Attended the premiere of "On This Earth", produced by Alexey Uchitel
Attended the premiere of "On This Earth", produced by Alexey Uchitel. The film is about a certain Russian village in the eighteenth century, where the local simpleton tries to build himself a pair of wings. We shall not discuss the plot; I suspect the authors themselves never got to the bottom of it. The picture is handsome, which is something Russia knows how to do.
Besides the magnificent village vistas, black and white though they are, and the period scenery of izbas, barns, porches and an entire reconstructed settlement, I noticed a curious flaw of a scriptwriting nature, namely the speech of the characters, which simply does not belong to the period. For instance, a very elderly grandmother repeats several times: problem, there will be problems, what a problem.
The word "problem" is absent from the spoken language of the eighteenth century; it becomes an active part of the lexicon only with the Russo-English rapprochement of the second half of the nineteenth. Having arrived in Russian under Peter with a whole squadron of other borrowings, "problem" remained for more than a hundred years merely a term for a scholarly question, a dilemma awaiting resolution, and naturally could not have formed part of the vocabulary of a village granny, or indeed of a town granny either. Yekaterina Dashkova might have pronounced the word at a session of the Academy; a crone in a calico headscarf, never.
But somebody wrote this text, in which a hundred-year-old village crone, somewhere in the middle of the 1700s, complains of "problems".
