Vaksali (Vaksal)

Railway station. Avenue (etc., see below) known first as Bahnstraße (train st.), Bahnhofstraße (station st.) or Vauxhallstraße until 1882, with later records (1907) giving the Russian name as Вокзальный бульваръ (Vauxhall boulevard) which, like its earlier German name, looks like a direct borrowing from Vauxhall in London, but probably arrived via Russian. According to Max Vasmer, etymologist of Russian, Indo-European, Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages, the word Вокза́л, voksal, meaning central railway station today, was first recorded in the САНКТПЕТЕРБУРГСКИЕ ВЕДОМОСТИ (St Petersburg Gazette) of 1777 as Фоксал, foksal, or pleasure garden (such as the Vauxhall Gardens outside Moscow run by theater man Michael Maddox [1747-1822]), and although railways of sorts date back about 2500 years, e.g. the 6th C BCE Diolkos wagonway (Δίολκος, from Greek διά, ‘across’ and ὁλκός, ‘portage’), used for pushing boats across the Corinth isthmus in Greece, they didn’t really come into their own until the 1800s, and in Russia not until 1842. So when Pushkin penned На гуляньях иль в воксалах, “At fêtes and voksals, la la la la...”, in his 1813 ditty TO NATHALIE, the association is clearly to pleasure gardens too. At some stage then its meaning shifted from pleasure garden to station. In London’s history, Vauxhall was long known for its Pleasure Gardens, operating from about 1660 to 1859, year of publication, need anyone be reminded, of Darwin’s ORIGIN OF SPECIES, and no foreign visitor to London could have ignored it. Various apocryphal stories suggest that a) a Russian railway delegation of 1840 and b) Tsar Nick the One in 1844 both pointed at Vauxhall station and mistook its specific name for that of a station in general (although the actual building station known as ‘Vauxhall Bridge Station’ was not opened until 1848, a ‘stop’ known as Vauxhall can be seen in Bradshaw’s Railway Companion of 1841), but this seems highly unlikely. They cannot not have known the word voksal, and may well have visited it too, perhaps even arriving by train at Vauxhall, common enough in those days. Any surprise must have come from the change in social importance of the two places: the gardens were teetering on bankruptcy and railways were definitely on the fast track, so Vauxhall now meant station. Parallel evidence in the shift in meaning comes from the fact that certain Russian stations were also used for concerts, the prime example being the Pavlovsk railroad station concert hall. What does seem odd, however, is what looks like earlier Russian spellings attempting to map something meaningful onto the original, with фок, ‘fore-’, and сал or за́л, place of assembly, or hall, suggesting an ante-room or waiting-room (a good 65 years before the railroad arrived), although вок is related more to voice. As to the origin of the actual name, it is unlikely to derive from the Garden’s original landowner, Jane Fauxe (or Vaux, once wistfully claimed to be the inevitably better half of Guy Fawkes) but predate her, from Faulke’s Hall (Fr. la Sale Faukes) where both ‘hall’ and ‘sale’ were metonyms for castle or ‘seat’, later Foxhall (Samuel Pepys spelled the gardens Fox-hall which better matches the original Фоксал), one-time property of her possible Anglo-Norman ancestor Sir Falkes de Breauté (d.1226) whose first name, rumor has it, was disparagingly derived from French faux, scythe, after the agricultural implement with which he once harvested a person disagreeable to his happiness, but rumor has many things, and a scythe was an effective cutting weapon too. Although it more sensibly derives from the far older Germanic name of Falco from falcon. So we end on an interesting and, yes, rambling, piece of serendipity with a piece of metal at both ends of the linguistic track from cutting cuttings to cutting through cuttings. Vaksali came in multiple flavors: a Soviet Era renaming (1950-1987) of Nunne (Vaksali tänav) and Väike-Kloostri (Vaksali põik); prior to which another Vaksali tänav in Nõmme was known as Jaama tn (railway rd); a district: Vaksalitagune linnajagu (district behind the railway station); and the puiestee permutations mentioned at the top. Vaksal seems to have gone out of fashion in the first quarter of the 20th C, before which numerous Estonian towns and even villages used the term.