French and Russian in Imperial Russia: Language Use among the Russian Elite 9780748695522

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French and Russian in Imperial Russia

Russian Language and Society Series Series Editor: Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, University of Edinburgh This series of academic monographs and edited volumes consists of important scholarly accounts of interrelationships between Russian language and society, and aims to foster an opinion-shaping ‘linguistic turn’ in the international scholarly debate within Russian Studies, and to develop new sociolinguistic and linguo-cultural perspectives on Russian. The series embraces a broad scope of approaches including those advanced in sociolinguistics, rhetoric, critical linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, politics of language, language policy and related and interdisciplinary areas. Series Editor Dr Lara Ryazanova-Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Russian, and the Academic Director of the Princess Dashkova Russian Centre, at the University of Edinburgh. Editorial Board Professor David Andrews (Georgetown University) Professor Lenore Grenoble (University of Chicago) Professor John Joseph (University of Edinburgh) Professor Vladimir Plungian (Institute of Russian Language/​Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences) Professor Patrick Seriot (Université de Lausanne) Dr Alexei Yurchak (University of California, Berkeley) Titles available in the series: The Russian Language Outside the Nation, ed. Lara Ryazanova-Clarke Discourses of Regulation and Resistance: Censoring Translation in the Stalin and Khrushchev Soviet Era, Samantha Sherry French and Russian in Imperial Russia: Language Use among the Russian Elite, ed. Derek Offord, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, Vladislav Rjéoutski and Gesine Argent French and Russian in Imperial Russia: Language Attitudes and Identity, ed. Derek Offord, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, Vladislav Rjéoutski and Gesine Argent

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French and Russian in Imperial Russia Language Use Among the Russian Elite Edited by Derek Offord, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, Vladislav Rjéoutski and Gesine Argent

EDINBURGH University Press

© editorial matter and organisation Derek Offord, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, Vladislav Rjéoutski and Gesine Argent, 2015 © the chapters their several authors, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun - Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/​13 Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9551 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9552 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0363 4 (epub) The right of Derek Offord, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, Vladislav Rjéoutski and Gesine Argent to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Preface vii Note on Dates, Transliteration and Other Editorial Practices xi Abbreviations Used in the Text, Notes and References xv Dates of Reigns in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Russia xvii Introduction 1 Derek Offord, Gesine Argent, Vladislav Rjéoutski and Lara Ryazanova-Clarke   1. French and Russian in Catherine’s Russia Derek Offord, Gesine Argent and Vladislav Rjéoutski

25

  2. The Use of French by Catherine II in her Letters to Friedrich Melchior Grimm (1774–96) Georges Dulac

45

  3. Language Use Among the Russian Aristocracy: The Case of the Counts Stroganov Vladislav Rjéoutski and Vladimir Somov

61

  4. The Francophone Press in Russia: A Cultural Bridge and an Instrument of Propaganda Vladislav Rjéoutski and Natalia Speranskaia

84

  5. Russian Noblewomen’s Francophone Travel Narratives (1777–1848): The Limits of the Use of French Emilie Murphy

103

  6. Russian or French? Bilingualism in Aleksandr Radishchev’s Letters from Exile (1790–1800) Rodolphe Baudin

120

vi  con t e nts   7. Code-Switching in the Correspondence of the Vorontsov Family 132 Jessica Tipton   8. French and Russian in Ego-Documents by Nikolai Karamzin 152 Liubov Sapchenko   9. Pushkin’s Letters in French Nina Dmitrieva

172

10. Instruction in Eighteenth-Century Coquetry: Learning about Fashion and Speaking its Language 193 Xénia Borderioux 11. The Role of French in the Formation of Professional Architectural Terminology in Eighteenth-Century Russia Sergei Klimenko and Iuliia Klimenko 12. The Coexistence of Russian and French in Russia in the First Third of the Nineteenth Century: Bilingualism with or without Diglossia? Nina Dmitrieva and Gesine Argent

209

228

Conclusion 243 Gesine Argent and Vladislav Rjéoutski Notes on Contributors 250 Index 254

Preface

The two volumes we introduce here concern an aspect of the social, cultural and political history of language in Imperial Russia. They deal with the profound impact which the French language and the culture that it bore had on Russian high society and on the consciousness of the social and literary elite in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, when French was an international language among such elites in the European world. The volumes explore the coexistence, competition and commingling of the two languages and the possible benefits and allegedly detrimental effects of Franco-Russian bilingualism. The two volumes are closely tied together in approach as well as subject-matter. They are conceived as original contributions to the multidisciplinary study of language. They address, from a historical viewpoint, subjects of interest to sociolinguists (especially language use and language choice, bilingualism and multilingualism, code-switching and language attitudes). At the same time, much of their subject-matter (social and national identity, nationalism, linguistic and cultural borrowing) falls within the purview of social, political and cultural historians, or of Slavists (who have an interest in the relationship between Russian and Western culture and debate about it) or of students of the European Enlightenment, Neo-Classicism and Romanticism. The volumes share a main title, French and Russian in Imperial Russia, and are conceived as complementary to one another, but their focus is different and each is intended to be capable of standing on its own. This volume, sub-titled Language Use among the Russian Elite, examines the functions of French in Russia in various spheres, domains and genres in the period in question and the interplay and intermixing of French and Russian. It also provides some examples of French lexical ­influence

viii  prefac e on Russian. It is concerned primarily with linguistic practice. The second volume, sub-titled Language Attitudes and Identity, investigates the effects of the use of French and analyses Russian perceptions of the phenomenon of elite bilingualism. It explores Russian literary and intellectual resistance to francophonie and its role in the formation of social, political and cultural identity as Russia began to flourish as an imperial state in the eighteenth century and as a form of cultural nationalism came into being there in the nineteenth. Of course, this distinction between actual linguistic usage, on the one hand, and linguistic perceptions and attitudes, on the other, should not be drawn too rigidly. After all, usage and perceptions are closely related. (Not that the relationship is always straightforward: Gallophobic attitudes could be expressed in French, for example, and many writers whom we might consider linguistic nationalists freely used French in some contexts, for one reason or another.) Accordingly, there are chapters in our volumes which deal with both aspects of our subject. Nevertheless, in most cases the balance of material in an individual chapter will clearly tilt towards one side or the other. The volumes focus, as we have said, on the period from around the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, although some chapters consider matters that relate to decades slightly before or after that timespan, and most chapters focus on certain parts of that period rather than attempting to cover the whole of it. The period may be considered the heyday of the French language in Russia and also the time when the modern Russian standard language (литературный язык), which found its realisation in classical Russian literature, was coming into full bloom. We have chosen to define the beginning and the end of the period we examine by reference to intellectual or cultural movements for two broad reasons. First, there is no precise date at either end of the period which marks a natural boundary of a sort that is of particular interest from the point of view of the social, political or cultural history of language. To begin our study in 1762, when Catherine II came to the throne, for example, would be to give undue importance to the reigns of monarchs in the periodisation of cultural and linguistic history. After all, there is no major shift of linguistic usage with the accession of Catherine, since her predecessor Elizabeth had already encouraged the use of French and the introduction of French culture to the Russian court in the 1740s and 1750s and sections of the nobility were already becoming francophone during Elizabeth’s reign. Nor do we want to give the impression that individual monarchs played the most important role in the introduction of cultural and associated linguistic changes, although cultural and linguistic practice at court was indeed a very significant driver of such changes. Secondly, though, the great majority of our chapters do fall

p r e f a c e   ix within that stretch of time that is encompassed, in Russia, by the Age of the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, in the course of which attitudes towards language shifted significantly in ways that we shall discuss in the introduction to the second volume in particular. Moreover, the Romantic period is roughly coterminous in Russia with the lifetime of Pushkin (1799–1837), who was the dominant figure in the creation of modern Russian literature and modern literary Russian and to whom we give due prominence in both volumes. The volumes have their origins in two international events that took place in the summer of 2012. One of these events, a symposium on ‘Enlightened Russian’, was held at the Princess Dashkova Russian Centre at the University of Edinburgh, directed by Lara RyazanovaClarke, from 30 August to 1 September. The other event, a conference on ‘The French Language in Russia’, took place at the University of Bristol from 12–14 September. This conference was conceived as part of a three-and-a-half-year project on ‘The History of the French Language in Russia’ which has been wholly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the UK. The conference programme, a report on the event and abstracts and recordings of the papers delivered at it can be found on the project website at http://​www.bristol.ac.uk/​ arts/​research/​french-in-russia/​conference/​. However, the volumes are not conceived as proceedings of the two academic events we have mentioned, at which delegates delivered almost fifty papers in all. Rather, they represent a proportion of the papers prepared for those events, carefully selected, arranged and expanded to provide a multifaceted and interdisciplinary but tightly themed introduction to a subject that has not hitherto been much studied in depth. In many cases, the material in the conference papers has been substantially changed both to sharpen focus on linguistic matters and to broaden the scope of coverage in accordance with the aims of these volumes. Several other chapters (the two chapters on Pushkin, the chapters on Russian comedy and on the debate between Karamzin and Shishkov, both introductory chapters and both conclusions) have been written specifically for this work, in order to lend it the greatest possible coherence. Six and a half chapters in this volume have been translated by Derek Offord, two and a half of them from French (Chapters 3, 11 and half of 13) and the remainder from Russian (Chapters 4, 9, 10 and 12). It is a pleasant obligation to acknowledge, first and foremost, the support of the AHRC for the project on ‘The History of the French Language in Russia’, based in the University of Bristol, which has provided the main platform for the production of these two volumes. This project, which commenced on 1 August 2011, has been led by Derek

x  prefa c e Offord, supported by three post-doctoral fellows (Vladislav Rjéoutski, from August 2011 to November 2013), Sarah Turner (from August 2011 to March 2012) and Gesine Argent (from July 2012 to the present) and by a research postgraduate, Jessica Tipton (from October 2011 to the present). We also gratefully acknowledge the assistance of staff in numerous archives and libraries, especially those institutions listed in the abbreviations below, and staff at Edinburgh University Press for their efficient and helpful advice and support at all stages in the preparation of these volumes. Particular thanks are due, lastly, to Anna Oxbury, who through her meticulous reading of the manuscripts has brought about innumerable improvements in the presentation of the volumes and ensured a higher level of editorial consistency than we would otherwise have achieved. On a sadder note, we recognise the contributions made to our Bristol conference in 2012, and more broadly to the study of the subject we have been investigating, by two scholars who have recently passed away, Catherine Viollet and Victor Zhivov. We respectfully dedicate our work to the memory of these two colleagues. We also publish the full-blown chapter into which Zhivov had developed his paper for one of our volumes, as a fitting afterword to Volume 2. We do this with the kind permission of his daughter, Margarita, as a tribute to this outstanding scholar. Derek Offord, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, Vladislav Rjéoutski, Gesine Argent

Note on Dates, Transliteration and Other Editorial Practices

OL D ST Y LE AN D NE W STYL E D ATES In 1700, Peter the Great adopted the Julian calendar, which was eleven days behind the Gregorian calendar in the eighteenth century, twelve days behind in the nineteenth and thirteen days behind in the twentieth. Thus the Bol’shevik Revolution took place in Russia on 25 October 1917 according to the Julian calendar but on 7 November according to the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar, which Western states had begun to adopt in preference to the Julian calendar in 1582, was not adopted in Russia until 1918. In this book, dates are given in the Old Style (OS; i.e. according to the Julian calendar) when the event to which reference is made took place in pre-revolutionary Russia and in the New Style (NS; i.e. according to the Gregorian calendar) when it took place outside Russia. In some instances, the NS date is given in brackets after the OS date, e.g. 18 (29) August 1771.

TRANSLI TERAT I ON We have followed the Library of Congress system of transliteration in the text, lists of references and endnotes in each chapter of this volume. Thus Russian surnames ending in -ский have been rendered with -skii (e.g. Dostoevskii) rather than the commonly used English form -sky (Dostoevsky). The Russian soft sign has everywhere been transliterated with an apostrophe, e.g. Gogol’. However, in the references, alongside the transliterated name of an author who has published a cited item in Russian, we have in a few instances added, in square brackets, the form of the surname by which the scholar in question may be known

xii  date s , tr a ns li te r a t io n, e di t o r i a l p r a c t i c e s from publications in languages other than Russian (e.g. Chudinov [Tchoudinov]). Russian words printed in pre-revolutionary orthography (e.g. the titles of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century journals) have been transliterated from their modernised form (thus Sovremennik rather than Sovremennik’’).

FOR M S OF FORENA MES We have preferred transliterated Russian forenames (e.g. Aleksandr, Ekaterina, Petr) to translated ones (Alexander, Catherine, Peter), except in the case of monarchs and other members of the Russian royal family (e.g. Alexander I, Catherine II, Peter the Great), who are familiar to the English-speaking reader from the translated form of their names. We also use the form Alexander in the case of Count von Benckendorff, the head of the secret police in the age of Nicholas I, and the nineteenth-century thinker Herzen, because we refer to those individuals by the German forms of their surnames which will be familiar to English speakers.

Q U OTAT I ONS I N FORE I GN L ANG U AG ES Quotations and individual words that are given in the text in the language of the original are italicised (and, if they are in Russian, with modernised Cyrillic orthography). Where there is a need to indicate that certain parts of an italicised quotation were highlighted in some way in the original source, we have done this by use of bold font.

TRANSL ATI ON OF Q UOTAT I ONS IN FOREIG N LAN G U A GES In many cases (for example, when authors are merely quoting an opinion or a statement about a fact), we have not considered it necessary to retain the language of the original and the quotation has been translated into English. However, in many other cases (for instance, when language usage is being illustrated), it has seemed important to retain the original. In these cases, we have also provided a translation. Our policy has been to put the translation in an endnote, in order not to break the flow of the text of the chapter, unless the quotation is very short (five words or fewer). In chapters translated from French or Russian by Derek Offord

dates, tra ns li te r a t io n, e di to r i a l p r a c t i c e s   xiii (these are listed in the preface) he is also responsible for the translation of quotations from those languages. In the remaining chapters, which were written by their authors in English, the translation belongs to the author(s) of the chapter in question, unless otherwise indicated.

TRANSLAT I ON OF T I T L ES In the text of each chapter, titles of novels, plays, poems, articles, chapters and other works written in a language other than English have been translated, but the original title (in transliterated form, if it was in Russian) is usually also given, in brackets, when the work is mentioned in the chapter for the first time. In the references, as a rule, only the foreign-language title is given.

TIT L ES OF PER I O D I CAL S Titles of Russian periodicals, on the other hand, are presented in the text of a chapter in their transliterated form. A translation of the title is also given, in brackets, when the title is first mentioned in that chapter. Likewise, titles of French periodicals are left in their original form, but are also translated at first mention in the text.

ORTHO G RAPH Y I N Q UOTAT I ONS In quotations in English and French we have retained the spelling, accents and use of capitals of the original. In quotations from Russian documents of the pre-revolutionary era, however, we have modernised the orthography, eliminating, for example, the hard sign at the end of words ending in a hard consonant and replacing obsolete letters with those that have been used instead since the Russian orthographic reform of 1918.

D ATES OF WOR KS Dates given in parentheses after the titles of works mentioned in the text are, unless otherwise stated, the date of first publication, not the date of composition.

xiv  dates , tr a ns li te r a t io n, e di t o r i a l p r a c t i c e s

REFERENCES I N T H E TEX T In general, references to sources are given in the text, in accordance with the author–date system, but if the reference is very lengthy (as in the case of some references to archival sources) then it may be placed in an endnote instead.

E LL I PSES Where we have omitted material from a quotation or title we have indicated the omission by use of three dots in square brackets (i.e. […]), in order to distinguish this type of ellipsis from suspension points (i.e. …) that have been used by the author who is being quoted.

Abbreviations Used in the Text, Notes and References

NA M ES OF ARC H I V ES, L I B RAR I ES USE D AAE AKV AVPRI BNF BRAN GARF GATO RGADA RGALI RGB RGIA RNB StPF ARAN

Archives des affaires étrangères, Paris Arkhiv kniazia Vorontsova Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi imperii, Moscow Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris Biblioteka Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, St Petersburg Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Tverskoi oblasti, Tver’ Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov, Moscow Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva, Moscow Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka, Moscow Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, St Petersburg Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka, St Petersburg Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, S.-Peterburgskii filial

OT HER A B B RE V I ATI ONS USED I N TH IS V OL U ME AN BAN ch. d. ed. khr. f.

Akademiia nauk Biblioteka Akademii nauk chast’ (part) delo (dossier, file) edinitsa khraneniia (individual file) fond (collection)

xvi  abbre viat io ns fol. IMLI IRLI

folio (list in Russian) Institut mirovoi literatury im. A. M. Gor’kogo, Moscow Institut russkoi literatury (Pushkinskii Dom) Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, St Petersburg k. karton (carton) op. opis’ (inventory) OR Otdel rukopisei (manuscripts department) port. portfel’ (portfolio) r. recto RAN Rossiiskaia Akademiia nauk razd. razdel (division) SIRIO Sbornik imperatorskogo russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva v. verso

Dates of Reigns in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Russia

Peter I (i.e. Peter the Great; 1672–1725, son of Tsar Alexis (ruled 1645–76); co-ruled with his half-brother Ivan V 1689–96 and sole ruler 1696–1725) Catherine I (1684–1727, Lithuanian peasant taken captive by the Russians in 1702; consort of Peter I from 1703 and his wife from 1712; reigned 1725–7) Peter II (1715–30, infant son of Prince Alexis (1690–1718), who was the son of Peter I; reigned 1727–30) Anne (1693–1740, daughter of Ivan V; reigned 1730–40) Elizabeth (1709–61, daughter of Peter I and Catherine I; reigned 1741–61) Peter III (1728–62, son of a daughter of Peter I and of Charles Frederick, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp; reigned 1761 (OS) or 1762 (NS) – 1762) Catherine II (i.e. Catherine the Great; German princess who came to Russia as fiancée of the future Peter III, 1729–96; reigned 1762–96) Paul (1754–1801, son of Peter III and Catherine II; reigned 1796–1801) Alexander I (1777–1825, son of Paul; reigned 1801–25) Nicholas I (1796–1855, son of Paul and younger brother of Alexander I; reigned 1825–55) Alexander II (1818–81, son of Nicholas I; reigned 1855–81) Alexander III (1845–94, son of Alexander II; reigned 1881–94) Nicholas II (1868–1918, son of Alexander III; reigned 1894–1917)

In memory of Catherine Viollet and Victor Zhivov

D. O fford, G. Argen t, V. Rjéouts ki & L . Ryazan ova- Clarke

Introduction Derek Offord, Gesine Argent, Vladislav Rjéoutski and Lara Ryazanova-Clarke

I

n the Military Gallery of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg there hang portraits of over 300 high-ranking officers who fought in the Russian army in the campaign of 1812, after the invasion of Russia by Napoleon’s Grande Armée, and in the European campaigns of 1813–14, which ended with Napoleon’s defeat. The portraits were painted by the English artist George Dawe, who was engaged on this task, with help from two Russian artists, from 1822 until shortly before his death in 1829. Many of the great Russian noble families (the Golitsyns, Naryshkins, Shcherbatovs, Shuvalovs, Stroganovs, Volkonskiis and Vorontsovs, for example) are represented in this collection, as well as some of the most notable heroes of the war, such as the commander-in-chief, Mikhail Kutuzov, Denis Davydov, Aleksei Ermolov and Nikolai Raevskii. However, many of the officers painted by Dawe were of non-Russian origin, as their surnames suggest. A few of these had recently come over to the Russian side, such as de Langeron, a French royalist who entered Russian service after the French Revolution, von Bennigsen and von Wintzingerode, natives of Brunswick and Hesse respectively, and the Dutch nobleman van Serooskerken. Others belonged to families who had only recently settled in Russia or found themselves in territory conquered or annexed by Russia in the eighteenth century. There was a Melissino, who had Greek forebears, and a de Witt, the son of a Polish-Lithuanian general. Above all, there were members of noble families from the Baltic regions of Courland, Estland and Liefland (or Livonia). These Baltic noblemen included members of the Berg family, a Bistrom, a von Jürgensburg, von Knorrings, von der Pahlens, Rozens, a von Sass and a von Staden. Not that the families of foreign origin who are represented in the gallery of the Winter Palace supplied the Russian emperor only with military personnel. Members of some of those families, such as the Korfs and

2  d. offord, g. argent, v. rjéoutski & l. ryazanova-clarke von Lievens, also occupied high office in the civilian administration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. General Alexander von Benckendorff, after a distinguished military career, would become the first head of the Third Section, the secret police established by Nicholas I in 1826. In the Alexandrine age, then, towards the end of the period encompassed by the two volumes we are introducing here, Russia was an empire with a multi-ethnic European elite. This fact goes some way to explaining why the Russian Empire was multilingual (see Argent et al. 2015). Not only did it contain ethnic minorities whose mother tongue was a language outside the Indo-European family, such as Tatars, Finns and, with the extension of the empire in the nineteenth century, Georgians and other Caucasian peoples, and eventually Central Asian peoples too. The empire also numbered among its elite many families in which a European language other than Russian – usually German or French – was the first or a frequently used domestic language or the language of education. These families might prefer to use that other language in their administrative, military and social roles. Multilingualism was encouraged, moreover, by practice at court. Peter I (that is to say, Peter the Great), who in his youth had frequented the foreign quarter (Немецкая слобода) of Moscow, was able to converse in German and had an enthusiasm for Dutch, the language of a country where he famously learned the craft of shipbuilding. He had his daughter Elizabeth learn French in childhood from an aristocratic French lady, the Countess of Launoy (Anisimov 1995: 10), and Elizabeth, when she became empress, promoted the French language and French culture at her court. The mother tongue of Catherine II was German, but from an early age she learnt French from a Huguenot governess at the German court in which she was brought up; only later did she acquire Russian, the language of the country to which she had been sent in 1744, as the prospective bride of the Grand Duke Peter, the heir to the throne, when she was fourteen years old. However, there was a further reason why eighteenth-century Russia became multilingual, besides the prominence among the elite of people whose mother tongue was not Russian and knowledge of foreign languages at court. Multilingualism in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russia was also due to the spread of French across Europe as a language of diplomacy, the lingua franca of the polite society frequented by aristocracies, the vehicle for a refined secular literature and, crucially, the principal means of communication in the so-called Republic of Letters. In these functions, French firmly established itself among the Russian nobility, especially in its higher echelons, during the age of Catherine II, as many chapters in our volumes show. Active or at

i n t r o duc t i o n   3 least passive knowledge of French, in both its spoken and written forms, was ensured by the teaching of it in public educational institutions such as the Noble Cadet Corps founded in 1731 in St Petersburg (Rjéoutski and Offord 2013) and, even more importantly, by the employment of French-speaking tutors in private households. The broad purpose of the education sought in noble households was to form an honnête homme1 or an accomplished young lady on the French model. Acquisition of a command of the French language was a fundamental element in this education; indeed French was often the medium through which other subjects, such as geography, history and the noble arts of dancing, drawing and fencing were taught. One might have expected that certain political and military developments – the overthrow of the French monarchy and the threat posed to the French nobility by the Revolution from 1789, Russia’s defeat by Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805 and the French-led invasion of Russia in 1812 – would militate against the continuing use of French for so many purposes on Russian soil. And yet, these developments evidently did not have this effect or significantly reduce the popularity of French, despite the reservations expressed by Russian writers (as we shall see in many chapters in our second volume) about their compatriots’ francophonie.2 More significant than wartime Gallophobia, as factors that discouraged the use of French, were the development of Russian linguistic consciousness, the standardisation and promotion of Russian and the extension of the functions of that vernacular. Paramount among these functions of Russian was its use as the vehicle for a native literature. The creation of such a literature, no less than the display of military might, was regarded as key to presentation of Russia as a fullfledged European power, and in the eighteenth century sovereigns and the literary community accordingly shared an interest, for a while, in this endeavour. Thus when the status of French did eventually begin to decline in some quarters, around the middle of the nineteenth century, this change was generated primarily by the development of a new sense of national identity in which language consciousness was an important element. In this introductory chapter, we shall lay foundations for the broadranging enquiry conducted by the contributors to these volumes into Franco-Russian bilingualism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the first section, we outline the scholarly literature that has a bearing on our study. In the course of this survey, we describe the methodological approach we take to the cultural, political and social history of language and discuss sociolinguistic matters on which our investigation touches, such as language choice, gender-related differences that affect

4  d. offord, g. argent, v. rjéoutski & l. ryazanova-clarke it, diglossia, bilingualism, code-switching and the politics of language. (We also mention, in this and other sections of the introduction, some of the topics that are explored in greater depth in our second volume, such as the role of language in construction of national, social or individual identity and the relationship between or comparison of language and fashion.) In the second section, we discuss the many types of primary source on which study of our subject can be based. Next, in the third section, we briefly establish a historical context within which we shall situate the development of Russian francophonie and the concomitant standardisation, development and rise in the value of Russian, focusing here on Westernisation and empire-building in eighteenth-century Russia. In the final section, we broach the subject of Russia’s relationship to ‘Europe’, which so preoccupied eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian writers, and consider the claim that has often been made about the exceptional nature of Russian cultural development.

