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projectsblogging circa 19th century, writing for the web circa 1992
So here's a cool MosNews article about how Vladimir Odoevsky, a 19th-century Russian prince, predicted blogging in his novel Year 4338. An interesting excerpt from an unidentified translation of the novel:
The job of publishing such a journal daily or weekly is carried out by the butler. It is done very simply: receiving an order from the masters, he makes a notice of what they tell him, then make copies by camera obscura and sends them to the acquaintances.
Hey, if I had a butler to blog for me, maybe I'd have a life.
But, um, not only is that quotation completely unreferenced by MosNews…so is the blog that they supposedly found it in. They claim that the information was blogged by one "Ivan Dezhurny, a Russian poet and singer" who is "generally fond of futuristic literature" but they don't provide a link to his post or his blog.
What year is this, MosNews? Link, people! Link to your sources! That is what hypertext is here for. Even if it's an incomprehensible Russian-language silly-willy LiveJournal. We are curious and we want to see the original right-now-this-very-second live-and-on-our-computer-screen. This is why we're using the internet rather than a reference book.
But what's really disturbing here is that this "Ivan Dezhurny" character is completely ungoogleable outside of the MosNews article and (as of the time stamp of this post) one referencing site with identical text. Whoever heard of an ungoogleable blogger? Sure, the Wired article hints at the possibility of blogging anonymously or under an assumed name, but then, er, wouldn't MosNews be calling him his blog name or "an anonymous blogger"?
Very mysterious indeed.
обновление—I think that means "update" in Russian.
Well, it's been a veritable tempest of Russian visitors and information-providers. First of all, I want to provide some html-ified links to Ivan Dezhurney's original post and an English-language page about Prince Odoevsky, both of which Sergei Rublëv kindly provided in my html-stunted comments.
I'm trying to decipher Sergei's recent post with this rather spiffy online translation app and I think what I'm gathering is that he wrote this Russian article about Odoevsky (quite properly linking to Ivan's post) for the lenta.ru news site. I know absolutely nothing about lenta.ru, but, hey, they're doing a better job of writing for the web than MosNews.
What I'm really digging, though, is the text that Sergei used to link to my Odoevsky post: это. My online translator renders this back to English as "it" and provides "кенспекл" as the Russian for "kenspeckle." Wonder what made him choose это.
ssr said,
MosNews took it from the Lenta.Ru Russian language article
comment posted on October 12, 2005 at 5:54
ssr said,
Hey, here\'s the link: http://lenta.ru/news/2005/10/03/odoevsky/
comment posted on October 12, 2005 at 6:05
The Sanity Inspector said,
Sounds hoax-y to me. \"Magnetic telegraphs\"? Real telegraphs were invented the same year this book was supposedly written, but not put into use until 1839, according to Wikipedia.
comment posted on October 12, 2005 at 12:55
lauren said,
anachronistic translation maybe?
TSI, good point about the anachronism. That could very well point to a hoax, but it could also be an anachronistic translation — like I mentioned in my post, we still have no idea where MosNews and ralphmag.org got their English rendering from, and it\\\'s possible that there\\\'s some confusion in Russian between the electrical and optical telegraph [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph] — considering that an optical telegraphs would have likely been in use during Odoevsky\\\'s time. I encountered a similar anachronistic translation of Russian to English while reading Dostoeveky\\\'s Notes From Underground. In one text there was the phrase \\\"I am a retort made man\\\" and in another the same phrase was rendered \\\"I am a test-tube made man.\\\" No clue why. Test tubes existed in 1864, of course, but the idea of being a test-tube made man wouldn\\\'t have made sense the way it does today — at least I don\\\'t think so. Maybe if some of my Russian visitors return they\\\'ll give us some insight into the translation.
comment posted on October 12, 2005 at 22:58
ssr said,
ЭТО
\"Это\" more likely means \"this\" in this case - I used _it_ because the original URL was too long and would stretch the journal design enormously. In other cases as you may had noticed I just pasted URLs into the journal post.
comment posted on October 15, 2005 at 6:56
ssr said,
Dostoevsky
\"Retort\" is an older form of \"test-tube\" and your guessing is right that it\'s all about anachronisms. In the book there are talks about an artifically made man - out of a \"retort\" which is a that-time equivalent for test-tube (you can also consult Oxford dictionary on this - http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/retort_2?view=uk - note the \"historical\" meaning)
comment posted on October 15, 2005 at 8:29
kenspeckle » the Russian blogging saga continues… said,
[…] So AxcessNews ran an article last week on Vladimir Odoevsky's 19th-century take on blogging and referenced my post on the subject from last month. […]
comment posted on August 31, 2006 at 22:18