The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

82 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

[1892–1941] in the twentieth) kept alive this vigorous archaic stratum of militant, “unintegrated” language, full of wild metaphoric associations and primitivist sound patternings, deployed to almost surreal effect.

By the eighteenth century, state-approved innovations in technology and bureaucracy had boosted the production of secular texts. The printing press was an accepted reality. Ecclesiastical censorship lost its monopoly in 1700. But the core problem of inter-cultural translation remained. How can a word, which makes sense in the context of its own source culture, be recreated in empty semantic space? The translator could provide a paraphrase in the form of a definition – a bulky solution. More common was the practice of “doublets,” embedding the foreign word (usually transliterated into Cyrillic) in the Russian text, followed by a parenthetical explanation (if one could be found – although often the Russian equivalent had an entirely different aura). Translators were most successful with concrete physical things. When a paraphrase or approximation could not be found, often the foreign word just sat there, in its own alphabet and alien script, grammatically uninflected and unresponsive to the rules of Russian declension or conjugation.

The difficulty of orienting oneself in this unmonitored polyglot sea was one reason why the Russian upper classes, by the second half of the eighteenth century, arranged matters so that their children learned to speak French from infancy, relying upon that language for all “civilized” society interactions. The wealthy families had multilingual teams of nannies and tutors on their estates (consider Tolstoy in the nineteenth century, Nabokov in the twentieth); the poorer nobles and gentry could generally afford only one miserable, underpaid, often ignorant immigrant from France, Polonized Ukraine or the German states. It is no surprise that some of the best neoclassical comedy in the eighteenth century was language comedy. Foreign language fakery, mutually incomprehensible dialogue, and linguistic snobbishness (primarily “Gallomania,” a frenzy or mania for all things French) will be a focus for the first half of this chapter.

Our exemplary genres are limited to two irreverent literary experiments, one dramatic and one prosaic, followed by one end-of-the-century response to them that transformed this irreverence into respect. The first genre, Russian prose comedy, was especially adept at ridiculing Gallomania; the second, Russia’s primitive picaresque novel, broadened the ridicule to include, among many other targets, literary pretense and high court poets. Triumphant over both these satiric projects was Sentimentalism, which took French influence seriously, even piously, and integrated it into a new prose style that swept up the Russian readership. All three genres – prose comedy, the picaresque, and Sentimentalist prose – enjoy a vigorous afterlife in the nineteenth century.