SCHO L ARSH I P ON L AN GUA GE U SE IN H ISTORICAL PERSPECT I V E Historians have not only become conscious, over roughly the last twentyfive years, of historiographical problems relating to language, such as the changing meaning of words over time (Evans 1998: 5–7); they have also laid foundations for the treatment of language as a subject worthy of their attention in its own right. Pioneering work has been done in this field by Penelope Corfield (1991), Robert Evans (1998) and Peter Burke, in a monograph (Burke 2004) and in three useful volumes coedited with Roy Porter (1987, 1991, 1995). Language has also necessarily featured in the writings of various students of nationalism, including Hugh Seton-Watson (1977), Benedict Anderson ([1983] 2006), Rogers Brubaker (1992, 1996, 2011), Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael (2000), Tomasz Kamusella (2009), Monica Heller (2010) and Stephen May (2012). Nonetheless, it remains the case that there is no established branch of history devoted to exploration of the effects that linguistic matters have had, over a long period, on the development of social groups, relations and institutions, on government policies and political and cultural ideas, or on a sense of personal, collective or national identity in a given community. There is therefore a dearth of general historiographical models for the study of the social, political, cultural and intellectual dimensions of language use in pre-revolutionary Russia, although some work has recently been done, for example, on tsarist russification policies (Pavlenko 2011).

i n t r o duc t i o n   5 Equally, there has been a dearth, until quite recently, of scholarship which approaches the subject of multilingualism (and more specifically francophonie) on Russian soil in the imperial period from the point of view of sociolinguistics. Perhaps there are two broad explanations for this lacuna. First, sociolinguistics itself is of course a relatively recent discipline. Scholars working in the theoretical branch of linguistics, which had been so affected from the late 1950s on by Noam Chomsky, for long concerned themselves with the construction of linguistic models which can be presented as having scientific rigour and as being universally applicable, but they took little interest in the contexts in which language is used or in the linguistic performance, habits and idiosyncrasies of individual communities or speakers (Romaine 1982: ix). Secondly, the discipline of sociolinguistics, to which we must look for models for any study of the social, political and cultural implications of language use, tended in its early stages to have a contemporary focus and to generate synchronic rather than diachronic studies. No doubt this bias was partly due to the nature of the sources available, to which we shall return shortly. However, it has now come to be widely accepted, as a result of the so-called linguistic turn in the humanities, that language issues should be a central concern in socio-political or cultural histories, because language is inextricably bound up with nation-building, the formation of individual and group identities and the negotiation of power hierarchies (Joseph 2004: 41 f.). Linguistic culture – defined by Harold Schiffman (1996: 5) as the ‘set of behaviours, assumptions, cultural forms, prejudices, folk belief systems, attitudes, stereotypes, ways of thinking about language and religio-historical circumstances associated with a particular language’ – is seen as linked to the history of any particular community, and study of it has become central to fields such as the sociology of language and linguistic anthropology. Moreover, the field of historical sociolinguistics, originating in the late 1980s, has sought to remedy the imbalance between contemporary and historical studies by engaging in ‘the reconstruction of the history of a given language in its socio-cultural context’ (Hernández-Campoy and Conde-Silvestre 2012: 1). At the same time, linguists and historians are recognising that they have much to contribute to each others’ fields and should work together to arrive at a comprehensive picture of their particular object of study (Davies et al. 2012: 4). There are three specific areas in which the general corpus of sociolinguistic literature can be of especial use in our investigation. (We shall also touch upon other areas in the following section as we enumerate the primary sources we have used.) The first of these areas concerns language

6  d. offord, g. argent, v. rjéoutski & l. ryazanova-clarke choice. We ask what governed language choice in Imperial Russia (for example, domains and gender norms), what forms it took (for instance, code-switching, on which see Milroy and Muysken 1995), and what societal linguistic norms and individual competences (such as diglossia or bilingualism) influenced choices. The contributors to this volume thus engage with the famous question relating to language choice that Joshua Fishman posed as the title of a seminal article: ‘Who Speaks What Language to Whom and When?’ (Fishman 1965). Like Fishman, we examine a multilingual community of speakers who use two or more languages or codes not only with outsiders but also for internal communication. Secondly, study of language choice in multilingual communities often requires us to consider whether a state of diglossia exists. Charles Ferguson (1959) first defined diglossia as the existence in a language community of two varieties of a code, one high and one low, which are functionally separated and used in different contexts. In Chapter 12, Nina Dmitrieva and Gesine Argent, who provide a theoretical discussion of the subject before examining it in the context of Russian bilingualism, show that the concept is contested (see also Hudson 2002; Edwards 2009; Snow 2013; Burke 2014: 33 ff.) and discuss the limitations of it for our particular subject of study. Thirdly, studies of language choice of the sort we have outlined, and of the sort found in these volumes, aim to discover the reasons for particular language choices as well to establish ‘who speaks what language to whom and when’. In examining such choices, contributors inevitably deal with questions of the politics of language. By politics of language, we mean not only specific language policies but also the wider significance of language choices, both at the level of the individual and the level of the group: the choice of a language here is not considered neutral but a means of making explicit or implicit statements that are not necessarily grounded in personal preference or competence alone (see also Lakoff 1990 and Schmid 2001). Turning to scholarship on the use of French in Russia, finally, we find that interest in the subject was already apparent in the nineteenth century (Ghennady 1874), when the phenomenon of Russian francophonie was at its peak. However, it was in the Soviet period that the subject first began to attract serious scholarly attention (Lozinskij 1925; Vinogradov 1938; Paperno 1975; Paperno and Lotman 1975; Galland 1976; Zhane 1978a, 1978b), not least because the attempts made during that period to deepen knowledge of Russian literature in the age of Aleksandr Pushkin encouraged its investigation. The main focus of these Soviet studies was French as a medium of literary activity and a language of sociability among Russian writers of the first half of the nineteenth century. Interest

i n t r o duc t i o n   7 in Russian francophonie has continued after the end of the Soviet era (e.g. Lotman and Rozentsveig 1994) and has been reinforced by a new curiosity about the culture of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian elite. Much of the recent scholarship on these subjects, like the scholarship of the Soviet era that we have cited, has continued to be devoted primarily to the phenomenon of Russian francophone literature. A particularly notable post-Soviet contribution to the field has been made by Elena Grechanaia, in the form of a monograph (Grechanaia 2010) and two edited volumes produced in collaboration with other scholars (Gretchanaia and Viollet 2008; Gretchanaia et al. 2012). However, aspects of the social and cultural history of Russian francophonie have also recently begun to be examined. These include the development of a Russian francophone press (Speranskaia 2005, 2008, 2013; Rjéoutski 2010, 2013; Somov 2011), translation from French into Russian (e.g. Levin 1995–6; Barenbaum 2006; Maier 2008) and – from slightly less recent times – the circulation of French books in Russia and their presence in Russian libraries and book collections (e.g. Luppov 1976, 1986; Khoteev 1986; Somov 1986; Kopanev 1988; Berelowitch 2006). A number of studies have been devoted to ‘French education’ among the Russian nobility (Berelowitch 1993; Rjéoutski 2005; Chudinov 2010; Rjéoutski and Tchoudinov 2013). In particular, one of the co-editors of these volumes, Vladislav Rjéoutski, has edited a cluster of articles on teaching and learning the French language in eighteenth-century Russia (see Rjéoutski et al. 2013). Russian francophonie has also been placed in the context of foreign-language use more broadly in Russia in the long eighteenth century (Argent et al. 2015) and of francophonie in Europe in general (Rjéoutski et al. 2014: 1–31, 371–404, 435–49). Finally, there has been new work in another field directly related to our study, namely the linguistic influence of French on Russian, particularly lexical borrowings from French (Gabdreeva 2001; Smith 2006). Interest in the history of language, language culture and language policy in Russia, particularly the development of the standard Russian language, may be expected to increase, given the nationalistic turn in political ideology there and the consequent instrumentalisation of language issues. These subjects have been broached in recent times by two co-editors of these volumes, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke (2014) and Gesine Argent (Strenge 2012), as well as by Michael Gorham (2014). At the same time, there is a growing trend among European scholars to consider language in historical perspective, as evidenced by the study of historical francophonie that is energetically promoted by the Société internationale pour l’histoire du français langue étrangère ou seconde3 (SIHFLES 2007 and many other publications).

8  d. offord, g. argent, v. rjéoutski & l. ryazanova-clarke

PRI M AR Y SOURCES We turn now from scholarly literature on the subject of the social, political and cultural history of language in general and the history of the French language in Russia in particular to the primary sources that may be used for the study of those subjects. We should note first of all that sociolinguists have hitherto tended to concern themselves more with spoken language than with written language. This they have been able to do because they can use empirical methods to measure linguistic phenomena with the precision to which the social scientist aspires but which historians, lacking living subjects, cannot achieve. For example, sociolinguists may make recordings of the spoken language, conduct interviews and distribute questionnaires designed to elicit information on speakers’ linguistic habits, social background and way of life. Sociolinguists who work on historical subjectmatter are indebted, of course, to those scholars who, since the 1960s, have worked on contemporary material for identifying and describing such areas as bilingualism, code-switching, language contact and borrowing, standardisation and codification, purism and language attitudes (Bergs 2005: 4). The work done by earlier sociolinguists on such matters may now help to shape the reflections of historical sociolinguists on the language of the past. However, historical sociolinguists can emulate students of contemporary language only to a certain degree, because their primary source material, for the most part, is different. They do not have access to large volumes of data collected for experimental purposes in carefully controlled conditions and with predetermined aims in mind. They are forced to rely instead on ‘bad’ or ‘imperfect’ data (Labov 1972: 100; Joseph 2012: 70), that is to say, such fragmentary written records as happen to survive. It is also relatively difficult, as Stephan Elspaß in particular has argued (Elspaß 2007: 3–4), to find written sources which provide reliable evidence of usage among the lower social strata of populations, as opposed to social elites. Balanced treatment of historical linguistic usage across the social spectrum may therefore be impossible. These methodological difficulties should not be considered too discouraging, though, for there is a vast corpus of primary sources, most of it untapped, on which to base a study of Franco-Russian bilingualism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia. This corpus includes textbooks and manuals (utilised by Vladislav Rjéoutski and Vladimir Somov in Chapter 3, in their examination of language use in the Stroganov family and by Sergei and Iuliia Klimenko in Chapter 11 on the language of architecture and urbanistics). We have at our disposal other batches

i n t r o duc t i o n   9 of material relating to the private education of the nobility, such as the teaching materials produced by tutors themselves, examples of their pupils’ work and correspondence between tutors and their employers. There were treatises in French on technical subjects such as fortification. Rules and other documents in French that relate to the activity of masonic lodges have also come down to us. There was a Russian francophone press (examined by Natalia Speranskaia and Vladislav Rjéoutski in Chapter 4) alongside the press that began to develop in the vernacular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There were numerous translations and lexicons (studied closely by Victor Zhivov in Volume 2). The corpus of primary sources also includes certain types of source that we shall now consider in slightly greater detail, pointing out where appropriate the value each type of document may have and the pitfalls such documents might contain. A particularly valuable source, which is exploited by many contributors (Georges Dulac, Vladimir Somov and Vladislav Rjéoutski, Rodolphe Baudin, Jessica Tipton and Nina Dmitrieva in this volume and Michelle Lamarche Marrese in Volume 2) is the personal correspondence of the noble elite and the sovereigns themselves. This correspondence is useful for many reasons. For one thing, either French or Russian might be found in it, or some combination of the two languages, depending on who is writing to whom, the nature of the relationship between writer and addressee, the context and the type of subject discussed. What is more, the range of possible subject-matter was very wide, from description of conventional social situations to commentary on political questions or personal character and discussion of practical matters such as estate management and the health of friends or relations. So too was the range of relationships between correspondents, who might be members of the same family, friends, colleagues, equals in social rank or superiors and inferiors and so forth. Thus letters can yield rich findings on the factors governing language choice and code-switching. Again, male epistolary practice might not be the same as female practice, reflecting different social experience and different understandings of noble men’s and noble women’s roles. Finally, writers of letters at the informal end of the range that correspondence spans may use language in a spontaneous and unguarded way, affording us insights into linguistic practice of a relatively non-formulaic kind. Another major source for the student of Franco-Russian bilingualism is the whole category of documents that might be defined as egowriting. This category includes the personal diary, the album and the récit de voyage (travel account). Such literary forms, like correspondence, could range over many different subjects and could be written in either

10  d. offord, g. argent, v. rjéoutski & l. ryazanova-clarke French or Russian, or they could contain some combination of the two languages (or indeed other languages as well, as Emilie Murphy indicates in her chapter on women’s travel writing). The degree of artifice in egodocuments also varied, depending on the number of readers they were expected to reach. They might be written for the more or less exclusive pleasure or interest of the author, or even as educational exercises supervised by a foreign tutor. Or then again, they might be intended to be read in the family circle or a wider group of friends or at some gathering such as a salon (a social institution imported into Russia along with the French language and the polite social life with which it was associated). It is useful in this connection to think of ‘literature’ in a very broad sense, as including not only the published printed outputs of the professional writer, or at least the writer with a sense of literary vocation, but also the handwritten products of the aristocratic amateur, particularly aristocratic women, who were discouraged from taking part in public literary activity. Our corpus of primary sources also includes imaginative literature (what in Russian was still called словесность for most of the age with which we are dealing), especially comic drama and prose fiction. Examples of both these types of imaginative literature are examined in our second volume, in the chapter by Brian Kim on Ivan Krylov and the two chapters by Derek Offord on various playwrights and on Pushkin. Here, however, we have to be particularly careful to decide what the source in question can yield and how reliable it can be for a given purpose. After all, we cannot be sure that the words that writers place in the mouths of their fictional characters provide us with a reliable record of actual linguistic usage, particularly when they write about earlier times (although they may, of course, base their characters’ speech on what is found in historical documents, as Lev Tolstoi frequently did in War and Peace (Voina i mir)). Writers might invent or exaggerate certain linguistic habits, such as the use of loanwords and code-switching, for their own polemical purposes. Imaginative literature may therefore be more valuable as an indicator of language attitudes than of linguistic usage. This is especially the case with works by eighteenth-century authors, who tended to use literature for overtly didactic purposes and adopted techniques (for instance, the naming of characters in comic plays) that left spectators or readers in no doubt about how they were expected to interpret the material put before them. However, since imaginative literature is a highly crafted form of writing, in which the narrator is not necessarily to be identified with the author and in which – especially from the nineteenth century – elaborate frames were often constructed around narratives, we may also need to explore the context of a work,

i n t r o duc t i o n   11 in order to be sure that we have understood its author’s position in a contemporary debate. The final element in our corpus of primary sources on which we should dwell here is polemical writing. The politics of language are especially pertinent when we come to use this type of source. Plainly, we are dealing with points of view that are put forward unambiguously, rather than with opinions filtered through some fictional intermediary. Nevertheless, we must bear in mind not only that polemical writing may have exaggerated or invented certain kinds of linguistic usage, just as fictional writing did, but also that language commentary itself often served to express political opinions or even personal animosities and that polemical stances were used as masks by authors aiming to present themselves as witty and acerbic. Again, careful examination of the context allows us to assess the significance of such writing and the nature of its contribution to the linguistic culture of the time. Most of the chapters in this study which draw on polemical writing (for instance, those by Carole Chapin, Gesine Argent and Gary Hamburg) naturally fall in our second volume, which focuses mainly on attitudes rather than usage. Therefore, the introduction to Volume 2 will deal more fully than we do here with the question of language ideologies and metadiscourse, including language commentary. For now, it should be noted that studies of these subjects and studies of linguistic usage are interconnected and do inform each other. Analysis of language commentary helps us to determine whether a particular language choice in spoken or written discourse was considered normal and which linguistic features elicited comment. If what we find in language commentary seems to be at odds with linguistic usage, then exploration of the reasons for the disparity may be illuminating.

TH E HI STORI CAL CONTE X T OF R USSIAN FRANCOPHON I E The acquisition of knowledge of foreign languages and the enormously increased use of them in eighteenth-century Russia were inextricably bound up with the transformation of the isolated, backward, inwardlooking Muscovite state inherited by Peter I, when he became sole ruler in 1696, into a major European power. Although Western influences percolated into Muscovy in the seventeenth century to a greater extent than they had before, the transformation initiated by Peter has with good reason been described as a ‘revolution’ (Cracraft 2003). By means of wholesale adoption of Western institutions, technologies and military, social and cultural practices, Peter began to modernise Russia (see e.g.

12  d. offord, g. argent, v. rjéoutski & l. ryazanova-clarke Hughes 1998; Dixon 1999).4 Later eighteenth-century rulers continued Peter’s project, notably Catherine II, who associated herself with Peter by commemorating him with the famous bronze statue, sculpted by Falconet, which stands on the bank of the River Neva, bearing the inscription ‘To Peter the First – Catherine the Second.’ We shall briefly outline the salient features of the transformation that Peter wrought, since they will need constantly to be borne in mind as the language situation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia unfolds in these two volumes. The process of Westernisation was driven mainly by political will from above, rather than by any spirit of enterprise and enquiry from below, at least in Peter’s reign, although in some fields, such as education, important initiatives subsequently came from individuals as well as the state (Fediukin and Lavrinovich 2014). Peter’s reforms brought about ‘progress through coercion’, to use the subtitle of a major monograph on Peter by a modern Russian historian (Anisimov 1993). At the administrative level, Westernisation was manifested in Peter’s reorganisation of the bureaucracy into ‘colleges’ conceived according to models developed in Sweden and other Western countries. The colleges began to function in 1719, each with responsibility for a major branch of state activity, such as foreign affairs, trade or collection of revenue. Peter’s Table of Ranks, introduced in 1722, which assigned state servants in the armed forces and the civil service and at court to one of fourteen classes, was inspired by Danish, Prussian and Swedish models. The titles in this table, such as адмирал, генерал, камергер and канцлер (‘admiral’, ‘general’, ‘chamberlain’, ‘chancellor’), like new designations of social rank, such as барон and граф (‘baron’, ‘count’), pointed to the Western provenance of Peter’s reforms. Rapid technological progress, much of it overseen by foreigners, made possible sharp increases in extraction of coal and iron, new types of manufacturing and ambitious building projects, most notably the construction of St Petersburg, Peter’s new capital on the Gulf of Finland. The army was reorganised, re-equipped, reclothed and retrained, also with the help of foreign advisers. A navy was created (Peter had a passion for ships and the sea). Learned and educational institutions were established to promote and disseminate scientific and cultural advances, including the Academy of Sciences, opened shortly after Peter’s death in 1725, following consultation with the German mathematician and philosopher Leibniz. (Moscow University would be founded in 1755, in the reign of Elizabeth.) With the creation of the Noble Cadet Corps in 1731 there came into being a new type of public institution offering a broad secular education in the humanities and modern languages and aiming to respond to a person’s

i n t r o duc t i o n   13 natural inclinations (Fediukin 2014; see also Rjéoutski and Offord 2013). Peter’s revolution, his attempt to ‘Westernise’ Russia, brought in its train social and cultural change too, especially in the decades after Peter’s death, although Peter himself might not have welcomed all of it. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the nobility, or at least the higher stratum of it, was emancipated and transformed from the slavish class of servitors described by Western travellers to pre-Petrine Muscovy (Fletcher 1966; Herberstein 1969) into a self-respecting corporation of a Western sort. In 1762, Peter III exempted the nobility from obligatory state service and in 1785 Catherine II confirmed its privileges in a charter (see Chapter 1 below). New forms of social life came into being. Peter himself had instituted ‘assemblies’ (ассамблеи), to which selected subjects were summoned and at which they were required to converse, dance, smoke and play cards. By the age of Catherine, gatherings on the French model (soirées, salons, balls) were commonplace among the social elite. The extension of the meaning of the Russian word свет (literally ‘world’) to include the concept of high society (Fr. monde) reflected this social change. Women, who had lived a cloistered existence in pre-Petrine Muscovy (as sixteenth-century visitors to Muscovy had also noted), became prominent, indeed admired, participants in this society. Dress changed too, from the time when, in 1699, Peter began to issue edicts requiring his noblemen to wear European clothes, so that by the age of Catherine fashionable costume, coiffure and vestimentary accessories gave the social elite a thoroughly Western appearance. Equally important from our present point of view were the changes in outlook and mentality that accompanied these social and cultural changes. From the middle of the eighteenth century the ideas of the Enlightenment were propagated, not least by Catherine herself in the famous Instruction (Nakaz) that she addressed to the delegates elected to a Legislative Commission which she convoked in 1767. The document was heavily affected by Catherine’s close knowledge of Baron de Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (De l’esprit des lois, 1748) and Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (Dei Delitti e delle pene, 1764). Catherine embraced the notion of enlightened absolutism and proved adept at promoting herself as an example of it. A secular literature came into being, with examples of Western genres such as the ode, the epic poem, tragedy, the elegy, the pastoral, satire, comedy, the fable and, eventually, prose fiction. A periodical press began to appear and to express a rudimentary form of public opinion. It will also be important to bear in mind, as we examine Franco-Russian bilingualism and the development of Russian linguistic c­onsciousness

14  d. offord, g. argent, v. rjéoutski & l. ryazanova-clarke during the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, that the identity being constructed by Russia’s eighteenth-century rulers and their elite was not only European but also imperial. The territorial expansion undertaken by these rulers, especially Peter the Great and Catherine II, took place chiefly at the expense of Sweden, Turkey and the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. First, Russia was victorious in the prolonged Great Northern War Peter fought against Sweden (1700–21), in which the Russian defeat of the Swedish army at Poltava in 1709 was a defining national moment. As a result of this war, Russia established itself as a major Northern European power, with egress into the Baltic Sea. In the south, Russian territory was greatly extended by the acquisition of land along the northern shore of the Black Sea and in the North Caucasus, as a result of Catherine’s two Russo-Turkish Wars (1768–74 and 1787–92). In 1783, Russia also annexed the Crimea, which had been independent since 1774 and, before that, subject to the Ottoman Empire. To the west, large stretches of Polish territory in White Russia, Livonia, Lithuania and north-western Ukraine were incorporated into the Russian Empire as a result of three partitions, carried out in 1772, 1793 and 1795 together with Prussia and, in the case of the first and third, with Austria as well. This territorial expansion, it should be noted, was clearly conceived as empire-building. Peter assumed the title Emperor (император, a borrowing from Latin, invoking the Roman example) in 1721, at the triumphant conclusion of the war with Sweden. The military prowess and martial valour on which empire-building depended were repeatedly celebrated by eighteenth-century Russian writers, whatever their intellectual or political complexion. The ode (in the hands of Mikhail Lomonosov and Gavrila Derzhavin, for instance) and epic poetry (written by Mikhail Kheraskov) served this purpose well. Perhaps the acme of the tradition of glorification of imperial conquest, though, is the twelvevolume, although still incomplete, History of the Russian State (Istoriia Gosudarstva Rossiiskogo, 1816–29) to which Nikolai Karamzin devoted the last twenty-five years of his life. Russia, according to Karamzin, had been steered by the autocrats of late medieval Muscovy, especially Ivan III (reigned 1462–1505), whom Karamzin heroised, towards a destiny that would eclipse even that of ancient Rome (Karamzin 1816–29: especially vol. 6; Offord 2010: 9, 46–8). How, then, should we weave eighteenth-century language use into this broad historical backcloth of modernisation, Westernisation and empire-building, or rather why can the linguistic thread not be removed from the tapestry without impairing it? Knowledge and use of Western European foreign languages suddenly became vitally important in eight-

i n t r o duc t i o n   15 eenth-century Russia both for the reception of Western civilisation there and for the projection of a new image of Russia in the West. On the one hand, foreign languages (Dutch, English, German and Italian as well as French, it should be noted) were required as means by which Russians could learn about innumerable subjects that were now of interest. These subjects included governance, taxation, mining, industrial production, weaponry, military strategy, ship-building, navigation, fortification, civilian architecture, mathematics, medicine, pedagogy, geography, history, literature, the polite society that was coming into being, dress, cuisine, taste, fashion and leisure pursuits. Translators with knowledge of foreign languages were needed, to be sure, in order to acquaint Russians with this enormous stock of printed information on practical matters, not to mention the literary, artistic and musical heritage of the West. The task was infinite, though, and so there was no alternative, if Russians were to draw extensively on this stock, but to learn to read writings in the original or in an intermediary language (French often served this purpose too). Moreover, foreign scholars and teachers who came to Russia were for the most part not russophone, and delivered their lectures and classes in other languages. Nor could study abroad, which the Russian nobility prized, particularly after their emancipation from state service in 1762, be undertaken without a good knowledge of the language of the country in which the student was based, or at least a good knowledge of one of the most widely used international languages of the time, French or Latin (with which few Russian nobles were familiar until the late eighteenth century). However, the increased communication between Russia and the West did not take place in only one direction. Russian knowledge of foreign languages also made it possible for Russians to attempt to transform their country in the Western imagination. Pre-Petrine Muscovy had seemed a benighted Oriental despotism, for that is how such travellers as the Elizabethan Englishman Giles Fletcher had influentially described it (Fletcher 1966). Post-Petrine Russia, on the other hand, presented itself as a ‘European power’ – the words are Catherine’s, from her Instruction ([Catherine II] 1977: 43) – which was ruled by an enlightened monarch. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Russian court and elite would seek recognition of Russia by other European powers as a civilised member of their community. Command of the dominant language of that community was an important credential for acceptance in it, entitling the Russian Empire to the same degree of respect in the cultural sphere as its military successes inevitably brought it in the diplomatic sphere. Such command enabled Russian writers to participate in the European Republic of Letters and to advertise their achievement to a

16  d. offord, g. argent, v. rjéoutski & l. ryazanova-clarke foreign readership, either through translation or at least in articles and private correspondence written in languages with which that readership was familiar. The Russian nobility, for its part, could use its multilingualism to fulfil its new ambition to belong to a European corporation. Thus, Russians’ newly acquired facility in foreign languages and their confident, extensive use of them deeply affected others’ perceptions of them, and their own self-perception too, at both the national and the personal level.

R U SS I A AN D ‘ T H E W EST ’ Our brief outline of Russia’s eighteenth-century modernisation, Westernisation and empire-building and our discussion of the importance of Russians’ foreign-language acquisition while those processes were going on bring us, finally, to consideration of an overarching question with which our study of Franco-Russian bilingualism is bound to engage. Could Russia be considered part of the European world? This question comes to the fore in our examination of language consciousness in Volume 2, but it needs to be broached here too because it informs the conception of our study as a whole. The turning to the West that we have described generated debate among Russians themselves about Russia’s relationship to ‘Europe’. This debate, which soon became – and indeed remains to this day – a central feature of Russian literature and thought, took many forms, relating at one time or another to history, religion, economic development, national character and – what is of paramount importance to us here – language use. Its classic formulation is to be found in the dispute between socalled Westernisers (западники) and Slavophiles (славянофилы) in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Westernisers, it is conventional to say, believed that Russia needed to adopt European ideas and practices in order to overcome its backwardness. They therefore admired Peter the Great as the initiator of progress. The Slavophiles, on the other hand, perceived Western peoples as aggressive, individualistic and materialistic and took a negative view of Peter as the ruler who was responsible more than any other for the introduction of unwanted habits and the consequent disruption of the organic community that had existed, they imagined, in pre-Petrine Muscovy. At the same time, they extolled Russia’s Orthodox form of Christianity and the communal instincts they attributed to the Russian peasant, in whom, they believed, the national essence was to be found. Native values and traditions, the Slavophiles argued, provided the bases for a distinctive Russian future. Konstantin

i n t r o duc t i o n   17 Aksakov memorably summed up the fracture that the Slavophiles thought the Westernisation of the elite had brought about when he compared the allegedly idle, irreligious and francophone nobility with the supposedly hard-working, pious and exclusively russophone common people (Aksakov 1910).5 The habit of juxtaposing Russia and the West provided Russians with a framework for consideration of their history, identity and practices, including language use among the new elite. However, this framework had the effect of emphasising Russia’s difference from the remainder of Western civilisation – a difference that is presented in Russian literature and thought as so marked that it transcends distinctions of every sort among other European countries and warrants the inclusion of all those countries in the concept ‘the West’ or ‘Europe’, which stands apart from ‘Russia’ in what Iurii Lotman liked to call a ‘binary opposition’. Such emphasis on difference is not characteristic only of nationalist thinkers in the Slavophile tradition, such as Fedor Dostoevskii. It is to be found equally in the first ‘Philosophical Letter’ (‘Lettre philosophique’) of Petr Chaadaev,6 who is often regarded as having inspired the Westernisers, and in the writings of Alexander Herzen, who is customarily classified as a leading figure in the Westernist camp. Within this paradigm, according to which Russia is marginal or even external to ‘Europe’, or in some fundamental way exceptional within it, the Franco-Russian bilingualism of the Russian elite tends to be treated as symptomatic of Russian difference and as in some way problematic. There is little or no room in the exceptionalist narrative, for example, for the possibility – or rather, the fact – that elite francophonie was a more or less pan-European phenomenon for certain purposes and at various times, depending on the stage of development a country had reached (Rjéoutski et al. 2014: 435–49). Nor does the exceptionalist discourse comfortably accommodate a predominantly positive view of bilingualism as a phenomenon that facilitates the flow of ideas and practices between peoples and cultures and enables civilisations to share riches with other civilisations across space and time. In particular, it may seem from our twenty-first-century vantage point to play down effects of the adoption of French language and French culture that many would argue were beneficial. These effects included the cultivation of polite sociability, the acceptance of a more prominent role for women in social life, the introduction of Enlightenment ideas, the dissemination of a rich literature, the supply of models for the creation of a national literature and provision of material for the expansion of the lexical and syntactic resources of Russian. On the contrary, the exceptionalist discourse dwells upon the perceived negative effects of francophonie on the Russian social

18  d. offord, g. argent, v. rjéoutski & l. ryazanova-clarke fabric and the personal wellbeing of the Russian nobility. Bilingualism and biculturalism, if we are to believe Dostoevskii, for instance, were indicative of, and perhaps perpetuated, a deep fracture in the Russian nation between the social elite and the common people and had an enervating effect on Russians who were francophone by weakening their sense of national identity and even their personal ontological security. This negative discourse had many antecedents in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as several of our chapters will show.7 Weight was added to it by the literary accomplishment and moral authority of some of its leading exponents, such as Herzen and Tolstoi, as well as Dostoevskii. It has persisted in the influential scholarship of Lotman (e.g. Lotman and Uspenskij 1984), where it depends, however, on heavy reliance on literary sources whose reliability, for our own purposes, we have called into question (see also the account of Franco-Russian bilingualism in Figes 2002: 53–7). * * * The multilingualism of the Russian elite in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Franco-Russian bilingualism in particular; the development of language consciousness in Russia; the eventual emergence of a standard Russian language which became the vehicle for classical Russian literature, and which was established through the production of that literature: all these phenomena need to be viewed in the context of the transformation that resulted from Peter’s reforms and the continuation of his Westernising project by subsequent eighteenth-century rulers. Westernisation created the conditions in which foreign languages could be learned and valued, of course. At the same time it could hardly have proceeded without knowledge of those foreign languages, not least because knowledge of Russian in the eighteenth-century Western world was negligible. The command of foreign languages which Russians quickly acquired, we have argued, also made it possible to project an image of Russia as a European power and enabled Russia’s emerging writers and emancipated nobles to participate in European intellectual, literary and social communities. Thus acquisition of foreign languages, and of French in particular, was both a means of catching up with the West and a means of proving that Russia as a nation and its social and literary elite were indeed catching up. The phenomenon of bilingualism could also seem problematic, though, and it quickly became one of the subjects contested in the debate about national identity to which Westernisation gave rise. In this introduction, we have surveyed both the foundations laid by other scholars for the study of language use, language choice and

i n t r o duc t i o n   19 language attitudes in Imperial Russia and the ample primary sources of many kinds on which such study can be based. We have also established the historical context in which our work needs, we think, to be located. We have emphasised the extent of the transformation brought about on many levels by eighteenth-century rulers, who looked to the West for models for Russian practice, and we have briefly considered the reflections on Russia’s relationship to the world beyond its western borders that this transformation precipitated. We now turn to the interplay of French and Russian in the age of Catherine. This is a key period in the history of Russians’ acquisition of first-hand knowledge about the West and the spread of the French language in Russia. It is no coincidence that it is equally important in the history of the development of the Russian language, the creation of a native literature and the stirring of national consciousness.

