Гордость вологжан

[freiburg234.livejournal.com]

Dear Community,

Here another sentence for your review. Could you please explain why "общественного предприятия" and "гордости вологжан" are in the genitive? I can't seem to find the reasoning for this.

Каждый уезжающий ссыльный — это было традицией — жертвовал свою всегда огромную библиотеку в книжный фонд Городской публичной библиотеки — тоже общественного предприятия, тоже гордости вологжан.

Thank you.

ФБ

Comments

[freiburg234.livejournal.com]

But, literally, it does seem that you phrase this in Russian as: "the book collection of the library of the pride of the citizens of Vologda". Looks like a matryoshka :-)

Indeed, this does indicate that it is the library that is the pride, i.e. the library of the pride (as in the pride of my heart). Again, the difficulty for me was what I see as a very unusual way of formulating a relationship between "pride" and its object. In any case, I see now how Russians justify their thinking on this and that is good enough for me.

[bayukov.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think that matryoshka is a good example :)
There are four things which should be organized.

1. his huge library
2. the book collection
3. City Public Library
4. The pride of the citizens.

They indeed can be put like matryoshka

Every departing exile donated his huge library to the book collection which is a part of the City Public Library which is the pride of the citizens :)

However, the original sentence is more close to something like this:

Every departing exile donated his always huge library to the City Public Library’s book collection - which was also the pride of the citizens of Vologda.
Каждый уезжающий ссыльный жертвовал свою всегда огромную библиотеку в книжный фонд Городской публичной библиотеки — которая тоже была гордостью вологжан.

In the Russian sentence you can say what was the pride by the feminine ending of ‘которая’.

But in a sentence like
‘Каждый жертвовал библиотеку в фонд областного отдела КГБ, который тоже был гордостью горожан’
you cannot say from the grammatical construction what was the pride – the book collection itself or the KGB department which has such a collection. The sentence is equivocal in this sense.

And, once again, in the grammatical construction in the cited example you have another opportunity to show to what part of our matryoshka we put ‘гордость вологжан’. Since it has the same case as ‘библиотеки’ it belongs to it.