User:Seraphim/Sandbox 3

Assuming you are looking at the picture that's captioned "Коллаж «Превед!»", it can be translated as "The 'Preved' collage". Hope it helps, although I have no idea why they called it a collage.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 19:01, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

«Осторожно, заразно!» (Careful, it's contageous!)

When I was looking for information about the picture which turned the whole Runet upside, I eventually stumbled upon lukomnikov_1).

—German [lukomnikov's name—Ezhiki], why did you take interest in the rate of growth of this epydemics and started looking so thoroughly for those who infected everyone with this bear disease?

—Well, it was me who infected everyone in the first place. I was one of the first (second, it looks like) Livejournal users who put this picture in my blog. I got it [the picture] more or less by accident—someone sent me a link to it (with a note that the "author is unknown") in [my blog's] comments as an example to illustrate a discussion about nonstandard orthography in the Internet. I myself am a man of letters, I tend to focus on texts, and until recently it was not very common that I'd post any images in my live journal, but this picture caught my imagination so much that I immediately posted it on the main page. The epydemics started a day after, and I started tracking its development very closely.

—I am a poet and I work with the language. The life of the language always interested me a great deal&mdsha;I mean the real life of the languge; it is so mysterious. How and why do languages change? Where do jokes come from? Who invents proverbs? How do the texts which are considered folklore come into existense? These and other similar questions pestered me from the childhood. And suddenly, completely by accident (or maybe not by accident, god only knows), I found myself in the epicenter of birth of completely new cultural mythology (which it terms of its scale can be compared with the Mitki mythology of the second half of the 1980s). I sensed it from the very beginning and tracked the development very closely. Lucky for me, it all was developing in the Internet (primarily in LJ), and search engines are very helpful. I was tracking and summarizing it. In the very first days I predicted that the preved bear would become a symbol of all Russian-speaking LJ, and that's exactly how it turned out to be. Of course, I was trying to find the author as well. As a result, I found myself participating not only in the prelude, but also in the conclusion of the original history of "preved". I was the first who announced the picture's authorship and about how the picture was modified by the Russians, and I also illustrated my announcement with other pictures of this painter. This information then took hundreds of blogs and newsfeeds by storm, which created a new wave of prevedomania.

—Why do you think the word "preved" is now commonly used outside of the Internet?

—I think that's a result of many things converging in one place. First of all, it is important to remember that the word is a quote, it is linked to the picture, its plot, and also with the very environment in which the picture became significant, and that environment is LJ, i.e. the Russian-speaking LJ segment, which contains hundreds of thousand personal blogs. That is, "preved" is not just an illiterate spelling; it is a password of some sort, a greeting used by those who get it.

"Those who get it" in this case are the people who've seen the "preved" picture and got a good laugh out of it. The moment when a person sees a picture for the first time and laughs at it is the moment they "get it". The original picture is very powerful itself, but the Russian version is amplified manyfold.

It is an important fact that the picture is painted in a naive manner, as if a child painted it. This manner directly addresses a "kid in us" and provokes an immediate, "child" response, which is very playful and very serious at the same time. It is also important that in the first two weeks when the picture travelled across LJ the author was not known and nobody even thought of a possibility of a painter being some famous person. This is why the core "preved" devotees was comprised of people who perceived the picture in a very spontaneous manner. To see a couple having sex with child's eyes is already a shock of sorts. Is it possible they are our parents? (or Adam and Eve?). But suddenly we see a huge bear in the vicinity, who seemingly has just made his appearance. It is scary, it is a real nightmare, and while we are ourselves are uninvolved, as if in a dream, we are still scared for our "parents". And what if this bear eats them, and we will never be born? But suddenly we note that the bear raises his paws towards the sky and says something. Yes, "says", with a human voice. And the word he says is "PREVED!". Precisely this way, with orthographical errors. With two errors in a six-letter word. This is when we start to laugh, because at this moment an adult person wakes up in us and we understand this is all but a dream and that a speaking bear who makes two mistakes in a six-letter greeting is very funny and not scary at all. Having finished laughing, we experience something like an enlightment. I, of course, have just described not the literal perception of the picture, but an unconscious perception the way I imagine it.

This way, the meaning of the picture is the victory over one's fears via laughter. A victory over the fear of intercommunication, over the fear of intrusion in one's intimate thoughts, the fear of force, agression, or death.

In LJ(Live Journal) the picture started immediately to produce uncountable parodies and variations, for which soon was dedicated ru_preved. members of this community demonstrated incredible interest, and «Bear hello» in a matter of days spawned (and still continues to spawn) hundreds and thousands new, distinct cultural allusions. another important thing is that the word "preved" - consciously or unconsciously - is perceived not only as an illiterate writing in the spirit of "padonkaffskoy" spelling (although that, too, is also important), but as a new word coinage - with the changed prefix ("pre"), and changed stem("ved"). The first one to draw attention to this was poet Igor Karaulov. "Preved" can be interpreted as a sign of "prevedeniya" (foresight, destiny, fate, etc.) At the same time, of course, this is just "hello", welcome. Hi to fate, or something like this. To ensure that "preved" is adequately taken when pronounced, it must be done in two phonetic changes: the first to add voice to vowel "e" (unstressed) and to final consonant "d". Ideally, it's desirable to stand in "Y" letter shape - with raised hands to the sky. So it's about speech and physical effort here - signs of good spirit forces. The fact that the original author of the picture proved to be a cult American actor and musician, has given to the picture and to the story, and, accordingly, to the word "prived" as well, hefty additional charm. This way, thanks to this picture, thousands of people heard of a extraordinary artist, but in this artistic hypostasis, strangely enough, until the "medved" history, he was totally unknown to anyone. Why the word spread over the boundaries of LJ and even more over the boundaries of Internet? So much stuff in six letters, which are also, first of all, simply a welcoming.[...] You can argue a lot on this subject. I'm sure that in time "preved" will be subject to many serious sociological, linguistic, psychological, cultural studies.