NOTES 1. I.e. a man who has breadth of culture, is courteous and socially at ease, can control his emotions and is able to please at court and in society but also to adapt himself to his surroundings. 2. We use the term here in the sense of ‘French-speaking’. For a discussion of the term, see Rjéoutski et al. (2014), chapter 1. 3. I.e. The International Society for the Study of French as a Foreign or Second Language. 4. For a discussion of ‘modernisation’ in eighteenth-century Russia, see Dixon (1999), especially pp. 1–26. 5. There is a large literature on the Slavophiles: see, for example, Riasanovsky (1965), Walicki (1975) and Rabow-Edling (2006). We should beware, incidentally, of treating positions in this debate as so polarised as they might appear at first sight. Writers working within the Westernist tradition were in most cases nationalists of a sort themselves, while Slavophiles owed their ideas to a considerable extent to the European counter-current to the Enlightenment, particularly to ideas associated with the panEuropean Romantic movement and emanating from the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German world in particular. We should also beware of seeing the ‘Westernisers’ as a coherent intellectual group. 6. ‘We are neither of the West nor of the East, and we possess the traditions of neither. Standing, as it were, outside time, we have not been touched by the universal education of mankind’ (translation from Leatherbarrow and Offord 1987). 7. See, e.g., Chapters 5, 6 and 7, by Derek Offord, Gesine Argent and Gary Hamburg respectively, in Volume 2.

20  d. offord, g. argent, v. rjéoutski & l. ryazanova-clarke

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c h apter 1

French and Russian in Catherine’s Russia Derek Offord, Gesine Argent and Vladislav Rjéoutski

I

n the second half of the eighteenth century foreigners visited Russia in increasing numbers, for cultural, educational, commercial and professional as well as diplomatic purposes. Many of them remarked on the development of Russian bilingualism or multilingualism, which of course facilitated their contact with Russians and made it easier for them to conduct the business that had brought them to Russia. Thus the English envoy to St Petersburg, Sir George Macartney, while by no means complimentary about the general level of knowledge of the Russian nobility, did note their multilingualism and the importance of modern languages in their education. The ‘chief point of their instruction’, he observed in an Account of Russia as he found it in 1767, ‘is a knowledge of foreign languages, particularly the French and German; both of which they usually speak with very great facility’ (Cross 1971: 203). The Scot William Richardson, who took up residence in St Petersburg with the family of Lord Cathcart when Cathcart was appointed ambassador to Russia in 1768, noted the importance of French in particular, though in a strikingly patronising tone: ‘If their children learn to dance’, Richardson wrote, ‘and if they can read, speak, and write French, and have a little geography, [the Russians] desire no more’ (Putnam 1952: 167). The Englishman William Coxe, who travelled more widely in Russia in the 1770s, accompanying his pupil the young Lord Herbert on the gentleman’s Grand Tour in Northern Europe, also noted Russian fondness for and proficiency in French, though with more open-mindedness and generosity: he was delighted to find that his charge and he could converse in French with a family who invited them to dinner in the western city of Smolensk (Putnam 1952: 254). The Frenchman Charles Masson, who lived in Russia during the 1790s, also informed readers of his memoirs that ‘the Russians, almost all brought up by Frenchmen, develop a

26  dere k o f f o rd, ge s ine ar ge nt a n d vl a dis l a v r j é o u t s ki ­ ronounced predilection for [France] from their childhood’ and ‘soon p know its language and history better than those of their own country’ (Masson 1800: vol. 2, p. 176). The rapidity with which French spread among the Russian elite in the second half of the eighteenth century and the range of functions it had (as lingua franca, vehicle for reception of Western knowledge, medium for certain types of writing, instrument of cultural propaganda, language of polite society and so forth) attest to the pace of the Europeanisation of post-Petrine Russia. They also reflect the intensification of this process of Europeanisation in the social and cultural spheres, as opposed to the military, industrial, technological and other spheres in which Peter was primarily interested as he tried to modernise the state he ruled, with territorial expansion uppermost in his mind. For Peter’s practical purposes, French was not necessarily the most important foreign language for Russians to acquire, and in the first half of the eighteenth century it was less widely known and less highly valued than German (Dahmen 2015). In the second half of the eighteenth century, on the other hand, French acquired greater importance in the cultural and intellectual spheres and in the social sphere that was developing on the French model. Our purpose in this chapter will be to complete our survey of the context in which the close studies of language use and language attitudes in our two volumes should be located. We shall go about this task in two ways. First, we aim to provide a broad outline of the ascendancy of French in the spheres we have mentioned during the second half of the century. To this end, we shall describe some of the factors that contributed to the spread of French and the ways in which knowledge of French among the Russian nobility was acquired. Secondly, we shall consider the status of Russian in this bilingual situation and the emergence of a Russian language consciousness. For this purpose, we shall examine the development of a critique of French which encouraged the promotion of Russian, attitudes towards Russian itself, early attempts to codify Russian and the concomitant growth of a native literature of a secular, Western kind. Our focus here will be on the age of Catherine II, both because of the richness of Russia’s cultural development during her reign – a development Catherine actively encouraged and in which she even participated herself – and because of the rising status of the nobility, among whom French became a prestige language, during Catherine’s thirty-four years on the throne. Before embarking on this survey, though, we should once again underline the complexity of the linguistic situation we are describing. This situation was not characterised by simple Franco-Russian bilingualism among the elite. For one thing, various foreign languages were

frenc h and r us s ia n in ca t h e r i n e ’s r u s s i a   27 used and they had value of different sorts (Argent et al. 2015: 14–15, 19). Nor can we classify the elite as a homogeneous group. As Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter has emphasised, the nobility of Imperial Russia was a broad and by no means imporous estate that extended from rich families – such as the Stroganovs and the Vorontsovs, to name two whose language use is examined closely in this volume – to provincial landowners whose wealth was measured in just a small number of serfs (Wirtschafter 1997: especially 22–37). Linguistic practice, like way of life more generally, no doubt varied widely across this social range and between the elite who spent at least part of the year in the capitals, on the one hand, and those provincial nobles who rarely visited the capitals, on the other. Even within individual clans, language use might differ greatly, depending on who was communicating with whom, on the circumstances in which communication was taking place and on the stage of life that a user or addressee had reached (as we may see from Berelowitch’s recent work on language use among the Golitsyns; see Berelowitch 2015: 50–6). Practice varied too, of course, from one generation to another, depending on changes in status, occupation, wealth and educational opportunity (as we see from Jessica Tipton’s work in progress on the Vorontsovs (Tipton 2011–14) and from her chapter in this volume). No simple generalisations, then, can be made about language use among the late eighteenthcentury Russian nobility.

TH E SPREA D OF FRENC H Many factors account for the ascendancy of French over German (the foreign language with which French was chiefly in competition), and for its spread as a prestige language among the elite society that was beginning to flourish in Russia in the second half of the eighteenth century and as a language which it was also essential to know in the emergent world of letters there. One such factor was cultural fashion at the court of Elizabeth I, daughter of Peter the Great, for it was during her reign that the court became a cosmopolitan environment frequented by French diplomats, French theatre troupes and francophone Russian courtiers, such as Ivan Shuvalov and Mikhail Vorontsov. The Frenchman La Messelière, who accompanied a French ambassador to St Petersburg in 1757, noted this development, declaring that French was spoken comme à Paris (as in Paris) (Cross 1971: 34, 194). To some degree, political circumstances too favoured the spread of French in the late 1750s and early 1760s. There was a diplomatic rapprochement between Russia and France at

28  dere k o f f o rd, ge s ine ar ge nt a n d vl a dis l a v r j é o u t s ki the beginning of the Seven Years War (1756–63). More importantly, on the cultural level, the status of French in the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters was of course a telling factor. It was a French literary corpus – containing the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, the comedies of Molière, the satires and Poetic Art (Art poétique) of Boileau – that provided the aesthetic doctrine of Classicism and the chief generic models for the Russian writers who began in the ages of Anne, Elizabeth and Catherine to lay the foundations for a secular national literature in Russia. (Antiokh Kantemir, Vasilii Trediakovskii and Aleksandr Sumarokov are important intermediaries in the reception of French literature in Russia in the decades following Peter’s death.1) Likewise, it was the writings of French political philosophers, moralists and encyclopédistes – Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, d’Alembert, Rousseau – which provided Russian writers with much of their food for thought during Catherine’s reign. In any case, the French language, by the second half of the eighteenth century, had become the dominant language of international communication within Europe in the fields of learning, literature and intellectual life, as well as diplomacy. It was also the language through which Russian readers came to know many works of modern and classical European literature. Its status was bolstered by claims that were being made in the age of Catherine about its supposedly exceptional inherent qualities, such as naturalness, logic and clarity (clarté), and above all about its universality (universalité), which was celebrated in a prize-winning essay presented by Antoine de Rivarol for a competition organised by the Berlin Academy in 1783 (Rivarol 1991). There is, however, one further major factor – a factor of a social nature – that helps to explain the rapid spread of French in Russia in the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1762, in the short and ill-fated reign of Peter III, the Russian nobility was emancipated from the compulsory service in the army, navy or civil administration that Peter the Great had relentlessly required, and that subsequent rulers had also demanded, if in slightly less onerous form since 1736. Whether this emancipation caused angst and even a sense of futility to the degree suggested by Marc Raeff in his stimulating study of the eighteenth-century nobility, making nobles into ‘superfluous men’ avant la lettre (Raeff 1966), it undoubtedly did have a major impact on the mentality of members of the estate, enabling them to conceive of themselves as a corporation of a Western sort. Catherine affirmed their exemption from the obligation to serve, and defined other privileges, in the charter she granted the nobility in 1785 (Madariaga 1981: 296–9). It is no coincidence that the habit of French-speaking became wide-

frenc h and r us s ia n in ca t h e r i n e ’s r u s s i a   29 spread among Russian nobles at the moment when the nobility, emancipated from service, was aspiring to become a European estate with rights and privileges as well as obligations. As a form of behaviour that characterised European nobilities, French-speaking became a mark of status, like the coats-of-arms that Russian noble families were also acquiring during the eighteenth century. It bolstered nobles’ sense of self-worth, enabling them to conceive of themselves as equals in the European world they were entering and in which they sought to inscribe themselves.2 For this reason, command of French had a social value higher than that attached to knowledge of German, although German remained useful for many practical purposes (Dahmen 2015). The use of French as an indicator of social worth and a means of social differentiation is strikingly illustrated in a passage from an autobiographical memoir written by Denis Fonvizin, the author of two important comic dramas, The Brigadier (Brigadir, 1769) and The Minor (Nedorosl’, 1782) and one of the major men of letters of the age of Catherine. Fonvizin recalls an encounter that he had in his youth, in the early 1760s, in a St Petersburg theatre, ‘with the son of a certain personage’. The ‘very manner’ of this man, Fonvizin wrote, impressed me by his evident sense of self-worth. He asked me if I could speak French. When I responded that I could not, his interest in me seemed to pass rather quickly. Apparently he considered me ignorant and improperly schooled. So he began taunting me […] This whole episode taught me how necessary it was for a young man to know French. I immediately undertook the study of the language. (Fonvizin 1985: 41) As a description of norms of social behaviour, Fonvizin’s remarks might be taken as substantiation of Iurii Lotman’s view that French-speaking was a tool used by nobles for the purpose of self-fashioning, a ‘social sign’, part of the performance required to confirm membership of a closed corporation (Lotman 1992–3: 351). Fonvizin’s acknowledgement of the importance that command of French had for the ambitious Russian nobleman around the beginning of the age of Catherine is all the more striking for the fact that Fonvizin himself was an early representative of what we might now call Russian cultural nationalism and nascent Gallophobia. Something similar may be said of Mikhail Shcherbatov, who in his treatise On the Corruption of Morals in Russia (O povrezhdenii nravov v Rossii) complained of the progressive addiction of his compatriots to the habits of luxury imported from the West and of their consequent moral degeneration (Shcherbatov

30  dere k o f f o rd, ge s ine ar ge nt a n d vl a dis l a v r j é o u t s ki 1969). Nevertheless, in letters written in the 1770s, Shcherbatov exhorted his adolescent son to apply himself to the study of French, since it ‘is now so widespread in Europe and consequently necessary both for conversation and for instruction because of the large number of good authors who have written in this language’. He also evidently considered it his paternal duty to help to prepare his son to live in a way worthy of his ancient aristocratic family by conducting his correspondence with him in French, chiding young Dmitrii for the shortcomings in his French grammar and spelling, although Shcherbatov himself refused to use French in other correspondence with his compatriots (Shcherbatov 2011: 352–4, 357–61).3 The importance of foreign languages in eighteenth-century Russia, and of French in particular in the second half of the century, is reflected in the considerable effort that went into teaching and learning them. They had a prominent place, for example, in the curriculum of the public educational institutions that sprang up in the eighteenth century, such as Moscow University (founded in 1755), the school attached to it and the Smol’nyi Institute for Noble Maidens established in St Petersburg by Catherine’s decree in 1764 (see Rjéoutski 2013). In the Smol’nyi in particular, French overshadowed German and the pupils seem to have had a very good command of it. This state of affairs may be explained partly by the importance of this institution for Catherine’s court (the empress often showed off the Smol’nyi to her foreign guests, including sovereigns). No doubt it also reflects the fact that noble women were now expected to represent their family in places of sociability where French was by this time de rigueur.4 It is indicative of the growing importance of French that both the standard reached and the numbers choosing to study it seem to have risen during Catherine’s reign in another important educational institution, the Noble Land Cadet Corps. If in 1764 not all cadets studied French and many of those who did, judging by extant information on examinations, attained only a mediocre level, by the late 1780s, on the other hand, numbers and standards were much higher. Take, for example, the following greeting sent to the director by a pupil at the New Year in 1790:    Monsieur le Comte.   Qui peut trouver plus de sujets de reconnoissance et de remerciemens, que nous? Tous les jours Votre Excellence repand sur nous de nouveaux bienfaits, toujours Elle cherche à nous procurer des plaisirs, pour nous rendre nos études faciles; par vos sages conseils M. le Comte nous nous accoutumons à vaincre tous les obstacles qui se présentent à notre esprit,

frenc h and r us s ia n in ca t h e r i n e ’s r u s s i a   31 ainsi comblé de vos bienfaits, je me fait un devoir de vous en témoigner ma juste reconnoissance; de vous souhaiter tout ce qui peut faire votre parfaite félicité.   Le 1 Janvier 1790. Smirnoff. (RNB, OR, f. 1059, ‘Compliments du nouvel an, 1790’ (folios not numbered))5 This improvement in standards was no doubt due in part to the arrival of foreign teachers, including women. Thus a cadet expressing his gratitude to an assembly of the Corps in 1791, attributed his progress to a Mme la Baronne Usslar, a Mlle Euler and other female teachers and governesses (RNB, OR, f. 1059, d. ‘L’histoire de la vie de trois cadets’, fol. 8 v.). French was by now the foreign language most used at formal assemblies of the institution, such as New Year celebrations (RNB, OR, f. 1059, ‘Compliments du nouvel an, 1790’). Most of the short ‘dialogues’ composed and presented by pupils at such events, for example, were written in French, especially when both Russian cadets and cadets from the Baltic territories were present.6 Evidently, much teaching of other subjects, such as mathematics and geometry, took place in French right up until the end of Catherine’s reign. We also find that certain works (for example, a collection of thoughts written in French by the Swedish Count Oxenstierna (1721)) were read in the original even when a Russian translation was available.7 French seems, moreover, to have remained the principal language of internal communication in the Corps even at the end of the 1780s, by which time Russian had gained higher status in the institution (as we shall see in the following section). The director still used French in his prefaces to collections of documents written by the cadets, although he himself was a native German, Friedrich von Anhalt, and was said by contemporaries to have an excellent command of Russian (RNB, OR, f. 1059).8 However, many of the pupils in public education institutions such as the Cadet Corps were not from the higher echelons of the nobility but from the lower gentry or non-noble backgrounds. For them, the language that had the greatest social value, the lingua franca of the European aristocracy, was not necessarily the most useful, nor did their families have the means to enable them to perfect their knowledge of it. Among the higher noble families, on the other hand, the preferred method of foreign-language acquisition was employment of resident francophone tutors or governesses. The French language would be instilled in pupils not merely through lessons on grammar and oral and written exercises (of which abundant examples survive in archival sources) but also through lessons delivered in French on other academic subjects such as

32  dere k o f f o rd, ge s ine ar ge nt a n d vl a dis l a v r j é o u t s ki geography and history, or through instruction in music, dancing, fencing and acting, or simply through the previously undeveloped art of polite conversation at the dinner-table. Then, if the family could afford it, command would be perfected by the educational Grand Tour, when the pupil would usually be accompanied by the francophone tutor himself, or by spells of study in foreign higher education institutions, for which prior knowledge of French might be a prerequisite. Knowledge might be further improved by participation in Western forms of sociability, such as gatherings in masonic lodges, which many young Russians frequented during their periods of study abroad in the age of Catherine (Rjéoutski and Offord 2012b).9 Once a certain level of knowledge of a foreign language had been acquired, of course, it could be maintained and improved through reading as well as through travel and social contact. (The emancipation of 1762, it should be noted, afforded the nobility the freedom and leisure to cultivate themselves.) The libraries of noble families, as well as public institutions, attest to the availability of and interest in French literature, and literature in other languages that had been translated into French, in Russia in the second half of the eighteenth century. Berelowitch, having studied Shcherbatov’s library on the basis of a catalogue that was compiled for it in 1790, finds that almost three quarters of the books in it were in French and that a great number of these were translations from Latin, German, English or Italian (Berelowitch 2006). He concludes that ‘in this barely Latinised country, French – perhaps more than elsewhere in Europe – was a language of culture and communication, a pathway leading to other languages that were not well-known’ (Berelowitch 2015: 49). Other chapters in our two volumes, on such subjects as the Russian francophone press and the Russian-language fashion press,10 indicate other sources of reading material which could keep linguistic knowledge fresh and extend it.

T HE PRO M OTI ON OF R USSI AN In addition to all the features we have already identified which encouraged the spread of French in Russia in the second half of the eighteenth century, mention should be made of the perceived weakness of Russian as a vehicle for a literature of the secular kind with which Russians were becoming familiar as a result of their increasing contact with Western Europe. Russian was often felt to be inadequate for certain purposes. Thus Aleksandr Mikhailovich Golitsyn, writing in 1785 to one of his nephews, who was in Strasbourg at the time, did encourage him to

frenc h and r us s ia n in ca t h e r i n e ’s r u s s i a   33 perfect his written command of Russian but also enjoined him to resort to French for a travel journal and description of everything worthy of attention that he might see while he was abroad. His nephew would come up against insurmountable difficulties, Golitsyn thought, if he were to attempt to write about such matters in Russian (Berelowitch 2015: 51–2). The written varieties known in pre-Petrine Muscovy, after all, had not been put to this sort of use. These varieties were predominantly the Church Slavonic that was used in the liturgy and in ecclesiastical genres, such as sermons and hagiography, and the chancery language used by the Muscovite bureaucracy. In any case, the written language differed considerably from the spoken language, as the late seventeenthcentury German traveller Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf had noticed when he compared the phonological and lexical Slavonicisms he encountered in religious texts with the Russians forms he found in the spoken language, of which he noted down examples in his Grammatica Russica, first published in Oxford in 1696. The Muscovites, Ludolf observed in his preface, described their linguistic practice thus: loquendum est russice & scribendum est Slavonice (Ludolf [1696] 1959).11 Nevertheless, as Russians began to embark in earnest on a key aspect of the Westernisation of their culture, the creation of a secular literature in the vernacular, they soon began to feel offended by linguistic subservience to another nation. Use of another people’s language seemed less and less appropriate as Russia asserted itself on the European stage through its military prowess, territorial expansion and diplomatic presence and the international exposure of Catherine’s court. Wounded linguistic pride was pointedly expressed by Nikolai Novikov, a major figure in the development of publishing and the periodical press in Catherine’s Russia. A fictitious ‘correspondent’ in one of his journals has a volume of the works of the scientist, polymath and poet Mikhail Lomonosov in his library and instructs his bookbinder to put the title on the spine of this volume in French so that he may avoid the ignominy of being thought to own a Russian book (Jones 1984: 113). A similar sentiment is expressed around the end of Catherine’s reign in Nikolai Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller (Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, first published 1791– 1801), which grew out of Karamzin’s journey to Germany, Switzerland, France and England in 1789–90. Russians should be ashamed to behave like parrots and apes, Karamzin remarked, when an encounter with an English lady who was reluctant to speak French to him prompted him to reflect on linguistic practice in high society in his homeland. Russians should develop their own language for the expression of their own thoughts (Karamzin 1984: 338). Such feelings gave rise to a new linguistic consciousness, which took many forms.

34  dere k o f f o rd, ge s ine ar ge nt a n d vl a dis l a v r j é o u t s ki For one thing, the topos of contamination of the Russian language by French began to be used. It found particularly vivid expression (as linguistic Gallophobia did elsewhere in Europe) in comic drama, to which Chapter 5 in our second volume is devoted, and in the satirical journalism that also began to develop in the age of Catherine.12 Language mixing and code-switching were stigmatised. The image of the French tutor responsible for French-language tuition and the inculcation of French culture in the Russian youth was also tarnished (Rjéoutski 2012). The topos of contamination was perhaps encouraged by a more general cultural mood – which was itself imported from Western countries, including France! – that found expression in Rousseauesque imaginings about a simple pastoral way of life far removed from the luxury and contrivance of the court and even in Stoicism, whose values pervaded Fonvizin’s writings (Offord 2005: 27). Faced with the French linguistic invasion, Russian writers also began to adapt for their own use the practice much used by other European peoples – the Italians, the English, the French and, most recently, the Germans – of extolling the supposedly exceptional innate qualities of their own language. (This practice is quite at variance, of course, with modern linguistic views about the equal potentiality of all human languages and the role of political and social circumstances in combining to privilege one language or variety of it over others.) The practice began well before the arrival of Catherine on the throne, it should be said. Thus Sumarokov, in an epistle on the Russian language that he wrote in 1747, conscious that Russian has not yet displayed itself in a literature as rich as those written in ancient Greek, Latin or contemporary French, contended that Russian itself was not without merit: ‘Our language’, he wrote, ‘is sweet, pure and luxuriant and rich’. Sumarokov plainly subscribed to the view that languages are of unequal merit, referring dismissively, for example, to the languages spoken by Mordvinians and Votiaks (Sumarokov 1957: 112–15). Lomonosov too famously eulogised the Russian language in the preface to his Russian grammar, first published in 1755, where he took up a witticism attributed, no doubt inaccurately, to the sixteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who, according to Lomonosov, used to say that it was fitting to speak Spanish to God, French to friends, German to enemies and Italian to the female sex. But if he had been expert in Russian he would of course have added that it was fitting to speak it with all of those, for he would have found in it the magnificence of Spanish, the vivacity of French, the strength of German and the tenderness of Italian and, moreover, the rich-

frenc h and r us s ia n in ca t h e r i n e ’s r u s s i a   35 ness and concision of Greek and Latin. (Lomonosov 1950–7: vol. 7, p. 391) In a similar vein Karamzin praises the purity and supple versatility of Russian in his Letters of a Russian Traveller: Honour and glory to our language, which in its native wealth, with virtually no foreign admixture, flows like a proud, majestic river: it roars and thunders, and all of a sudden, if need be, it becomes muted and babbles like a gentle brook and sweetly seeps into the soul, forming every metre that is contained within the rise and fall of the human voice! (Karamzin 1984: 370) Catherine herself, according to Dashkova, opportunistically subscribed to this linguistic patriotism, predicting that the Russian language, uniting as it did the energy of the German with the sweetness of the Italian, would one day become the standard language of the world (Rogger 1960: 113). No matter that such tropes about the virtues of Russian were themselves variations on Western themes. The passage we have quoted from Karamzin looks remarkably like a reworking of a paean to the French language by the seventeenth-century French Jesuit Dominique Bouhours.13 It sits comfortably in the contemporary international discourse – emanating from France, we again emphasise – about the purity, naturalness, universality and multifunctionality of languages deemed to be superior. The rising status of Russian was reflected in its growing prominence in the domain of education, both as a means of instruction and as a subject of study. Mikhail Kheraskov, the Rector of Moscow University, sought permission in 1767 for the use of Russian as the language of instruction in the university, and this measure was implemented the following year (see Rogger 1960: 109–10).14 Russian also became more important as a language of instruction at the Smol’nyi Institute as a result of Catherine’s educational reforms of the 1780s (Dahmen 2015: 35). Again we may illustrate the trend by reference to the archive of the Cadet Corps. In the institution’s early years German was taught to all pupils and French to many, though not all, while Russian was taught only to cadets from the families of the Baltic nobility, no doubt as a means of integrating into the Russian Empire the nobility of regions that had only just become part of it. The absence of Russian as a subject of study for Russian pupils of the Corps, some of whom entered the Corps at the age of six, would seem to suggest that it was not felt important at that time for the Russian nobility to master the written form of their language. Nor was Russian used as

