The Dog Who Tells Lies in Nikolai Gogol’s Comedy “Marriage”

This article draws attention to the expression pyos vryot ‘dog tells lies’ found in the matchmaker’s line from the comedy “Marriage” by Nikolai Gogol. Researchers have already studied the peculiarities of women’s speech in this comedy and the “linguistics of lying” in Gogol’s texts but the phrase “lying dog” was hardly noticed by them. The word dog addressed to a person have long been considered an obscene word which correlated with the disdainful attitude towards these animals. The East Slavic word brekhat’ possesses two meanings ‘to bark’ and ‘to tell lies’. The main meaning of brekhat’ in Russian is ‘to bark’ while the meaning ‘to lie’ is more common in Russian dialects. On the contrary, the main meaning of Ukrainian brekhati is ‘to tell lies’. The action of the comedy “Marriage” was originally supposed to take place in a village or small town (apparently in Ukraine). Gogol worked on the comedy for a long time and later moved its action to St. Petersburg. While working on his comedy, Gogol didn’t delete or rework this line although the expression pyos vryot is either a Ukrainianism or a colloquial expression, which is not very appropriate in the speech context of the Russian metropolitan society. This expression is not noted among the identified Ukrainianisms in Gogol’s texts. Perhaps Gogol deliberately retained such unusual words for the matchmaker showing that while living in St. Petersburg she remains a provincial.