I AM READING NOTES FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD, a cheery tome by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov (which my English teacher dubbed "the most boring book ever written") and The Insulted and Injured ~ I'm sure the authors of modern misery memoirs are peeved to find that particularly evocative title already used up!I had some drinks this afternoon and sat under an electronic posterboard leafing through the cheery tale, which is set in a Siberian hard labour camp.
Dostoyevsky's characters ~ murderers, alcoholics, gamblers ~ remind me of some of the junkies I have met in my time ... I'm not saying anything else.
I googled various topics concerning Siberian labour camps and came up with a page from a school punishment book, detailing how many lashes of the cane various miscreants received for such crimes as stabbing someone with a pear(!) and grave robbing~(!!!) Am I badly misreading things (you can click on the picture to enlarge)~? Or was the world even crazier in Victorian times (or whenever those whippings are from)..? ~ than it is now?? (Surely not!)
I thought I would invent some comedy crimes of my own ...
The only sample offences I could come up with were:
Allowing school hamster to grow too tubby.
Allowing goblin to chase school hamster ...
I don't think I'd have done too well making up school rules in the dark ages, do you?
COMPETITION TIME ~ roll up and give your guesses, educated or otherwise, please! Tell me WHAT LANGUAGE ARE THESE SCRIBBLES WRITTEN IN?Answers in the commentary box, if yer please...
PS the end of my HAMMY AND THE GOBLIN tale of wonder is coming soon. I bet y'all are yawning with excitement!
it must be "stabbing with PEN", not "pear" ???????
ReplyDeleteI think it was likely stabbing with a pen.
ReplyDeleteGrave robbing? was it a medical school? anatomy class?
The world was crazier in the past. I read a study online years ago - I should try to find it again - that compared the murder rate of London a couple hundred or so years ago (they kept very good records apparently) with today's rates. It seems murders per capita were 14 times higher than modern Chicago, Detroit or whatever other major city in the States had high rates. Altogether, people are much less violent and the world is a safer place today.
The scribbles look like shorthand to me but I know as much about shorthand as I do about Arabic.
Swedes: yeah you must be right. Why on earth did I think it was a PEAR... I have no idea. I does kinda look like that...
ReplyDeleteJeannie: was the murder rate really that high? I dimly recall hearing such figures before, but I don't remember them being quite that high...
What were people so upset about, I wonder??
Is the writing Sanskrit?
ReplyDeleteOh, I think the world was definitely crazier then!
ReplyDeleteAfter careful examination of the title of the photo of that sample of scribble, I have determined that it is Gabelsberger shorthand from 1834!
ReplyDeleteIt's all Greek to me. But I know that the scribbles aren't. I read his books so many years ago because I had to.
ReplyDeleteI think it's stabbing with pen.
ReplyDeleteBut surely grave robbing is more than 2 strokes worse than indifference!
I think that the aliens wrote it.
ReplyDeleteAkelamalu: no not Sanscrit! If I were guessing I'd guess it were Armenian. It does look quite a lot like Armenian or Georgian writing, with the up-&-down-iness
ReplyDeleteWelshcakes: yep!
Igsquirrel: o you cheated. Yes it is, it's German written in Gabelsberger shorthand, which it has been said (accurately in my view as I've checked the competition internationally) "has a beauty of form and outline that is unsurpassed" ...
Syd: didn't you like Dostoyevsky? I heard he got paid by the page and was in debt... which stuck in my mind and certainly explains why his later work was far more boring than his early stuff. Up to Crime and Punishment he's really good, but the supposed great novels (Crime and Punishment aside) are intolerably dull... nothing at all like Tolstoy, whose Anna Karenina is unsurpassed. No film has ever captured its glory even closely
Liz: I think "indifference" was their ability to give a good whipping to anyone they pleased!!
Reeny: looks like Alien, aye! Hey perhaps it's Klingon. Actually I've seen Klingon Official Script online and it's nothing like that. Did you know Klingon has a higher number of fluent speakers in America than Esperanto. Dunno what that says about Esperanto... PS did you know Google do a Klingon language portal? It's here:
http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-klingon
Although I never learned steno it looks like steno to me ! No idea about the language though.
ReplyDeleteTo your questions, yes there are lots of construction work in London ! It's really awful. I hope the result will be good at least ! When my son lived in London I didn't go that often to the center, it's just now because I have to take the Eurostar there so I always stop for the day to smell London air, lol !
I hate automn, If I could I would do like a bear and disappear in a hole from End September til April ! I have been in Brighton quiet often 15 years ago, there was always a lot going on. Eastbourne is much calmer, some bad languages say that it is the last door to the graveyard ! There are so many retired people from London living there now !
i Love Dostoyevsky, and i think "the idiot" was a really good book.
ReplyDeleteHey, Friend,
ReplyDeleteI can transliterate this script for you, and also translate into English, if you don’t have it yet but would like to.
Greets from Hamburg (Germany),
A Fellow of Yours.
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