Title: An Old Friend

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

Старый друг лучше новых двух.

Literal translation: “An old friend is better than two new ones.”

Meaning: When meeting someone new, you should not fully trust them until you get to know them better.

Associated file:

Transcript: “‘Старый друг лучше новых двух.’ An old friend, uh, or one old friend, is better than two new ones.”

Informant’s comments:

“[It’s] pretty standard. … When you meet new people and you’re kind of, like, unsure about them, you would use, like, the ‘an old friend is better than two new ones.’ That one I heard more than the other ones.”

Collector’s comments:

This proverb, like other Russian proverbs I collected, emphasized the importance of prior relationships. In particular, it seems related to the idea of building trust capital. An old friend is better not just because they are older, but because new people have not yet had the time to fully establish themselves as deserving of one’s trust. Thus, loyalty is not just benevolent, but also self-interested.

Like many Russian proverbs I collected, this one follows a two-part structure in which one thing is directly compared to another, with the first one being considered superior. It also uses a disjoint in quantity (one vs. two) to emphasize its point, which came up in other Russian proverbs as well.

Collector’s name: Zachary Benjamin