Russian Language Blog

Even if you don’t know the words, anyone who’s ever seen an old Bugs Bunny cartoon will recognize the seven-note melody of “Shave and a haircut…” — it’s classically used as a musical accompaniment to punctuate the end of a joke.

And I instinctively hummed the tune after I found this great little анекдот online, concerning a visit to a парикмахерская (“barbershop” or “hair salon”), and filled with useful vocabulary related to haircuts, shaving, and grooming. Here’s the joke in Russian — I’ll save the translation till the bottom of the post, but there are a few pop-up notes to give you some help:

Мужчина с маленьким мальчиком заходят в парикмахерскую. После того как мужчине сделали стрижку и побрили, он встал, вынул расчёску и тщательно причесался, посадил мальчика в
кресло, и говорит парикмахерше:
— «Мне надо сбегать за сигаретами. Буду через пару минут!»
Но мальчика уже успели подстричь, а мужчины всё не было.
Парикмахерша говорит:
– «Ну и куда же исчез твой папа?»
Мальчик отвечает:
– «Это не мой папа. Он просто подошёл ко мне на улице и сказал: “Ну пацан, сегодня мы с тобой подстрижёмся на халяву!”»

Before we get to the specific vocabulary about cutting hair and other things that a barber does, let’s take a quick look at the very last word in the punchline, since the joke doesn’t make sense without it! Халява is a somewhat slangy term meaning “a freebie,” and it’s typically used in the expression на халяву, which is similar to the English “on the house”:

В казино мы выпили на халяву.
They “comped” our drinks at the casino.

Incidentally, I’ve heard that casinos often water down their free drinks (they don’t want gamblers getting too drunk), but why complain? As the saying goes, на халяву и уксус сладкий — “when they’re giving it away free, even vinegar is sweet”!

A парикмахерская is a shop where you go to get your волосы (“hair on the head”) clipped and/or groomed. With the work being done by a парикмахер (masc.) or a парикмахерша (fem.). The services available may include a стрижка (“simple haircut/trim”) for both sexes; a причёска (“fancy hairdo/hairstyling”) for women; and for men, a бритьё (“shave”). Some shops may also trim and style a man’s усы (“mustache”) and борода (“beard”).

The various tools of the trade include cutting implements such as ножницы (“scissors”) and the машинка для стрижки (“electric hair-clippers”). For men, some barbers still do old-fashioned shaves with a бритва (“shaving razor”), although many guys prefer to do it at home with an электробритва. And чтобы расправить волосы (“in order to smooth/fix the hair”) after it has been cut, a парикмахер will also use a расчёска (“comb”) or a щётка для волос (“hairbrush”), both of which come in various shapes.

That covers some of the Russian equivalents for nouns like “hairdo” and “razor”, but in order to say “I forgot to shave this morning!” or “How much do you charge to trim a woman’s hair, no styling?”, you’ll need some basic verbs.

First, there’s стричь, which can mean “to cut someone’s hair” (стричь волосы кому-нибудь) or “to give someone a haircut” (стричь кого-нибудь), depending on the construction you use. A synonymous phrase is делать стрижку кому-нибудь, literally “do a haircut for someone”. In any case, it suggests a relatively simple cut-and-trim without a lot of fancy styling. The conjugation pattern is somewhat similar to мочь (“to be able”):

As far as I know, the most commonly used perfective is подстричь (same conjugation as above), though sometimes you might run across остричь or постричь. But the prefix под- can imply “just a little bit; not too much” — which is, of course, what one often says after sitting down in a barber’s chair!

Attaching the so-called “reflexive” -ся to стричь will usually give the meaning “to have your hair cut by someone else”. If you actually cut your own hair and you want to make this clear, you could use a сам(а)/себя type of construction together with the phrase сделать стрижку, like so:

Ты подстригся в парикмахерской? = Тебя подстригли в парикмахерской?
–Нет, я сам сделал себе стрижку дома.
Did you get your hair cut (did they cut your hair) at the salon?
No, I gave myself a haircut at home.