36  dere k o f f o rd, ge s ine ar ge nt a n d vl a dis l a v r j é o u t s ki a medium for teaching foreign languages, which were taught mostly by foreigners who did not know Russian. Even in 1748, only about 23 per cent of the Russian pupils were studying it. By 1764, on the other hand that number had roughly doubled. The sense among the Russian nobility that it was important for their children to have a command of their native language may have been strengthened by the attitude of Ivan Betskoi, who is often seen as Catherine’s unofficial minister of education and who became head of the Cadet Corps in 1765. In 1766 Betskoi drew up a new set of rules, which included a section on language teaching. Russian became a compulsory subject from the moment a pupil entered the institution. Moreover, Russian was to be the medium for tuition in other subjects. The amount of space devoted to this point in Betskoi’s document suggests that it had considerable pedagogical significance for him: if cadets are taught Geography, History and other subjects in a language other than their native one, then the benefit of this will not be great. […] If [a child] has been taught in a foreign language, then these subjects will seem quite new and unprecedented to him in his native language. Similarly, cadets will never learn to speak another language in a pure way if they speak only Russian in the Corps.   We see clear proof that it makes a big difference which language subjects are taught in [when we consider] that cadets from Liefland and other Foreigners learn more and faster than Russians do, because they learn everything in their own language. ([Betskoi] 1766: 63–4; Betskoi’s italics) Betksoi’s views on the role of the native language in education and in the upbringing of the nobleman in particular should be seen, like so much else in the evolution of Russian language consciousness, in a broad European context. After all, Betskoi and people in his circle were well acquainted with European pedagogical literature, especially the writings of Rousseau. Betskoi himself had spent many years in France and was in several respects a product of French culture. At the same time, his views do need to be set against the Russian background we have described. That is to say, French had spread in Russian noble society and a critique of the nobility’s linguistic behaviour, which some were beginning to associate with estrangement from national roots, had taken hold in literature and journalism. It is of relevance in this connection that Betskoi emphasised the need to study the ‘Slavonic language’, by which he meant Church Slavonic, ‘in order to be able to write Russian correctly and eloquently, and thereby to understand our church books better’ ([Betskoi] 1766: 50).

frenc h and r us s ia n in ca t h e r i n e ’s r u s s i a   37 Documents in the Cadet Corps archive also provide further information on the place of Russian in the Cadet Corps towards the end of Catherine’s reign, from 1788 to 1794. These documents comprise notes made by cadets of different ages, such as quotations from various authors (there are more than three hundred volumes of such notes) and greetings to the director on the occasion of his birthday or at the New Year. All these documents were written with the aim of improving pupils’ command of languages and their written style. It is clear that by now Russian was one of the official languages of the institution, since it was obligatory to use all three languages, French, German and Russian, on formal occasions, for which many of the texts we have listed were produced (RNB, f. 1059). The growing sense of national self-awareness and pride; the influx of Europeanisms into Russian in the eighteenth century (Hüttl-Worth 1963; Smith 2006);15 concern with the state of the vernacular (what we should now call language ecology); the rapid development of a print culture, which disseminated linguistic practices that had previously been largely confined to particular groups or regions: all these factors encouraged lexical and grammatical systematisation, in other words codification and standardisation, processes that typically involve the production of grammars and dictionaries. Lomonosov had contributed to this process in the age of Elizabeth when he produced the first descriptive grammar of literary Russian (Lomonosov [1755] 1950–7), in which he distinguished Church Slavonic and Russian elements and literary and dialectal material (Matthews 1960: 312). He also defined three linguistic ‘styles’ (стили), or registers, which he labelled ‘low’ (низкий), ‘middle’ (посредственный) and ‘high’ (высокий), and he identified philological and lexical features associated with each style and literary genres in which it was appropriate to use them (Lomonosov [1758] 1950–7). Production of grammars quickened in the age of Catherine. There was Nikolai Kurganov’s Universal Russian Grammar […] (Rossiiskaia universal’naia grammatika […]), of which ten editions appeared between 1769 and 1837, for example. This was followed by Vasilii Svetov’s Brief Rules for the Study of Russian (Kratkie pravila k izucheniiu iazyka rossiiskogo, 1790), Anton Barsov’s Short Rules of Russian Grammar (Kratkie pravila rossiiskoi grammatiki, 1771) and Petr Sokolov’s Basic Principles of Russian Grammar (Nachal’nye osnovaniia rossiiskoi grammatiki, 1788) (all listed by Rogger 1960: 119–20). Attempts to describe and systematise Russian vocabulary gathered pace too. Petr Alekseev published an Ecclesiastical Dictionary (Tserkovnyi slovar’) in 1773–6 under the aegis of a Free Russian Assembly that had been established in Moscow University in 1771. Catherine herself

38  dere k o f f o rd, ge s ine ar ge nt a n d vl a dis l a v r j é o u t s ki encouraged lexicographical ventures.16 In 1785, she commanded Peter Simon Pallas, a German naturalist, to compile a comparative dictionary. Nearly 300 Russian words were selected, many by Catherine herself, and at her behest equivalents of these words in as many as possible from 200 European and Asian languages were collected (Wendland 1991: 492 f.). The first volume of the resultant Comparative Vocabulary of the Languages of the Whole World (Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa) was published in 1786–9 and came out in a Russian edition in 1790–1.17 These lexicographical efforts were crowned by the work of the Imperial Russian Academy, founded by Catherine in 1783, with Dashkova as its first president.18 Dashkova, a confidante of Catherine’s from the days when she came to power, claims in her memoirs to have told Catherine during a friendly conversation that there was a need to establish a Russian academy and create a good dictionary in order ‘to do away with the absurdity of using foreign words and terms while having our own’ (Dashkova 1995: 213, quoted in Considine 2014: 154). Catherine, Dashkova continues, promptly asked her to draw up a plan for such an academy. In her opening speech at the first meeting of this academy, Dashkova declared that because the rules of the Russian language were not written down systematically anywhere, there was too much variety and borrowing of foreign words, and that the first tasks of the academy would therefore be the compilation of a grammar and a dictionary (Dashkova 1783). The dictionary overseen by Dashkova, the Dictionary of the Russian Academy (Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi), comprised six volumes which were published over the period 1789–94 and included a total of 43,257 words. The opening pages of the volumes summarise the input of the contributors, who included highly placed court officials, famous writers such as Fonvizin and the poet Gavrila Derzhavin, scientists, mathematicians and historians. Dashkova herself collected and defined words about moral qualities (Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi 1794: 2). The preface to the first volume announces that the dictionary serves a demonstrative purpose: without such a dictionary it would be impossible to prove the beauty, importance and strength of a language (1789: v). The reader is told that the dictionary will also show how to use the language correctly. Thus it is intended as a normative collection of words, and its content and prescriptions are in fact further detached from contemporary language use than was the case for other academy dictionaries of the same era (Considine 2014: 156). Perhaps Russian linguistic purism affected the editors’ approach. At any rate, the introduction specifies that foreign words have been avoided where possible, particularly those that have

frenc h and r us s ia n in ca t h e r i n e ’s r u s s i a   39 been ‘introduced without need and which have Slavonic or Russian equivalents’ (Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi 1789: ix). This approach foreshadows the strengthening of the link between language and nationality that would become so marked in the nineteenth century. In the dictionary itself, the entry for язык, or more specifically the sub-entry for the word in its meaning ‘language’, is enlightening in this respect. It defines language as ‘a dialect, the words and ways of speaking used by a people’ (1794: 1037 f.). Thus languages are linked to particular groups, and there is no mention of the possibility of multilingualism.19 We have described in this section the critique of Russians’ use, or abuse, of French, the topos of linguistic contamination, the glorification of Russian, extension of the use of Russian in education and the beginnings of codification of the vernacular. All these manifestations of language consciousness can be associated with that crucial aspect of cultural nation-building, the development of a new native literary tradition. Thus we see Sumarokov, Fonvizin, Kheraskov, Derzhavin, Karamzin and many other writers producing examples of work in the main forms and genres, in both poetry and prose, that were utilised in European literature, including of course those forms and genres in the French canon. Karamzin in particular is commonly considered to have made, through his prose writings, the most important contribution before Pushkin to the development of the Russian literary language (Vinogradov 1969: especially 102–4). This literary enterprise was supported by the establishment of such prerequisites for a literary culture as publishing houses and booksellers (see Marker 1985) and by the production of periodicals and almanacs, to whose development first Novikov and then (in the 1790s and early 1800s) Karamzin made major contributions. It is important when viewing this eighteenth-century body of letters to discard the distorting lens of later critics and scholars who have viewed art as an end in itself and to focus on the patriotic impulse that drove these writers to create an independent literature that would first replicate and then, they hoped, equal and surpass the achievement of Western peoples. It is indicative of the burgeoning sense of nationhood, incidentally, that historical writing was a particularly important component of the literary corpus in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russia. Shcherbatov, with Catherine’s encouragement, continued the task begun by Vasilii Tatishchev in the first half of the eighteenth century, laying foundations for a native historical tradition through his collection of primary source material and his (unfinished) seven-volume History of Russia from the Earliest Times (Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, 1770– 91). Karamzin would crown this first stage in Russian historiography with

40  dere k o f f o rd, ge s ine ar ge nt a n d vl a dis l a v r j é o u t s ki his twelve-volume, but unfinished, History of the Russian State (Istoriia Gosudarstva Rossiiskogo 1816–29), written and largely published during the reign of Alexander I. These writers consciously rejected French influence or models as they went about the tasks of collecting material and producing a historical narrative of their own. Novikov regarded his collection and periodical publication of Russian archival material as a defence of Russia against Russians who had succumbed to Gallomania: ‘Not all of us yet, thank God, are contaminated by France’, he wrote in his preface (Jones 1984: 115–16). Karamzin, for his part, conceived of his History, long before he embarked upon it in earnest, as a corrective to the sort of account written by the French historian Pierre-Charles Levesque who, Karamzin complained, could never understand Russia because Russian blood did not flow in his veins (Karamzin 1984: 253). It is significant that European neologisms, which were a conspicuous feature of Karamzin’s early fictional prose and his Letters of a Russian Traveller, were more sparingly used in his later historical writing, and not merely, one suspects, because the subject-matter of his History was pre-modern. * * * In considering the interplay of French and Russian, we have emphasised the connection between the spread of French in Russia in the age of Catherine and the simultaneous rise of classical Russian literature. Far from being a bane, familiarity with French – like familiarity with medieval Latin in Renaissance Italy and then in France – affected the vernacular by stimulating the development of linguistic consciousness and native literary production. The French language also enriched the literature that was being born by providing vocabulary and phraseology, syntactic and stylistic models, and examples of new literary genres. The importance that the French language and the culture which accompanied it acquired in Russia in the age of Catherine, finally, invites reflection on the degree to which language use is integral to identity. Does speaking a language really imply attachment to the country inhabited by those who speak it as a mother tongue? Language, we contend, would become more closely tied to notions of individual and collective identity in the nineteenth century, when the sense of cultural nationhood became stronger, in Russia and many other parts of Europe, than it had been in the age we have been examining in this chapter. In the late eighteenth century, when a multi-ethnic empire was ruled by a francophone German sovereign who positioned Russia within the European community, a bilingual or multilingual identity was less discomfiting for Russian nobles, pace many of Russia’s early satirical journalists and comic dramatists, than has often been supposed. It would become more

frenc h and r us s ia n in ca t h e r i n e ’s r u s s i a   41 problematic for the mid-nineteenth-century intelligentsia, which was drawn from various social backgrounds and whose views were deeply coloured by the Romantic movement and nationalist notions.

NOTES We have drawn in this chapter on small amounts of the material that we have previously published in Rjéoutski et al. (2014) and Argent et al. (2015).  1. On Kantemir and Trediakovskii, in this connection, see Rjéoutski and Offord (2012a), and Gretchanaia (2012: chapter 1), respectively. On Sumarokov, see especially Volume 2, Chapter 3, by Svetlana Skomorokhova.   2. As shown especially in Chapter 3 in this volume, by Vladislav Rjéoutski and Vladimir Somov, on the Stroganovs.   3. Shcherbatov does not regard French as the only foreign language which it is important for the Russian nobleman to acquire. He also reminds his son how necessary it is to know German, because several provinces of the vast Russian Empire speak this language, because Russia is near to German-speaking countries and because Russians have various types of relationship with the German-speaking ‘nation’.   4. On French in Russia as the ‘language of women’, see Chapter 12, by Nina Dmitrieva and Gesine Argent, in this volume.   5. ‘Sir Count. Who can find more things than we can to be grateful for and to offer thanks for? Every day Your Excellency bestows new acts of kindness on us, every day You seek new ways of obtaining favours for us to make our studies easier; through your wise counsel, Sir, we become accustomed to overcoming all the obstacles which confront our minds and thus overwhelmed by your acts of kindness I feel it my duty to express my true gratitude and to wish you everything that may make you perfectly happy. 1 January 1790. Smirnov.’   6. E.g. ‘Dialogue récité devant son excellence Monsieur Le Comte d’Analt, général en chef du Corps des Cadets gentilhommes, par MM. les Cadets du Pr. Age, le 10 mai 1792’, RNB, OR, f. 1059, ‘Compliments ou harangues courtes et flatteuses’ (1792 ), fols 43–7 v.; ‘Dialogue récité à l’occasion de l’anniversaire de la naissance de Son Excellence Monsieur le Comte d’Anhalt, chef du Corps Impérial des nobles Cadets de terre’, ibid., f. 1059, ‘Compliments ou harangues courtes et flatteuses’ (1793), fols 55–61 v.; ‘Dialogue entre Mrs les Cadets du 1er âge à l’occasion de la Fête de Mr le Comte d’Anhalt le 10 de Mai 1794’ (1794), ibid., f. 1059, ‘Compliments ou harangues courtes et flatteuses’ (1794), fols 21–5 v.   7. The translation of this work had been printed on the Corps’s own printing press (Oxensherne, Iu. T., Razmyshleniia i nravouchitel’nye pravila gospodina Oksen-stirna […], St Petersburg, 1771).   8. See ‘La pratique journalière’, 1788, fol. 1; ‘Compliments du nouvel an’, 1790, fol. 1; ‘L’histoire de la vie de trois cadets’, fol. 1, etc.   9. The fact that it was men from the higher ranks of the nobility who tended to frequent masonic lodges may help to some extent to explain why their command of French was superior to that of men from the lower nobility. 10. On these subjects, see Chapter 3 in this volume, by Vladislav Rjéoutski and Vladimir Somov, and Chapter 10, by Xénia Borderioux. 11. ‘Russian should be used for speaking and Slavonic for writing.’ Slavonicised forms

42  dere k o f f o rd, ge s ine ar ge nt a n d vl a dis l a v r j é o u t s ki such as глава, глад and град (head, hunger, city) could be compared with the Russian pleophonic forms голова, голод and город; нощь (night) with ночь; the aorist form любих (I loved) with the Russian past tense любил; and, in the field of lexis, Slavonic рекл (said) with Russian сказал. 12. See especially Volume 2, Chapter 4, by Carole Chapin. 13. ‘Italian is like those streams that babble pleasantly over the stones, meandering through meadows full of flowers, yet sometimes swelling so much that they flood the whole countryside […] French is like those beautiful rivers that enrich every place they pass through; without being either fast or slow, their waters roll majestically and they take a course that is always even’ (quoted by Nadia Minerva in Rjéoutski et al. 2014: 123). 14. We are grateful to Dmitrii Kostyshin for refinement of this point. 15. On lexical borrowing, see also Chapter 10, by Xénia Borderioux, and Chapter 11, by Sergei and Iuliia Klimenko, in this volume and Chapter 9, by Olga VassilievaCodognet, in Volume 2. 16. Catherine’s own views on linguistic matters are also explored elsewhere in these volumes: her language practice in personal correspondence is examined in Chapter 2, by Georges Dulac, in this volume and her views on language in general are presented by Stephen Bruce in Volume 2, Chapter 1. 17. Motivated perhaps by fears that this work might compete with her own lexicographical endeavours for royal attention, Dashkova dismissed it as ‘a sort of glossary in ninety to a hundred languages, some of which were represented by no more than a score of words such as Earth, Sky, Water, Father, Mother etc. […]’; it was ‘useless and imperfect’ (Dashkova 1995: 216, quoted by Considine 2014: 154). 18. Dashkova’s own views on language use are the subject of Chapter 2 in Volume 2, by Michelle Lamarche Marrese, and are also mentioned by Carole Chapin in Volume 2, Chapter 4. 19. For a fuller history of the dictionary, see Varvazzo-Biensan (1998) and Viellard (2006). For details on other lexicographical projects in Russia, both before and after Dashkova, see Jachnow (1990). The Academy grammar duly appeared in 1802.

REFERENCES Argent, G., D. Offord and V. Rjéoutski (2015), ‘The functions and value of foreign languages in eighteenth-century Russia’, The Russian Review, 74: 1, 1–19. Berelowitch, W. (2006), ‘La bibliothèque en langues occidentales de Mikhaïl Chtcherbatov: premières approches’, in S. Ia. Karp (ed.), Le siècle des Lumières, 1: Espace culturel de l’Europe à l’époque de Catherine II, Moscow: Nauka, pp. 282–93. Berelowitch, W. (2015), ‘Francophonie in Russia under Catherine II: general reflections and individual cases’, The Russian Review, 74: 1, 41–56. [Betskoi, I.] (1766), Ustav imperatorskogo shliakhetnogo sukhoputnogo kadetskogo korpusa uchrezhdennogo v Sankt-Peterburge dlia vospitaniia i obucheniia blagorodnogo rossiiskogo iunoshestva, St Petersburg: Imprimerie du Corps des cadets de l’armée de terre. Considine, J. (2014), Academy Dictionaries 1600–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cross, A. (1971), Russia under Western Eyes, 1517–1825, London: Elek Books.

frenc h and r us s ia n in ca t h e r i n e ’s r u s s i a   43 Dahmen, K. (2015), ‘The use, functions, and spread of German in eighteenth-century Russia’, The Russian Review, 74: 1, 20–40. Dashkova, E. (1783), ‘Rech’ pri otkrytii imperatorskoi rossiiskoi akademii’, at http://​ az.lib.ru/​d/​dashkowa_e_r/​text_0060.shtml (last accessed on 22 October 2014). Dashkova, E. R. (1995), The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova: Russia in the Time of Catherine the Great, trans. and ed. K. Fitzlyon; introduction by J. M. Gheith, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Fonvizin, D. I.] (1985), The Political and Legal Writings of Denis Fonvizin, trans. with notes and an introduction by W. Gleason, Ann Arbor: Ardis. Gretchanaia, E. (2012), ‘Je vous parlerai la langue de l’Europe…’ La francophonie en Russie (XVIIIe–XIXe siècles), Brussels: Peter Lang. Hüttl-Worth, G. (1963), Foreign Words in Russian, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Jachnow, H. (1990), ‘Russische Lexikographie’, in F. J. Hausmann, O. Reichmann, H. E. Wiegand, L. Zgusta (eds), Wörterbücher, Dictionaries, Dictionnaires. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Lexikographie, vol. 2, Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, pp. 2309–29. Jones, W. G. (1984), Nikolay Novikov, Enlightener of Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karamzin, N. M. [1791–1801] (1984), Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, ed. Iu. M. Lotman, N. A. Marchenko and B. A. Uspenskii, Leningrad: Nauka. Lomonosov, M. V. [1755] (1950–7), Rossiiskaia grammatika, in Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10 vols, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, vol. 7, pp. 389–578. Lomonosov, M. V. [1758] (1950–7), ‘Predislovie o pol’ze knig tserkovnykh v rossiiskom iazyke’, in Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10 vols, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, vol. 7, pp. 587–92. Lotman, Iu. M. (1992–3), ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, in Lotman, Izbrannye stat’i, 3 vols, Tallinn: Aleksandra, vol. 2, pp. 350–68. Ludolf, H. W. [1696] (1959), Grammatica Russica (facsimile edn), ed. B. O. Unbegaun, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Madariaga, I. de (1981), Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Marker, G. (1985), Publishing, Printing and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia 1700– 1800, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Masson, C. F. P. (1800), Mémoires secrets sur la Russie, et particulièrement sur la fin du règne de Catherine II et le commencement de celui de Paul I, 2 vols, Paris: Chez Charles Pougens. Matthews, W. K. (1960), Russian Historical Grammar, London: Athlone Press. Offord, D. (2005), ‘Denis Fonvizin and the concept of nobility: an eighteenth-century Russian echo of a European debate’, European History Quarterly 35: 1, 9–38. Oxenstierna, J. T. (1721), Recueil de Pensées du Comte J. O. sur Divers Sujets […], 4 vols, Frankfurt am Main: Heinscheit. Putnam, P. (ed.) (1952), Seven Britons in Imperial Russia 1698–1812, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Raeff, M. (1966), Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Rivarol, S. [1783] (1991), De l’universalité de la langue française, Paris: Obsidiane. Rjéoutski, V. (2012), ‘Le Précepteur français comme ennemi: la construction de son image en Russie (deuxième moitié du XVIIIe – première moitié du XIXe siècle)’, in

44  dere k o f f o rd, ge s ine ar ge nt a n d vl a dis l a v r j é o u t s ki B. Krulic (ed.), L’ennemi en regard(s). Images, usages et interprétations dans l’histoire et la littérature, Paris, pp. 31–45. Rjéoutski, V. (2013), ‘Le français et d’autres langues dans l’éducation en Russie au XVIIIe siècle’, Vivliofika, 1: 20–47, at http://​ vivliofika.library.duke.edu/​ article/​ view/​14789 (last accessed on 5 September 2014). Rjéoutski, V., G. Argent and D. Offord (eds) (2014), European Francophonie: The Social, Political and Cultural History of an International Prestige Language, Oxford: Peter Lang. Rjéoutski, V. and D. Offord (2012a), ‘French in Russian diplomacy: Antiokh Kantemir’s address to King George II and his diplomatic and other correspondence’, at https://​ frinru.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/​introduction/​french-russian-diplomacy-antiokh-kantemir%​ E2%​ 80%​ 99s-address-king-george-ii-and-his-diplomatic (last accessed on 13 November 2014). Rjéoutski, V. and D. Offord (2012b), ‘Foreign languages and noble sociability: documents from Russian masonic lodges’, at https://​frinru.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/​introduction/​ foreign-languages-and-noble-sociability-documents-russian-masonic-lodges (last accessed on 8 November 2014). RNB (OR), f. 1059 (Cadet Corps archive). Rogger, H. (1960), National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Shcherbatov, M. M. (1969), On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, ed. and trans. A. Lentin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Shcherbatov, M. M.] (2011), Perepiska M. M. Shcherbatova, ed. S. G. Kalinina, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘Drevlekhranilishche’. Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi (1789–94), St Petersburg: pri Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk. Available online at http://​www.runivers.ru/​lib/​book3173/​10107/​(last accessed on 22 October 2014). Smith, M. (2006), The Influence of French on Eighteenth-Century Literary Russian: Semantic and Phraseological Calques, Oxford: Peter Lang. Sumarokov, A. P. (1957), Izbrannye proizvedeniia, Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’. Tipton, J. (2011–14), ‘Multilingualism in the Russian nobility: a case study on the Vorontsov family’, PhD thesis, University of Bristol (in preparation). Varvazzo-Biensan, S. (1998), ‘Le premier dictionnaire de l’Académie russe (1789–1794)’, in B. Quemada and B. Pruvost (eds), Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française et la lexicographie institutionnelle européenne, Paris: Honoré Champion, pp. 439–47. Viellard, S. (2006), ‘Quand la Russie voulait surpasser ses modèles: l’aventure du Dictionnaire de l’Académie Russe’, Dix-huitième siècle, no. 38: 161–86. Vinogradov, V. V. (1969), The History of the Russian Literary Language from the Seventeenth Century to the Nineteenth: A Condensed Adaptation into English, with an introduction by L. L. Thomas, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Wendland, F. (1991), Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811): Materialien einer Biographie, Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Wirtschafter, E. K. (1997), Social Identity in Imperial Russia, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

c h apter 2

The Use of French by Catherine II in her Letters to Friedrich Melchior Grimm (1774–96) Georges Dulac

A

mong the correspondence in French that Catherine II conducted with men and women of the literary world, her exchange of letters with F. M. Grimm over a period of more than twenty years stands out by virtue of the trust and closeness that were immediately established between the two of them.1 It was only to Grimm that she could declare, on 2 (13) October 1780: ‘I write to you about everything that goes through my mind, with no rule or order, without good style or proper spelling […]’ (SIRIO 1878: 191–2); or again, on 2 (13) March 1778: ‘with you I chatter, I never write […] I prefer to enjoy myself and set my hand free’ (1878: 83). These letters were not read through by a francophone secretary or preceded by a rough version, whereas the draft of a letter such as that of 29 May/​9 June 1767 to Voltaire has scarcely a single line without corrections.2 The point is that letters addressed to d’Alembert, Voltaire or Marmontel were intended to show Catherine in a good light: some of them were immediately published and others were passed around or commented upon in salons and correspondence. It was more or less the same when Catherine wrote to her ‘friend’ Mme Geoffrin, whose salon was the place where the aristocracy of a good part of Europe and princes or sovereigns could meet celebrities from the world of letters (Lilti 2005: 143, 386–7, 390). In the literary arena too the empress had her reputation to maintain. After all, Voltaire wrote, in 1766, as he praised the style of a note by Stanisław Poniatowski, that he knew ‘three crowned heads of the North who would be a credit to our Academy, the Empress of Russia, the King of Poland and the King of Prussia’.3 The concern of the empress for her public image had no effect on the form of her letters to Grimm. These letters therefore provide an exceptional set of data with which to analyse the spontaneous way Catherine used French in the course of a very private epistolary relationship. We

46  george s dula c are bound to wonder what made two Germans by birth choose a language other than their mother tongue to keep up the sort of intimacy that characterised this relationship. However, the question is more complicated than one might think at first sight and invites responses at various levels. These levels correspond to the ways in which the empress used French, for her exchanges with Grimm, far from being just the continuation of a society conversation, as seems at first to be the case, in fact had several functions. I shall try to distinguish these different uses of French, which are also attested by examples from outside the correspondence we are studying, without concealing the fact that the categories I propose in order to make things clearer are used only for the sake of convenience, for they all merge into a single discourse, the multifaceted language of the letters addressed to Grimm.

FRENC H , T H E L AN GUA GE OF TH E CO U RT On 30 April 1774, a few days after Grimm left St Petersburg, Catherine replied to his first letter. Their exchanges of letters would henceforth be regular and had hardly any utilitarian function in the first instance: they have the appearance of a continuation of the conversations that the two correspondents had regularly had at St Petersburg or Tsarskoe selo during Grimm’s stay in Russia. They are what Catherine, in a letter of 25 April/​6 May 1774 calls ‘chit-chat after eight o’clock’ (SIRIO 1878: 1), discussions that Grimm described thus to Mme Geoffrin in a letter of 10 November 1773: ‘we converse and chatter there about things that are serious or gay, solemn or frivolous […]’(Grimm et al. 1877–82: vol. 16, p. 494). Seen from this viewpoint, the use of French in their correspondence reflects the dominant practice at court, which is attested by numerous examples. Thus from the moment of his arrival in Russia in August 1775, as secretary to the French ambassador, the Chevalier de Corberon frequented the court and established relations there without ever encountering any linguistic obstacle, although he knew neither German nor English and nor of course did he know Russian. He unfailingly made a note of those quite rare occasions when he witnessed some episode that took place in that language, whether it concerned the reception of a Turkish ambassador or the performance of a Russian version of Voltaire’s Nanine (Corberon 1901: vol. 1, pp. 97, 145, 162, 242, etc.). Nor had Diderot experienced any more difficulty during his stay in St Petersburg when he had questioned courtiers before presenting the empress with his reflections on their state of mind (Diderot 1995: 244–5). This statement about the omnipresence of French should be nuanced,

fre nch in ca t he rine ’s le t t e r s t o g r imm   47 to be sure, for at court, as in the city of St Petersburg, German could in a good many cases seem to compete with it. However, it was French that was preponderant, as an episode which took place in August 1771 illustrates. In order to bring to fruition a plan to provide the editors of the Supplément à l’Encyclopédie (Supplement to the Encyclopedia) with contributions about Russia, Catherine instigated an extraordinary meeting of the Imperial Academy, including its honorary members, of whom some were courtiers, and the minutes of this meeting, exceptionally, were recorded in French, not in German, as was the usual practice. This happened – as Johann Albrecht Euler, the secretary of the Academy, explained in a letter of 18 (29) August 1771, in German, to Academician Gerhard Friedrich Müller – because ‘several honorary members prefer French to German or Latin’ (Kowalewicz and Dulac 2007: 366).4 Of course, the use of French as a court language was commonplace in a large part of Europe. It is well known that Frederick II scorned German, which he seems to have spoken quite poorly (Idée de la personne, c. 1763),5 while the King of Sweden, Gustav III, ‘was more comfortable using French than Swedish’ (Gustav III 1986: 9). But these analogies, to which we shall return in due course, obscure great dissimilarities to Catherine’s attitude in such matters.

