Phrases new to me: вот Бог, а вот порог

For days I was thinking about why opera libretti are so much rarer on the internet than novels and short stories and poems. I’d gone through lots of cultural and economic reasons why Lev Mei’s play The Maid of Pskov (Псковитянка, 1849–59) is easy to find, but the libretto of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Maid of Pskov (Псковитянка, 1873, 3rd version 1894) isn’t, even though I’d guess people now remember Mei’s play mainly because of the opera, and both are in the public domain.

But there are more libretti out there than I thought, and the trick is to search for words sung instead of titles. “Maid of Pskov libretto” and “Псковитянка либретто” only got me synopses, but “постойте образумьтесь” took me to what I was looking for right away. The same trick works for nineteenth-century journals, if you’re lucky enough to know a fragment of the text you’re trying to find. The linked site, operalib.eu, has lots of Russian libretti in elegant formats. If you prefer a clean site and text with no bells and whistles, libretto-oper.ru is also nice, albeit with a smaller selection.

I noticed “вот (тебе) Бог, а вот (и) порог,” a rhyming phrase that literally means “there’s God (for you), and there’s the threshold (too),” but really means “don’t let the door hit you on your way out,” in two pretty different places this week.

In the opera The Maid of Pskov, just before Tucha and his men sing patriotically about laying down their lives for Pskov in futile resistance against Ivan the Terrible, Prince Tokmakov (even though he disagrees with Tucha and wants to avoid provoking Ivan), says to the villainous Matuta, “Matuta! You are a servant neither to Pskov nor to Tsar Ivan Vasilievich! There’s God, and there’s the threshold, boyar!” (act 1, scene 2, 1:01:33).

And Dmitry Nagiyev, playing himself in the October 2020 finale of Kitchen: The War for the Hotel, says the same phrase (with порох for порог to rhyme with the usual pronunciation of Бог) to dismiss his daughter’s erstwhile suitor (Кухня: Война за отель, season 2, episode 21, 18:43).

In Ushakov it says people used to say this pointing first at an icon, then at the door, which makes sense. It comes up in an 1841 Nekrasov vaudeville, Turgenev short stories from 1855 and 1876, and Dostoevskii’s notes for A Raw Youth (Подросток, 1875).