The verb брить (“to shave”) has a one-syllable infinitive ending with -ить, so you might logically THINK that it conjugates like пить, “to drink”. But, instead, it’s:

The perfective for this one is побрить. And for this verb pair, the -ся form happens to have a literally reflexive meaning — (по)бриться is “to shave (oneself)”:

Кодга Миша брился сегодня утром, он нарочно не брил верхнюю губу, потому что он хочет отрастить усы.
When Mike was shaving this morning, he deliberately didn’t shave his upper lip, because he wants to grow out a mustache.

The derived adjective бритый means “clean-shaven”. But if you haven’t shaved for a while, the небритый (“unshaven”) regions may be covered with щетина — which here means “stubble,” although more literally it’s “bristles”, as on a щётка (“brush”) or a кабан (“wild boar”).

And the perfective расчесать (imperfective расчёсывать) is “to comb or brush” the hair:

For example:

Русалка расчёсывает свои длинные волосы серебряным гребнем .
The mermaid is combing her long hair with a silver comb.

Русалка причёсывается (“the mermaid is combing her hair”), in J.W. Waterhouse’s imaginatively titled oil-on-canvas A Mermaid, 1901

The verb pair причёсывать/причесать also refers to combing/brushing the hair, but it has another sense: “to style someone’s hair” (hence the already mentioned noun причёска, “a hairdo”). As with брить(ся), the combing/brushing verbs have -ся forms that are truly reflexive. Thus, Русалка причёсывается is a complete sentence meaning “The mermaid is combing her hair”, even though the noun волосы isn’t used.

And now, finally, here’s how the joke translates:

A man and a little boy drop into a barber shop. After they’ve given the man a haircut and a shave, he stood up, pulled out a comb and carefully combed his hair, sat the boy in the chair, and then says to the hairstylist: “I need to nip out for cigarettes. I’ll be back in a couple minutes!”
But by the time they’d already finished trimming the boy’s hair, the man still wasn’t back.
The hairdresser says, “Well, where did your dad disappear to?”
The boy answers, “That’s not my dad. He just came up to me on the street and said, ‘Well, kiddo, today you and I are getting our hair cut on the house!’”

♪♫ Shave-and-a-haircut, BUMP-BUMP! ♪♫

In the US and several other countries, второе воскресенье мая (“the second Sunday in May”) is День матери, Mother’s Day. In Russia, moms have usually been honored on Восьмое марта (“the 8th of March,” aka “International Women’s Day”), though technically there is a День матери in late November.

ˇˆ^ √¬ ^~~√ˇˆ^~ ტპձ պՁԺზ ჭნწ჻ უ ~~ √ˇˆ¬~~^~  ~~^~
С днём матери!
Happy Mother’s Day!

Obviously, we can’t say much по-русски on the subject of motherhood without knowing the basic word мать. We can define it in Russian as женщина, по отношению к её детям (“a woman in relation to her children”) — or in zoological contexts, самка по отношению к её детёнышам (“a female animal in relation to her offspring.”)

For beginners, let’s take a look at the highly unusual declension of мать. It has the same case endings as any typical feminine noun ending in -ь, such as мышь (“mouse”) or кость (“bone”) or вещь (“thing”). But what makes this one unusual is that a -ер- pops in «откуда ни возьмись», “from out of nowhere“, except in the nominative and accusative singular. Oh, and just to make your life harder, the stress is sometimes on the stem, and sometimes on the case ending. Here’s the complete declension, with the end-stressed forms highlighted in red:

For beginners, there are no easy mnemonic tricks to learning exceptional words like this one; you just have to recite the forms until they stick in your head. Or, as the famous rhyming proverb goes, «Повторение — мать учения!» (“Repetition is the mother of learning.”) But don’t be a slacker about it, because as a famous, non-rhyming proverb goes: «Лень — мать всех пороков!» (“Laziness is the mother of all vices/defects!”).

Memorizing the declension of мать is actually a 2-for-1 deal, because the word дочь (“daughter”) follows exactly the same pattern of endings and stress-shifts. (So, for example, it’s дочери in the dative singular, but дочерям in the dative plural.) But these two words are, as far as I know, totally unique — if there are any other nouns in the Russian language with this pattern, they’re much too obscure for non-natives to worry about.

