Tenth Wave

Tenth Wave

 

(in Russian, the ninth wave) in art, journalism, and colloquial speech, a symbol of terrible danger or the highest degree of an insuperable force. Underlying the symbol is an ancient popular belief that during a storm at sea the tenth wave is the strongest and most dangerous. The ancient Greeks believed the third wave to be the most dangerous, the Romans, the tenth. The symbol of the tenth wave was quite common in Russian 19th-century poetry and in revolutionary literature of the early 20th century. It has been employed in Soviet literature in M. Aliger’s narrative poem Zoia and in I. Ehrenburg’s novel The Tenth Wave.