Pushkin’s wonderful long poem Yevgeny Onegin begins: ‘When my uncle, a man of principles, fell ill ne v shutku …’ Ne v shutku means ‘not in jest’. So, ‘seriously’, then? It won’t do at all: ‘fell seriously ill’ happens to convey a truth, but the least important part of the truth. Because the point is that the uncle was a tedious old hypochondriac, a valetudinarian who was always crying wolf and keeping the family at his bedside, cooling their heels: and, then, at last he really was ill. Only the formulation ‘not in jest’ conveys all of this picture in one little phrase.
