on words in the attribute, evoking the Russian "mashina" ("car") by similarity of sound, while the actual word used for naming the vehicle is English - "kar".

the severe iron and brick business center, the ever-frightful American center of business) [86].

In large cities, the travelers refer in English to the "downtown." Mayakovsky: ". esli vy priekhali v kontoru, nakhodiachshuiusia versty za tri v Dantaune..." [298] (".if you have come to an office located in the Downtown three versts or so away."). He juxtaposes provocatively a typically Russian measure of length - "versta" (approximately 66 miles) and the English "downtown." Ilf and Petrov are aware of the etymology of the word "downtown" and they seek a literal "lower city" and "upper city" on the hills of San Francisco: "My tshchetno iskali 'Ap-taun' i 'Daun-taun'. Net! V San-Francisco ne bylo Verkhnego i Nizhnego goroda. Ili, vernee, ikh bylo slishkom mnogo, neskol'ko sot nizhnikh i verkhnikh chastei" [280] ("We sought in vain for uptown and downtown. No, in San Francisco there is no upper town and no lower town, or rather there are too many of them, several hundred upper and lower parts") [259].

Such borrowings as "gremer-skul" ("grammar school") and "gai-skul" ("high school") [Ilf and Petrov, 189] are employed in order to explain the American school system. Ilf and Petrov define them accordingly as "primary school" and "secondary school" and point out that even the completion of the latter does not guarantee a man employment.

By contrast with Russia, the American drugstore surprised the travelers with its universal assortment of products and services not necessarily related to drugs: Pilniak calls it "drag-stori, sirech' apteko-restorany" ("drugstores, in other words drugstorestaurants") - he uses the noun in the plural, evidently interpreting the English ending -e as Russian plural ending - i). Ilf and Petrov clarify that "drastor" ("drugstore") is "a genuine American pharmacy" where one can eat.

The usage of the English words alluding to American entertainments is decidedly not neutral. It is crucial for the travelers to claim the difference between Russian and American cinematographic production, even on the linguistic level. Thus, they use the word "kino," accepted in Russian, when they discuss the Soviet cinema, and the borrowings "muvi" ("movie,") "muving pikchers" ("moving pictures") to refer to American mass production. In particular, Pilniak introduces the English word to label the American cinema and Hollywood as kitsch: "kinopromyshlennost' - vse eti chudesa banditov i svad'by Emel'iana Pugacheva za zaborami, gde riadom raspolozheny tropiki i Arktika..., - vse eto po-amerikanski nazyvaetsia kratko: 'muvi'" [523] ("cinematographic production - all these wonders of

bandits and weddings of Emelian Pugachev behind fences where the tropics and the Arctic are located in close proximity. all this in American is called in brief: 'movies'"). Ilf and Petrov continue in the same vein: "... vam ostaetsia tol'ko poiti v 'muving pikchers' smotret' prekrasno sniatuiu... i oduriaiuchshuiu glupost'u soderzhaniia kartinu" [100] ("there is nothing for you to do but to go to a 'muvi-pikchers,' to watch a beautifully photographed . motion picture, the contents of which befog your senses with their foolishness").12

3. Technology

The usage of Anglicisms denoting technological objects facilitates the construction of the image of America as an urban, super-technological civilization. The writers amplify this effect by accumulating technological borrowings in one sentence. We find in Mayakovsky: "Khochesh pod zemliu - beri sobvei. Na nebo - beri eleveiter." [poem "Broadway", 56] ("If you want to go under the ground - take the subway, to heaven - take the elevator"). Technology in Mayakovsky's picture of the city determines all dimensions: it penetrates the lower domains of the city (Hell) and the upper ones (Heaven). Mayakovsky repeatedly uses "elevator" in the meaning "elevated railway" as he explains in his reference.13 He could have produced this Anglicism according to the principles of Russian noun-formation for foreign words by adding the suffix -er to the stem of "elevated" - but it is more likely that he simply confuses it with the existing American word "elevator" (lift) which he borrows with a shift in meaning.

Pilniak uses the word "elevator" in the traditional meaning - an elevator in an apartment building: "Za stenoi sopit refrizherator. svistit po nashim etazham rabochii eleveitor" ("lift") [471-72] ("Behind the wall the refrigerator breathes heavily. the technical elevator ('lift') whizzes through our storeys"). Pilniak's image of technological America is more mundane than Mayakovsky's; he constructs it through the sounds of home appliances.

12 Charles Malamuth, the translator of OdnoetazhnaiaAmerika, tried to compensate for the usage of the Anglicism in the Russian text by distorting the original English expression: he uses "movie pitcher" in the translation [87].

13 Even if in the poem "Broadway" "elevator" could pass for "lift" if it were not for the reference, the context of the prosaic sketches assuages all doubts: the poet reports having observed the multinational quarters of New York on his return home "by elevator": "Vozvrashchaias' noch'iu eleveiterom, eti natsii i kvartaly vidish' kak narezannye..." [52] ("Returning on the elevated at night, you see these nations and neighborhoods as if they were sliced.") [176].

Of course, many Russian words denoting technological terms were of foreign origin anyway. But even if there are Russian equivalents, for example, "kholodil'nik" "refrigerator," the writers choose Anglicisms. Besides, not all Anglicisms are equal to their Russian equivalents: Pilniak prefers the American "elevator" to the British "lift," which was borrowed into Russian and which Pilniak uses in brackets in order to explain the Americanism.

