Phraseologism "Pour the bells" meaning

Cannon pour - gunner - take on a cannon - cast a bullet - get it from Pushkin.
Isn't it true, the prettiest phraseological chain. It began with one superstitious custom, and ended ... And what is it; It's over, you'll find out for yourself.
Everyone knows comic expressions that mention the name of the great poet: “And who will do for you (read, write, work, Pushkin?”, “Let Pushkin pay!”, “You will get it from Pushkin”
The pedigree of these is not very simple and at first glance even incredible.
First, let's get acquainted with one custom that developed in Russia back in the 14th century.
In those days, the casting of a bell was a complex matter, requiring both high skill and ingenious devices, and, as they believed, observance of rituals and accounting for signs. It was then that it became customary during the casting of bells to spread among the people the most ridiculous rumors “from the evil eye”, without which the bell would not cast well, would not ring crimson.
Listen to how V. Gilyarovsky describes it in the book “Moscow and Muscovites”:
“The bells are ringing! .. And immediately, all over the market, and then throughout the city, ridiculous stories and lies will be spread. And not only do strangers repeat; everyone tries to lie worse and is sure to accurately designate the character and scene of action.
Did you hear that this morning? A whale ran aground under the Stone Bridge... There are people there!..
- Now the Spasskaya Tower has failed. All! And with a watch. You can only see the top.
A beginner will actually believe, but a real Muscovite will listen and will not give a look that it’s a lie, will not smile, but he himself will add something even cleaner. Such a custom."
So, following the belief, the very expression of pouring a bell began to mean: to invent who knows what, to tell fables.
An interesting custom to compose fables migrated over time to other branches of foundry. They start casting artillery pieces at the factory, and the city is filled with rumors, one more implausible than the other. This is now the masters of the cannon business pouring a cannon.
Well, who pours a gun? Of course, gunner. So, the people began to call a gunner anyone who was not averse to inventing God knows what.
They set up the production of lead bullets in Rus' - and here you are: a new expression for a bullet appears, but the meaning is the same: to invent all sorts of unheard-of things. True, shades have been outlined in the meaning: pouring bullets, casting a bullet is not just lying, but “swearing, boasting.”
In the meantime, he replenished his secret dictionary and the thieves' world. He christened personal firearms a cannon, and in the language of criminals to take on a cannon began to mean: to mislead, to take in fear.
So, the chain reaction led us gradually to a completely, it would seem, understandable allegory you will get from Pushkin. This pun is based on a game of figurative meanings of the words cannon, gunner and the surname Pushkin.
And he went for a walk in conversation, on the pages of books a comic winged turnover.

Moscow words, buzzwords and popular expressions Muravyov Vladimir Bronislavovich

The bells are pouring

The bells are pouring

Is there any talk in Moscow? - asks the matchmaker Akulina Gavrilovna Krasavina, the merchant's widow, languishing from boredom and loneliness, "thirty-six years old, a very plump woman, a pleasant face" Domna Evsignevna Belotelova.

To which the matchmaker replies:

You never know the conversation, but you can’t believe everything. Sometimes a bell is cast, so they deliberately let out an empty rumor so that it will be louder.

In this scene from the play Balzaminov's Marriage, A. N. Ostrovsky talks about an old Moscow custom, one of the ritual actions of bell-casters.

The Moscow bell factories, according to the authoritative statement of M.I. Pylyaev, were considered the best in Russia in the 19th century, they also received orders from abroad. Most of these factories were located in the Balkans, that was the name of the area in Moscow behind the Sukharev Tower (the current Balkan lanes; the Balkan is a valley between hills, a large ravine).

The literary scholar and author of memoirs A.P. Milyukov, who lived in his youth, in the 1830s, near the bell factories, tells about them in his memoirs: “These factories constantly reminded us of their neighborhood with a loud ringing. In our street there were several vast courtyards, in the depths of which one could see stone buildings with tall chimneys, and in front of them, under sheds on massive pillars, hung large bells, brightly shining with fresh copper. As soon as a newly poured bell was raised here, they immediately began to try it and call it, and anyone who only had a desire and itched their hands could practice this as much as they liked. And since the factories were constantly working not only for Moscow, but in different provinces and for fairs, and there was no shortage of hunters to call, then at any time of the day and even at night we heard a thick, rapid blast, which, to indicate sonority a new bell or the strength of the hands of a practicing amateur reached the most frantic tones ... "

But not only the constant ringing of bells was a distinctive feature of this Moscow region. A.P. Milyukov notes one more of his features: “Our side was for the whole of Moscow a source of the most eccentric gossip and fiction. From time immemorial, bell builders have established a belief that in order to successfully cast a large bell, it is necessary to let some deliberately invented fairy tale go to the people, and the faster and further it disperses, the more sonorous and sweet-voiced the bell cast at that time will be. This is what gave rise to the well-known saying “the bells are ringing” when it comes to some kind of ridiculous rumor. I don’t know who was engaged in composing these fantastic stories at the factories and how they were distributed throughout the city, but the bell stories testified to the lively, poetic imagination of their authors ... "

In the custom of spreading rumors and fictions, when the bell is ringed, one can see echoes of the ancient beliefs of a person who, among the protective measures against evil forces, also had such as diverting the attention of these forces from themselves and their affairs, deceit. The spreading rumor was precisely aimed at diverting the attention of ill-wishers from the bell and occupying it with something else. The owners of the bell factories believed very much in the power of such actions. N. I. Olovyanishnikov (and it must be borne in mind that the Olovyanishnikovs had a bell factory) reports that “the witty inventors of such rumors received a good fee for their compositions.” If the bell turned out to be successful, then a refutation of the rumor followed: they say that the bell was leaked at such and such a factory, it turned out to be very sonorous. If there was a failure, they did not admit to fiction, and then the rumor, as N. I. Olovyanishnikov writes, "turned into a legend."

