Title: Business and Friendship

General information about item:

Verbal folklore, proverb
Language: Russian
Country of origin: Russia
Informant: Katarina Nesic
Date collected: 11/9/18
Informant Data:

Katarina is a junior at Dartmouth College. She is 21 years old and was born and raised in Serbia. At 16, she attended boarding school in Switzerland and came to Dartmouth after.

Contextual Data:

Katarina learned this proverb while studying abroad in St. Petersburg in the summer of 2017. She is also currently taking classes in Russian at Dartmouth to further her study of the language.

Item

Дружба дружбой, а служба службой.

Literal translation: “Business is business and pleasure is pleasure.”

Meaning: The needs of a friendship are different than the needs of a business relationship, and attempting to conflate the two is likely to end up hurting at least one of them.

Associated file: 

Transcript: “‘Дружба дружбой, а служба службой.’ It translates to, like, don’t mix business and friendship, or don’t mix business and pleasure.”

Informant’s comments:

“The one about, like, ‘don’t mix business and pleasure,’ like, uh, started being a thing in the Soviet Union. … The one about, the ‘don’t mix business and pleasure,’ I heard, like, every other day in St. Petersburg.”

Collector’s comments:

The proverb follows a kind of parallel structure — one thing is affirmed to be itself, as is the second thing. This serves both to make the proverb pithy and memorable, and also to emphasize the importance of keeping the two ideas separate.

I found it interesting that this proverb first became popular during the Soviet Union. Ostensibly, communism is about attempting to lower class divisions and make business for and by the people. Yet this proverb contains a clear distinction between personal relationships and business ones — an attitude I would normally have associated with capitalist sensibilities.

Collector’s name: Zachary Benjamin