Ilf and Petrov's reference to the New York subway subtly accentuates their Soviet pride: they explain the notion of "sabvei" to the Russian reader through the word "metro," of French origin, which had been borrowed in Russian as a signifier for the Moscow underground railway: "Eto probegal pod zemlei poezd n'iu-iorkskogo metro - sabveia, kak on zdes' nazyvaetsia" [23] ("... there passed a train of the New York metro - the subway, as it is called here") [13]. The first line of the Moscow Metro was opened in 1935 -the year of Ilf and Petrov's voyage to America, so for them, it is important to stress that the concept of a metro is well-known to Soviet readers - it is just that in New York it has a local name. They avoid Mayakovsky's ambiguity and refer to the elevated railway as "eleveited," not declining it: "Nad nimi gremit zhelezom 'eleveited'" ("nadzemka") [37]. (Over them is the iron thunder of the "elevated" [elevated railway]).

By contrast with Mayakovsky and Pilniak, Ilf and Petrov even in their most technological chapter, "The Electric House of Mr. Ripley," are very reserved in using English terms for defining technological miracles. They prefer descriptions of the objects in Russian: for example, they never give the English word "toster" ("toaster") but utilize "mashinka dlia podzharivaniia khleba" ("machine for roasting bread") [111]; they also use paraphrases: "elektricheskaia mashinka dlia sbivaniia iaits" ("electric machine for whipping eggs") [113], "stiral'naia mashina" ("washing machine"), "gladil'nyi press" ("ironing press") [114]. In different parts of the text they have both "refrizherator" ("refrigerator") [115, 118] and "elektricheskii shkaf-kholodil'nik" ("electric freezing box") [113]. Although Ilf and Petrov were deeply impressed by American technology, this is not reflected lexically, possibly because they heard descriptions rather than names from their translator, Mr. Throne, who might have omitted the proper terms. However, one of the few English technological borrowings they use is "'fulpruf' - zashchita ot duraka" [114] ("foolproof - protection from fools"). Here they choose to use English since it is a mark of an alien, capitalist attitude to technology and suggests that people are subordinate to machines rather than their masters: "High technology distrusts man, has no faith in his resourcefulness" [100].

3.1 The Automobile

Among the borrowings with technological meaning, words related to cars and driving form a special subcategory. Since Russian travelers discovered America as a land of automobiles, automobile vocabulary reflects for them the essence of the country. Indeed, the multiple automobile-related Anglicisms offer a meeting ground for literary travelogues and the speech of emigrants from Russia;14 many such Anglicisms were borrowed by the writers only indirectly from English, through the émigré language. Most of the terms in question simply did not exist in Russian because most Russians in 1920s - 1930s did not deal on a daily basis with cars, and the infrastructure of automobile service was not developed. But even for those phenomena which were known, the travelers preferred English borrowings - the same way as emigrants. Although in their novel The Golden Calf, where the action is constructed around an automobile journey across Russia, Ilf and Petrov always refer to the car as "avtomobil'," in their American road novel they very often call their own automobile "kar" ("car"). Grammatically they treat it as a masculine noun: "nash kar" ("our car"). Luxurious cars are mentioned as "turing-kary" ("touring cars").

In the sphere of automobile-related Anglicisms, Ilf and Petrov often allude to the speech of Russian emigrants and operate with borrowings formed according to grammatically productive models. One such example is "parkovat'sia," "priparkovat'sia" ("to park"), which a whole generation later became acceptable in standard Russian. Facing the notorious problem of parking, Ilf and Petrov complain: "Eto inogda prevrashchaetsia v muchitel'noe zaniatie - naiti mesto, gde mozhno postavit' mashinu, kak govoriat russkie v Amerike - 'priparkovat'sia'" [97]. ("It becomes at times a task of torment to find a place where you may leave your car or, as the Russians in America say, where you can 'park' it") [85].

It is impossible to identify whether writers took some borrowings in the automobile sphere from English and adapted them to Russian, or whether they took them from emigrant speech, where they existed in the same form. In Russian, there was no one-word equivalent for these phenomena since there was no referent; these Anglicisms appear in quotation marks and are followed by an explanation. In Ilf and Petrov, for example, we find "Prodal

14 Andrews, who studies automobile-related words in the emigrant language as a special thematic group, notes that an abundance of borrowings is universal not only for Russians but for all emigrants to America; he cites Vildomec and Haugen who share this opinion [Andrews 1999: 76]

nam ego 'diler' ('torgovets avtomobiliami')" [83]. (It was sold to us by a dealer [automobile merchant]). In Pilniak, "Rossiiski shofer, esli by on proekhal po N'iu-Iorku chas vremeni s moskovskimi pravilami ezdy, - on byl by zasypan 'tiketami', shtrafnymi kvitkami" [476]. ("A Russian driver, if he drove through New York according to the Russian standards, would be buried in "tickets," penalty stubs"). Here Pilniak's use of the Anglicism "ticket" stresses the difference between the Russian careless style of driving and New York's highly regulated one. The concept of service stations, which remained unknown in Russia until the last quarter of the twentieth century, is introduced in Ilf and Petrov's travelogue together with the English word: "My ostanavlivalis' vozle 'servis-steishen,' kotoraia v nuzhnuiu minutu obiazatel'no okazyvalas' pod bokom" [148] ("We stopped near a 'service station,' which in a moment of need was always at hand") [135].

