Khalyava: All Play and No Work

When I was a little girl, I got my fair share of Russian сказки (fairy tales) at bedtime. While they rarely succeeded in putting me to sleep, they did teach me the Russian philosophy of life... while likely negatively affecting my impressionable personality.

Contrary to Soviet mythology, сказки taught that the world is a cruel place, where one’s morality has no influence upon one’s fortune. The сказки swarmed with young fools (дураки) and lazybones (лентяи) who always got the biggest piece of pie at the end of the story.

Take a неудачник (a loser, today anglicized simply as лузер) named Емеля (Yemelya). The youngest son of the prototypical старик со старухой (an old man and his wife), Yemelya was also the stupidest дурак his village ever knew. All he would do was lie on the печь (stove) all day пальцем не пошевелит¸ (not lifting a finger). Then, one day, his family somehow manages to coax him into going down to the river to get water.

As luck would have it, Yemelya catches a miraculous щука (pike) in his bucket. It will grant his every wish. All he has to do is say по щучьему веленью, по моему хотенью (“by the pike’s command, by my desire”) and any whim is realized. Yemelya started by having the water-filled buckets walk home on their own and finished his wishing spree by marrying the local tsarevna. Somewhere in the middle of the fairy tale, he made his stove drive him all the way to the tsar’s palace. The image of a lazy лузер lying on a печь and getting whatever his heart desires firmly imprinted itself in my mind.

This getting everything for nothing is summarized by one of Russia’s most untranslatable words – халява. It is a word with such a broad semantic field that a single magazine page cannot hope to accommodate all the shadows of its meaning. Халява means a freebie, something someone gets for free or without making much effort – на халяву, e.g. the way Yemelya got himself a tsarevna for a wife. This is not to say that халява only applies to things of great value. After all, as modern Russian wisdom has it, на халяву и уксус сладкий (“Even vinegar is sweet when it is khalyava”).

Халява also means an easy, low-effort (халявный) job, something that requires little effort and is compensated well. And it means moonlighting too. A person who is good at getting such jobs and at doing the least work possible is called a халявщик. This is a person who is good at dumping his workload on others, or eating in restaurants at others’ expense – a freeloader. The verb is халявить.

An easy job or moonlighting can also be referred to as халтура. The person who works carelessly, a hack or potboiler who works without due diligence, follow through or dotting his i’s (the verb being халтурить) is called a халтурщик.

In November, as it turns out, the Russian State Duma indulged the national халява habit by passing a bill that considerably extends Russia’s most celebrated national holiday. Deputies stretched the official New Year holiday from January 1 to 5, giving Russians five consecutive days to праздновать. This is not to imply, of course, that, before the bill came into effect, the Russian workforce was universally to be found in offices at 9 am sharp on January 2 or the first working day (рабочий день) after the official New Year’s break. It is just that now the New Year’s халява has been made official.

National traditions must be enshrined in law, after all. Work, as we know, can wait. Or, as the familiar Russian adage has it: Работа не волк, в лес не убежит. (“Work is not a wolf, it won’t run off into the woods.”