Language: Russian
When we discuss word borrowings, we usually consider this linguistic exchange to be a direct consequence of two languages that had hitherto followed two separate paths of linguistic development residing in relative geographic vicinity for a substantial amount of time. The mutual acquisition of words, therefore, seems to be an obvious follow up to the long-lasting cultural and trade exchanges that inevitably occurred between the two. Indeed, we can find evidence to support this belief in the extensive influx of German words into Russian as well as other minor Eastern Slavic languages in the 17th-18th centuries. Tsar Peter the Great of Russia and his successors had a vision to bring their country into the pantheon of European colonial and regional superpowers and thus they openly encouraged the spread of comparatively progressive Western ideas, which was, of course, only feasible through adopting terms to describe those new concepts from the neighboring languages.
However, as the tellurocratic, Tsarist regime collapsed and as its Eurocentrism became gradually replaced with an Iron Curtain, the Russian language was to embark on a different path of linguistic evolution – an internal one. Such a “U-turn” from playing an active role in world affairs to relative isolation would not have been possible, have the Civil War of 1917-21 not forced the majority of foreign language speakers – the intelligentsia - out of what then was Soviet Russia. The exodus of many Anglicisms and Frankicisms from Russia’s language culture created a social demand for new creative ways of devising words, with particular predilection given to various abbreviations and portmanteaus of already existing terms. The latter, or rather, the movement to popularize the latter, surprisingly found great support in naming children, resulting in a smorgasbord of names like Vladlen (Vladimir Lenin) and Dazdraperma (Glory to the First of May) being widely used throughout the Communist superpower. Even mass imprisonments of individuals by the NKVD that peaked in the 1930s during the harsh reign of Joseph Stalin made a significant contribution to this artificial purification of Russian as it allowed the prison protégé of Yiddish – the fenya language – to flourish.
So, what exactly is fenya, you might be wondering? Well, it is most likely the world’s most widely spoken cant language to such an extent that almost every person in Russia and in other CIS states regardless of their social status would have heard of and would have exploited words of fenya origin in daily life. Two examples of this are the following Yiddish words: “malina” and “khalyava”. The first one – “malina” – is the word speakers of Russian use for a raspberry and employ to cheer themselves up with idioms when something is at their wits’ end by saying that life is not like a raspberry or “malina”, meaning that life is not very sweet and straightforward. This expression derives from the more traditional Yiddish meaning of this word – bright – and its adoption in Russian imperial and later Soviet prisons as a synonym for freedom. The second example, on the other hand, denotes something positive in contemporary Russian. If something is like money for jam, i.e. acquired with great, perhaps, unanticipated ease, then it is considered a “khalyava”. This word actually happens to be the Yiddish word for milk, which used to be given for free to prisoners in some Russian imperial institutions. Consequently, it became a synonym of something free, requiring no effort whatsoever to acquire.
Is fenya then primarily based on Yiddish? Yes and no, because although there are plenty of Yiddish loanwords that successfully migrated into the universal Russian lexicon through the medium of fenya, the grammar of this criminal argot and the vast majority of verbs tend to have Greek or indeed Slavic origins as Vladimir Dahl, one of Russia’s most prominent lexicographers, had concluded in his works. Here is one example of fenya found in The Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great Russian Language, authored by the aforementioned expert:
Fenya: “Ropa kimatj, polumerkot, ryhlo zakureščat voryhany.”
Normative Russian: “Pora spatj, polnoč; skoro zapojut petuhi.”
Translation: "Time to go to bed, <it's> midnight; roosters will sing soon.
As you are able to see, there is clearly some difference in vocabulary between the Russian you are likely to encounter in literature and its more vulgar counterpart. This is because fenya surprisingly happens to be much older than it is speculated to be at first from its sudden rise in popularity during the Soviet era. In fact, the origins of fenya can be traced all the way back to medieval Russia, where travelling vendors, also known as ofenyas, had devised their own language to communicate as they had created entirely new words whilst remaining loyal to the traditional Russian morphology. Later, this secretive language penetrated the criminal world of Russia and became absorbed into the prison culture. However, there is limited evidence in favor of this hypothesis, and one comparatively prominent Jewish historian – Dan Michael - claims that the fenya cant language actually has its roots in Kokumloschen – a jargon that many Ashkenazi Jews in Mediaeval Germany and Eastern Europe had used in their daily speech. Given that the vast majority of those Jews were members of the poor classes of society, he argues, this argot was able to spread and extend its influence to other social outcasts of the time, such as thieves, vagabonds, and beggars. This view is further supported by the fact that at the end of the 15th century, there was published an entire book in Basle under the title of Liber Vagaborum, which described and examined the lives and the subcultures of the poor. For it contained a glossary of Kokumloschen, which, in turn, accommodated for a plethora of words of Hebrew origin.
By and large, fenya has had a revolutionizing effect on the Russian language of the 20th century, only made possible due to mass imprisonments and repressions that the Cheka and later the NKVD had been carrying out throughout the first half of the century in the Soviet Union. The language of Gogol, Pushkin, and Bulgakov, which had hitherto tried to mirror its Western Romance and Germanic neighbors through cultural interactions and consequent word borrowings, found new internal resources for linguistic development. This resulted in both abbreviating already existing words and embracing the inevitable influence of the criminal language as more and more people found themselves experiencing life in prison. The legacy of the culture of Yiddish, severely undermined, first, by the Soviets during the 1930s and then by the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45, still lives on today in our daily conversations. However, this stage of linguistic evolution has certainly reached the end, with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the subsequent full prohibition of the use of fenya and criminal-related slang in Russian criminal institutions in 2016 marking its imminent decline. Yet despite this, fenya still largely lives on in some pieces of literature, such as, the works of Sergei Dovlatov, who had spent his military service as a prison guard in high-security camps, as well as in cinema. If you wish to learn more about fenya and how exactly prisoners communicated in this uniquely widespread argot, I suggest you explore those and perhaps watch “The Gentlemen of Fortune” (1971) after reading this article.
Mikhaylov's mother tongue is Russian. He is from Moscow, Russia and attends school in Oundle, United Kingdom.
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