Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia by Victor Zhivov

Author:Victor Zhivov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Published: 2018-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

2. Rationalist Purism and the Richness of the Slavenorossiiskii Language

The metamorphosis of the purist conception that had taken place led to a situation in which the new literary language was able to derive sustenance from both Russian and Church Slavonic sources. The previous understanding of purism had limited an author’s choice of vocabulary, at least in theory. Thanks to this one single change in the linguistic equation, the new conception generated an exceptional abundance of words, especially when contrasted with the former lexical poverty. As early as 1733 academic translators had written in “A Prediction” printed in the Notes to the Gazette (Primechanii k vedomostiam) of January 1 that “To this day we... have tried very hard to bring out into the light various necessary matters using a clear and easy presentation, materials which for the most part have been greatly obscured by special clever words. This was also no easy task, since the German language, in which we write, as well as the Russian, into which we convert our thoughts, still isn’t sufficiently capable of depicting all ideas” (Berkov 1952, 72). Not twenty years would pass before an abundance of words—an embarrassment of riches — would be ascribed to the new literary language as its predominant characteristic (see Alekseev 1982, 118f). The main reason for this change was the acceptance of Church Slavonic’s lexical stock, part of a new complex of ideas which turned Slavonicizing purism into an analogue for prevailing European linguistic theories.

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