> "I think we could call that homesickness, cultural rejection, or a few other English words that are similar (though from the Russians I know that are versed in English, they disagree and say homesick misses how deep of a feeling тоска has."
тоска sounds to me to be a mixture of homesickness and patriotism. I personally suspect your Russian acquaintances that are versed in English are overlooking that homesickness without patriotism can be a deep feeling.
For example, when I've been away from the UK for a long period of time, what I've found I miss the most is the sense of humour. That's not to say other countries are lacking a sense of humour (and there's plenty of other enjoyable facets of all the countries I've been to so far), but there's a particular style of humour that is particularly prominent in the British Isles (including Ireland) where we 'take the piss' out of ourselves as much as each other. To others, that might seem like a strange thing to be homesick about, especially in a deep way, but I assure you that when you're tired of pretense you can miss it a lot, just as much as any wistful dreams of the motherland.
P.S. Google Translate converts тоска into 'yearning', I wonder if that sits better with your Russian acquaintances.
I hadn't considered "yearning", but I ran it by a few of my colleagues and tried to find examples in literature/movies/songs they might be familiar with. Granted, this might be their lack of intimacy with English, but they didn't feel that it quite captured the feeling that тоска is supposed to give. It could also just be them being stubborn, as is occasional to happen.
But the point of тоска was more to illuminate the uniqueness of авось, making it stand as a clear example of something that I really feel doesn't have an English equivalent.
And no, I do understand what you're missing - I'm an American working abroad in Russia, and the humor my friends and I use in the US doesn't translate well either, largely because my colleagues, while being very good at English for the purpose of supporting our product, aren't quite fast enough with the language to get wordplay or the sarcastic bits.
> "I hadn't considered "yearning", but I ran it by a few of my colleagues and tried to find examples in literature/movies/songs they might be familiar with. Granted, this might be their lack of intimacy with English, but they didn't feel that it quite captured the feeling that тоска is supposed to give. It could also just be them being stubborn, as is occasional to happen."
Thanks for trying. I suspect you may be right about the stubbornness. Competing on depth of feeling is an easy way to create a sense of distinction between us. In a similar way, the Koreans have a word, Han, that they have set out as describing something uniquely Korean, but from what I can see it's a catch-all term for the feelings that come along with oppression. If you want to highlight a deep sense of oppression not felt elsewhere, of course you're going to try to create a sense of uniqueness for your own word describing these things.
Yeah, totally. I'm always open to being wrong on stuff, plus as I struggle to learn Russian it helps to try to understand words better - I can say that business-wise, I've had no need to тоска nor do I anticipate it. Since I'm not good enough at Russian to get into their literature without a dictionary in hand, I can't really find examples of it in literary or poetic works to get a better idea of how it's been used.
тоска sounds to me to be a mixture of homesickness and patriotism. I personally suspect your Russian acquaintances that are versed in English are overlooking that homesickness without patriotism can be a deep feeling.
For example, when I've been away from the UK for a long period of time, what I've found I miss the most is the sense of humour. That's not to say other countries are lacking a sense of humour (and there's plenty of other enjoyable facets of all the countries I've been to so far), but there's a particular style of humour that is particularly prominent in the British Isles (including Ireland) where we 'take the piss' out of ourselves as much as each other. To others, that might seem like a strange thing to be homesick about, especially in a deep way, but I assure you that when you're tired of pretense you can miss it a lot, just as much as any wistful dreams of the motherland.
P.S. Google Translate converts тоска into 'yearning', I wonder if that sits better with your Russian acquaintances.