Wearied by the Sun

I write these lines on Wednesday, July 28, and the столбик термометра зашкаливает за отметку 35 градусов (the mercury in the thermometer topped the 35º Celsius mark).

As I have written frequently in this space, weather is a sacred topic among Muscovites, and this historic Moscow жара (heat) will surely be the talk of the town for many decades.

Since mid-June, the capital has been struggling with аномальная жара (abnormal heat), and the expression носиться с мокрой задницей (run around with a wet butt – i.e. hurry about in a hassled state) has regained its original meaning. Call it global warming (глобальное потепление) or the парниковый эффект (greenhouse impact), the current погода in Moscow sure makes Climategate (климатгейт) skeptics look bad.

Muscovites all feel like the heroes of Nikita Mikhalkov’s Oscar-winning film: утомлённые солнцем (wearied by the sun).¹ In fact, this heat wave evoked another cultural touchstone: Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem Необычайное приключение, бывшее с Владимиром Маяковским летом на дачед(An Unusual Adventure Befalling Vladimir Mayakovsky One Summer Vacation).² Its opening is a perfect description of our July:

В сто сорок солнц закат пылал,
в июль катилось лето,
была жара,
жара плыла -
на даче было это.

As if one hundred suns had flared –
each sunset's
conflagration.
The heat that year
was hard to bear
on my July vacation.

The media cliché for this baking heat is аномальная жара. But more literary adjectives would be несусветная (unfathomable), адская (infernal), удушающая (suffocating), and изнуряющая (exhausting). In fact, it is not appropriate to say жара, but rather жарища, the -ща ending connoting a special awfulness. A synonym for жара is зной and the adjective derived from this noun is знойный (-ая) (sultry).

A note in passing: знойная can also be an adjective applied to a hot, temperamental, passionate woman. We owe this to Ilf & Petrov’s novel, The Twelve Chairs, in which Ostap Bender notes that “знойная женщина - мечта поэта” (“a passionate woman is a poet’s dream”)

But back to the weather. These days you hear phrases like, “В центре Москвы стоит такое пекло” (“there is such hell-fire in downtown Moscow”), and even a кондей (slang for air conditioning) is no recourse. Which brings us, I am sorry to say, to sweat (пот).

In weather like this you can have all kinds of fun with пот. The most widely used clichés are обливаться потом (to be inundated by sweat), пот течёт ручьём (sweat is flowing like a stream), пот течёт в три ручья (in three streams), пот градом катится (sweat is rolling in a torrent). You can also be sweaty as a mouse (мокрый как мышь), and your shirt can be wet to the point of хоть выжимай (you just want to wring it dry).

Throw in the burning peat bogs (горящие торфяники – another front page topic these days) and you can imagine our духота (suffocation). The последней каплей (the last straw) for me was a conversation I had with a taxi driver from Uzbekistan. He told me with a cunning smile that “back home” it is rather прохладно (cool): no more than 25º C!

Jealous of Uzbeks in Tashkent and fed up with the (far more than three) streams of пот running down my back, I paid the driver, got out and glanced angrily at the sun. Then did exactly like Vladimir Mayakovsky:

И так однажды разозлясь,
что в страхе все поблекло,
в упор я крикнул солнцу:
«Слазь!
довольно шляться в пекло!»

I cursed the sun, I lost my cool,
From days of heat eternal.
«Come down from there,
you blazing fool!
From your playground infernal.»

But the солнце didn’t listen. Not even to the words of a poet who has a square and a metro station named after him.

As of this writing, the Гидрометцентр (Federal Center of Weather) informed us the жарища would last at least until August 15. To paraphrase Hamlet “неладно что-то на нашей планете”(something is rotten on our planet).