Words new to me: плевел

The word plevel can be a specific plant from the Eastern Hemisphere, lolium or ryegrass, but in literature you’re more likely to see the plural plevely as a New Testament allusion.

It’s not the chaff that Jesus will burn with unquenchable fire (Matthew 3:12, Luke 3:17), which is soloma or miakina in different Russian translations. Nor is it in the parable of the sower (Mark 4:1–9, Matthew 13:1–9, Luke 8:4–15) or the parable of the mustard seed (Mark 4:30–32, Matthew 13:31–32, Luke 13:18–19). It’s from the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24–30 and 36–43), where the equivalent of plevely is “tares” (KJV) or “weeds” (NRSVUE) or “thistles” (The Message). [Update 6/22/24: also “darnel” (DARBY) and “cockle” (DRA). On darnel see LH’s comment below and 2023 post.] Click through to see the whole passage in Russian and English side-by-side.

The word comes up in Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s Ursa Major (Большая медведица, 1870–71) in an argument among the sympathetic characters (the truly selfish and calculating people are offstage), where the older generation, represented by Katerina’s father Bagrianskii, wants a strict rules-based order that can protect the innocent from the guilty as a group, while the younger generation wants compassion for individual wrongdoers who were shaped by a system they did not create and just need to be enlightened:

“[…] No, I mean the kind of people whose words could awaken people’s conscience…”

“If a person has one, it doesn’t go to sleep,” Bagrianskii sternly interrupted.

“Not their conscience, rather their consciousness; people often know not what they do…”

“Oh, they know all right! But by not knowing they have a lot to gain…!”

“But when people who aren’t thinking about what they have to gain, people with the best motives, speak and remind them of their duty…”

“Found some good talkers, have you…! All right, fine, suppose they remind them. And do you think those ones”—he nodded as if to indicate them—“will fail to find loopholes where they can hide from your vaunted consciousness? Will they fail to find their own logic, one stronger than yours? Will they fail to lead you astray yourselves? Won’t they get you to agree to one concession, and another, and a dozen more in the name of justice for all, in the name of compassion?”

“Of course, justice for all, of course, compassion!” cried Verkhovskoi. “Otherwise it’s just replacing one arbitrary system with another!”

“So, impunity?”

“Not impunity, but…”

“No point putting our hopes in you!” cried Bagrianskii, laughing. “There it is: all of you people, the best we have today—you can neither kill nor pardon! You can’t do anything…! Compassion! For whom, I ask you—for individuals, or for the society they are ruining?”

“You can’t make society better by adding more unhappy people to it…”

“Same old story—don’t make anyone unhappy!”

“For society to be better, make more people happy,” Katerina suddenly interjected. “Make life easier, give people rights, and there won’t be any crimes…”

“What’s this?” cried Bagrianskii. “Rights for whom? An easier life for whom? What good things do they need? Do they even deserve to live?”

“To live?” Verkhovskoi repeated.

“Yes, to live! Wipe them off the face of the earth, annihilate them, put them to death, spare society from them by lawful means!”

“By lawful means?” Verkhovskoi repeated. “Can that against which human nature rebels be lawful?”

“Human nature ought to find the crime offensive, not the penalty,” Bagrianskii loudly interrupted him. “To spare the plevely… Have you read the Bible? What did the Lord lay Saul low for?”

“I can’t say I remember,” replied Verkhovskoi.

“For not annihilating the unrighteous to the last man, for taking it into his head to reason about it and concede something in the name of compassion… To spare the evildoer… Give him to me, and I’ll sign his death warrant with pleasure and cross myself while I do it!” (12–13)

You can find literary allusions that spell things out more than the Khvoshchinskaya passage (where Bagrianskii rapidly moves between 1 Samuel 15 and Matthew 13), like Boris Sadovskoi’s novel The Wheat and the Tares (Пшеница и плевелы, 1936). But the context doesn’t always point you to the Biblical source of the allusion. Maksim Gor’kii in 1915 used the metaphor of getting rid of the tares to talk about the coming literary selection of Russian Futurists. In Nabokov’s poem “Fame” (Слава, 1942) or on Ekaterina Schulmann’s Telegram channel (July 3, 2022), you can find the phrase “tares of speech” (plevely rechi).