Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia

Victor Zhivov's magisterial "Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia"
tells the story of the creation of a new vernacular literary language in modern
Russia, an achievement arguably on a par with the nation's extraordinary
military successes, territorial expansion, development of the arts and formation of a modern empire. The language served as the primary vehicle for Russia's modernization and for its entry into the Western European cultural sphere, and Zhivov demonstrates that the unusually intense debates over it, down to violent disagreements over particular grammatical endings, have profound implications for understanding the basic social, political, and cultural dynamics of the era.
"Language and Culture" analyzes the European theories concerning modern literary languages that were transplanted into Russia and demonstrates the ways in which they were creatively transformed when adapted to the complex legacy of medieval and seventeenth-century literary culture. Zhivov traces this creative adaptation from the "hybrid Slavonic" of the late seventeenth century; through Peter the Great's demand for a new Russian vernacular literary language; to the "Slaveno-Russian" linguistic and cultural synthesis of mid-century and the beginnings of a Russian literary tradition; to the early nineteenth-century debates between "archaists and innovators"; and fi nally to the subsequent decoupling of secular and religious language and culture that in his view represented the last echo of eighteenth-century debates. Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia fundamentally revises much of the received wisdom concerning the development
of the literary language and offers fundamentally new perspectives on the genesis and development of modern Russian language, literature, and culture.