Russian Words for ‘freedom’ Revisited

Abstract

The paper deals with the Russian words referring to ‘freedom’ ( svoboda , volia , and their derivatives svobodnyj , vol’nyi , vol’nost’ , etc.) in both synchronic and diachronic aspects. I seek to elaborate and to refine the analysis given in some earlier publications (by Anna Wierzbicka and by myself). The paper analyzes the spatial dimension of the semantics of the words under consideration, the contrast between svoboda and volia before the Revolution, their semantic development during Soviet times and their current semantic status. It also considers metalinguistic comments on their semantics by Russian speakers. I make special reference to the role of these words in The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the problem of their translation into other languages. In addition, I briefly consider the use of the words in question in the translations of various texts into Russian (with reference to the parallel corpora of the Russian National Corpus). The starting point for such an analysis is the assumption that one may regard translation equivalents and paraphrases of a linguistic unit extracted from real translated texts as a source of information about its semantics. This approach is particularly efficient in case of language-specific words that defy translation. Translations into Russian may be even more revealing in this respect: when Russian is the source language, the choice of a paraphrase depends on the translator’s meta-linguistic reflection while an occurrence of a Russian language-specific expression in the target text, more often than not reflects a “naive” choice of words as a part of “natural” linguistic activity.