In the sphere of automobiles, travelers also use idiosyncratic neologisms. Mayakovsky creates an anglicized word "avtomobilirovat" when he portrays an American driving an automobile: "Esli amerikanets avtomobiliruet odin, on. budet zamedliat' khod i ostanavlivat'sia pered kazhdoi khoroshen'koi peshekhodkoi..." [308] ("If an American is driving alone, he will slow down and brake near every pretty female pedestrian"). The fact that the Russian language has no one word meaning 'to drive' and has to choose between the phrases "vesti mashinu" (literally - "to lead a car") and "ekhat' na mashine" ("to go by car"), provides a reason for the neologism.15 Mayakovsky utilizes a productive verb-forming suffix "-irovat'16" (as in "lidirovat'" - "to lead", or "galopirovat'" - "to gallop").

4. Social and Economic Life

This rubric is broad, but it is impossible to separate the social from the economic, since the phenomena of economic life are invariably perceived by the travelers as part of a single socio-economic complex possessing an ethical dimension. Moreover, the travelers perceive moral phenomena as derivatives of socio-economical ones. Within the overarching group, however, it is reasonable to differentiate between Anglicisms naming concrete phenomena and those signifying more abstract concepts.

15 Émigré speakers in this case widely employ the word "draivit'" ("to drive") [Andrews 1999: 81-82].

16 Verbs formed by adding the native suffix (-ovat', irovat', -stvovat') to foreign words are among the most widespread [Andrews 1999: 32].

Among the first category, "Prohibition" must be mentioned. It appears in graphemic rendering in Mayakovsky ("progibishen") and in phonetic in Pilniak ("prokhibishen"). Although it is a term referring to a specific American law in a specific era and it is therefore quite understandable that writers would use the English word, there are negative connotations tied to it: Mayakovsky and Pilniak introduce it as an American term for "sukhoi zakon" ("dry law") in episodes in their travelogues that focus on drinking and expose the hypocrisy of the government's attempt to stop it. Mayakovsky, who has been invited to drink with his new Mexican acquaintance, alludes to this episode as "pervoe znakomstvo s amerikanskim sukhim zakonom -'progibishen'" [293] ("my first acquaintance with the American dry law -prohibition"). Later he discusses the recipe for a cocktail made from gin and lemonade which, being mixed, produce "amerikanskoe shampanskoe epokhi progibishena" [63] ("American champagne of the Prohibition era"). The theme of drinking makes the traveler introduce other Prohibition-related Anglicisms, like "butleger": "U poslednego poimannogo optovika 'butlegera' bylo na sluzhbe 240 politseiskikh" [79] ("The last wholesale 'bootlegger' who was caught had two hundred and forty policemen in his employ" [185]). He also directly claims that "progibishen" is a typical manifestation of American business and American hypocrisy.

Pilniak mentions the phenomenon for the first time in his narrative about the Transatlantic journey, stating that it is "prohibishen" in the States that makes Americans drink so impetuously on the ship: "amerikantsy vspominaiut, chto na rodine u nikh 'prohibishen'" [447] ("the Americans recollect that there is 'prohibition' in their motherland"). Quoting the speech of the Other, a Wall-Street millionaire, Pilniak groups the word "prohibishen" with other Anglicisms signaling typical American concepts: "...ne nado zabyvat', chto blizhaishee nashe prosperity sozdali - avtomobil', kotoryi stal dlia amerikantsev katorgoi, i prohibishen" [461] ("we should not forget that the current American prosperity has been created by the automobile, which for Americans has become servitude, and prohibition").

Anglicisms referring to abstract concepts contain many significant shades of meaning if compared with their Russian equivalents and synonyms. The central concept in this sphere is "biznes" ("business"). In the travelogues, the foreignness of the word is graphically stressed, which shows that the phenomenon signified by it is perceived as typically American; besides, many writers find it necessary to define it for the Russian reader. Representative examples of the context in which the word "business" figures in the travelogues include the following: Esenin,

"Amerikanets vsetselo pogruzhaetsia v 'Business' i ostal'nogo znat' ne zhelaet." ("The American immerses himself entirely in 'Business' and has no interest in anything else") [153]. Mayakovsky, "Put', kakim vy dobyli vashi milliony, bezrazlichen v Amerike. Vse - 'biznes', delo, - vse, chto rastit dollar . Poluchil protsenty s razoshedsheisia poemy - biznes, obokral, ne poimali - tozhe" [314] ("The way you acquired your millions is a matter of complete indifference in America. Everything is 'business', work; everything that grows a dollar. If you get royalties from a poem that has been sold out, that's business; if you stole and didn't get caught - so is that") [182]. "Tipichnym biznesom i tipichnym khanzhestvom nazovem i amerikanskuiu trezvost', sukhoi zakon 'progibishen'" [317] ("We can also call American sobriety - the dry law 'prohibition' - typical business and typical hypocrisy") [184]. Pilniak: "U Ala Kapona big biznes - bol'shoe delo!" [574] ("Al Capone has 'big business!'") Ilf and Petrov, "Nikomu iz amerikantsev ne pridet, konechno v golovu mysl' ukorit' Dempseia v tom, chto iz sportsmena on sdelalsia soderzhatelem bara. Chelovek zarabatyvaet den'gi, delaet svoi biznes. Ne vse li ravno, kakim sposobom zarabotany den'gi?" [74] ("It would never occur to any American to blame Dempsey for turning from a sportsman into a barman. The man is making money, he is doing business. Does it make any difference how he earns his money?") [62].

