LIFE IS SO FRUSTRATING, ARG!

Warning: boring catalog of research complaints

If I were to make a list of the things that have caused me frustration in life, these things would be near the top of the list:

1) Dealing with the incomprehensible nature of Russian thought and action
2) Following footnotes
3) Writing footnotes
4) Reading in Russian, which is, like, totally a different language than the one I speak

Writing this thesis tends to combine these things in horrible ways. I am currently looking at a page of a much-respected and cited book, Leonide Ouspensky's Theology of the Icon. This page includes an interesting passage, antiquated in style, about the redecoration of the Kremlin after the fire of 1547, and I would really like to quote it in my thesis. The problem is that I don't know if the passage is antiquated in style because it is from the chronicles of the sixteenth century, which would be great, or if it is merely the wording of the Imperial Society of Russian History and Antiquities of 1847: Ouspensky's footnote doesn't really make it clear. Usually this society's journal (which is not, apparently in any US libraries) is a publication of old manuscripts, so the former seems likely, but then O. doesn't cite it as such.

But what's really annoying is that the footnote continues: quoted in N. Andreev, "The Affair of Diak Viskovatyi" (in Russian). This article, which is central to my research, is sitting on my desk, and I have read it many times, and it is simply untrue that any such thing is quoted in its many pages. What the heck?! This is even worse than when Soviet writers don't cite at all, which they generally didn't, since intellectual property was seen as collective and all (Ouspensky was writing in Paris).

Since I don't know if I can include the passage in my thesis at all, not having much of an idea where it came from, I will at least reproduce it here:

"The sovereign Orthodox tsar... sent people to Novgorod the Great, Smolensk, Dmitrov, and Zvenigorod to find holy, precious icons. Numerous holy and wondrous icons were brought from several cities. They were placed in the Cathedral of the Annunciation to be venerated by the tsar and all the Christians, until new icons could be painted. The sovereign sent for iconographers from Novgorod the Great, Pskov, and other cities. The iconographers arrived, and the sovereign tsar ordered some to paint icons, others to decorate the walls of the palaces..."

In an unrelated note, I really like it when Ivan Viskovatyi complains that the new icons depict the Holy Spirit as an "incomprehensible bird."