In the poem "Gypsies" in response to Zemfira's question: "Tell me, my friend: do you have any regrets / About leaving you forever?" - we hear Aleko's first monologue:
What is there to regret? If only you knew.
When would you imagine
The captivity of stuffy cities!
There are people in piles, behind the fence,
Do not breathe the morning coolness,
No spring smell of meadows...
Pushkin's definition of townspeople, even in the mouth of Aleko, is unusual and shocking to readers. There is a certain pile of small trees outside the fence of cities, in which people are swarming.
The comment of the compilers of the authoritative "Dictionary of the Pushkin Language" only reinforces this disturbing perplexity: the word form in piles is defined as "to live, to be, to be crowded" (Dictionary of the Pushkin Language, Moscow, 1957, Vol.P.).
In Aleko's monologue, A. S. Pushkin puts the credo of his romantic hero: a lone rebel, a freedom-loving man who rebelled against a society that suppresses the human personality. Aleko took the path of struggle, he denies "captivity":
...Great excitement,
Predisposition sentence,
Crowds are a mad chase...
and suddenly the colloquial word in relation to a cluster, a lot of people - a bunch\
The development of the Russian language is "to blame" for the appearance of reader nonsense, or rather a complex case of coincidence in the pronunciation of soft variants of three proto-Slavic roots at once: * kuk -, *kqt -, *kust -, as a result of which their meanings converge or are homonymically repelled from each other, and some of the values go into the passive reserve the dictionary.
The first root *kuk-forms a common Slavic word with the suffix -jb-
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vo kuca: Russian heap "something piled up in a hill, pile", " crowd, accumulation (of people, animals)", Russian dialect "hill, small haystack, pile"; "stack, seed, stack"; "fire"; Ukrainian, Belarusian heap, according to dialects " snowdrift, gourba"; Czech kuce "piece, piece", "mass"; Slovenian kuca ...
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