CON V ERSAT I ON AS SOC I ETY PRACT ICE If the use of French in Catherine’s letters to Grimm can be explained in the first place by the dominance of this language at court, we should not be surprised to find in them a number of linguistic and stylistic features that accentuate their attraction as ‘chit-chat’ (jaserie), to take up the word used by Catherine herself. We should, though, restore to the word the import that she implicitly gave it, to denote a form of writing which strove to mimic a purely oral account. By applying a pejorative term to her letters, Catherine undoubtedly meant not so much to make a show of modesty (the letters would just be chatter) as to insist on what she had most set her heart on, that is to say continuation of a lively and witty exchange. We may also suspect that certain signs of carelessness, which she herself underlined, were, in part at least, an expedient that served this rather nostalgic purpose. From this point of view, Catherine’s use of French in her letters to Grimm might be more accurately compared to certain practices she introduced which call to mind the Parisian salons. It is no doubt significant that she sometimes likened her role in relation to Grimm to that of Mme Geoffrin. ‘I’ll have to chide you at least as much as Mad: Geofrin chides

48  george s dula c Burigni’, she wrote to him, for example, in one of her first letters, dated 3 (14) August 1774, apropos of eight pages that he had written to her from Karlsbad (SIRIO 1878: 6). Or again, the following year, she wrote on 16 (27) June 1775: ‘After having given you a good dressing-down as Mad: Geoffrin might have done […]’ (SIRIO 1878: 25). Mme Geoffrin’s salon owed its success to ‘two reputational factors: the presence of men of letters, savants and artists, and connections with the aristocracy and princes of Europe’ (Lilti 2005: 163). We find this combination, in a diluted form, in the correspondence of the empress with the journalist who is a friend of the philosophes. We know, moreover, that Catherine ‘compensated for the gaps in society life in St Petersburg by setting up her own salon’, in the form of her ‘hermitages’, which gathered her most cultured and best-educated courtiers round her and one of the rules of which was that ‘it was forbidden […] to be bored’ (Berelowitch 1997: 105). In fact, in St Petersburg as in Paris, the sociability of the salon, which is shaped by conversation, ‘seeks to ward off ennui’; it aims at gaiety which is kept up by ‘the art of joking’ by means of various types of linguistic play, witticisms, mockery and banter (Lilti 2005: 274–80) – features which are to be found in Catherine’s correspondence with Grimm. This should not surprise us, for as Antoine Lilti observes ‘it is difficult to separate society sociability from the epistolary practices which extend it’ (2005: 287). However, our two correspondents, as we shall see, knew how to enliven their relationship with games of their own. Be that as it may, certain features of Catherine’s language in her letters to Grimm can undoubtedly be considered signs of orality. Her syntax, for instance, is very often that of rapid speech, showing little regard for normal grammatical connections. Sometimes there are enormous cumulative sentences which link quite diverse elements together by means of simple coordination. Thus a letter of 21 January/​1 February 1775, which Catherine plainly wrote in a hurry from the bishopric of Tver’ before her entry into Moscow in February 1775, opens with an interminable sentence which brings together the contents of five or six normally constructed sentences about as many subjects concerning the circumstances of her journey (SIRIO 1878: 13–14). Another letter, of 1 (12) September 1778, consists of hardly more than a single sentence devoted to various reflections on copies of the Raphael lodges and the sentence ends only when the subject is exhausted (pp. 101–2). However, in the latter case this sort of cumulative syntax evidently conveys a burst of enthusiasm. The same sort of thing happens at the beginning of a letter of 19 (30) October 1778 apropos of the new edition of the works of Voltaire, when Catherine’s request for ‘a hundred complete copies’ takes the form of what she herself calls a ‘tirade’, uttered in a single breath, in honour of

fre nch in ca t he rine ’s le t t e r s t o g r imm   49 her ‘master’ (pp. 104–5). Elsewhere, though, the rhythm is generally more measured and the fits of passion which interrupt it, and which are rendered by certain syntactic anomalies, are the better for it. This is why we should see these anomalies as stylistic effects rather than the products of carelessness. No doubt we may also consider the frequent lack of grammatical agreement, mistakes in personal verb endings, missing punctuation (for which Catherine sometimes apologises) and so forth as characteristics of rapid speech, so many details which have no effect on meaning and which are visibly treated with disdain.

FRENCH AS A L AN GUA GE OF I NT I M ACY AND REF L ECTI ON In seeking to explain what use Catherine is making of French in her letters to Grimm, however, we should go beyond the fact that French was a standard language at court, or even in the select society of an imperial salon, for these letters answer to a pressing need of Catherine’s to communicate with a confidant of her choice. She emphasises the exceptional nature of this collusion on several occasions. ‘I read and re-read your letters’, she writes to Grimm on 2 (13) March 1778, ‘and I say how well he understands me, Oh Heaven, there is hardly anybody apart from him who understands me so well […]’ (SIRIO 1878: 83). The collusion had a dimension which was both sentimental and intellectual, as, for example, when Catherine identified Grimm’s Literary Correspondence (Correspondance littéraire) – of which she had been an admiring reader for more than seven years before they first met – as the starting-point of their relationship, so that their exchanges are tinged in many ways by the memory that this reading had left in her. This is why she reacts vigorously when Baron Grimm happens to disparage his old métier as a journalist: ‘[…] these sheets made a delightful read’, she tells him in a letter of 2 (13) February 1780, and […] if you ever speak ill of them then be aware that you yourself have no idea of your worth, and above all the worth of these sheets, and that you’ll have to deal with me, who will defend them with all my might, and that is why Mr Whipping-boy [monsieur le souffre-douleur] was welcomed […] (SIRIO 1878: 172)6 This sort of perfect intellectual match, which Catherine thought existed between them, explains why she regularly confided to Grimm her tastes and opinions, her plans and moods, or simply how she ordinarily spent

50  george s dula c her days, so that her correspondence sometimes looks like a personal diary. In this respect, we might hazard a comparison with the use that Catherine made of French in other, very different writings which are nonetheless similar in that they are entirely personal. This is the case with her memoirs, which she began to write in 1771, recollecting her years of childhood and youth (Catherine II 1901–7: vol. 12, pp. 3–69), as she would also do in her letters to Grimm, when she frequently recalled her Huguenot governess, Mademoiselle Cardel, to whom she was indebted for a good part of her tuition in French and also the initial shaping of her mind. This was a memory that was dear to her, unlike her memory of Pastor Wagner, who taught her German and religion. We could also cite her personal notes, which were often inspired by her reading (vol. 12, pp. 607 ff.), or again, the first draft of her Instruction to the Deputies, the famous Nakaz, which stemmed in large part from her prolonged engagement with Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (De l’Esprit des lois) (Plavinskaia 1998: 67–88). On these various occasions, we may surmise, Catherine wrote in French spontaneously and for herself because at the time she was thinking in that language – thinking in the words of Montesquieu, but also no doubt in those of Jacob Friedrich von Bielfeld, whose Political Institutions (Institutions politiques) had been written and published in French in 1760, and even in the words of British authors whose works she had read in French translation, such as William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (Blackstone 1774–6),7 which were her main reading for a two-year period. The same could be said of sovereigns such as Frederick II and Gustav III, who wrote very naturally in French. Their intellectual disposition, like Catherine’s, can be explained first and foremost, but not solely, by their education. The King of Prussia would remain closely attached to his Huguenot tutor Duhan de Jandun, who had guided his studies for ten years from 1716 (Dannhauser 1999: 154). As for Gustav III, he too had acquired an extensive French culture very early in life, thanks to Count Carl Gustav Tessin, his governor up until 1756, a highly Frenchified Swede who had made him read Corneille, Molière, Racine, Mme de Sévigné, Fénelon and Voltaire at a very young age (Nordmann 1986: 28).8 The traces left by this precocious literary cultivation can be seen in all three sovereigns, who would maintain throughout their lives the habit of reading French works in abundance, which was bound to affect their use of the language. Thus Gustav III, a great reader of French journals, very quickly absorbed into his vocabulary the new words he discovered in them (Gustav III 1986: 9–11). As for Catherine, we can easily see that in her letters to Grimm the language she uses is all the richer and livelier

fre nch in ca t he rine ’s le t t e r s t o g r imm   51 for the fact that, despite the appearance of carelessness, it harbours literary recollections that seem to echo things read long ago as well as things read recently, although we can rarely identify them precisely. However, the use that the empress makes of French in this correspondence is altogether personal to her, for it is very dependent on the style that she wanted to impart to a relationship that had no equivalent in her eyes.

PLA Y F U L U SE OF FRENC H Catherine would always be careful to ensure that her exchange with Grimm was lively and playful, and in this respect the style she adopted may be reminiscent of usage in salon conversation, as I have said. However, we need to go further than this, for the game in question is played à deux and with no witnesses, which has several advantages. For one thing, the social distance separating the sovereign from the journalist is straightaway removed, because there is no correct form of procedure other than the implicit rules they have laid down for themselves, and the most important of these rules is that the words exchanged should sustain gaiety. At the same time, the game established a deep understanding between them through the multiplication of conventions that were peculiar to it, a sort of private language which is difficult to decode today. This included, for instance, the repeated use of nicknames to denote Grimm himself (Georges Dandin, seigneur Héraclite and so forth) and above all to denote princes and sovereigns (frère Gu (brother Gu) for the King of Sweden; Hérode (Herod) for Frederick II; Maman (Mum) or Madame Bigote (Mrs Sanctimonious) for Maria Theresa and so on). Among other practices peculiar to this correspondence we find the insertion of words and phrases in German, the use of words in the meaning that Grimm gave them in his Literary Correspondence (for example, secte (sect), to denote the Physiocrats) and frequent recourse to parodies of religious discourse, in the manner of the ‘Philosophical Sermon’ inserted in the Literary Correspondence for January 1770. Thus when Grimm, on 24 November/​ 5 December 1776, sent Catherine a ‘General Confession’, which began with a ‘Credo’ followed by an ‘Act of Contrition’, and so forth (SIRIO 1885: 3–14), she replied to him, on 2 (13) February 1777, in the same style (SIRIO 1878: 696–7). One of the most notable features of this language game as Catherine plays it is the abundance of proverbial and idiomatic expressions, which reflect her fondness for concrete, picturesque turns of phrase and for everything that puts gaiety into speech. Take, for example, a very old

52  george s dula c French expression ne pas se moucher du pied (roughly equivalent to the English expression ‘to put on airs and graces’; literally ‘not to wipe one’s nose with one’s foot’), for which Catherine has a liking. Catherine writes on 11 (22) June 1778 that she has had ‘a headache which ne se mouchait pas du pied’ (SIRIO 1878: 92). Or again, on 14 (25) May 1780, she says she has begun ‘a little ABC of maxims which ne se mouche pas du pied’ (1878: 176) for her grandson. Thus the idiom, as used by Catherine, expresses intensity or excellence. This is an offbeat usage by comparison with the norm; it is no doubt deliberate and designed for comic effect, since the expression is normally used of a person. Another old expression which Catherine uses several times and which also has comic value is aller paître les oies (literally ‘to go and feed the geese’), or mener les oies paître (to take the geese to be fed). The expression generally means ‘to make fun of’ (Di Stefano 1991: 607), but it may be contaminated by another expression, envoyer paître (to get rid of someone with contempt) when Catherine uses it about rhymesters who had thought fit to hold forth on the names of her grandsons, Alexander and Constantine: ‘I’ve had them told to go and feed the geese’, she announces on 5 (16) July 1779 (SIRIO 1878: 148). We also find ‘to speak German comme une vache l’espagnol’ (as a cow speaks Spanish), aller la bride en main (to go cautiously, slowly; literally ‘with bridle in hand’), à propos de bottes (without reference to what has gone before, without reason; literally ‘about boots’) and so on. Sometimes Catherine quotes old proverbs or alludes to a song which has given rise to a proverb, as when she writes on 5 (16) July 1779: I feel sorry for you having to read everything that comes from my pen, you know how it goes, like the good lady’s petticoat in the song, sing this song a little, it will distract you from reading this enormous letter. (1878: 151) Catherine is referring here to the song ‘Ma commère, quand je danse /​ Mon cotillon va-t-il bien […]’ [my italics],9 which comes from the Île de France region and had been very popular since the early eighteenth century (Laforte 1987: 864). Often Catherine applies to herself expressions whose comic effect is reinforced by the context. She has run ‘like a Basque’ (1878: 40), a phrase which belongs to the burlesque register and which is found, in the form trotter comme un Basque (to scamper about like a Basque), in both Molière and Scarron.10 She travaille comme un âne (works like a donkey) (p. 185). Again, M. Bertin (Grigorii Potemkin’s cook), she writes, m’aime comme pain (likes me like bread) (p. 94)11 and so on. The frequency of such

fre nch in ca t he rine ’s le t t e r s t o g r imm   53 proverbial expressions attests to Catherine’s great familiarity with the French language. The majority of them belong to the spoken language rather than the written language. A good part of Catherine’s vocabulary, on the other hand, has a decidedly literary quality. We may try, albeit in a very hypothetical way, to identify the possible origin of words which Catherine in all likelihood knew through her reading. Quite often Catherine’s vocabulary contains words which by her time were already archaisms. She had read French authors who wrote before the classical age, for example works by Brantôme and translations by Amyot (Bil’basov 1900: vol. 1, pp. 273, 275; Bilbasov 1972: 34) and probably some medieval authors too, editions of whom had been published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She seems to have employed some of these archaisms without any particular intent, or sometimes, perhaps, for their picturesque value. Thus on 19 (30) June 1774 she writes reçue for réception in the phrase à la reçuë de ma lettre (on receipt of my letter) (SIRIO 1878: 3); this is a word that figures in the Dictionary of Middle French (Dictionnaire du moyen français), that is to say it belongs to the language of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Likewise, we find in Catherine’s letters a number of occurrences of revange (a form which also comes from Middle French) for revanche (revenge), as well as vela for voilà, which occurs frequently, for instance, in Froissart’s Chronicles (Chroniques). Frequently, though, these archaisms are used for humorous effect. Thus Catherine writes to Grimm on 18 (29) April 1776: ‘I have the portrait of Pope Ganganelli and there is no more room in the Grenouillère where I summon all the sovereigns’ (où je huche tous les souverains) (SIRIO 1878: 47). The Grenouillère where she puts sovereigns’ portraits is a castle in the neighbourhood of St Petersburg. The verb hucher, which means to ‘call for’, whence here the meaning ‘to summon’, is rare from the seventeenth century and is considered a dialect form, but it does figure in Le Roux’s Comical Dictionary (Dictionnaire comique), for it belongs at that time to the burlesque register, being found in Scarron’s Virgile travesti (Virgil Travesty). However, it is a word that is often used in Middle French and we find it in a number of places, for example, in the Hundred New Novelettes (Cent nouvelles nouvelles), a collection of amusing and saucy stories from the late fifteenth century which were republished several times in the eighteenth. As for Rabelaisian expressions, which were quite commonplace, such as tenés vous en joie (be merry) (SIRIO 1878: 15), they may have come from Grimm himself, who often used them. When Catherine wrote to Grimm on 14 (25) July 1774 ‘I have a suspicion where this little scripile [that is to say scrupule (scruple)] comes to you

54  george s dula c from’ (1878: 4), this is not a slip but a borrowing from the language of the theatre. Several expressions of this type, which come from Molière, the theatre of the fairground or the Comédie Italienne, flow regularly from her pen. On 27 February/​10 March 1775, she suggests that she owes some of them to Mademoiselle Cardel, who knew ‘every possible comedy and tragedy backwards’ (1878: 18). Besides, several collections of comic operas and plays were probably available to her, for example Le Théâtre de la Foire, ou l’opéra comique,12 a collection in nine volumes published by Le Sage and d’Orneval from 1721, or again the collections published by the husband and wife Favart from the 1740s on. Most importantly, from 1743 St Petersburg hosted the Sérigny troupe, which staged short plays from the Italian theatre in Paris, among other works, and from 1764 a Parisian troupe had introduced the Russian court to French comic operas, large numbers of which would be performed during Catherine’s reign. The Smol’nyi Institute for Noble Maidens that Catherine had founded in 1764 would become ‘one of the most active centres’ for this kind of spectacle (Mooser 1954: 13–99). Catherine makes frequent use of the oath morgué (zounds!), which is a common feature of the conventional language of peasants and valets in French comedy. In The Love Feast (La Fête d’amour), a short play by Justine Favart (1754), we come across it, together with other words that Catherine uses, from the mouth of Lucas, a boy who works in the garden and also from Colinette, his girlfriend. Lucas sings Je chantons d’tout not’cœur; morgué chacun fait d’même13 and declares J’entendons rian à tout c’biau tripotage.14 Colinette, for her part, says Stapendant jn’avons rian mieux a faire.15 Tripotage, stapendant, or rather stipendant (for cependant (however)), are also words Catherine is fond of. She commonly writes sti for ce (this) or ces (these), sti la and sti çi for celui-là (that one) and celui-ci (this one), expressions which are borrowings from the fairground theatre. She frequently uses ma for mais (but), basta (enough!), which she no doubt borrows from the Italian comedy, and more infrequently ze for je (I), which mimics the lisping of characters in comedy.16 These, then, are the comic features with which Catherine regularly seasons her letters to Grimm, but there are other, more serious, literary borrowings too. It is no surprise to find in Catherine’s letters words which are more or less marked as belonging to Voltaire’s vocabulary, although these words may also be echoes of Grimm’s Literary Correspondence or his letters, for Grimm himself makes much use of them as well. The word pancarte, by which our two correspondents often refer to their letters, especially the longer ones, for instance, is Voltairean. (Littré gives several examples of it in his Dictionary of the French Language (Dictionnaire de la langue française).) The same may also be said of rogaton (piece of junk), brimbo-

fre nch in ca t he rine ’s le t t e r s t o g r imm   55 rion (knick-knack), momerie (tomfoolery) and above all velche (ignorant or superstitious man), which Catherine uses on 19 (30) June 1774 on hearing the news that Louis XV had died of smallpox, because he had not had himself inoculated (cela est welches) (SIRIO 1878: 3). Many other words in Catherine’s vocabulary had been acquired in the course of her reading. Some of them were common among the seventeenth-century writers whom she had spent much time perusing (Bil’basov 1900: 269–74). This is the case with pécore (to denote a stupid person), which she often uses, sometimes in a very personal manner, the verb opiniâtrer (to be stubborn), which is found in Mme de Sévigné and La Rochefoucauld, and rarer terms such as girouetterie (weathervanery), which Catherine applies to the King of Sweden, who was very inconstant in his aims (she would have been able to read this word in the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz). When on 30 August/​10 September 1774 Catherine writes vous autres French dog (you French dog) to Grimm (SIRIO 1878: 7), she may be recalling Samuel Sorbière’s Account of a Journey to England (Relation d’un voyage en Angleterre), published in 1664, in which the author relates how he had been welcomed at Dover by the insults of the urchins who had called him French Dog; but in fact this expression is found in numerous French writers from the time of the Hundred Years War (1337–1453). While Catherine’s vocabulary amply attests to the great extent of her literary culture, it also reveals a constant search for expressivity, whence her recourse to words which are rare but picturesque, such as toupillage (futile activity of someone who bustles about all over the place). This word, which does not appear in many dictionaries, is applied by Catherine on 21 December 1774/​1 January 1775 to the behaviour of the Grand Duchess Natal’ia (SIRIO 1878: 12). Later, on 7 (18) December 1779, engaging in wordplay, she would write of herself that the empress, occupied with multiple tasks, toupille, sans toupiller (is in a constant whirl, without being in a spin) (p. 166). Among these linguistic variants, in which Catherine takes such pleasure, lexical creations of her own are not unusual. Diderot, in the course of his discussions with Catherine, had taken up and commented on one of them. ‘Great men’, he wrote, ‘prefer their private glory to general utility. They would rather make a noise than a profit. De l’hommerie [manism(s)], madam! de l’hommerie, that is precisely it. You have invented a word which is most indulgent and apt’ (Diderot 1995: 350; also 290). Admittedly, Catherine sometimes incorrectly substitutes a suffix for the one that the word normally bears, but often we are dealing with expressive inventions. We have evidence of this in a letter of 25 November/​6 December 1777. After having spoken of a

56  george s dula c coquetterie (in the sense of ‘compliment, words made to please’) that a duchess had addressed to her, she wrote that she had also received tout plein de coquetage de la part des Momorençi (SIRIO 1878: 71).17 The word coquetage, which Catherine has invented, has the same meaning as coquetterie but it has a pejorative nuance, like radotage (rambling), because she is making fun of repeated exchanges of compliments. In another register, she frequently jokes about her legislative works, which preoccupy her from 1775: thus on 29 November/​10 December 1775 she speaks to Grimm of her législomanie (legislomania) (1878: 37) and on 5 (16) July 1779 she informs him that she legislote (legislatises) every morning p. 148). She is also seeking humorous effect when on 7 (18) August 1775 she mentions her correspondent’s atheism and calls him a heretique que Luther a defoiysés (heretic whom Luther has detached from his faith) (p. 19). More often than not, these creations are not alien to the spirit of the French language: defoiysé is no doubt imagined on the model dépaysé (out of one’s element), and so forth. * * * I shall try to summarise the position that French occupies in Catherine’s language use, as I have outlined it, in relation to that of the other two languages, German and Russian, which she commonly employed. The extensive use that she made of French and her deep knowledge of it may give us the impression that this language enjoyed such high status in her eyes that the others were relegated to an inferior level. That was the sort of position adopted by Frederick II, who saw German as just ‘a semi-barbarous language’ (Frederick II 1781: 9) incapable of giving birth in the near future to a literature of quality. Catherine’s attitude was quite different. Perhaps it is useful first and foremost, though, to recall that the place she accorded French in her intellectual practice and the fact that she seems to have done most of her reading in this language do not imply Francophilia, contrary to what we may see, for example, in the case of Gustav III. Catherine set little store by contemporary French plays, which she considered for the most part cold and insipid (SIRIO 1878: 118), and contemptuously challenged French historians who wrote about Russia (p. 274). At the end of her life the revolutionary events in France would lead her to abominate everything that came from there. Regarding the use that Catherine made in her letters to Grimm of their shared mother tongue, we may note, first of all, that the insertion of words and sentences in German served to reinforce the intimate nature of their relationship. This practice is often linked to Catherine’s memories of youth: the word Prüfungen (examinations), for example, she uses in a humorous way when she implicitly recalls her loathing of the

fre nch in ca t he rine ’s le t t e r s t o g r imm   57 pedantic tests to which Pastor Wagner subjected her (SIRIO 1878: e.g. 51, 117). She also makes frequent reference to a heritage she shares with Grimm, the stock of German proverbs (Scharf forthcoming). More significant, though, is the fact that Catherine indicates to her correspondent how much she appreciates certain contemporary German works, especially satirical novels. And with a hint, surely, at Frederick II, the most illustrious of German literature’s detractors, she rejoices to see that this literature will henceforth include writers who ‘have learned to master their language as Voltaire mastered his’ (SIRIO 1878: 208; also 212). Catherine’s efforts to promote the Russian language and the new Russian literature are well known (Madariaga 1998). In October 1767, when Falconet passed on to her a letter from Diderot, who reported that his friend Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn was encountering ‘all the difficulties of a language which has not matured’ as he translated the lives of painters from French into Russian,18 Catherine observed that this ‘comes of the fact that, like the majority of our lords, [Golitsyn] does not know his own language, which nonetheless is unrivalled […] in richness’. She holds up as an example her great Instruction, where ‘there is not a foreign word’, even though the subject-matter is ‘not of the simplest’.19 In the literary domain, we know that the empress encouraged the theatrical work of Aleksandr Sumarokov and supported the ephemeral Russian periodicals of her time, notably the publications of Nikolai Novikov. She herself wrote a great deal in Russian for the theatre, concurring with Diderot in the belief that the theatre was capable of having an effect on mores: her first comedy, Oh Time! (O Vremia! 1772), would be followed by some twenty other plays (Catherine II 1901–7): vols 1–4). Finally, on a private level, one may note that of the letters Catherine addressed to her lover Potemkin very few were in French and most were in Russian, a language which, in the view of their editor, allowed her to express her thoughts and feelings clearly (Catherine II 1997: 542–3). All things considered, it seems then that Catherine II was in a position to use the three languages, French, German and Russian, with great freedom, according to the circumstances, and that she gave preference to French and Russian.

NOTES I am very grateful to Anthony Strugnell of the University of Hull for his advice on various linguistic points as the translation of this chapter was being completed.   1. My references to Catherine’s letters are to pages in SIRIO, vol. 23 (see the list of works cited at the end of this chapter), where these letters were first published. However, the text in SIRIO has been corrected; my quotations will therefore be

58  george s dula c given in the form found in the manuscripts preserved in RGADA, f. 5, op. 1, ed. khr. 152 (1–3) and reproduced in the forthcoming critical edition (Catherine II and F. M. Grimm forthcoming) which is also cited in the references at the end of this chapter.   2. RGADA, f. 5, op. 1, ed. khr. 154 (1), fols 10 v.–11 r.  3. Voltaire to Marmontel, 20 December 1766, Best. D 12862. The reference is to the definitive edition of Voltaire’s letters by Theodore Besterman in Les Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, Geneva, Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1968–77, vols 85–135.   4. Privy Councillor Grigorii Teplov and College Councillor Grigorii Kozitskii figured prominently among these honorary members.   5. This eight-page tract may be found in BNF (MP-754) and elsewhere. It was erroneously attributed to Voltaire; its author may have been the French Minister in Berlin, the Comte de Tyrconnel.   6. Catherine is referring to the welcome she gave to Grimm when they first met, in St Petersburg, where he arrived in September 1773.   7. Catherine’s notes on her reading, taken from the French edition of Blackstone cited in the references to this chapter, are in the Panin holding of RGB, OR, f. 22, k. 17, no. 1. See Catherine’s letter of 4 (15) August 1776 to Grimm (SIRIO 1878: 52).   8. There are some remarks on Tessin and his highly accomplished use of French in Östman 2014: 290–2, 299–300.   9. ‘My dear, how does my petticoat look when I dance […]’, my italics. 10. Molière, Le Dépit amoureux, Act I, Scene 2; Scarron, Don Japhet d’Arménie, Act III, Scene 2. 11. There is an allusion here to the proverb bon comme le bon pain (good as good bread). 12. The reference here is to short plays written for spectacles performed in Paris at the fairs of St Germain and St Laurent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 13. ‘I sings with all our ’eart; zounds! Everyone does the same.’ 14. ‘I don’t understand nothin’ of all this messing around muddle.’ 15. ‘But I ain’t got nothin’ better to do anyway.’ 16. For example, Ninette in Favart’s Lover’s Whim, or Ninette at Court (Le Caprice amoureux ou Ninette à la cour) (1756): Ze tombe en faiblesse /​Le zour, le zour me blesse (I’m dropping from weakneth /​The brightneth, the brightneth is hurting me). Catherine who on 20 (31) March 1780 declared to Grimm me voila de nouveau dans le role de Ninette à la Cour (there I am again in the part of Ninette at court) (SIRIO 1878: 28, where the letter is incorrectly dated 1779) mimics this pronunciation on several occasions, e.g. ze ne suis que chef de l’Eglise Grecque (I’m jutht the head of the Greek Church) (1878: 131) and ze n’ai point d’argent pour ça (I haven’t got any money for that) (p. 140). 17. ‘plenty of pleasing chattering from the Montmorencies’. 18. To Falconet, 15 August 1767, Diderot (1955–70: vol. 7, p. 105). 19. To Falconet, 12 (23) October 1767, SIRIO, vol. 17 (1876), p. 21.

