Show Your Colors

Каждый охотник желает знать, где сидит фазан.
Every hunter wants to know where the pheasant sits.

This seemingly stupid phrase is actually a trick to help you learn Russian colors. Each initial letter corresponds to the colors of the rainbow красный, оранжевый, жёлтый, зелёный, голубой, синий, фиолетовый. Russian schoolchildren are taught it in natural science or physics and it’s so catchy that once you’ve learned it you are bound to remember these Russian colors’ names.

No, this isn’t a lesson in elementary physics. But colors are essential in linguistics too: they help you make your language more sophisticated, or just more colorful.

The first thing every foreign student in Russian should know is the role of red. Anyone who’s been to Red Square will remember that красный in old Russian means “beautiful” – like красная девица (pretty girl).

Centuries later, red became the symbol of revolution – associated with the color of the blood shed by its heroes. Therefore everything beautiful or glorious became red, hence the Red Army, Red October Chocolate Factory, etc.

Over the years, the word красный lost its old meaning. As for the new meaning, Russians came to realize there’s nothing beautiful or glorious about bloodshed – ven in the name of revolution.

Today even New Russians have stopped wearing tasteless red jackets and opted for more discreet colors. Maybe they’re getting more stylish, maybe Yeltsin’s [1996] victory over Zyuganov played its role, or maybe somebody told them about the famous folk saying, дурак любит красное (fools love red).

Whatever the explanation, in post-communist Russia, red is associated with danger. You go red from anger or shame (покраснеть от злости / стыда). Your eyes go red from crying (or drinking). If you get cold water from the red tap in a hotel in a remote Russian town, don’t blame cultural differences. Red means hot in Russia, too – so either the hot water was cut off or the plumbers’ eyes were red and he confused the colors.

Not all colors are as popular. It’s hard to find anything with orange in it, only the lyrics of a mid-1960s song which goes: оранжевые мамы оранжевые песни оранжевo поют (orange mothers sing orange songs in an orange way). This anthem to color-blindness sounds a little bizarre today, but for people living in the Khrushchev thaw, it was refreshing to sing something light and easy instead of proletarian hits about the red cavalry.ﾕ

Yellow (жёлтый) is used more extensively, but usually has pejorative connotations. One example is желторотик (yellow-mouth), meaning someone inexperienced and cowardly.

Зелёный is worth remembering if only because of the almighty dollar, in Russian зелёные (greenbacks), and here they give the green light too (дают зелёный свет).

Like in the U.S., голубой (blue) isn’t just a color of the rainbow. Don’t try to use it with its American meaning (sadness) here, however, because it most often means someone with homosexual tendencies. Other meanings include голубая мечта (a blue dream), i.e. the dream of your life. Ostap Bender, meanwhile, hero of the comic novel The Twelve Chairs, dreamed of someone bringing him a million rubles on a small plate with a blue border (на блюдечке с голубой каёмочкой). Like many quotes from the novel, this became proverbial, meaning wanting to have one’s cake and eat it too.

Синий (dark blue) is associated with cold. You can say your nose is blue from cold (синий от холода). If you shave closely, a Russian will say you’re shaven blue: до синевы выбрит. Hence the joke: What’s the difference between a White officer and a Soviet officer? The former was always a bit drunk and shaven blue (слегка пьян, до синевы выбрит) while the latter was a bit shaven and drunk blue (до синевы пьян, слегка выбрит).

Speaking of White officers, белый (white) has plenty of other meanings. Geographers will remind you of “white spots” on the map (белые пятна на карте), i.e. undiscovered regions. Russian history still has far too many white (unknown) pages (белые страницы). Someone who wants to start from scratch can say he’s starting from white (начать набело). Fear is also associated with white: like Americans, Russians go white with fear (побелеть от страха).

Russians consider white a color which stands out. If you wore jeans to a cocktail party, a Russian would say you looked like a white crow (выглядеть, как белая ворона), i.e. you stuck out like a sore thumb.

Серый (grey) is, of course, the color of mediocrity, referring to dull and illiterate people. Yet Russians call influential politicians who keep a low-profile серые кардиналы (grey cardinals), the best known being Brezhnev’s ideology chief Mikhail Suslov.

Like in English, чёрный (black) is reserved for the macabre, like black days in history (чёрные дни в истории) or black humor (чёрный юмор). Russians might also feel чёрная зависть (black envy). Yet, some English phrases have a slightly different equivalent – a black sheep in the family is not the чёрная but the паршивая (lousy) овца в стаде (in the herd).

To end on a brighter note, remember the meaning of the word розовый (pink). Looking pink means looking healthy and rejuvenated. As Russians tend to look at things with Dostoyevskian pessimism, they might say that someone who seems too jovial sees everything in pink (всё видит в розовом свете) or looks at the world through rose-colored glasses (смотрит на мир сквозь розовые очки). Little wonder that you will see few Russians smiling on the street. Which is one reason why smiling Americans look like white crows in a Russian crowd.