From мать we get such derivatives as the adjective материнский (“maternal; motherly; belonging to mom”), and also an abstract noun:

Материнство — вторая по древности профессия
“Motherhood — the second-oldest profession.”
(title of a book by American humorist Erma Bombeck)

As you may know, affectionate diminutives are used much more often in Russian than in English — so from дочь we get дочка, which implies “one’s darling daughter”. HOWEVER, the seemingly logical diminutive матка is generally not used in regard to human mothers, at least not in standard educated Russian. Instead, матка usually means the “womb/uterus” of any female mammal, including humans. (In certain contexts it can refer to non-human mothers, as in пчелиная матка, “queen bee”.)

So if you need an affectionate diminutive for a human mother, you can use мама (“mom”) instead. Мама has its own diminutives — most often мамочка, though маменька may be found in old literature.

Мамочка, мы больше не будем!
“Mommy, we won’t do it anymore!”
(said by children caught doing something bad)

And a grown man who has never cut the пуповина (“umbilical cord”) and who постоянно «держится за юбку» мамы (“perpetually clings to mom’s skirt”) may be called a маменькин сынок (“mama’s boy”).

Of course, there are other nouns that describe women in maternal or mother-like relationships. You may already know бабушка, “grandmother.” And a родная мать (“birth/biological mother”) can be contrasted with a приёмная мать, “mother by adoption”. (Note that приёмный can apply to either the parents or the children in a adoptive relationship — thus, приёмный сын, “adopted son”).

Other motherly relationships can be established by marriage. So, for instance, you’ve got мачеха, “stepmother,” whose reputation in jokes and fairytales is almost as bad as that of the тёща (“the groom’s mother-in-law”). For some unfair reason, the свекровь (“bride’s mother-in-law”) doesn’t come in for nearly as much cultural abuse! And a крёстная мать is your own godmother, but shouldn’t be confused with кума, who is either the godmother of your children, or the mother of your godchildren. (In other words, the mother and the godmother are кумы to each other.)

And now let’s consider a few verbs relating to материнство…

«А мама, откуда берутся дети?»
“Mom, where do babies come from?”

Perhaps the most central and defining verb is:

(I’ve included the past passive participle in the table because, going by the general rules for PPP formation, you would logically predict it to be рожённый, not рождённый!)

So, for example, there’s the expression как мать родила, literally “as mother gave birth (to you)”, which is a synonym for голый, “naked”:

На этом пляже все ходят «как мать родила».
At this beach, everyone walks around stark raving nude.

The corresponding imperfective for родить is, usually, рождать, which has no stress shifts or consonant mutations to worry about. Thus, in the present it’s я рождаю, ты рождаешь…; and in the past it’s рождал, рождала. In colloquial contexts, you may also come across the imperfective рожать — which conjugates just like рождать, minus the -д-. Attaching the reflexive ending -ся to рождать/родить gives the meaning “to be born”:

В нашем городе, с две тысячи девятого года ни один ребёнок не рождается с ВИЧ.
In our city, not one child has been born with HIV since 2009.

Incidentally, рождать/родить will generally work for dogs, elephants, and other mammals besides humans. But if you’re talking about egg-laying creatures, you can instead use выводить/вывести, “to hatch out (offspring)”:

Матка Чужих вывела двадцать три личинки.
The queen-alien hatched 23 larvae.

But there’s more to motherhood (or there should be!) than just makin’ babies. Children also need a proper воспитание, “upbringing.” (This word can sometimes be a synonym for образование, “education,” except that воспитание emphasizes moral and civic education more than academic skills like reading and arithmetic.)

The corresponding verb is воспитывать/воспитать (“to raise, bring up, morally educate”) — related to питать, “to feed/nourish,” and пища, “food.” Both the imperfective and perfective have predictable -аю, -аешь, -ает conjugations without any stress shifts:

Как правильно воспитать ребёнка?
How does one correctly bring up a child?

Sometimes the verb is used in the construction воспитать что-нибудь в кого-нибудь, “to instill/inculcate something in someone”:

«Наши мамы воспитали в нас самостоятельность и любовь к человечеству» — сказали земляне.
“Our moms instilled in us self-reliance and a love for humanity,” said the Earthlings.
«А наша мама воспитала в нас самостоятельность и влечение к ЧЕЛОВЕЧИНЕ» — ответили Чужие.
“And our mom instilled in us self-reliance and a craving for «long-pig»,” replied the space-aliens.