REFERENCES Berelowitch, W. (1997), ‘La vie mondaine sous Catherine II’, in A. Davidenkoff (ed.), Catherine II et l’Europe, Paris: Institut d’études slaves, pp. 99–106. Bil’basov, V. A. (1900), Istoriia Ekateriny vtoroi, Berlin: Gottheiner.

fre nch in ca t he rine ’s le t t e r s t o g r imm   59 Bilbasov, V. A. (1972), ‘The intellectual formation of Catherine II’, in M. Raeff (ed.), Catherine the Great: A Profile, London: Macmillan, pp. 21–40. Blackstone, W. (1774–6), Commentaires sur les lois anglaises de M. Blackstone traduits de l’anglois par M. D. G***, 6 vols, Brussels: [Auguste Pierre Damiens de Gomicourt]. Catherine II (1901–7), Sochineniia, 12 vols, ed. A. N. Pypin, St Petersburg: Akademiia nauk. Catherine II (1997), Ekaterina II i G. A. Potemkin. Lichnaia perepiska, 1769–1791, ed. V. S. Lopatin, Moscow: Nauka. Catherine II and F. M. Grimm (forthcoming), Une correspondance privée, artistique et politique au siècle des Lumières, vol. 1 (1764–78), ed. S. Karp et al., Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle. Corberon, M. D. B. de (1901), Un diplomate français à la cour ce Catherine II, 1775–1780. Journal intime du chevalier de Corberon, 2 vols, ed. L. H. Labande, Paris: Plon-Nourrit. Dannhauser, M. (1999), De la France à l’Allemagne. Les Huguenots français et l’un de leurs descendants, Jacques-Egide Duhan de Jandun, précepteur du roi de Prusse Frédéric II, Egelsbach: Frankfurt am Main. Di Stefano, G. (1991), Dictionnaire des locutions en moyen français, Montreal: CERES. Dictionnaire du moyen français (DMF), an electronic dictionary conceived by Robert Martin, available at http://​www.atilf.fr/​dmf/​(last accessed on 16 June 2014). Diderot, D. (1955–70) Correspondance, ed. G. Roth, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, vol. 7. Diderot, D. (1995), Mélanges philosophiques pour Catherine II, in Diderot, Œuvres, ed. L. Versini, Paris: Laffont, vol. 3, Politique. Frederick II (1781), De la littérature allemande, Neuchatel: Samuel Fauche. Grimm, M. et al. (1877–82) Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot […], ed. M. Tourneux, Paris: Garnier. Gustav III (1986), Gustave III par ses lettres, ed. G. von Proschwitz, Stockholm: Norstedts and Paris: J. Touzot. Idée de la personne, de la manière de vivre, et de la cour du roi de Prusse (c. 1753), no place of publication or publisher. Kowalewicz, M. and G. Dulac (2007), ‘Catherine II, l’Académie impériale des sciences et le Supplément de l’Encyclopédie (août-septembre 1771)’, in G. Dulac and S. Karp (eds), Les Archives de l’Est et la France des Lumières, Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle, pp. 345–76. Laforte, C. (1987), Les Chansons brèves, les enfantines, Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval. Lilti, A. (2005), Le Monde des salons, sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Fayard. Madariaga, I. de (1998), ‘The role of Catherine II in the literary and cultural life of Russia’, in Madariaga, Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Collected Essays, London and New York: Longman, pp. 284–95. Mooser, R. A. (1954), Contribution à l’histoire de la musique russe. L’Opéra-comique français en Russie au XVIIIe siècle, Geneva: R. Kister et Union européenne d’éditions. Nordmann, C. (1986), Gustave III, un démocrate couronné, Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille. Östman, M. (2014), ‘French in Sweden in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, in V. Rjéoutski, G. Argent and D. Offord (eds), European Francophonie: The Social, Political and Cultural History of an International Prestige Language, Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 273–306.

60  george s dula c Plavinskaia, N. (1998), ‘Catherine II ébauche le Nakaz: premières notes de lecture de L’Esprit des lois’, Revue Montesquieu, 2: 67–8. Scharf, C. (forthcoming), ‘L’allemand de Catherine II’, in Catherine II and F. M. Grimm, Une correspondance privée, artistique et politique au siècle des Lumières, vol. 1 (1764–78), ed. S. Karp et al., Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle. SIRIO (1878), vol. 23, ed. Ia. K. Grot. SIRIO (1885), vol. 44, ed. Ia. K. Grot. Voltaire (1968–77), Les Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, Geneva, Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, vols 85–135.

c h apter 3

Language Use Among the Russian Aristocracy: The Case of the Counts Stroganov Vladislav Rjéoutski and Vladimir Somov

M

any Russian aristocrats had a command of several foreign languages. Knowledge of languages – above all French, in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries – played an enormous part in their lives: in their studies, in their social life within the family and beyond it, in the composition of ego-documents and so forth. Examination of the ‘linguistic behaviour’ of the upper stratum of the Russian nobility in the period when French was an international language in Europe and when the aristocracy presented itself as in many respects a cosmopolitan group will help us to see in what ways linguistic processes in Russia were similar to those that we may observe in other parts of Europe and in what ways they were different. We do not yet have many accurate studies of this subject that are based on large volumes of sources, but a recent survey shows that although panEuropean processes were at work the situation does differ considerably from one country to another (Rjéoutski et al. 2014). Choice of languages for study and for social intercourse in the families of the aristocracy might be regarded as a type of adherence to panEuropean fashion. Indeed, adherence to models of linguistic behaviour that had become firmly established may explain the relative infrequency of metalinguistic commentary among the Russian aristocracy. However, while ‘the fashion for languages’ undoubtedly played an important role, adherence to models of upbringing among the higher nobility was, as a rule, a conscious process – it is no accident that the families of high society have left us many an ‘education plan’ (plan d’éducation). We should therefore probably assume a certain degree of reflection about the benefits that command of one language or another might confer or, to put it in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, the ‘cultural capital’ which this or that language possessed in the imagination of Russian aristocrats. Mastery of

62  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd vl a dimi r s o m o v one language or another, we believe, may be part of the process of creating ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991). By ‘imagined communities’ Benedict Anderson understood, above all, nations; but the term could be extended to describe communities that are based not on national self-consciousness but on shared social interests, allegiance to specific ideas and so forth, such as ‘aristocracy’ or the ‘Republic of Letters’. Of course, it is hardly possible to establish a clear correlation between one language or another and one ‘imagined community’ or another, because languages are polyfunctional. Thus in one context French could serve as the language of high society but in another simply as the language of cultivated people (the language of politesse) or civilised society (the language of civilisation), the Enlightenment, social emancipation and so forth. The contours of these imagined communities, as we may easily see, are blurred and many of them overlap. The linguistic behaviour of members of a single family may be described in these terms too. The family we shall discuss is one of the best-known families in the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, that of the barons and counts Stroganov.1 The clan played a very important role in Russian history and culture. The Stroganovs were descended from merchants and factory-owners and it was not until the eighteenth century that they acquired noble status and became able to intermix with aristocratic families. Baron Sergei Grigor’evich Stroganov (1707–56) concerned himself with the reputation of the clan in court circles, presenting his family as a clan of the enlightened aristocracy. The upbringing of their children, including what for boys was its key element, the Grand Tour, was an important part of this strategy (Berelowitch 1993). This was the upbringing that Sergei Stroganov gave to his heir, Aleksandr (1736–1811), who in 1752, at the age of sixteen, departed from Russia on a Grand Tour that lasted until 1756. Aleksandr visited Germany, spent two years in Geneva, travelled in Italy, set off for France in September 1755 and left Paris in September 1756, quickly returning to Russia upon receiving news of his father’s death. A second stay in France lasted from 1771 to 1779. On this occasion Stroganov was accompanied by his second wife, Ekaterina Petrovna (née Princess Trubetskaia, 1744–1815).2 By now he was a chamberlain at the Russian court and a member of the College of Foreign Affairs (Mesiatseslov 1778: 7, 76). It was no accident that he chose the French capital as the place for such a long sojourn: Paris and Versailles attracted many European aristocrats with the splendour of the court and, to no less an extent, with their energetic cultural life, including their literature and music. Stroganov plunged into this atmosphere with enthusiasm. Diderot wrote that it was hard to find the count at home – he was con-

lan guage us e a mo ng the rus s ia n a r i s t o c r a c y   63 stantly about town in Paris, ‘led hither and thither by his activities, his curiosity and the desire to see [things] and to educate himself’ (Diderot 1965: 48–9, 71–2). As he already had a fine command of French by that time, Stroganov was well integrated into Parisian society. When he left Paris, Friedrich-Melchior Grimm wrote to Catherine II, on 27 October/​ 7 November 1779: ‘His long stay will have almost naturalised him here; he has therefore left behind many friends and many regrets. He would be ungrateful if he forgot Paris’ (Grimm 1885: 68). Catherine replied sarcastically on 7 December 1779: ‘Stroganov is far from forgetting Paris: he talks of nothing else’ (Ekaterina II 1878: 166). Aleksandr Stroganov became a prominent figure in the Russian Enlightenment and from 1800 occupied the posts of President of the Academy of Arts and Director of the Imperial Libraries. A connoisseur and patron of the arts, he was a passionate collector of paintings, sculptures, drawings, books, archaeological antiquities and objects from the natural world. His collections were housed in his beautiful palace, in the very centre of St Petersburg, on the corner of the Moika Embankment and Nevskii Prospekt. This mansion was near the imperial residence and was often a venue for court festivities and for literary, artistic, musical and learned gatherings. The treasures of the Stroganov Palace, which had been acquired in Europe,3 were accessible to the broad circle of their owner’s acquaintances, from high officials of state to students of the Academy of Arts, and thereby had an effect, as Stroganov intended, on the development of Russian culture. Stroganov’s children were born in France4 and there a teacher was found for his only son, Pavel (1772–1817). This was Gilbert Romme, an admirer of Rousseau’s ideas and subsequently a participant in the French Revolution. In 1786, after a few years spent in Russia, Pavel travelled with Romme through Germany to Geneva, as his father had done in his time. Being in Paris during the Revolution, Pavel was present at sessions of the National Assembly and even entered the Jacobin Club, not without the involvement of his tutor. Having returned to Russia in 1790 on the instructions of the court, in time he entered the small circle of friends of the Grand Duke Alexander Pavlovich and when Alexander acceded to the throne Stroganov became the central figure in the ‘Unofficial Committee’, an intimate circle of the emperor’s associates in which reform of the government was discussed. He also occupied the post of Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs from 1802 to 1807. His wife, Sof’ia Vladimirovna, née Princess Golitsyna (1775–1845), was the daughter of the famous Princess Natal’ia Petrovna Golitsyna (the prototype of Pushkin’s ‘Queen of Spades’) and the sister of the Russian francophone writer Boris Golitsyn. The Stroganovs’ only son, Aleksandr Pavlovich

64  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd vl a dimi r s o m o v (1794–1814), was killed at the Battle of Craon. The Stroganovs also had four daughters: Natal’ia (1796–1872), Adelaida (1799–1882), Elizaveta (1802–63) and Ol’ga (1808–37). Their children and grandchildren are the fourth and fifth generations of the family whose linguistic history we are going to outline. We shall show the part that various languages played in the Stroganovs’ lives. The first section of the chapter is devoted to the most famous member of the clan, Aleksandr Sergeevich, and the second to his descendants. From the point of view of linguistic, literary and historical context, we are dealing with different epochs: in one case the beginnings of francophonie in Russia and in another its peak; in one case the appearance of a secular Russian literature and in another its flowering and the appearance of new literary currents, Sentimentalism and Romanticism, and vigorous discussions about Russian identity and language against the background of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The main participants in these discussions were representatives of the noble estate – Nikolai Karamzin, Aleksandr Shishkov, Sergei Glinka, Fedor Rostopchin5 – and the aristocratic circles to which the Stroganovs belonged felt the effect of the atmosphere of the age. In the first half of the chapter linguistic behaviour is presented as part of the socio-cultural behaviour of the Russian aristocrat, for the use of foreign languages by the upper nobility was closely linked to nobles’ assimilation of Western European cultures and to their fashioning of themselves in accordance with Western cultural models. In the second part, making use of a broad range of hitherto untapped sources,6 we shall present an analysis of the functions which were assigned to this or that language by different generations of this family: although French occupied a leading position in the Stroganov family throughout almost the whole of the period in question, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, the position and role of other languages, including the native language, Russian, underwent substantial changes. Finally, by looking at different generations of this family we shall examine the relationships between francophonie, Francophilia and patriotism, and between national identity and language use.

T HE M A KI N G OF A E UROPEAN ARISTOCRAT Sergei Stroganov knew French, although, by his own admission, he did not know it very well (Kuznetsov 2003: 374). The letters he wrote in French to his son’s tutor have survived; he may have had help in writing them from his secretaries, one of whom was the Frenchman Baron Théodore Henri de Tschudy, the author and editor of the first Russian

lan guage us e a mo ng the rus s ia n a r i s t o c r a c y   65 journal in French, Caméléon littéraire (The Literary Chameleon).7 Sergei’s brother, Baron Aleksandr Grigor’evich (1699–1754), made translations from French. Aleksandr Stroganov studied French from childhood, in constant contact with teachers in the household. Tutors often wrote textbooks for their pupils. One such textbook, listed in the catalogue of the Stroganov library as ‘Une grammaire française ecrite par ***’ (‘A French Grammar Written by ***’), has been preserved in the family archive (RNB, OR, f. 958, F. XVIII, no. 177/​2, p. 316). It consists of two parts: a grammar and a few documents, including copies of letters written by Aleksandr Stroganov in French; he was probably the owner of the exercise book (BRAN, OR, f. 18, no. 19). The grammar has nine chapters. It explains the basic rules of pronunciation, morphology and syntax and gives a small number of examples. The rules are set out simply and clearly in the question-and-answer form that was widely used in language teaching at that time. The need to study French is explained at the outset: Q: Which is the most widely used of all the living languages in Europe? A: French. Q: In which country is this language in common use? A: In France, the Pays de Vaud, Switzerland, Geneva, the Valois, the Principality of Neufchâtel, Lorraine and Savoy. Q: Is it not spoken anywhere else? A: It is commonly spoken in all the courts of Europe and French refugees have continued to use it in those countries to which they have fled, such as Germany, England, Holland and Prussia. (BRAN, OR, f. 18, no. 19, fol. 1) Aleksandr’s teachers were indeed Protestants: Guillaume François de Foligny (a native of Nyon, in Switzerland) lived with the Stroganovs in Moscow around 1750 and later taught at the Pages Corps. Another of his tutors, from the time when he was in St Petersburg, was Jean Antoine, from Berlin, who in all probability came from a Huguenot background (Mézin and Rjéoutski 2011: 22, 328; Kuznetsov 2011: 164–77). It is difficult to say who the author of the grammar was, but it was compiled for a Russian pupil, possibly for Aleksandr Stroganov himself, for we find among the examples such phrases as Je demeure à Moscou (I live in Moscow) and Je viens de Moscou (I come from Moscow). The text is written in French and is addressed to a pupil who already has some command of the language, like young Stroganov.

66  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd vl a dimi r s o m o v During his Grand Tour Stroganov studied at the Geneva Academy, taking lessons with Professors Jacob Vernet (on history and geography), Jean Jallabert (on mathematics and logic) and Louis Necker (on experimental physics). He also studied natural law, music, dance, riding, fencing and so forth. His lessons were private and conducted in French, possibly because – as was usually the case among Russian noblemen at that time – he had not previously studied Latin, which was so important in the European university world (Rjéoutski 2013b: 9; Stroganov began to study Latin in Geneva). There are surviving manuscripts which provide evidence of Aleksandr’s studies in Geneva; they are in French, which was the main language of his tuition: Lettre à Mr le baron Alexandre Stroganov sur le gouvernement de Genève; Lettre sur l’Eglise de Genève, sur son culte, sa discipline & son gouvernement (BRAN, OR, f. 18, no. 5), Additions à diverses parties du droit naturel de Bourlamaqui (BRAN, OR, f. 18, no. 28), Abregé du droit de la nature et des gens (BRAN, OR, f. 18, nos 35, 36), Histoire romaine sous les empereurs (BRAN, OR, f. 18, nos 2–4), Révolution des Empires d’Orient; Histoire moderne depuis l’Election de Charles Quint en 1519 jusqu’à l’entrée du règne de Louis XIV l’an 1643 (RGADA,8 f. 1278, op. 4, d. 76), Abregé de l’histoire de l’Angleterre (BRAN, OR, f. 18, no. 10) and so on.9 However, Stroganov studied other languages too; Baron Karl von Sievers, whom he met in Venice, praised his knowledge of German and Italian as well as French (Kuznetsov 2003: 201). His father insisted that Aleksandr meet Sievers in the hope that the latter would tell the empress herself what progress his son was making in his studies and in acquiring languages, thereby consolidating at court an image of the family as a clan of the enlightened aristocracy. In Paris Aleksandr continued his studies (experimental physics with abbé Nollet, chemistry, riding and dancing) and he attended balls. He requested permission to extend his stay in the French capital but his father insisted that he return: Paris – a ‘city of temptations’ and ‘vices’ – was considered dangerous for a young nobleman. French guided Aleksandr Stroganov through the Western world, for instance when he visited German ruling personages. As he was on his way to Switzerland through Germany he witnessed the wide use of French in Europe, for example at the theatre (in Hanover he attended two plays in French; Kuznetsov 2003: 372–4). He conducted an extensive correspondence in French while he was abroad. The addressees are not indicated in the drafts that have survived, but it is evident that they include Russians (for example, a relative of Stroganov’s and Ivan Shuvalov, a favourite of the Empress Elizabeth) as well as foreigners, and not just French people (op. 1, d. 5). Thus French for Stroganov was not only a lingua franca but also a language for communication with his com-

lan guage us e a mo ng the rus s ia n a r i s t o c r a c y   67 patriots, which at that time was something new in Russia. Following etiquette, he also wrote in French to Gerhard Friedrich Müller, a German historiographer who was in Russian service (StPF ARAN, f. 21, op. 3, d. 307/​42, fols 1–1 v.) and who did know Russian. However, his letters to his father were written in Russian (Kuznetsov 2003: 366–467; Pisarenko 2005; Jaeger 2007: 417–96), perhaps because for Sergei Stroganov, a man of the older generation, correspondence with his son in French seemed unnatural; besides, his father regularly showed his son’s letters to relations and courtiers and evidently not all readers of this correspondence had a sufficient command of French. The choice of French in Stroganov’s case is unlikely to have been a sign of social distinction, because he distances himself from the model of aristocratic behaviour. Rather it is a sign of membership of the Republic of Letters. In France he does not aspire to contact with the high social world: ‘Paris is a large and fine city’, he says in a letter of 23 February 1756, ‘but it is very difficult for a person like me, who does not like playing cards, to have an acquaintance with the higher nobility’ (Jaeger 2007: 485). He struck up contacts, above all, with scholars and merchants, in order to build up his cabinet d’histoire naturelle and his collections of paintings and old medals as well as to increase his knowledge. He became acquainted with writers, including Voltaire, whom he visited. Through the use of French, and in particular epistolary stock phrases, he assimilated forms of communication that were new for him and, to some extent, interiorised emotional models that corresponded to them (Zorin 2010). In this correspondence we can plainly see leitmotifs, such as friendship and politeness, which make up the psychological features of the ‘imagined communities’ of enlightened Europeans and the aristocracy. (These communities overlap to a considerable extent in the Age of Enlightenment.) The signs of friendship and politeness are often exaggerated in Stroganov’s letters (and this is unlikely to be by chance), as we see from the following undated letter written soon after his return to Russia: C’est un criminel, mon cher Sarasin [a Genevan acquaintance of Stroganov], honteux des fautes qu’il a commise vis-à-vis du meilleur de ses amis qui vien devan vous comme devan son juge entendre sa sentence, oui très cher ami s’est le Baron cet homme que vous avés comblé de votre amitié c’est lui qui vien vous demander Million et Million de pardon pour la faute la plus grossiere qu’il ay pu commetre c’est-à-dire par [pour] avoir été si longtems sens [sans] vous donner de ses nouvelles. (op. 1, d. 5, fol. 54)10

68  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd vl a dimi r s o m o v Stroganov kept a travel diary in French (op. 4, d. 77). His essay Lettre à un Ami sur les Voyages (‘Letter to a Friend about Travels’), written in Geneva in 1753 (op. 4, d. 78, fols 51–8), shows that this sort of diary was kept consciously, in accordance with a tradition that was known to him. He dwelt on the role of languages, especially French, in the Grand Tour: ‘Among the things one needs to know beforehand we should place languages, which are of such help to the traveller, above all French, which is now spoken at almost all the courts of Europe’ (op. 4, d. 76, p. 56). During his second stay in France, Stroganov took advantage of the eminent position he now had, his excellent command of French and his knowledge of the practices of French society to meet a great many people. Agents of the French authorities reported on the count’s circle of acquaintances and activities in Paris. He featured in the category ‘Foreign ministers’, that is to say he was regarded as an official representative of Russia. Stroganov regularly saw Russian aristocrats who were living in France (Shuvalovs, Razumovskiis, Chernyshevs and others), the Russian ambassador, Prince Bariatinskii, and his relations, diplomats of other European states and other foreigners. The Stroganovs attended the salons of Madame Necker, the Marquise de la Ferté-Imbault (the daughter of Madame Geoffrin), and the Marquis de Brancas in the castle at Crosne (BNF, Ms, fonds maçonnique, nos 2–44, fol. 75; Lilti 2004: 117–27). They visited theatres (the Comédie Française, the Comédie Italienne) and amused themselves in jeux de sociétés (parlour games). They organised dinners and suppers and even concerts in their country house at Passy (AAE Contrôle des étrangers, no. 28, passim). Imitating the French aristocracy, the Stroganovs themselves held a salon, which became popular (Lilti 2005: 131, 134, 145, 310, 430, 493). The ‘main Russians’ would come here, diplomats and other eminent foreigners, the French aristocracy, including the Maréchale de Luxembourg, the Marquise du Deffand and so on. ‘The Russian ladies who are here make the house very pleasant’, wrote the French sleuths (AAE, fonds Contrôle des étrangers, no. 4, fols 77–7 v.). The francophone circles in which the Stroganovs moved in France included not only high society but also men and women of letters and philosophers. Thus in Paris Stroganov met Diderot who, before setting off for Russia in May 1773, wrote to the sculptor Falconet: ‘I am closely linked to Mr and Mrs Stroganov’ (Diderot 1965: 229–30). These circles extended to masonic lodges. Stroganov was initiated as a freemason in Paris in 1773, became a member of several lodges and attained high degrees (Bacounine 1967: 520–1). Here the count met aristocrats, political figures, scholars and philosophers, writers, artists, sculptors and musicians. In 1778 he took part in a ceremony at which Voltaire was accepted in the Nine Sisters

lan guage us e a mo ng the rus s ia n a r i s t o c r a c y   69 Lodge (Stroev 2007). People close to him were freemasons, such as the landscape painter Hubert Robert (Jaeger 2007: 60) and his son’s tutor, Gilbert Romme. However, the Stroganovs’ francophonie was not just a means of becoming integrated into various spheres of French society; it was also an important means of improving the image of Russia, which Europeans often thought was not entitled to be considered a civilised country, for the Stroganovs were de facto representatives of Russia in France. On more than one occasion they used their authority to uphold the honour of their nation, as shown by an incident that took place at a reception at the home of the Duc d’Orléans, where a certain lady, in Stroganov’s words, started ‘talking all sorts of wild nonsense about Russia’ and Stroganov’s wife, who happened to be present, ‘replied to this very moderately’. The duke apologised to Stroganov and banned the lady from his house (4 (15) February 1773; RGADA, f. 1263, op. 1, d. 3323, fols 1–1 v.). Stroganov described this incident to the Vice-Chancellor Prince Aleksandr Golitsyn in Russian. In Russia too Stroganov was already surrounding himself with predominantly francophone society after his first journey abroad. The Genevan astronomers Jean-Louis Pictet and Jacques-André Mallet met many people at Stroganov’s home in St Petersburg in 1768–9, including other foreigners (Jean Baptiste Charpentier, a teacher of French at the Academy gimnaziia, who was well known as the author of a Russian grammar; his wife, who was the sister of a French painter at the Russian court, Jean-Baptiste Leprince; the actors Denis Sénépart and Pierre Nicolas Bourdais; a Doctor Girard and others). They were amazed at the combination of free conversation, the simplicity of the host’s manner and the Asiatic magnificence of the house (Pictet and Mallet 2005: 97–8, 135, 237–8, 266). Many years later the same contrast would be noticed by the Polish aristocrat Adam Czartoryski: The count, who had lived in Paris for many years, had adopted habits there which contrasted sharply with his old Muscovite customs. People spoke in his house about Voltaire, Diderot and the Paris theatre and discussed the merits of the paintings of the masters, of which the host owned a rich collection; and alongside this one would see an enormous table being prepared to which one would go to dine without being invited and where one was served by a swarm of slaves and where the disorder of things betrayed the origin of these Siberian riches […] Stroganov embodied a peculiar mixture of the encyclopédiste and the old Russian boyar. He had French wit and conversation but Russian manners and habits. (Czartoryski 1887: 45–6, 298–9)11

70  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd vl a dimi r s o m o v As a rule, French was the language of communication in this cosmopolitan circle. Stroganov was a participant in a circle of lovers of French literature which brought together Russian Francophiles and foreigners who lived in St Petersburg (Berkov 1936: 240–62). St Petersburg’s francophone society was attracted to his palace by its library too. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it contained roughly 4,800 titles (about 10,000 volumes), more than 3,000 of which were in foreign languages, mainly French (Somov 2006: 238). Stroganov planned to publish a catalogue of part of the library in French and he produced a catalogue of his picture gallery that took descriptions of French collections as models (Stroganov 1793). Readers of the library included Catherine II herself, statesmen and military men, courtiers, diplomats, scholars, writers and painters, about fifty people in all, including foreigners. The greatest demand was for works by d’Alembert, Bossuet, Fénelon, Gresset, Helvétius, Montesquieu and, of course, Voltaire. These were the writers who were spoken of at court and in high society (BRAN, OR, f. 18, no. 37, ‘Pro-memoria des livres prétés’; Somov 2002: 200–34). Francophonie and even Francophilia went together in Stroganov with an acute sense of patriotism and concern for the development of his own country’s culture. As early as his spell of study in Geneva, when he became familiar with ideas about the usefulness of travel in a nobleman’s education, he reflected on the traveller’s purpose, namely to acquire knowledge and acquaint oneself with other cultures in order to be useful to one’s country, following the example of another traveller, Peter the Great (op. 4, d. 76, pp. 51–8). Speeches could be heard in Stroganov’s literary salon in St Petersburg which, although they were made in French, presented the development of the arts and sciences in Russia in a favourable light (for example, the abbé Faure’s ‘Discourse on the Progress of the Fine Arts in Russia’ (‘Discours sur le progrès des beauxarts en Russie’), which was delivered in Stroganov’s house on 16 January 1760 and printed anonymously in St Petersburg in the same year). It was also in Stroganov’s house that a plan was announced in 1766 to found a public library in St Petersburg. Aleksandr busied himself with the acquisition of Russian books, sought to open the Imperial Library to wider sections of the public and urged people to write a history of Russia (Lander and Mikheeva 2006: 31–49). At the end of his life his main project was to build one of the largest Orthodox churches in St Petersburg, the Kazan’ Cathedral. Russian craftsmen were recruited to decorate the cathedral and the person put in charge of the design was the Russian architect Andrei Voronikhin, a former serf of the Stroganov family who had been liberated in 1785 and sent to Paris to study at Stroganov’s expense. At the same time, cultural projects completed by

lan guage us e a mo ng the rus s ia n a r i s t o c r a c y   71 the count in Russia were influenced by specific French models of the 1770s (Jaeger 2007: 55, 92, 265). Stroganov’s activity was in line with the general thrust of Catherine’s policy for the development of the Russian language and Russian culture (the creation of the Russian Academy, of which Stroganov became a member in 1783, production of the Dictionary of the Russian Academy, which he helped to compile, and so forth). As his example clearly shows, command of French and a cosmopolitan way of life could indeed go together with patriotic feelings.

