MovieChat Forums > Doctor Zhivago (1965) Discussion > Misspelled Banner

Misspelled Banner

posted 12 years ago by futhark985
5 replies | jump to latest

I'm trying to learn a little Russian and am taking much pleasure in reading the signs in movies made in and/or about Russia. The banner shown at the head of the "peaceful" march near the beginning of the movie is supposed to read in Russian "FREEDOM AND BROTHERHOOD". IMDB comments do not allow Cyrillic letters pasted on these comments, so forgive me for giving rather crude transliterations. In Russian the banner reads "SVOBODA I BRATSVO". Now that this film can be shown in Russia, I would suppose that audiences must get a belly laugh out of the illiteracy shown by the makers. The suffix "STVO" in Russian indicates an institution. For instance, the government is "pravitel'stvo". The misspelled banner in the march would be the equivalent of it reading in English "FREEDOM AND BROTHERHOD". With so much effort having been put into this movie to make it look authentic, someone should have run the signs and banners past a literate Russian for spell checking purposes.

[–] DryToast 12 years ago

As a Russian student myself, I always justified that mistake as being a product of some not-very-literate protestors. I'm sure you've seen some misspelled signs in English at political demonstrations; in fact, in recent years, the Tea Party demonstrations have been rather notorious for them.

"You must sing him your prettiest songs, then perhaps he will want to marry you."

[–] rimbaud14 12 years ago

There are a few misspellings in the film. The first is the one you point out: "svoboda i bratsvo". Indeed it should be "bratstvo" and this was a mistake on the production crew's part. Later in the film as Zhivago finds himself in the Yuriyatin train station, the sign reads (as transliterated from Russian): "Yuryaitin"which would read nonsensically in Russian even though Yuriyatin is a fictional place name. Again, the set workers who painted this sign transposed two letters and made gibberish. On top of all that, all the Cyrillic shown in the film used modern Cyrillic orthography, not the script that was used in Russia up until the orthographic reforms of Russian in 1918. The story goes that an assistant on the set tried to tell David Lean that the signs were wrong, but Lean ignored him. It's probably impossible to prove whether or not Lean ignored the warnings, but what we do know is that the Russian shown on signs in the film are generally problematic. It's not a fatal error in the film as most people don't even notice.

[–] MarsFlyTrap 12 years ago

Actually, the word RESTORAN has a hard sign at the end, as per the old orthography, at around the 21m33s mark, and a few seconds later we see SAPOZHNIK and its proprietor SEMYONOV, both with hard signs at the end. At 1h05m10s, we see BYSTRAYA POCHINKA CHASOV[hard sign] (=quick repair of watches), and at 1h13m42s banners with TY NUZHEN[hard sign] RODIN[yat'] (= birthland needs you). Even the misspelled YURYAITN has a hard sign at the end. In fact, I can't find a single instance of anachronistic orthography. It would be tedious to list any more of the many more correct examples.

[–] jdlexus 11 years ago

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz........

[–] EJF 11 years ago

Apart from the spelling error, the characters read the banner as "Brotherhood and Freedom" instead of "Freedom and Brotherhood."