The Beautiful Afar
The Beautiful Afar (Russian: Прекра́сное Далёко) - a so-called "winged expression" aka catchphrase or a phraseme of the Russian language. It was first used by Nikolai Gogol in the novel The "Dead Souls" first published in 1842. The expression is used as a joke, sometimes irony indicating the often fictitious place of well-being, where a person who is not burdened with routine, rests, leads a carefree, unladen, and idle lifestyle.[1]
History of the expression
The "Dead Souls" were written by the author while residing mostly abroad, mainly in Italy and Germany, but also in France, Switzerland, and Austria. In one of the lyrical digressions of the novel in the second chapter of the first volume of The "Dead Souls", the author exclaims: "Rus'! Rus’! It's you that I see, from my wonderful, beautiful afar, I see YOU." These lines were written by a writer while living in Italy. By self-admission, Gogol loved Italy and called it 'my dear soul', in a letter to Zhukovsky he writes: "If you knew with what joy I abandoned Switzerland and flew to my dear soul - Italy. She is mine! No one in the world will take her from me."[2]
"The Beautiful Afar" from which Gogol paints spiritualized Rus', is primarily Italy, the homeland of the Raphael, whom he worshiped, to whom the "Peter The Great" poem by Sergei Shirinsky-Shikhmatov was addressed in an appeal to portray Russia in all its splendid grandeur, awakened to creative life and triumphant victory over enemies.
— Mikhail Weisskopf, "Gogol's story. Morphology. Ideology. Context", Publisher: RadixBooks, 1993; Page 410; ISBN 5-86463-004-7
As an idiomatic expression, "The Beautiful Afar" was first coined by Vissarion Belinsky, in the argument against Nikolai Gogol himself. Belinsky attacked Gogol with an angry letter dated July 3 (15), 1847, about Gogol's journalistic book "Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends" published in the same year:
"... for so many years, you have been accustomed to looking at Russia from your "beautiful afar", while it is well-known that nothing is easier than to see objects from afar as we want them to be; as you are living in this beautiful afar, you become completely alien to it, enclosed in yourself..."[3]
References
- ^ "Encyclopedic Dictionary of winged words and expressions"
- ^ Romanticism and the City, Larry H Peer, New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 165
- ^ "Letter from V Belinsky to N Gogol July 15/3, 1847" (in Russian).