TRA D I T I ONS AN D I NNO V ATI ONS While Aleksandr Stroganov’s only son Pavel was studying in Geneva, his curriculum included almost the same subjects as his father’s curriculum before him: physics, chemistry, riding, fencing, dancing and music, although a new language (English) also appeared. This was an exceptional case for the Russian aristocracy at that time; it no doubt reflects awareness of the importance of British culture, which was known in Russia mainly through French and German translations of British books and of articles that had appeared in the British press (Rjéoutski 2013a). Like his father, Pavel attended lectures in French in Geneva and Paris, because he did not know enough Latin. Romme informed Aleksandr Stroganov that Pavel was interested in history and French literature (Tchoudinov 2007: 689). As in his father’s case again, Pavel acquired his knowledge of non-linguistic subjects in French: chemistry, mathematics and even the ‘geography of the Russian state’ were studied in French, with Romme, we may suppose (op. 1, dd. 75–6, 482, 509–11). However, on this occasion the travel abroad was preceded by a long journey within Russia: the young Stroganov was to familiarise himself first with his own country and its culture and industry. To all intents and purposes we are again dealing with a Grand Tour but this time it is a tour of the native land, which represents an interesting pedagogic innovation on the part of Aleksandr Stroganov. The father explained the importance of this journey to his son in one of his letters. Only love of one’s country can instil in us the qualities of good citizens and members of the State […] And for that reason I have conceived the idea of laying a foundation for your upbringing in the depths of our fatherland, in order thereby to instil in you an attachment to it […] With that purpose you have travelled through many parts of Russia under the guidance of a friend who is esteemed for his virtues and knowledge. At every instance he has shown you

72  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd vl a dimi r s o m o v traces of the courage of your compatriots, the marvels of the spirit of our creator Peter the Great and monuments to the charitable hand of Catherine II. (Kuznetsov 2003: 59) ‘Be a good Russian,’ Aleksandr exhorted his son, ‘subordinate yourself to the needs of the country where all your family were born’ (Nikolai Mikhailovich 1903: 34). Although the question of one’s native language is not touched upon in these injunctions, it is significant that they were written in Russian. Having lived for the first eight years of his life in France, Pavel had acquired a better command of French than Russian, and French was indisputably the first and most important language in his education. Some of the letters he wrote to his father while he was abroad were in French and he wrote in French to other relatives as well (Rzheutskii and Chudinov 2010: 52). He also learned German, though not until 1787–8, when he was studying in Geneva, by which time he was already fifteen; he used German in some of his letters to his father in order to practise this language too (RGADA, f. 1278, op. 1, d. 348).12 However, it was mainly in Russian that he wrote to his father during his travels, also for linguistic practice (Jaeger 2007: 498–9). He studied Russian with Voronikhin, as well as with teachers who were employed by the Stroganovs. In 1785, in Kiev, these studies were conducted alongside study of the catechism. Pavel directly linked the catechism and the Russian language as ‘the most essential things for a person who has to live on this earth’ (Chudinov 2010: 167).13 It is interesting that Pavel’s tutor Romme, in accordance with the principles of Rousseau, thought study of one’s native language was of paramount importance, because it was ‘natural’ first to master one’s native language and to master other languages and subjects only after that had been done. In Romme’s opinion, study of the native language should precede methodical study of the sciences (Chudinov 2010: 169). His pupil’s attachment to his fatherland preoccupied Romme during their journey abroad as well (2010: 211), which shows that the presence of a foreign tutor did not by itself lead to alienation from one’s native country. As was the custom, Pavel kept a diary of his foreign journey in French. For a Russian aristocrat French was preferable for keeping a diary of this sort both for practical reasons – communication in the different countries most often took place in French – and because of the role of French in the noble model of education. Stroganov’s style is the style of quite a young man, but it reveals a good knowledge of the language (leaving aside spelling mistakes and lax punctuation, which are to be found among French aristocrats too) and it has a ‘natural’ feel. Pavel also had a good grasp of

lan guage us e a mo ng the rus s ia n a r i s t o c r a c y   73 specialised terminology in French, for example, from the field of metal production, which for him, as the heir to a family of mine-owners, was of some importance. Thus, having visited an iron production depot in France, he wrote: on ne prend que les fers qui dans leur cassure presentent un grain egale[,] soit très fin soit très brillant[,] on aime aussi beaucoup le fer qui en se cassant ne se romp pas nette mais s’arrache et a des filandries. (op. 1, d. 345, fol. 12 v.)14 Pavel married Princess Sof’ia Golitsyna, who had been brought up by Swiss French-speaking tutors and had spent much time abroad. In his correspondence with her, he used French almost exclusively (more than 1,000 pages of letters have survived for the period from 1793 to 1816, practically all of them in French; op. 1, dd. 349–55, 357). The count also mainly used French for his correspondence outside the family circle. His correspondents included foreigners (and not only French people), some of whom were in Russian service (the Comte de Langeron, the Marquis d’Antraigues, the Marquis de la Maisonfort, the Duc de Richelieu, Count von Bennigsen, General van Suchtelen, the Duke of Cambridge and so on), numerous Russians, who were aristocrats as a rule (Apraksins, Bariatinskiis, Golitsyns, Volkonskiis, Vorontsovs and so forth; op. 1, dd. 59–62), and members of the imperial family, including Alexander I (op. 1, dd. 328–42, 344, 348). He also wrote his memoirs in French (op. 1, d. 17, fols 69–98). In ministerial papers from the family archive (not always in his own hand) French coexists with Russian; occasionally we come across English and very rarely German and Latin.15 In business correspondence with the emperor Stroganov used French (op. 1, d. 17). We believe that the frequent use of French in the environment of work may be explained not only by Stroganov’s role at court but also by his inability to write Russian with such ease as he could write French. In Russian he quite often calques French expressions, constructs phrases in accordance with French syntax, forgets to decline nouns and mixes up their gender. His Russian texts were sometimes corrected (probably by ministerial officials, and not always successfully) to give them an acceptable appearance (op. 1, d. 16, fols 58–62 v., 69). In the following examples mistakes are in bold and the correct versions are given in brackets : бумага вступающая [вступающая бумага]; разделить обработка[у] каждого дела; надобно нарочно для того канцелярския[их] служители[ей]; кто мало [немного] обращался с канцеляриями; в столь обширном [ой] империи; никаких мер брать [принять] не можно.16 We are dealing

74  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd vl a dimi r s o m o v here with interference from French (for example, in French an adjective is usually placed after the noun, as in papier entrant; empire is masculine in French, but Russian империя is feminine; in French one says prendre des mesures, and so Stroganov, instead of writing принять меры, uses the calque брать меры). The standard of Pavel’s Russian, at first sight, confirms the impression of a Russian nobleman who does not know his native language well. We come across this image of the Russian nobleman in the belles-lettres and memoirs of the time and also in historical scholarship. However, Stroganov, and his wife too, are special cases, for not only were they brought up by francophone tutors, they also spent their early years abroad. On the whole a shaky command of Russian was the exception among the Stroganovs. Aleksandr Stroganov (as shown by texts that he wrote in Russian, some of which – for instance, a well-known letter to his estate manager (Kuznetsov 2003: 52–5) – are not without literary beauty) and his grandson Aleksandr Pavlovich (as shown by his letters to his father and by his essays) had a fine command of their native language. Consequently, if we are to judge by sources in the Stroganov archive, the idea that the upper Russian nobility were ignorant of their native language should be recognised largely as a historiographical myth. The socio-political terminology in official documents that Stroganov wrote requires a separate investigation, but we may note here that he seems to express a number of concepts primarily in French. His experience of life in France during the Revolution (his visit to sessions of the National Assembly and so forth) probably had a linguistic effect, affording him the opportunity to familiarise himself with these conceptual fields in French. In other cases where Stroganov uses a French word rather than a Russian one his practice may be explained by the fact that corresponding conceptual fields were poorly developed in Russian or that Stroganov was not familiar with them. We have in mind, for example, words and concepts such as loi fondamentale (fundamental law), chose publique (public affairs), économie politique (political economy), utilité générale (general utility) and magistrat suprême (supreme magistrate) (op. 1, d. 17, passim). Sof’ia Stroganova used French both in correspondence and in egodocuments. One of the notebooks into which she copied quotations from the books she had read has an English title, ‘Commonplace book’ (RNB, OR, f. 669, no. 169), but it contains mainly excerpts from French authors and French translations of English books. The authors include Lally-Tollendal, Sénac de Meilhan, Montesquieu, Racine fils, Madame de Sévigné, Madame d’Epinay, Rollin, David Hume and Seneca. The countess’s own remarks are also written in French. There is a note in

lan guage us e a mo ng the rus s ia n a r i s t o c r a c y   75 French on the title page, saying Ce livre est destiné à ma fille Elisabeth,17 that is to say Elizaveta Pavlovna, whose married name would be Princess Saltykova (1802–63). There is frequent mention in the mother’s letters to her daughter of the study of languages, and not only foreign languages but also Church Slavonic. This mention may be an echo of the debates of the time, in which Karamzin, Shishkov, Glinka and Rostopchin participated and to which we referred earlier. In 1819, for example, Stroganova wrote to her daughter (in French): ‘I am delighted that you are working at Slavonic, it’s the key to Russian, and then again it is so beautiful that this reason alone ought to be enough to [make one] study it. I expect to busy myself with it this winter […]’ (RNB, OR, f. 669, no. 54, fols 4, 6). The children of Pavel Stroganov and Sof’ia Stroganova studied Russian, French, English, Italian and Latin, but not German, it seems, or very little of it,18 although the following generation would learn German and even classical Greek as well (op. 1, dd. 30, 38, 45). The presence of Latin in this list should be noted. By strengthening the classical component of education the authorities were trying to reduce the role of French, which seemed to carry some threat to the foundations of the empire, particularly after the revolt of 1825 by the Decembrists, who had an excellent command of French, and the revolution of 1830 in France. That said, the influence of official policy on tuition in the families of Russian aristocrats is highly debatable. It is also worth noting that the set of subjects taught to boys and girls was very similar, apart from a few distinctions that are easy to understand (for example, the study of fortification by boys). This applies to languages too, except that Latin was studied only by boys. This was probably a reflection of ideas that were traditional in Europe as a whole: women were often thought of as beings who were mentally weaker than men and the grammar of the classical languages was felt to require unnecessary exertion for the female mind. The Stroganovs’ children translated not only from one living foreign language (or dead language) to another but also from a foreign language into Russian. This was a real revolution in the didactics of noble education in Russia. One language or another often served as the medium for learning non-linguistic subjects: Aleksandr Pavlovich Stroganov studied history in Russian and French (op. 1, dd. 409–10), logic in French (op. 4, d. 408), mathematics in French and a little in Russian (op. 1, d. 414), as also fortification and military tactics (op. 1, d. 418), but physics and mechanics only in Russian (op. 1, d. 419). French maintained its dominant position as an intermediary language, but it was becoming possible to study certain subjects in Russian. These changes were bound up,

76  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd vl a dimi r s o m o v above all, with the emergence of Russian teachers: thus Aleksandr was taught surveying (a skill needed by an officer) by a professor of the First Cadet Corps, Semen Prokhorovich Lukin, literature by Petr Stepanovich Sokolov and physics by Vasilii Grigor’evich Kukol’nik. Admittedly, Aleksandr Sergeevich Stroganov had already been taught mathematics in Russian by a teacher of the Cadet Corps, Nikolai Erofeevich Murav’ev, the author of a mathematics textbook,19 but that had been an exception rather than the rule, and in any case the Stroganovs seem not yet to have studied Russian literature at that time. As in the case of other languages, the set of Russian texts selected for study does not seem random (op. 1, d. 404, passim). In 1812 Aleksandr Pavlovich Stroganov was copying long passages out of works such as the following: a play by Matvei Kriukovskii that was popular at the time, Pozharskii (first published in 1807), which was about the Time of Troubles (1598–1613) and which offered a clear parallel with the war of 1812; several texts with titles such as ‘Love of the Fatherland’ or ‘What is True Love of the Fatherland?’; the speech of Peter the Great before the Battle of Poltava (1709), which begins with the words ‘Friends! I am sure that you will today show that you are worthy sons of the fatherland’; and Kheraskov’s epic poem Rossiada (The Rossiad), for instance a passage about the parting of a mother and her sons who are going off to defend their country. Aleksandr comments on the last of these passages in a letter to his father, who at that time was in the Russian army: ‘This is very true to life. I witnessed it myself when the regiments were leaving St Petersburg’ (op. 1, d. 404, fol. 41). The concept of the ‘fatherland’ (отечество) constantly occurs in these texts. Of course, we may see in all this the conscious selection of Aleksandr’s teacher of Russian literature, but the very inclusion in the curriculum of Russian literature, which Stroganovs of previous generations had hardly studied at all, would seem to reflect the growth of national consciousness in Russian society, and this development affected aristocratic circles too.20 It is perhaps relevant to add that the Stroganovs remained Orthodox believers and that they brought their children up as Orthodox.21 The extant letters that Aleksandr addressed to his father in the course of 1812 were written in Russian. As in the texts which he transcribed in his lessons on Russian literature, they touch on the theme of service to one’s fatherland, including service on the field of battle. Thus in one of his letters to his father Aleksandr writes, in Russian: ‘While you are distinguishing yourself on the field of battle and defending the honour and independence of Russians, I am training in the sciences so that one day I might be just as worthy as you to serve our fatherland’ (op. 1, d. 70, fol. 137; Stroganov’s emphasis). It is tempting to see Aleksandr’s choice of

lan guage us e a mo ng the rus s ia n a r i s t o c r a c y   77 language in this instance as a conscious decision made under the influence of current events. At the same time the letters are undoubtedly written with an educational purpose: in Aleksandr’s exercise book for Russian language and literature, we find among his translations and essays drafts of his letters with traces of correction by his teacher. Moreover, the boy’s correspondence with other relations and with his aristocratic friends over the period 1808–13 is almost all written in French (op. 1, d. 538). Although we have to say that the surge of national feeling did not affect language choice in this family, nonetheless we cannot help but notice the sense of patriotism and the positioning of themselves as Russians in the Stroganovs’ teaching materials and correspondence in the early nineteenth century. In an essay on ‘The Spirit of the Russian Villager’, which the young Aleksandr probably wrote in 1812, we find a Romantic image of the Russian peasantry as keepers of Russian values – ‘reverence for God’, ‘steadfast adherence to the holy Orthodox faith’, ‘allegiance to their Sovereign and fatherland’, ‘love for their neighbour’ – which Stroganov contrasts with the ‘false Enlightenment’ ‘of those who preach courtesy to us’ (a transparent hint at the French; op. 1, d. 404, fols 107–11 v.). Taken together, these documents seem to us to confirm the thesis of Michelle Lamarche Marrese that there is no foundation for Iurii Lotman’s assertion that Russian nobles were cut off from their national roots as a result of the ‘French’ upbringing they had received and that they suffered from an inner conflict (Marrese 2010). One could in all probability say of the young Stroganov what Pushkin said of his heroine Tat’iana in his novel in verse Eugene Onegin (Evgenii Onegin): although Tat’iana had an excellent command of French, she was ‘Russian in her soul’.22 The other Stroganov children also wrote to their parents mainly in French. Of the letters that these children wrote to Sof’ia not many at all are in Russian or English, and those letters are plainly intended to demonstrate the children’s ability to write in those languages. In the Russian letters we quite often see French words written in Cyrillic, such as гранмама, гранпапа (grandma, grandpa) and Frenchified names such as Адель instead of Aglaida, which would seem to suggest that in everyday life, in the spoken language as well as in writing, French was used more than Russian (op. 1, d. 364, fol. 36; d. 365, fol. 169 v.).23 In the children’s correspondence for 1813 Russian is not used, while English occupies a modest place by comparison with French.24 However, the emergence of English as a new language of intimacy, albeit for educational purposes for the time being, portends a certain cultural reorientation on the part of the Russian aristocracy.25 This was reflected in choice of tutors, when an English governess, Sophie Rochfort, appeared in the Stroganov

78  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd vl a dimi r s o m o v household. German was not used in intimate communication at all. The limited role of German can probably be explained by the Stroganovs’ leaning towards the French Enlightenment, their proximity to the court, where it was above all French that was spoken and written, and the role of French among the Russian aristocracy in general. We are bound to note the contrast with the central role of German, for example, in the Land Cadet Corps, where, during the reign of Catherine, there were many students from the lower gentry. It is therefore difficult to avoid the conclusion that there is a correlation in Russia between linguistic training and pupils’ social level (Rjéoutski 2013c). In 1820, the young Elizaveta Pavlovna Stroganova wrote to her mother, in French: ‘I have at least eighty volumes. The works of Bossuet, Massillon, Racine, Corneille and Voltaire’ (op. 1, d. 365, fol. 142). In spite of their ‘patriotic’ upbringing and the war with Napoleon, even after 1812 the French language and French literature remained for the Stroganovs at the centre of the educational process and communication within the family. Not until the generations of Pavel’s and Sof’ia’s grandchildren does one see some increase in the role of Russian and English and a diminution of the role of French in the family’s private correspondence.26 * * * The Stroganovs learned quite a few European languages, but above all French, which was the international language of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and an essential attribute of the way of life of a European aristocrat. For this family, who had only recently acquired noble status, French was a means of self-fashioning on the basis of European models and a means of becoming integrated in ‘imagined communities’, such as the upper circles of the Russian and European elite and the Republic of Letters. In the first generations, in the mid-eighteenth century, communication between father and son was in Russian, although when Aleksandr Sergeevich Stroganov took up his pen French was already turning from a lingua franca into a language of intimate communication with his compatriots. This development was most probably linked to the notion of French as a marker of ‘civilised’, ‘learned’ society, a community of cultivated people (honnêtes hommes), within which the Stroganovs ranked themselves. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries French held almost complete sway within the family, in correspondence with people of their circle and members of the royal family, in ego-documents and even in business correspondence. However, there was also much that was beginning to change in this

lan guage us e a mo ng the rus s ia n a r i s t o c r a c y   79 period: the Stroganovs’ children increasingly studied Russian and a new language, English, appeared and began to make a claim as the second language of intimacy, although in the first instance only in an educational context. In the age of the Napoleonic Wars, the Stroganovs were not bilingual; rather they were at least trilingual, in Russian, French and English. The place of Russian and English would grow at the expense of French, although this process would drag on over many years. German was barely used in correspondence and ego-documents. From this point of view, we believe, this family was quite typical of the upper Russian nobility (the Bariatinskiis, Buturlins, Golitsyns, Golovkins, Naryshkins, Shuvalovs, Vorontsovs and others), although it is hard to make definitive statements about this since there are as yet no well-documented studies of language use in other Russian aristocratic families.27 Francophonie coexisted among the Stroganovs with patriotic feelings. The family increasingly acknowledged the value of their native language, and this was reflected in the introduction of new educational subjects such as Russian literature. The self-positioning of the Stroganovs as Russian was grounded in a firm sense of themselves as belonging to a clearly defined national ‘imagined community’, which makes it impossible for us to speak of them as being cut off from national roots. And yet, the Stroganovs’ conception of themselves as Russian, surprisingly, had almost no effect on their choice of language for communication with their relations and people of their circle. This choice was made in favour of French. In other words, the use of French was not a nationally marked practice for the Stroganovs. Loyalty to this language, which was already beginning to go out of fashion in some parts of Europe, may be explained in this case by a number of factors which we have tried to highlight in this chapter: notions which had developed about the ‘cultural capital’ of French, allegiance to the ideals and practices of the French Enlightenment and also family and social traditions, including the influence of the court, with which the Stroganovs were closely associated.

NOTES We are grateful to Andreas Schönle and Aleksandr Chudinov for their comments and advice and also to Ekaterina Kislova and Dmitrii Kostyshin for their help in the preparation of this chapter.   1. In 1761, while he was in Vienna on a mission for the Russian court, Baron A. S. Stroganov received the title Count of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1798 he was raised to the status of Count of the Russian Empire.

80  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd vl a dimi r s o m o v  2. His first wife was Anna Vorontsova (1743–69), daughter of Chancellor M. I. Vorontsov.   3. On Stroganov as a collector and patron, see Kuznetsov (2006) and Jaeger (2007).   4. The Stroganovs’ daughter Sof’ia (1774–1801) died young.   5. The linguistic ideas of these writers will be examined in Volume 2, Chapters 6 and 7, by Gesine Argent and Gary Hamburg respectively.   6. See the list of archival sources in the References. Many documents from the archive of the Counts Stroganov have been published in the works cited in our references by the Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, Sergei Kuznetsov, Aleksandr Chudinov and Susanne Jaeger. See also Rzheutskii and Chudinov (2010).   7. See Chapter 4 in this volume, in which Rjéoutski and Speranskaia discuss the francophone press in Russia.   8. Unless otherwise indicated, all references are to RGADA, f. 1278 (the Stroganovs). Henceforth we indicate only the number of the opis’ and delo.   9. The titles cited are: ‘Letter to Mr Baron Alexander Stroganov about the government of Geneva’; ‘Letter about the church of Geneva, its cult, its discipline and its governance’; ‘Additions to various parts of Bourlamaqui’s natural law’; ‘Summary of natural law and human law’; ‘Roman history under the emperors’; ‘Revolution of the empires of the East’; ‘Modern history since the election of Charles V in 1519 to the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV in the year 1643’; ‘Summary of the history of England’. 10. ‘This is a criminal, my dear Sarasin, ashamed of the mistakes he has committed in relation to the best of his friends, and he comes before you as before his judge to hear his sentence, yes, my dearest friend, it is the baron who is this man on whom you have bestowed your friendship, it is he who comes to beg millions of pardons for the grossest mistake he has been able to commit, that’s to say for having gone so long without giving you any of his news.’ In this and other quotations in French we have used the spelling in the original document. 11. The passage that has been translated here was written by Czartoryski in French. 12. We are grateful to Hélène Rol-Tanguy for this information. 13. Pavel studied Russian from the ‘Moscow University grammar’; this was probably the Kratkie pravila rossiiskoi grammatiki: Sobrannye iz raznykh rossiiskikh grammatik: V pol’zu obuchaiushegosia iunoshestva v gimnaziiakh Imperatorskogo Moskovskogo universiteta, [Moscow]: Pech. pri Imp. Mosk. un-te, 1773. This grammar was republished many times. For the catechism, Platon [P. E. Levshin], Kratkii katekhizis radi obucheniia maloletnikh detei khristianskomu zakonu, Moscow 1775, may have been used (there were also earlier editions). 14. ‘They only take pieces of iron which have an even grain on their fractured edge, whether it is very fine or very shiny, and they also very much like iron which, when it is fractured, does not break cleanly but tears and has threads.’ 15. Here is the information for a number of dela (documents) for the Ministry of Internal Affairs from the Stroganov archive. The information relates to the early nineteenth century. In brackets we give the number of folios in the dela in each language: op. 1, d. 16 (221 Russian/​49 French); 18 (122 Russian/​53 French); 20 (47 Russian/​ 97 French/​28 English); 23 (179 Russian/​52 French); 24 (208 Russian); 25 (147 Russian/​6 English); 26 (139 Russian/​84 French/​6 German); 27 (316 Russian/​55 French/​3 Latin); 28 (185 Russian/​29 French); 29 (209 Russian/​46 French); 30 (260 Russian/​18 French); 31 (314 Russian/​10 French); 32 (300 Russian/​167 French). 16. ‘incoming document’; ‘separate the treatment of each case’; ‘clerical staff are needed

lan guage us e a mo ng the rus s ia n a r i s t o c r a c y   81 specifically for that’; ‘whoever has had some dealings with chancelleries’; ‘in such an extensive empire’; ‘no measures can be taken’. 17. ‘This book is for my daughter Elizabeth.’ 18. Aleksandr Pavlovich Stroganov would study German while he was stationed with the Russian army in the German states in 1813. 19. Nachal’noe osnovanie matematiki, vol. 1, St Petersburg: pri Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, 1752 (vol. 2 did not appear). This was one of the first mathematics textbooks in Russian. 20. On the concept of ‘fatherland’ (отечество) see the work of Ingrid Schierle (2009), for example. See also Chapter 10, by Sara Dickinson, in Volume 2. 21. Although the children’s attitude towards the Orthodox clergyman sometimes seems condescending and rather alienated, so that they do not refer to him like their other teachers, by his name, but just as ‘the clergyman’. 22. The reference is to Canto 5, Stanza 4 of Pushkin’s work. On treatment of francophonie in Pushkin’s fictional prose see Chapter 11, by Derek Offord, in Volume 2. 23. Here is the information for two dela which contain in total almost 1,500 pages of letters: op. 1, d. 70 (63 Russian/​243 French/​11 English); 71 (1,142 French/​3 English). 24. Op. 1, d. 554 (1813; 17 French/​2 English); 557 (1813; 9 French/​6 English); 564 (1813; 13 French/​2 English). 25. On anglophilia and anglomania in Russian society at this time, see Cross (2015). 26. See the correspondence of Aleksandr Sergeevich Stroganov (1818–64) with his children (op. 1, d. 594). There are 69 pages in Russian, 27 in English and 12 in French. This Stroganov was the son of Natal’ia Pavlovna Stroganova and her distant cousin Sergei Grigor’evich Stroganov. 27. Jessica Tipton (University of Bristol) is writing a thesis about the use of languages – mainly French – in the Vorontsov family.

REFERENCES AAE, fonds Contrôle des étrangers, nos 3, 4, 28, 30. Anderson, B. (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Bacounine, T. (1967), Répertoire biographique des francs-maçons russes (XVIIIe et XIXe siècles), Paris: Institut d’études slaves. Berelowitch, W. (1993), ‘La France dans le “Grand Tour” des nobles russes au cours de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle’, Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, 34: 1–2, 193–210. Berkov, P. N. (1936), Lomonosov i literaturnaia polemika ego vremeni, Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR. BNF, Ms, fonds maçonnique, nos 2–44. BRAN, OR, f. 18 (Stroganovs, foreign manuscripts), nos 2–5, 10, 19, 28, 35–6. Chudinov, A. (2010), Zhil’ber Romm i Pavel Stroganov. Istoriia neobychnogo soiuza, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Cross, A. (2015), ‘English – a serious challenge to French in the reign of Alexander I?’, The Russian Review, 74: 1, 57–68. Czartoryski, A. (1887), Mémoires du prince Adam Czartoryski et correspondance avec l’empereur Alexandre Ier, vol. 1, Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et cie.

