We were complaining about the onset of six months of cold, gray days in cold, gray buildings when a friend suggested we combat the Russian winter the way locals do -- with a healthy dose of pofigizm and the occasional styob.


A loose translation might read "with a devil-may-care attitude" and "the occasional laugh," but these words mean much more than that.


Pofigizm comes from the expression mne po figu ("I don't give a fig"). Pofigizm allows one to ignore the injustices and unpleasant aspects of life while not getting overly excited about the good things. It's more than mere "indifference"; a better definition might be, "An existentialist demeaning of the importance of things, bred by the acceptance that one's emotional reaction cannot change things."


That sounds fine in theory, but in practice pofigizm clearly has its weaknesses. Take Vasya, a budding young pofigist. His pofigizm allows him to throw his empty can of Fanta out the car window; keeping the streets clean is clearly not his problem.


On the other hand, when a local thug tried to make a point by cutting a three-inch gash in the side of Vasya's head with a knife, pofigizm allowed Vasya not to take it too badly. Instead, Vasya found his ensuing interrogation by well-meaning but utterly clueless police officers to be quite a laugh -- a styob.


Before we say anything else about the word styob, we should warn you that not all Russians recognize it as part of their language. In his dictionary of hippy slang,


Fyodor Rozhansky suggests that styob, and its verb form, stebat', came into use in the early 1970s in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and have branched out only slightly since then.


Exclusivity is what separates a good styob from an ordinary laugh. Not everyone is expected to understand the styob.


A few years ago, two popular television personalities spent an hour on their show proving that Lenin was actually a mushroom. The hosts interviewed experts, showed graphs and charts, and gave a generally well-constructed argument in favor of the notion that the founder of state socialism was really nothing more than a spore. It was pure styob all the way, especially because so many people took it so seriously. That, in turn, was also a styob for everyone watching who was hip.


The attentive reader might comment, "So this is how you expect us to make it through the winter? Indifferent to the point of numbness, and cracking jokes that only a few people in the world understand? Pretty bleak."


But not as bleak as cold, gray days spent in cold, gray buildings.