Last but not least, mothers care for their children. “Take care of” or “care for” can be expressed by the verb (по)заботиться о ком/чём (prepositional) — note that the noun забота means “concern”. The conjugation of this one is я забочусь, ты заботишься, with a consonant mutation in the 1st-person singular, but no stress shift:

Мама, спасибо за то, что ты всегда заботишься обо мне!
Mom, thanks for the fact that you’re always concerned about me!

P.S. If you’re talking about houseplants or pets, the imperfective verb ухаживать за кем/чем (instrumental) can also mean “to take care of,” but reader Fitzmat recommends that in the context of humans, you’d typically use this verb for someone “taking care of” a sick child or adult.

I’m not much of an opera fan — because most of them, in my opinion, have maybe 5 or 10 minutes of musically entertaining sections heavily padded with hours and hours of shouting and warbling. The typical opera is like one of those pop-music albums that contains exactly ONE hit anyone wants to hear again, plus 10 instantly forgettable “B-side” numbers, plus 3 or 4 dance remixes of the one song for which you bought the album. Perhaps only футбол can rival opera in the sheer quantity of “Nothing Interesting Is Happening Right Now” that it offers to spectators.

A шкатулка (“ornamental box”) depicting an episode from the life of Prince Igor Svyatoslavich

And yet — a few operas do have their moments, and for me one of the most spectacular examples is the Половецкие пляски (“Polovtsian Dances”) section from 1890′s «Князь Игорь» (“Prince Igor”) by Александр Бородин (“Aleksandr Borodin”). It only runs about семь минут, but they are an AWESOME seven minutes.

In this YouTube video, it’s performed by a massive theatre company with everyone приодетые в блестящих средневековых тряпках (“dolled up in glittery medieval ‘threads’”), and it’s quite a spectacle!

Admittedly, I really had trouble understanding what they’re singing, at first — all those operatic voices sort of blend together into a indistinct tra-la-hah-lah that’s difficult to decipher, especially in a language that isn’t my native one. (Soprano voices, in particular.) But after just a bit of Googling, I found the written lyrics for this section. And it’s wierd how the sounds that had been meaningless траляля, труляля start to magically crystallize into intelligible Russian words once you’re able to read along while you listen! But before we get to the sing-a-long lyrics…

A Bit of Backstory from Medieval Rus’

Borodin based the opera’s libretto on a 13th-century East Slavonic epic poem known as «Слово о плъку Игоревѣ», which is typically translated as “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” The poem describes a rather disastrous military raid led by the Slavic prince Igor Svyatoslavich in 1185 against the Polovtsian army of Khan Konchák — which ended in the slaughter of all but a dozen Russian warriors, and the capture of Prince Igor.

Even though Igor’s military campaign was a flop, the epic that recounts it is revered for at least two reasons: First, from a linguistic standpoint, it’s a rare and valuable record of what ancient East Slavonic looked like before it began to be influenced by Old Church Slavonic (which belongs to the South Slavic group). Second, from the standpoint of Slavic nationalism, the poem urges the princes of Kievan Rus’ to cease their constant in-fighting and unify against the incessant attacks by various Turkic peoples. Little did the anonymous author know that the fearsome татары (“Tatars” or “Mongols”) would come riding into town just a few decades after Prince Igor’s death and kick the butts of everybody in the region, both Slavic and Turkic!

Who were these Polovtsians? Половцы is simply the Slavic name for a bunch of nomadic Central Asians who called themselves “Kumans” or “Cumans.” Their periodic raiding and pillaging of Kievan Rus’ started around 1060 and continued for almost 200 years (until the Tatars showed up uninvited). Our knowledge of Kuman/Polovtsian culture is a bit scanty, but we know that their language belonged to the Turkic group; they were evidently rather light-haired (at least compared to other Central Asians); and in Igor’s time they were still pagan, although in later centuries, some assimilated to Islam and others to Christianity.

As for the хан (“khan” or “king”) named Кончак, don’t make the mistake of thinking he was a total bad guy. Despite the constant hostility between the Russians and the Polovtsians, they would occasionally form ad hoc military or political alliances. In fact, Konchak and Igor were сваты, or “co-fathers-in-law” — the pagan khan’s daughter was in an arranged marriage with the Christian prince’s son!