Each writer accentuates the foreignness of both the word and the concept in his own manner: Esenin presents it in English transliteration, capitalized and in quotation marks; Mayakovsky has it in quotation marks; Pilniak uses it as part of the English phrase "big business." Ilf and Petrov in many contexts in the novel borrow the idiom "to do business" which they translate as "delat' biznes" in the meaning "to work": "v tekh zdaniiakh, gde liudi delaiut biznes, mozhno ostavat'sia v shliapakh" [30] ("in the buildings where people do business one may keep one's hat on"). "V nachale vtorogo oni vse uzhe sidiat v zdaniiakh i delaiut biznes" [69] ("Just after one p.m. they are already sitting in their offices and doing business") [58].

Although there is a Russian synonym for "business" - "delo," and Mayakovsky and Pilniak use it translating the American word into Russian, "delo" has a wide range of meanings, usually positive or neutral: it can mean "occupation," "profession," "work," "deed," etc. In the expression "eto delo!" it means "this is a real, decent thing (occupation)." By contrast, "business" in all these examples has explicitly negative connotations. It is the epitome of materialism, stripping man of all wider interests or moral concerns. It implies the pursuit of profit regardless of the means. The ethical

aspect of this Anglicism for Russians resides precisely in the absence of ethical dimension of making money for Americans.

Mayakovsky escalates the role of business in American life: he reports that children in America are trained to do business from childhood, while among adults, business "takes on grandiose, epic forms" [183]. In his poem "Broadway" he even creates a repugnant image of a baby sucking his mother's breast: according to Mayakovsky, he is also "occupied by serious business": ("zaniat ser'eznym biznesom") [56]. Pilniak frequently employs the expression "monkei biznes" ("monkey business") in the meaning of adulterous acts in order to criticize the moral deficiency of Americans.

Similarly, the writers alienate the word "dzhab" ("job"), rendering it as an Anglicism in order to stress its difference from the Russian "rabota." "Rabota" ("work") is the sacred occupation of the Soviet citizen, more a goal in itself than a means, while "dzhab" ("job") in the travelogues connotes a temporary means of sustaining one's life in a capitalist society; it is constantly accompanied by exploitation. In Russian, the word "rabota" is close to "delo;" it is broader than "job," standing for "job," "work," and "the process of working." But for the expression "to lose a job," Russian has a perfectly equivalent phrase "poteriat' rabotu;" nevertheless, Ilf and Petrov find it necessary to mention that in America it is called "poteriat' dzab." Obviously, for them the loss of a job, unemployment, is part of the capitalist socio-economy, and they stress it on the linguistic level.

Pilniak's text brings together the words "biznes" and "dzhab" and highlights the semantic difference between the two: while the former can secure one's profit and independence - since one is the master of one's own business - the latter suggests that the individual is dependent on it. Besides, it is implied that society lures the worker with the prospect of "business," enslaves him, and can easily throw him away: "Rabochie v rassuzhdeniiakh o 'chastnom' dele ne zamechaiut dolzhno byt', chto ikh biznes davno prevratilsia v dzhab" [640]. ("The workers discussing 'private'" enterprises must have failed to notice that their 'business' turned into a 'job' long ago").

An essential part of American "biznes," which the travelers who lead an active social life experience personally, is publicity. It appears as "publisiti" in Pilniak ("Ia ekhal s 'publisiti'" [454] ("I was coming with 'publicity"') and "pablisiti" in Ilf and Petrov ("No on byl strogo nakazan za svoe neverie v moshch amerikanskogo 'pablisiti.'" [121] ("But he was severely punished for his lack of faith into the power of American 'publicity'"). The whole concept is new for the Soviet citizens; they introduce it through "reklama"

(advertisement), an established Russian word of French origin.17 The contexts in which it appears in Ilf and Petrov accentuate the fact that it is yet a new degree of advertisement: it is more powerful and broad; it includes such varied methods of attracting the public as a loan, scientific experimentation, or the occasional mention of the advertised product or person in public. The writers emphasize the impersonal character of publicity: it turns a man into a tool of profit; everybody can be publicized. Pilniak laments: "Chasto kazalos' mne, chto liudi v Amerike sushchestvuiut ne k tomu, chtoby byt' liud'mi, no dlia publisiti i dlia reklamy" [457] ("I often thought that people in America exist not as people but as the material for publicity and advertisement"), and he complains of his own objectification by the American audience: "Ia byl ne ia, no material dlia publisiti," [455] ("I was not myself but the material for publicity"). Ilf and Petrov quote an American who said with envy that "gospod' bog imeet v Soedinennykh Shtatakh shikarnoe 'pablisiti.'" [125] ("the Lord God has excellent publicity in the United States") [111]. Pilniak also shows that publicity concerns sometimes lead to paradoxical actions on the part of companies: he tells how he has been hired by Paramount film corporation to write a movie script, apparently because Paramount wanted to prevent him from writing a script for somebody else. He concludes his story with an ironic exclamation: "Publisiti - reklama!" [462] ("Publicity! - advertisement!").

