The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The eighteenth century 81

static foreign tongue, vigorous local vernaculars developed that were sophisticated enough by the sixteenth century to produce literary masterpieces. In contrast, Russian Orthodox Christianity had always conducted its liturgy – and communicated its texts – in an archaic Old Church Slavonic. Its writing system (called “Cyrillic” after the ninth-century Thessalonican missionary Cyril and his brother Methodius) had been adapted from the Byzantine Greek alphabet, supplemented with new letters devised for uniquely Slavic sounds.1 This abstract, ecclesiastical language, vaguely comprehensible to its dispersed congregations but native to none, suited the needs of a borderless continent with migrating populations and contiguous, shifting dialects. But it increased Russia’s isolation from the West. With Church Slavonic as their linguistic “binder,” there was little impetus among the Orthodox Slavs to master Latin or Greek, the portals to pan-European culture. When language reform began in earnest under Peter the Great, as part of his ambitious attempt to order and rationalize all aspects of Russian life, the initial tactic of the reformers was to work with this chaotic but familiar “Old Slavonic mass”: cleansing it, simplifying it, and defining high, middle, and low styles according to the proportion of archaic words that each layer contained.

In 1700, the Russian language, both spoken and written, was porous, receptive, shapeless, and lacked fixed norms for orthography or pronunciation. Polonisms, Latinisms, and Germanisms abounded. Tsar Peter – a regimenting mentality in all things – staffed his Foreign Office with corps of regulators and translators. Dictionaries, glossaries, and lexical commentaries became the rage at court. But no number of tsarist decrees could create a linguistic equivalent when the concept was lacking in the Russian language or in native Russian culture, which was the case for most technical terms and many abstract words. Even the forward-driving impetus of linear narrative, with its values of novelty and suspense, lacked a dignified literary container. More common for written texts in the Russian pre-modern era was “word-weaving” [pletenie sloves], a dense fabric of ornamental epithets, alliterations, and assonances that aspired to reflect the unknowability and inexpressibility of God’s grace (or of a given saint’s blessedness) through purely poetic resources. Word order could be very free, sentences monstrously long, “plot” of negligible relevance. On occasion, however, this porous ecclesiastical texture provided an author with a rough-and-tumble freedom. Protected from Western intrusions and mandated stylistic levels, Church Slavonic could absorb racy colloquialisms and even bawdiness, fuse these images with bookish formulas or realize biblical allegory in a strikingly crude, realistic manner. A minor thread in the work of major poets (from Gavril Derzhavin in the eighteenth century to the cubo-futurist Velimir Khlebnikov [1885–1922] and the great Marina Tsvetaeva