Some bell fictions have been preserved in the memoirs of contemporaries.

Some of them were very primitive. For example, some wanderer wandered from house to house and everywhere reported:

A man appeared with horns and hairy, horns like hell. He does not ask for food, but shows up to people at night; my cousin saw it. And the tail sticks out from under the tie. That's why he was recognized, otherwise no one would have guessed.

Sometimes they came up with a story of tricks. Here, for example, is one of the "bell" stories.

In one church, on Pokrovka, the priest was crowning the bride and groom, but as he led them around the lectern, the wedding crowns fell off their heads, flew out of the windows of the church dome and fell on the outer crosses, approved on the heads of the church and the bell tower.

It turned out that the bride and groom are brother and sister. They grew up and were brought up in different places, never saw each other, met by chance, mistook a kindred attraction to each other for love; the lawless marriage was about to take place, but Providence stopped it in such a miraculous way.

People from all over Moscow came to Pokrovka. Indeed, the domes of the Church of the Resurrection in Barashi, built in 1734, are decorated with gilded crowns. They looked, were surprised, gasped, and somehow it didn’t occur to them that these crowns had been decorating the church for almost a hundred years, and their dimensions were so large that the tallest newlyweds could easily fit in this crown, as in a gazebo. (Later, a legend was kept in Moscow for a long time that the crowns were placed on the Church of the Resurrection because Empress Elizabeth secretly married Razumovsky in it.)

And once all of Moscow was only talking about the incident that happened on the eve of St. Nicholas Day (Nikola Zimny, December 19). On that day, the governor-general had a ball, and suddenly, in the midst of dancing, the bell on Ivan the Great struck, and at the same moment the chandeliers and candelabra went out in the hall, the strings on musical instruments burst, glass fell out of the windows, and freezing cold breathed on the dancers. The frightened guests rushed to the doors, but the doors slammed shut with a crash, and no force could open them. The next morning, corpses were found frozen and crushed in the ballroom, and the owner of the house, the governor-general, also died.

Moscow newspapers announced that this was an absurd fairy tale, that there had never been a ball in the governor-general's house, that the governor-general was alive and well. Nevertheless, rumors about the frozen ones circulated around the city for a long time.

The Moscow police, investigating rumors, sometimes got to their source. Breeders, as A.P. Milyukov recalls, “were given strict suggestions and even took away their subscriptions so that when casting bells, they would not spread absurd and especially unseemly rumors that excite the inhabitants and disturb the tranquility of the city.” But the breeders, even after giving a subscription, nevertheless continued to come up with more and more absurdities.

In the second half of the 19th century, “in connection, as N.I. Olovyanishnikov believes, with the increased spread of reading newspapers,” the custom of spreading rumors when casting a bell disappeared, but he told about one of the last, and maybe even the last, in the book “ The history of bells and the art of bell foundry.

In 1878, the largest bell was poured for the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and at the next meeting of the Commission for the construction of the temple, its chairman, the Moscow Governor-General, Prince V. A. Dolgorukov, joked:

“- It would be necessary, according to the ancient Moscow custom, for the bell to be louder, to spread some kind of rumor ...

Everyone laughed, and a member of the Commission, known in Moscow, P. N. Zubov, went up to the chairman and whispered something in his ear.

Prince Dolgorukov glanced at the member of the same Commission, the immensely fat and huge Baron B., who was sitting opposite him, and burst out laughing uncontrollably.

What, what is it, Your Excellency? - everyone became interested, but V.A. was silent.

What's happened? What?

Secret... Big secret... When the bell is good, then I'll tell you...

And then, in secret, to each member of the Commission, of course, except for Baron B., Prince Dolgorukov and Zubov told a rumor that was so “suitable” that it spread all over Moscow in a whisper in the living rooms and thundered in clubs and taverns.

Only one Baron B. was perplexed when every time he appeared, everyone “died with laughter.”

And Zubov told V. A. Dolgorukov the following: “Let’s spread the rumor that Baron B. is“ in such a position ”...“

This joke fell in place and flew around Moscow. The bell, weighing 1,400 pounds, is known to be very good.”

In ancient proverbs, bell fictions are called news. It is this word that is used in the proverb that speaks of the phenomenon itself: “The bells are cast, so the news is dismissed”; and in another proverb, which says that this action is not always crowned with success: “They let the news go, but they didn’t cast the bells”; and in the third, from which it can be understood that the most intricate inventions that spread throughout the country owe their origin to the Moscow Balkans: "Khariton came running from Moscow with news."

In the "Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language" by V.I. Dahl, along with old proverbs, a newer, shorter expression is given - an idiom with the same meaning: "To pour bells - to compose and dissolve nonsense news." After the revolution, the word “bells” was thrown out of the old formula, and Professor D.N. Ushakov in the first Soviet “Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language” (1935–1940) recorded a new kind of old expression: “Pour, ayu, aesh, carry. - to lie boastfully, to compose (colloquially, jokingly). It's you, brother, pouring.

In a synonymous series of words - lie, lie, lie, invent, tell fables, fantasize, poison, scatter rubbish, put in a slop bucket, refuel arap, bend, fill - all these words seem to say about one thing, but each in a different way: “to lie "- not like "fantasy", and "bend" - not like "fill in".

In the word "fill" and now still retains the shade of its old prototype. “To flood” means to tell a kind of complex story in which fiction is so intertwined with the truth or so similar to it that the most incredulous skeptic will remain in doubt for a long time: whether to believe or not.