Such examples are abundant in Pilniak's text. He uses Anglicisms to name the phenomena of the American economy (i.e. "prosperiti" ("prosperity") and social life (i.e. "amiuzment", "publisiti.") Prosperity is the lucrative outcome of business, achieved through the shameless pursuit of profit on a country-wide scale, but it is temporary; "Amiuzment" is the thoughtless, pathetic entertainment of working Americans cheated by their social system.

The most striking example of the preference for an Anglicism over its Russian equivalent belongs to the realm of ethical concepts: from his first pages Pilniak widely uses the word "gipokritstvo" ("hypocricy"), which is derived with the help of a productive suffix for abstract meaning, instead of Russian "litsemerie." In Pilniak's narrative, it is one of the key words that

17 Though A. Ilf in her introductory note to the new edition of Odnoetazhnaia Amerika mentions that I. Ilf and E. Petrov were exploring America at a time when in Russia there were no "skyscrapers, cafeteria, burlesque (i.e. striptease), service... electric and other advertisement," [Ilf, Petrov 2007: 8] Soviet citizens had significant experience of advertisement in the era of NEP.

epitomize bourgeois morality; it characterizes American government and economics.

As we can see, the use of Anglicisms reveals the negative connotations of the realia named. The only distinctively American concept of economy and social life which has positive connotations is perhaps "servis" ("service") as it appears in Ilf and Petrov's travelogue; they speak of it with respect and argue that this concept should be adopted by the Soviet economy. Naturally, they borrow the word "servis" and use it with adjectives "umelyi" ("skillful") and "spokoinyi" ("orderly") [186] and use it instead of Russian "obsluzhivanie."

The Graphic Rendering of Anglicisms

Sometimes English phrases and words appear in the texts as explicitly alien fragments - in the Latin alphabet; all our writers offer examples of such unassimilated borrowings, written in not always correct English. Take, for example, Pilniak's "Experimantal Sinema" ("experimental cinema"). It would appear that, at first, he adjusted the expression to Russian pronunciation and then wrote it in Latin letters. English words rendered graphically in Russian texts can stress rivalry, opposition between the Russian and the American: "Nyne SSSR i USA igraiut v shakhmaty segodniashnego chelovechestva" [451] ("Now the USSR and the USA are playing a game of chess with contemporary mankind"). Ilf and Petrov occasionally use English phrases in English, quoting Mr. Adams in order to give his psychological portrayal: when he reverts to his native language it signals a high degree of disturbance: "Nu Bekki, Bekki. What are you doing? Chto ty delaesh'? It's impossible!" [103] ("Why, Becky, Becky. What are you doing? What are you doing? It's impossible!").

When the travelers use Cyrillic graphemes in their travelogues, their rendering of English words is highly inconsistent. At least two of the writers offer no system at all, while most of them follow inconsistent sets of principles within their text. Hugh McLean enumerates distortions that occur when Mayakovsky tries to convey English words by means of the Cyrillic alphabet: for example, he offers two spellings of the word "building" - the graphemic "bil'ding" and the phonetic "b'iul'ding" ("Vul'vort B'iul'ding") [McLean 1956: 338-339]. English words can appear in mixed rendering within the same phrase: "Drogs soda, gret end feimus kompani-neishenal" ("Drugs soda, great and famous company national"): while "famous" and "national" occur in phonetic form, "great" apparently does not. McLean notes Mayakovsky's multiple inconsistencies in spelling final voiced consonants as

well as the inadequacies of Cyrillic vowels for rendering English phonemes. Similar distortions can be found in all the travelogues.

Ilf and Petrov are the most systematic borrowers. Converting English words into the Cyrillic, they transliterate "h" as "g": "gai-skul" ("high school"), "turist-gauz" ("tourist house"). There is some variation in rendering final consonants, but the choice usually depends on the degree of word adaptation to the Russian. For example, they have both "muving-pikchers" ("moving pictures") ending with "s" but "turistgauz" ("tourist house' with the voiced 'z'"). But they do not decline "muving-pikchers," whereas "turist gauz" is more assimilated and appears in the plural form with the Russian noun ending -y "turistgauzy" and in different cases ("iz turist-gauza" [from the tourist house]), so that the consonant before the vowel is not devoiced. Possibly, words of German origin such as "tseihgauz" ("storage room"), which also occur in the text, could have influenced their utterance of this phoneme, as well as of word-final voiced consonants. Ilf and Petrov are usually oriented towards pronunciation and obviously listen constantly to Mr. Adams as he speaks with their American interlocutors. Sometimes they make a choice in favor of pronunciation even when they see a word in the written form: for example, in the name of the company "Viking Press" which they notice on a bill-board they omit "g" at the end [126] so that it appears in the text as "Vaikin press," although a Russian reader would rather expect that they associate it with the familiar word "Viking."

The most inconsistent and casual borrower is Pilniak, whose negligent spelling of English words reflects his condescending attitude to the socio-economically backward country. There are cases when he is guided by spelling, i.e. "publisiti" ("publicity"), "kompani" ("company"), "Konei-ailend" ("Coney Island"). He uses the plural for drug store, evidently interpreting the English ending -e as the Russian plural ending - i, while in other cases he is definitely influenced by American phonetics: "dzhab" ("job"), "stap" ("stop"), "bylding" ("building").