So, the Половецкие пляски segment that you see in the video clip is from end of Act 2 in the opera — the wounded Igor is technically a POW in the Polovtsian camp, but Konchak has intervened on behalf of his son-in-law’s dad, and is playing the part of a gracious host in hopes that the Kievans will agree to some sort of truce.

The lyrics (and their translation)

In the first section, entitled Пляска девушек (“Dance of the girls”), we hear a chorus of невольницы (“slave maidens”), who address their song as «ты» and urge it to “fly away on the wings of the wind,” back to their long-lost homeland on the far side of the Caspian Sea. (Hmmm, can you think of another classic Russian tune where the singer addresses her own song in the imperative, and tells it to fly to some distant place?)

Anyway, practically everyone will recognize the melody, which was ripped off (via the Broadway show Kismet) and turned into the 1950s pop standard “Stranger in Paradise”. Here it is with a line-by-line translation — click and drag on the pink lines to see the English:

♪♫ Улетай на крыльях ветра
Fly away, on the wings of the wind,
Ты в край родной, родная песня наша,
You [fly away], our native song, to the region of our birth.
Туда, где мы тебя свободно пели,
To where we sang you in liberty,
Где было так привольно нам с тобою.
Where you and we were so free.
Там, под знойным небом,
There, under the sultry sky,
Негой воздух полон,
The air is full of bliss,
Там под говор моря
There, under the murmuring of the sea,
Дремлют горы в облаках. ♪♫
The mountains half-slumber in the clouds.

Incidentally, I’m really not sure why the next-to-last line has под говор (accusative) instead of под говором (instrumental) — since it’s hard to see how the verb дремать (“to be drowsy”) conveys motion, even in a figurative sense. Perhaps one of our native speakers can shed light?

Anyway, some very athletic dancing by the male slaves follows, and all the frenetic leaping and banging of kettle drums leads us into a bombastic, Carmina Burana-ish chorus that begins at around 03:40 in the video clip. In the opera’s score, this part is rather unimaginatively titled Общая Пляска (“General/Collective Dance”), but “Khan Konchak, Superstar!” might be a better title. The key verb in this section is definitely славить — “to glorify, to sing the praises of”. If you close your eyes, you can almost imagine Ricardo Montalban’s minions singing this to William Shatner:

♪♫ Пойте песни славы хану! Пой!
Sing songs of glory to Khan! Sing!
Славьте силу, дочесть хана! Славь!
Glorify the might, the honor, of Khan! Praise him!
Славен хан! Хан!
Glorious is Khan! Khan!
Славен он, хан наш!
Glorious is he, our Khan!
Блеском славы
In the gleaming of his glory
Солнцу равен хан!
Khan is like unto the Sun!
Нету равных славой хану! Нет!
There are none equal in glory to Khan! None!
Чаги хана славят хана…♪♫
Khan’s slaves praise Khan!

And as the Polovtsians are singing their lungs out in praise of Mr. Fabulous, Konchak offers Igor a beautiful slave-girl as a party favor from one сват to another — though with a string attached, of course! It starts around 04:40 in the video, and basically turns into a duet by “Konchak and the Khan-ettes”, as the невольницы sing back-up:

♪♫ Видишь ли пленниц ты –
Do you see the captive-girls
С моря дальнего?
From a distant sea?
Видишь красавиц моих
Do you see my beauties
Из-за Каспия?
From beyond the Caspian?
О, скажи, друг,
Oh, say it, friend –
Скажи только слово мне!
Say only a word to me!
Хочешь, любую из них я тебе подарю! ♪♫
If you want, I’ll make you a gift of any one of them!

If you’re wondering what happens next — well, Igor eventually makes a heroic escape by digging a mile-long tunnel with a teaspoon and swimming through the rat-infested sewers crawling under a loose tent-flap and jogging away. (Konchak isn’t exactly holding the prince in maximum-security conditions — after all, they’re both blue-blooded noblemen, and in-laws on top of that!) After arranging for the ransom of other Russian chiefs still in Polovtsian hands, Igor goes back to his job running the princedom of Novgorod-Sverensk, arranges more political marriages for his kids, and eventually dies around 1201. It’s unclear what happens to Konchak, but as we know, the fortunes of the Kievans and the Kumans alike went into decline after the Tatars showed up!

1985 USSR stamp commemorating the 1185 battle