The frequency of Anglicisms as well as the degree of their integration into the narrative varies from author to author but some consistent patterns can be identified. Korolenko, Gorky and Esenin rarely borrow English words. Gorky almost provocatively refuses to employ them even when it seems natural; he refers to "elevated" as "nadzemka" and even prefers the expression "skrebnitsy neba" ("scrapers of the sky") to the one-word loan translation "neboskreby" ("skyscrapers"). In the only case when he operates with an English word, it is not a borrowing but an alien fragment inserted into the text, "mob." The word appears in English as the title of a sketch and

is used further on in the text to connote a repulsive monster, a beastly crowd. The English stresses the alterity, even inhumanness, of the phenomenon studied in the sketch.

Esenin includes a single English phrase in his travelogue - his words addressing American journalists - rendered in fractured English, in English transliteration: "Mi laik Amerika" ("I like America"). He also chooses an English title for one of the travelogue's parts ("Bot 'Paris'" ["Boat Paris"]. The insertion of "business" as a mark of foreignness has already been discussed.

Translating the toponym "Broadway" into Russian, Esenin makes a curious Freudian mistake, which signals not merely a poor knowledge of English but also a hidden loyalty to the periphery despite his declared preference for the center. He reports: "Amerikantsy zovut Brodvei pomimo prisushchego emu nazvaniia 'okrainnaia doroga,' 'belaia doroga' ("Besides its regular name of '[peripheral] road,' the Americans call Broadway the great white way") [152]. Later he tells us that it is more pleasurable to walk Broadway at night when it is full of light than in the daytime. Esenin is seemingly lost in American binary oppositions; when electric lights turn day into night, the author mistakenly refers to a central street as a side one. In general, English borrowings in Esenin refer to proper names; only on one single occasion do they refer to an American concept. They are distinctively set aside from his own discourse.

Pilniak, Mayakovsky, and Ilf and Petrov widely utilize English words in their texts and allow themselves significant liberty and variety as concerns the form of their integration. A mark of this liberty is their loan translations. In Mayakovsky's texts, we have already registered a typical émigré loan "brat' tren, (sabvei, eleveiter)" ("to take a train [subway, elevator]"). A more idiosyncratic example is "vy smotrite na dva tsenta" - (literally: "you look at two cents"). The English construction seems especially odd since, if he had added a reflexive suffix, it would have looked Russian, at least grammatically ("vy smotrites' na dva tsenta" [you look like two cents]). In order to demonstrate by linguistic means how alien American social values are, Mayakovsky also uses a mirroring technique: he not only borrows English idioms but also deconstructs Russian idioms, replacing their elements with American ones. When he criticizes the newspapers for their indifference in the face of appalling events he writes: "Gazety zamolchali, budto dollarov v rot nabrali." ("The papers fell silent as if they had filled their mouths with dollars"). Here he "Americanizes" the Russian idiom "molchit, budto vody v rot nabral" ("is silent as if he has filled his mouth with water").

Pilniak stresses the difference between the Russian and American concepts of humor, translating the English expression "roll with laughter": "eto dolzhno katat' amerikantsa smekhom" ("this should roll an American with laughter"), referring to certain tasteless jokes in the newspapers. The realm of formal social relations also required of Pilniak a loan translation that he favors and frequently repeats: "postroil vecherinku" ("built a party"). Pilniak needs this expression in order to emphasize the artificial nature of interpersonal relations in America.

Ilf and Petrov usually avail themselves of loan phrases in Russian when they ironically simulate the speech of Mr. and Mrs. Adams: "brat' nochleg" ("to take a night's lodging"), instead of the Russian expression "ustraivatisia na nochleg"; brat' informatsiiu ("to take information"), instead of "uznavat', razuznavat'" ("to find out"). And, of course, we have the abovementioned phrase which they must have perceived as typically American - "delat' biznes" ("to do business"). It is possible, however, that these loan phrases belong not to Ilf and Petrov but to the Adams couple who could have literally translated English phrases into Russian. "Vystrelivat' kartinu" ("to shoot a picture"), however, seems to be their own loan (since it sounds very specific in Russian, it is unlikely that Mr. and Mrs. Adams would have translated it this way). Since the word "streliat' in Russian usually figures in the context of weapons ("to shoot a gun"), it acquires very ironic connotations when applied to movies: it suggests not only rapidity of movie production but also their potentially deadly effect on the viewer.

The following table reflects the different degrees of assimilation of Anglicisms by Russian writers. Korolenko, Gorky and Esenin are not included since there is not enough data - the few examples that can be found in their texts have just been discussed. I have not listed all the borrowings occurring in travelogues, but rather listed those that appear most often and represent typical models of borrowing.

Borrowings easily travel from one category to another: when an Anglicism occurs for the first time it is often used in quotation marks and with an explanation; later it can function without them, becoming more familiarized and grammatically incorporated into speech. In Pilniak, however, various degrees of assimilation of the same word can appear randomly in the text.

Different degrees of adaptation of English borrowings

1. English words in English transliteration

2. Non-declinable forms in quotation marks

Mayakovsky

Выходим на Woodword - улица [340]

Pilniak

C "Final assembly line" -с финального конвейера [607]

"Experimantal Sinema" [529]

Такое средневековье Я ехал с «публисити»

рядом с первым в мире паровозом «Твенти-сенче-ри-экспресс»... [317]

Они приезжают из первых веков сквозь лязг «Пенсильвэниа Стейшен» [58] Возьмите наши «муви» (фильмы) и ваши [Mayakovsky 1961: 227]

[454]

«монкэй бизнес» («обезьянье дело») [447]

Ilf and Petrov

Мы проезжали

"painted

desert" -

«окрашенную

пустыню»

[219]

Называется оно «фул-пруф» - защита от дурака

[114]

Ели «гэм энд эгг» (яичницу с куском ветчины) [145] «динер намбр уан, динер намбр ту» [95] «потерять джаб» [95] проезжал по «резиден-шел-парт» [144]

Над ними гремит железом «элевейтед» (надземка) [37] Пойти в «мувинг пикчерс» [100] Мы не пили «Кока-кола» [123]

Директор

«грэмер-скул»

[189]

3. Non-declinable forms without quotation marks

...стала раздавать в целование свою ручку... в ньюйоркском Мондейморнинг -опера-клуб [337]

4. Declinable уважают вас, как forms in настоящего аме-

quotation marks: риканца, веселого usually names of «аттабоя» [312] brands, proper Все - бизнес, дело names [314] (also is used

without quotation marks)

У последнего пойманного оптовика «бутлегера» было на службе 240 полицейских Обгоняя «бусы» [70] Да, Америка, этот «биг, вери биг сити» (большой, очень большой город) [Mayakovsky 1961: 227]

несколько саженей «битча» (пляжа)

Законов Вулворта, кока-кола [610] Пили кока-кола [540] Разнообразие начинается от дрог-стори, сиречь аптеко-ресторанов [474]

Не надо, мол, мне, «Сэнт-Моритца» [448] Бритвенных «жиллета» же ножичков [459] Взяли «бойс'ы*» да и свистнули в сотый этаж [501]

Законов Вулворта, кока-кола, «эскимоса»... [610]

Ал Капон пока подтвердительного «стейтмэнта» не дал [571]

Российский шофер, если бы он проехал по Нью-Йорку час времени с московскими правилами езды, - он был бы засыпан «тикетами», штрафными квитками [476]

Там собирается до полутора миллионов нью-йоркцев для «гуд тайма» (хорошего времени) [462]

Заведующий

отделом

паблисити

[114]

Огромных «роллс-ройсов» [82]. Сидели в голубом «бьюике» [82] Этих... «сосиджей» будет шесть [95]

(Утолять жажду) «Джин-джер-эйлем» [121]

для опускания «никеля» (пятицентовой монеты) [40]

* Depluralisation often occurs in Pilniak's borrowings: he adds the plural Rus

5. Declinable forms without quotation marks

Шампанское эпохи прогибишена** [309] Божий менджер, поп Платон [72] Ребенок. сосет как будто не грудь, а доллар - занят серьезным бизнесом [56]

. бесчисленные голосенки узеньких стритов [300] Пропустить рвушдхся с боковых стритов [304]. С очень увесистой палкой - клобом [304]

пассажиры не идут к брекфесту [446] на ходу ест хатдогс'ы [463]

чуинг-гом'ом [482] Глаза рабочих запорошены историями Форда, Вулворта, эскимо, коки-колы... [637] Хлопок не дает никакого профиту [553]

Нашего кара [253]

Ночевали в кэмпах или турист-гаузах [143] Брали

хич-хайкеров [189]

6. English words treated according to the models of Russian word-formation

... поезд летит по Гудзонову берегу [298]

Если американец автомобилирует один. [308] Портные Нью-Йорка в дни маскарадного съезда кланцев публиковали рекламы. [326] Такой-то куксин вождь убил такого-то. [326] И гладью Миссисипи под нами миссисипится [54] Тридцативерстный Бродвеище [304]

Люди фокстротили и пили шампанское [456] Должны амюзментить-ся [473]

лонча (завтракая) около работы и диннеря (обедая) в порядке амюзмента [474]

Избрали кэмпчане старосту [631] Приритцных американских леди [552] Человек пикнического склада [553] Если не можешь быть мэй-монейщиком [484]

В поисках «паркинга» мы отъезжали от своего ресторана все дальше и дальше... Мы наконец «припарковались» и пошли в ресторан [349] Дорога с газолиновыми станциями [101]

** Also is used with quotation marks сухой закон «прогибишен» [79]

7. Вы смотрите на два это должно катать «брать

Characteristic цента* [314] американца смехом информацию»

English Сколько вы стоите [468] [206]

syntactic Берите экспресс Ваш друг скажет высокая

structures. [299] вам, что он для вас техника [114]

«построил» вечеринку я делаю свой

[508]; Когда «строят» бизнес [71]

для вас вечеринку Mr. Adams: с

[508] наступлением

вечера мы

берем ночлег

[102]

In comparison with Mayakovsky and Pilniak, Ilf and Petrov's Anglicisms are less well incorporated into their language. We see only occasional code switching: after using English words they immediately give explanations in Russian, usually with formal markers "in Russian it means," or just translate the word in brackets. But they do not operate freely with borrowings, do not familiarize them like Mayakovsky and Pilniak. In their texts, we almost never see English words declined or taking plural forms according to Russian patterns. Moreover, Ilf and Petrov never practice idiosyncratic word-formation: they only employ the popular emigrant derivatives of the verb "to park" ("parkovka" ("parking"), "parkovat'" ("to park")). Therefore, even despite the fact that English borrowings appear frequently in Ilf and Petrov's text, they fail to become an integral part of their American discourse.

Mayakovsky and Pilniak, by contrast, use borrowings aggressively; they violate them by declining and conjugating English words, juggling with neologisms, ironically deconstructing idioms, creating bi-lingual puns. In their texts, Anglicisms function as markers, criticizing the foreign, but at the same time familiarizing the new American land. Mayakovsky masterfully employs inter-lingual games in his poems, rhyming English and Russian words: i.e. "gerl" ("girl") and "gorl" ("throats"); his poem "Baryshnia i Vul'vort" is an intricate experiment in macaronic speech.

This linguistic violence might seem paradoxical at first glance, since it is inflicted not only on English but also on their own language as well, which is being invaded by borrowings. But for both Pilniak and Mayakovsky, language in general is an open playground, a space for linguistic experiments.

* This really is not characteristic of English - Mayakovsky just thinks it is.

Mayakovsky is famous for his futuristic word constructions, so in his American travelogues he merely uses different building blocks - English stems. Both Pilniak and Mayakovsky apply to the borrowed words the same word-formation patterns they use in creating Russian-based neologisms. For example, Pilniak calls Ford "Arsentii Ivanovich" after an orthodox Russian manufacturer he has known in his childhood and immediately derives a term "arsentivanstvo" to signify a concept of backwardness and traditionalism. This idiosyncratic term, although it denotes a presumably American concept, is absolutely Russian in its structure: Pilniak agglutinates the name and patronym and adds a productive suffix, which denotes general concepts.

Thus, the acquisition of another language and its use for artistic purposes largely depends on the writers' principles of poetics as well as their general approach towards language experiments. Esenin, Mayakovsky, and Ilf and Petrov construct the image of an exotic, estranged country both by adopting Anglicisms and by demonstratively rejecting them. While in the speech of immigrants the borrowings are markers of the speakers' integration into a new reality,18 in the texts of travelogues, they reveal the difference between the native and the foreign.

REFERENCES

[Andrews 1999] - Andrews, David. Sociocultural Perspectives on Language Change in Diaspora. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1999.

[Bogoraz 1988] - Bogoraz (pseud., Tan), Vladimir. "The Black Student." Olga Hasty and Susanne Fusso, eds., transl. America Through Russian Eyes. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University, 1988: 111-126.

[Fedorova 2013] - Fedorova, Milla. Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York: America and Americans in Russian Literary Perception. DeKalb, IL: NIU Press, 2013.

[Granovskaia 1995] - Granovskaia, Lidia. Russkii iazyk v "rasseianii": Ocherki po istorii russkoi emigratsiipervoi volny. [Russian Language in "Dispersion". Essays on the Language of Russian Emigration of the First Wave.] Moscow: Institut russkogo iazyka RAN Publ., 1995. (In Russ.)

18 Eduard Limonov, however, demonstrated several decades later that in literary texts written by emigrants, borrowings can also be used as artistic devices to express the mutual hostility to the new country and the narrator. Limonov's Anglicisms as a demonstrative violation of the norms have been studied in [Levin 1984] and [Shukman 1983].

[Ilf, Petrov 1974] - Ilf, Ilia, Petrov, Evgenii. Little Golden America, transl. Charles Malamuth. New York: Arno Press, 1974.

[Ilf, Petrov 2007] - Ilf, Ilia, Petrov, Evgenii. Odnoetazhnaia Amerika. Pis'ma iz Ameriki [Little Golden America. Letters from America], ed. and introduced by Aleksan-dra Ilf. Moscow: Tekst Publ., 2007. (In Russ.)

[Kiparsky 1964] - Kiparsky, Valery. English and American Characters in Russian Fiction. Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1964.

[Levin 1984] - Levin, Ilia. "Ob evolutsii literaturnogo iazyka v emigratsii." ["On the Evolution of the Literary Language in Emigration."] O. Matich, Olga and Heim, Michael H., eds. The Third Wave: Russian Literature in Emigration. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1984: 263-268.

[Mayakovsky 1957] - Mayakovsky, Vladimir. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii: v 13 tomakh. [Complete Works] in 13 vols. Vol. 7. Moscow: Goslitizdat Publ., 1957. (In Russ.)

[Mayakovsky 1961] - Mayakovsky, Vladimir. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii: v 13 tomakh. [Complete Works] in 13 vols. Vol. 13. Moscow: Goslitizdat Publ., 1961. (In Russ.)

[McLean 1956] - McLean, Hugh. "On Mr. Pont Kic, his Ruptured Russian, and Related Subjects." Halle, Morris, comp. Festschrift for Roman Jakobson. Essays on the Occasion of his Sixties Birthday. The Hague: Mouton &Co., 1956: 332-343.

[Pilniak 1976] - Pilniak, Boris. "O'kei: Amerikanskii roman." ["Okay: An American Novel."] Izbranneproizvedeniia. [Selected Works.] Moscow: Khudozhestven-naia literatura Publ., 1976: 443-675. (In Russ.)

[Ryan 2002] - Ryan, Karen L. "Imagining America: Il'f and Petrov's 'Odnoetazhnaia Amerika' and Ideological Alterity." Canadian Slavonic Papers: 44 (Sept.-Dec., 2002): 263-277.

[Shukman 1983] - Shukman, Ann. "Taboos, Splits, and Signifiers: Limonov's 'Eto ya - Edichka'." Essays in Poetics 8 (1983): 1-18.