82  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd vl a dimi r s o m o v Diderot, D. (1965), Correspondance, vol. 12 (January 1772 – June 1773), ed. G. Roth, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Ekaterina II [Catherine II] (1878), Pis’ma imperatritsy Ekateriny II k Grimmu, izd. Ia. K. Grotom, St Petersburg: Tip. Akademii nauk. Grimm, F.-M. (1885), Pis’ma Grimma k imperatritse Ekaterine II, izd. Ia. K. Grotom, St Petersburg: Tip. Akademii nauk. Jaeger, S. (2007), Alexander S. Stroganov (1733–1811): Sammler und Mäzen im Russland der Aufklärung, Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag. Kuznetsov, S. O. (2003), Pust’ Frantsiia pouchit nas ‘tantsovat’’, St Petersburg: Nestor. Kuznetsov, S. O. (2006), Ne khuzhe Tomona: Gosudarstvennaia, metsenatskaia, sobiratel’naia deiatelnost’ roda Strogonovykh v 1771–1817 gg. i formirovanie imperskogo oblika S.-Peterburga, St Petersburg: Nestor. Kuznetsov, S. O. (2011), ‘Puteshestvie v Evropu 1752–1757 gg. Zh. Antuana i barona A. S. Stroganova’, in A. Chudinov [Tchoudinov] and V. Rzheutskii [Rjéoutski] (eds), Frankoiazychnye guvernery v Evrope XVII–XIX vv., Moscow: IVI RAN, pp. 164–77. Lander, I. G. and G. V. Mikheeva (2006), ‘1800–1811: Aleksandr Sergeevich Stroganov’, Istoriia biblioteki v biografiiakh ee direktorov: 1795–2006, St Petersburg: RNB, pp. 31–49. Lilti, A. (2004), ‘Espace urbain, espace mondain: la géographie parisienne de la sociabilité au XVIIIe siècle’, in K. Béguin and O. Dautresme (eds), La ville et l’esprit de société. Sociabilité, urbanité: le legs de la modernité (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle), Tours: Publication de l’Université de Tours, pp. 111–27. Lilti, A. (2005), Le monde des salons. Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Fayard. Marrese, M. Lamarche (2010), ‘ “The poetics of everyday behavior” revisited: Lotman, gender, and the evolution of Russian noble identity’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 11: 4, 701–39. Mesiatseslov (1778) [i.e. Mesiatseslov s rospis’iu chinovnykh osob v gosudarstve na leto ot Rozhdestva Khristova 1778], St Petersburg: pri Akademii nauk. Mézin, A. and V. Rjéoutski (eds) (2011), Les Français en Russie au siècle des Lumières: Dictionnaire des Français, Suisses, Wallons et autres francophones en Russie de Pierre le Grand à Paul Ier, Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle, vol. 2. Nikolai Mikhailovich, Grand Duke (1903), Pavel Aleksandrovich Stroganov: Istoricheskoe issledovanie ėpokhi Aleksandra I, St Petersburg: Tip. Ėkspeditsii Zagotovleniia gosudarstvennykh bumag, vol. 1. Pictet, J.-L. and J.-A. Mallet (2005), Deux astronomes genévois dans la Russie de Catherine II..., ed. J.-D. Candaux, etc., Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle. Pisarenko, K. A. (2005), ‘Iz semeinoi khroniki roda Stroganovykh: Pis’ma barona A. S. Stroganova ottsu iz-za granitsy. 1752–1756 g.’, Rossiiskii Arkhiv: Istoriia Otechestva v svidetel’stvakh i dokumentakh XVIII–XX vv.: Al’manakh, Moscow: Studiia TRITE, Ross. Arkhiv [vol. 14], pp. 9–70. RGADA, f. 1263 (Golitsyns), op. 1, d. 3323; f. 1278 (Stroganovs), op. 1, dd. 3, 4, 5, 16, 17, 18, 20, 23–32, 38, 45, 59–62, 70, 71, 75, 76, 328–42, 344, 345, 348–55, 357, 364, 365, 404, 408–10, 414, 418, 419, 482, 538, 554, 557, 564, 594; op. 4, dd. 76–8. Rjéoutski, V. (2013a), ‘Cas de transfert culturel triangulaire Grande-Bretagne–France– Russie: le Journal des sciences et des arts de Philippe Hernandez, Moscou, 1761’, in L. Andries, F. Ogée, J. Dunkley and D. Sanfey (eds), Intellectual Journeys: The

lan guage us e a mo ng the rus s ia n a r i s t o c r a c y   83 Translation of Ideas in Enlightenment England, France and Ireland, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, pp. 309–21. Rjéoutski, V. (2013b), ‘Apprendre la “langue de l’Europe”: le français parmi d’autres langues dans l’éducation en Russie au siècle des Lumières’, Vivliofika. E-Journal of Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies, 1, pp. 5–19 at http://​vivliofika.library.duke.edu/​ article/​view/​14833 (last accessed on 5 September 2014). Rjéoutski, V. (2013c), ‘Le français et d’autres langues dans l’éducation en Russie au XVIIIe siècle’, Vivliofika. E-Journal of Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies, 1: 20–47 at http://​vivliofika.library.duke.edu/​article/​view/​14789 (last accessed on 5 September 2014). Rjéoutski, V., G. Argent and D. Offord (eds) (2014), European Francophonie: The Social, Political and Cultural History of an International Prestige Language, Oxford: Peter Lang. RNB, OR, f. 669 (Saltykovs), dd. 54, 169; f. 958 (manuscripts in various languages), F. XVIII, 177/​2. Rzheutskii [Rjéoutski], V. and A. Chudinov [Tchoudinov] (2010), ‘Russkie “uchastniki” frantsuzskoi revoliutsii’, Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik, Moscow: Institut vseobshchei istorii RAN, pp. 6–236. Schierle, I. (2009), ‘Patriotism and emotions: love of the fatherland in Catherinian Russia’, Ab Imperio 3, pp. 65–93. Somov, V. A. (2002), ‘Krug chteniia peterburgskogo obshchestva v nachale 1760-kh gg. (Iz istorii biblioteki grafa A. S. Stroganova)’, XVIII vek: Sbornik 22, St Petersburg: Nauka, pp. 200–34. Somov, V. A. (2006), ‘Kabinet dlia chteniia grafa A. S. Stroganova (Inostrannyi fond)’, Vek Prosveshcheniia, Moscow: Nauka, vol. 1, pp. 232–69. StPF ARAN, f. 21 (Müller), op. 3, d. 307/​42. Stroev, A. (2007), ‘Gilbert Romme et la loge des Neuf Soeurs (juillet 1779)’, in G. Dulac and S. Karp (eds), Les Archives de l’Est et la France des Lumières: Guide des archives et inédits, Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle, vol. 2, pp. 673–81. Stroganov, A. (1793), Catalogue raisonné des tableaux qui composent la collection du comte A. de Stroganoff, St Petersburg: de l’imprimérie du Corps des cadets nobles. Tchoudinov, A. [Chudinov] (2007), ‘Quatre lettres de Gilbert Romme et de Pavel Stroganov écrites de Paris en 1789–1790’, in G. Dulac and S. Karp (eds), Les Archives de l’Est et la France des Lumières: Guide des archives et inédits, Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle, vol. 2, pp. 682–95. Zorin, A. (2010), ‘Import chuvstv: k istorii ėmotsional’noi evropeizatsii russkogo dvor­ ianstva’, in Ia. Plamper, Sh. Shakhadat and M. Eli [Jan Plamper, Schamma Schahadat and Marc Elie] (eds), Rossiiskaia imperiia chuvstv: podkhody k kul’turnoi istorii ėmotsii, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, pp. 117–30.

chapter 4

The Francophone Press in Russia: A Cultural Bridge and an Instrument of Propaganda Vladislav Rjéoutski and Natalia Speranskaia

T

he francophone press, in the ages of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, was a pan-European phenomenon. It helped to spread the influence of the French Enlightenment and disseminated information and cultural models all over Europe, including Russia (Volmer 2000: 12–13). It began to reach Russia as early as the reign of Peter the Great, and from the mid-eighteenth century a francophone press began to develop in Russia itself. Our aim in this chapter is to consider the role of this indigenous French-language press in the second half of the eighteenth century, when it came into being, and during the first half of the nineteenth, when it reached its peak.1 As we shall show, this press was limited in scope and its impact on the Russian cultural landscape was not very far-reaching. However, it was of considerable interest for the Russian authorities and the Russian cultural elite as a whole. It also illustrates certain aspects of the role of French as one of the means by which francophonie was spread in Russia and as a linguistic and cultural medium in Russian society. We shall begin with a brief survey of the Russian francophone press, against the background of the development of the francophone press in other countries and the general development of the press in Russia. We shall then show the degree to which the appearance of this press reflects the growth of a French-speaking readership in Russia. Did the Russian francophone public write articles for and take part in editing this press and was it attracted by the opportunity to express its views in French? We shall then turn to the attitude of the Russian authorities towards the francophone press and show how they exploited it for their own purposes. Finally, we shall show to what extent the francophone press, benefiting from the status of French as the main international language of the time, became an intermediary in cultural transfer from

the f ra nco p ho ne p r e s s i n r u s s i a   85 Western Europe to Russia and a platform for discussion of Russian cultural life.

EU ROPEAN ANTECE D ENTS AN D T HE PRESS IN RUSS I A It was not until the eighteenth century that a press of any sort appeared in Russia. In the seventeenth century, the only Russian periodical was Vesti-Kuranty (The News Gazette), a sort of digest of the European press (primarily of Dutch and German periodicals), which was hand-written and prepared for the tsar and his entourage (Maier 2008). The first newspaper, Vedomosti (Gazette), was an official publication produced in the reign of Peter the Great. Periodicals devoted to literary and miscellaneous other subjects appeared much later, in the mid-eighteenth century, in the reigns of Elizabeth and, in particular, Catherine II. The first literary journal in Russian was Ezhemesiachnye sochineniia (Monthly Works, 1755–64), which was published in St Petersburg,2 but it had been preceded by a literary journal produced in French, Le Caméléon littéraire (The Literary Chameleon, 1755), also published in St Petersburg. The Russian-language periodical press developed steadily from this time on, and by the 1780s a considerable number of Russian literary journals existed, reflecting current literary movements in both Europe and Russia and characterised by a markedly satirical tone. It was certainly no coincidence that a Russian press and a French press developed in Russia side by side, for Russia had been opened up to Western intellectual influences. Moreover, Russian writers and French journalists who found themselves in Russia emulated the models provided by European literary and scientific periodicals, such as Addison’s and Steele’s Spectator, Fréron’s Année littéraire (Literary Year), Le Journal étranger (The Foreign Journal) edited by Suard, Arnaud and Prévost, and Gottsched’s Das Neueste aus der anmuthigen Gelehrsamkeit (What is New in Graceful Learning) (Gukovskii 1958; Stroev 2010). During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, nearly every government department in Russia began issuing its own periodical. In all, eighty-four new periodicals appeared between 1801 and 1810, in the relatively free atmosphere that Alexander created in the early part of his reign, though not many of them lasted long (Zapadov 1973: 99). The repertoire of the Russian press widened too during this period: special publications began to be devoted to economics, science and technology, music, pedagogics and so forth. One of the most popular and long-lived private journals, offering articles on literature and general knowledge,

86  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd nat a li a s p e r a n s k a i a was Vestnik Evropy (The Herald of Europe, 1802–30), which was launched by Nikolai Karamzin. The war against Napoleon in 1812 and the growth of nationwide patriotic feeling brought into being several periodicals published or supported by the government, including a very successful weekly, Syn otechestva (The Son of the Fatherland, 1812–52), and the newspaper Russkii invalid (The Russian Invalid, 1813–1917), which was first a weekly and then a daily and which was devoted mainly to military news. The francophone press in Russia, to which we now turn, was not such an important phenomenon as it was in the Netherlands, England or Germany, where it was boosted by the mass immigration of Frenchspeaking Protestants, particularly after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, or, later, by royalists fleeing from the revolution of 1789 and by the international flow of information into those countries through the medium of French (Gibbs 1971; Böning and Moepps 1996; Volmer 2000: 67–181; Rétat 2001). The Russian francophone press also seems quite small-scale when it is compared to the francophone press that developed at a later date in some Middle-Eastern countries, such as Egypt and Turkey. In those countries, the development of a francophone press, particularly between 1870 and 1930, represented a call for modernisation, French being considered a tool connecting their developing societies to what seemed to be most progressive on the European continent (Kraemer 2001; Centre d’études alexandrines 2014). With its limited number of titles, the Russian francophone press may be more aptly compared to the French-language press in Poland or Sweden (Łozek 1980; Östman 2014: 295–7). Indeed, fewer than a dozen periodicals in French, many of them shortlived, were published in Russia in the eighteenth century (Rjéoutski 2010: 2). Most of these came out in St Petersburg, some in Moscow. In the nineteenth century, we find one further centre with a burgeoning francophone press, namely Odessa, where French influence and a French-speaking community were then becoming important. The francophone press in the two main Russian cities, St Petersburg and Moscow, was also more diversified in the nineteenth century than it had been before, a fact which mirrored a general trend in the history of the press and also the intellectual development of cultivated society in Russia. In St Petersburg, we find a combination of official and private periodicals and also a range of specialised ones. Besides the official Journal du Nord (Northern Journal, 1807–12), which became Le Conservateur impartial (The Impartial Conservative, 1813–24), then Le Journal de St.-Pétersbourg politique et littéraire (St Petersburg Political and Literary Journal, 1825– 1918), there was the privately edited Le Furet (The Ferret, 1829–31),

the f ra nco p ho ne p r e s s i n r u s s i a   87 which later became Le Miroir (The Mirror, 1831–3).3 There were also musical, technical and scientific publications, such as Le Troubadour du Nord (The Northern Troubadour, 1804–11), La Harpe du Nord (The Northern Harp, 1822–9) and Le Journal des voies de communication (The Journal of Highways, 1826–42), the last of which was published both in French and in Russian versions (Gouzévitch and Gouzévitch 2008). In Moscow, we find Le Bulletin du Nord (The Northern Bulletin, 1828–9), Les Mémoires de la société des naturalistes de l’université Impériale de Moscou (The Transactions of the Society of Naturalists in Moscow Imperial University, 1806–23) and so forth. French, it should be added, was by no means the only foreign language in which periodicals were produced in Russia. There were more than thirty German-language titles in the eighteenth century and several were published in German in the first half of the nineteenth century in St Petersburg, Moscow and the Baltic provinces. There were also scholarly periodicals in Latin and at least one short-lived periodical in Italian that was devoted to the theatre (Svodnyi katalog 2004: passim). The considerable extent of the press in German can easily be explained by several factors: the size of the German-speaking communities in St Petersburg and Moscow, the annexation of the Baltic provinces (where German was the main language of the elites) in the reign of Peter the Great, and the close relations between Russia and German lands. In Odessa, a multinational and multiconfessional city, French-language periodicals were published along with journals in German, Italian, Greek and Yiddish (Grebtsova 2002: 399–403; Polevchtchikova 2013). The distinction between periodicals in Russian and those in French was often somewhat blurred. Periodicals in each of those languages included quotations in languages other than the main language of the publication. Taking just one number of Moskovskii telegraf (The Moscow Telegraph, 1825–34), which was produced in Russian, we find long quotations and advertisements in French, usually inserted without any translation (Moskovskii telegraf 1827: no. 18, part 1, pp. 37–65), and a bilingual section on fashion in both Russian and French (part 2, pp. 32–5). The readership of such periodicals was expected to be bilingual.

TH E R U SS I AN FRANCOP H ONE PRESS AND TH E SPREA D OF FRENC H I N R USSI A It might seem that the existence of a francophone press in Russia indicated the spread of French there, as reflected in the growth of a francophone readership, and that it served at the same time as a vehicle

88  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd nat a li a s p e r a n s k a i a through which the French language was spread. We shall show to what extent this view is correct. We shall also consider who the main editors of and contributors to this press were, so that we may judge whether francophone Russians welcomed the opportunity to express their views publicly in French. We do not have direct evidence about the readership of the Russian francophone press for the eighteenth century, but the fact that francophone periodicals were for the most part short-lived would seem to suggest that this press did not enjoy any great success. This does not mean, though, that there were hardly any francophone readers in Russia at this time. Such readers did exist, at least in St Petersburg and Moscow, as early as the 1750s and 1760s, but they do not seem to have had much interest in the kind of intellectual fare that francophone journals were offering. In a letter of 1761 addressed to Marc-Michel Rey, an important Dutch publisher of French origin, Philippe Hernandez complained that his Muscovite journal Le Journal des sciences et des arts (The Journal of Sciences and Arts, 1761–2) was struggling and identified the main reason for its failure as the lack of a readership capable of appreciating a cultural journal publishing book reviews (Rjéoutski 2013: 321). However, the situation seems to have changed by the end of the eighteenth century. Le Journal littéraire de St.-Pétersbourg (The St Petersburg Literary Journal), which was edited by a French émigré, the Chevalier Marie Joseph Hyacinthe de Gaston, lasted nearly three years (1798–1800) and enjoyed some popularity. The number of francophone readers had increased, but they were more numerous in St Petersburg than in Moscow, thanks to the cosmopolitan outlook of the newer capital, the large numbers of foreigners there and the presence of the imperial court, which was an important hub of francophone life. The demise of the journal was no doubt due to political factors, rather than lack of interested readers: French émigrés were starting to return to France and Gaston himself left Russia. Besides, Paul I, who feared the influence of the French Revolution, imposed restrictions on the circulation of French books and periodicals, which were banned altogether in 1800 and on which this journal depended to a considerable extent for its information about what was being published in France (Somov 2011). As regards readership in the nineteenth century, in many cases we know the number of subscribers. The number taking Le Journal du Nord, for example, was small, amounting to around 450 in five years (AVPRI, f. 1, razriad IV, op. 50, d. 1, part 1, fols 74, 80 v.). Le Conservateur impartial, the successor to Le Journal du Nord, on the other hand, had a larger number of subscribers. In 1813, the first year of the journal’s existence, when Russian troops started pursuing Napoleon’s retreating

the f ra nco p ho ne p r e s s i n r u s s i a   89 army through Europe, there were 624 subscribers for the whole year and 594 for six months. In 1814, when the Russian army entered Paris, the total was around 1,000. Then the number decreased and remained, between 1815 and 1824 (Le Conservateur’s last year), at around 600 (AVPRI, f. 1, razriad IV, op. 50, d. 1, part 1, fols 256–63, 412–13). In 1825, Le Conservateur was replaced by Le Journal de St.-Pétersbourg, which became de facto the main official journal of the empire. Its printrun for 1825 was around 1,100 copies, although the list of subscribers for that year consisted almost exclusively of Russian courtiers and officials (AVPRI, f. 1, razriad IV, op. 50, d. 1, part 2, fols 33–4). The number of subscribers to Le Furet amounted to a few hundred, though probably not much more than 300, the figure that the editors thought would be needed for the publication to be economically viable (announcement of Le Furet in Le Journal de St.-Pétersbourg, 9 (21) May 1829, no. 56). Le Bulletin du Nord, finally, had fewer than one hundred subscribers in the middle of 1829, a writer in Moskovskii telegraf regretfully reported, and ‘nearly all of them [were] Frenchmen living in Russia’. As the editor of Moskovskii telegraf commented: ‘if few people read Russian books in Russian, even fewer read them in French’ (Moskovskii telegraf, 1829, July, no. 13). The printruns of Russian francophone periodicals, then, were small compared to those of European newspapers and periodicals in Russian, which naturally addressed wider circles of readers.4 The greater number and variety of francophone periodicals in the nineteenth century, then, do seem to indicate an increase in the number of well-educated francophone readers, who were becoming more demanding than eighteenth-century readers. However, this readership was still limited and was mainly concentrated in St Petersburg and Moscow. When a letter was sent to provincial governors, inviting them to supply information that was considered worth publishing and to solicit subscriptions to a new periodical, Le Journal de St.-Pétersbourg, only three replies seem to have been received and a total of just four subscriptions was reported (AVPRI, f. 1, razriad IV, op. 50, d. 1, part 2, fols 28–9). The readership of Russian francophone periodicals was not made up exclusively of Russians. In 1830, Literaturnaia Gazeta (The Literary Gazette, 1830–1) described the readership of Le Furet as the ‘FrenchRussian public’. Translations of Russian literary works, accompanied by explanations of Russian names or features of local life, could only have been addressed to French people and other francophone foreigners living in Russia. It must have been for such foreign readers that the editors of Le Furet explained that ‘Dounia’ was the diminutive form of ‘Eudoxie’ and that [l]e télègue est un char paysan (the telega is a peasant

90  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd nat a li a s p e r a n s k a i a cart). However, a large proportion of the articles in Le Furet, such as detailed reviews of Russian theatre performances and Russian books, could have been of more interest to Russian readers. In announcements or commercial advertisements, the names of the books or goods advertised were sometimes printed in Russian, without translation. For francophone readers, the Russian francophone press could serve as a platform for discussion of their views in the language they valued. Indeed, Russian writers were already publishing articles in the first francophone periodical, Le Caméléon littéraire. A literary dissertation by Grigorii Teplov, which was published in this journal in French before it appeared in Russian, shows that some Russian men of letters considered this French-language periodical a useful medium for Russian literary debate. Again, a French translation of a letter by the well-known Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, who defended the Russian scientist and poet Mikhail Lomonosov against his German critics, was published by Lomonosov in the same journal (though without Euler’s consent). This may mean that although we cannot be sure that Le Caméléon littéraire was distributed outside Russia, its existence was thought to be of some use in an international discussion (Rzheutskii 2010b). However, such instances were rare in the eighteenth century, no doubt because the main francophone group, the high and upper-middle nobility, considered public writing beneath their status, while members of the relatively small group of Russian francophone literati were more interested in contributing to the burgeoning Russian press and often criticised the immoderate use of French by their compatriots.5 In the nineteenth century, Russian writers more often published writings in the francophone press, which plainly became part of the cultural landscape of the Russian educated public. These writers included Vil’gel’m Kiukhel’beker, a poet, travel writer and critic who was close to Aleksandr Pushkin, Aleksandr Ulybyshev, who wrote a book about Mozart in French (Speranskaia 2013b), Vladimir Burnashev, Prince Nikolai Golitsyn and Sergei Glinka (on the role of this press in Russian literary debate, see also the last section of this chapter). Nevertheless, most of the articles published in francophone periodicals were written by the editors of the periodicals, who were often Frenchmen, and other foreigners living in Russia. Le Mercure de Russie (The Russian Mercury, 1786) was published by a ‘society of people of letters’ which included foreigners and was edited by a foreigner, Gallien de Salmorenc. Among the editors of Le Journal du Nord and its successors, we find, at various times, the following foreigners: the Polish aristocrat and francophone writer Jan Potocki, the author of Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (Manuscript Found in Saragossa); Gotthilf-Theodor von Faber, who was a native of Riga, a political commentator and later a diplomat;

the f ra nco p ho ne p r e s s i n r u s s i a   91 the French abbé Manguin, who was the domestic tutor of the future President of the Academy of Sciences and Minister of Public Education, Sergei Uvarov;6 the French count Edouard de Sancé (sole editor of Le Journal de St.-Pétersbourg from 1829 to 1855); and the Prussian historian Friedrich von Adelung (Grinchenko 2010; Speranskaia forthcoming). Thus the interest of the Russian francophone public in the francophone press grew over the period in question, but not to any great extent. We therefore cannot say that this press really contributed to the growth of Russian francophonie. There were various reasons for the relatively undeveloped nature of the Russian francophone press, such as cost and competition. Journals were expensive at this time and the consumer at whom the periodicals were aimed belonged to the elite, which was not numerous, so that there might not be enough readers to ensure the economic viability of the publication. The elite also had access to a vast choice of French publications whose content was similar to what was standard in a francophone literary periodical published in Russia. These publications included periodicals coming from France itself and the growing number of French books sold in Russia through a network of foreign and Russian booksellers (Rjéoutski 2012), and a large number of French books circulated in manuscript form as well.

TH E R U SS I AN FRANCOP H ONE PRESS AND TH E RUSS I AN A U T H ORI T I ES Although the Russian francophone public showed limited interest in Russian francophone periodicals, nonetheless these periodicals did play a part in the government’s cultural, political and propagandistic agenda. The first Russian periodicals in French were private or semi-private publications. However, not all such periodicals were private undertakings. La Gazette de St. Pétersbourg (The St Petersburg Gazette, 1756–9) was a French version of the Russian official newspaper, and its purpose was to meet Russia’s propaganda needs during the Seven Years War (1756–63). Other periodicals, although they seem at first sight to have been privately run, were in fact supported by the Russian authorities. Théodore-Henry de Tschudy, the editor of Le Caméléon littéraire, was secretary to the Francophile Ivan Shuvalov, the favourite of the Empress Elizabeth and de facto Russian minister of education (Rzheutskii 2010b), and his journal was partly financed by the Academy of Sciences, probably with Shuvalov’s help. Gallien de Salmorenc’s Mercure de Russie was supported by the Grand Dukes Alexander (the future Emperor Alexander I) and Constantine. At the end of the eighteenth century, Gaston was also

92  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd nat a li a s p e r a n s k a i a supported by one of the grand dukes, possibly Alexander, who obtained permission for him to publish Le Journal littéraire de Saint-Pétersbourg. Le Troubadour du Nord, edited by Honoré-Joseph Dalmas, a former actor in the Russian court theatre, could not have been dedicated to the Empress Elizabeth, wife of Alexander I, without her agreement. It is clear, then, that the Russian court supported this press, but it is worth asking why they should have done so. The order issued in 1755 by Kirill Razumovskii, the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to publish Tschudy’s journal on the Academy’s press provides a clue, in that it contained a clear statement about the general usefulness of such publications for the Russian nation as a whole: ‘these sheets are being printed not for the profit of Du Lussy [a pseudonym used by Tschudy] himself but for the pleasure of the Russian people’ (Popova 1929: 24). The Russian court naturally thought that periodicals which focused on literature, music and art would be beneficial for the progress of civilisation in Russia, but no doubt they also felt that they would promote an image of the court as a European institution and of St Petersburg as a major European city, because francophone journals could then be found in all the main European capitals (Sgard 1999). Le Journal du Nord, which was launched in St Petersburg in 1807, was set up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the aim of countering the Napoleonic press during the War of the Fourth Coalition (1806–7) against Napoleon. In this political context, it seemed essential to choose French as the language in which the periodical would be produced, as we see from a ministerial document which describes the aim of the periodical as ‘to publish rebuttals in French of various writings by the French Government, when almost all of Europe had been subjugated by the armed forces of this state’ (AVPRI, f. 1, razriad IV, op. 50, d. 1, part 1, fols 136–8). In 1813, when the title changed from Le Journal du Nord to Le Conservateur impartial, the periodical adopted an ambitious programme, thanks to the efforts of Uvarov, who was then curator of the St Petersburg educational district. None of Uvarov’s initiatives went unpraised in the pages of Le Conservateur impartial (Maiofis 2008: 630–55). At the end of 1824, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Karl Nesselrode, sent a circular letter to the other Ministers of State, in which he explained the intentions of his Ministry in the following way (we have retained Nesselrode’s crossings-out and revisions): The Minister of Foreign Affairs, on the orders of H[is] M[ajesty] the Emperor, has been authorised to publish, for the year 1825, a paper in the French language, under the title ‘Political and

the f ra nco p ho ne p r e s s i n r u s s i a   93 Literary Newspaper’, which is to be a continuation of to replace Le Conservateur and the Prospectus for which I hasten to send to Y[our] Ex[cellency] herewith. I feel sure that He will discover therein the dual aim that we have set ourselves: to help our public to inform itself on events in the political and commercial world by publishing news that is most worthy of attention and trust, in the language most universally used; and to offer external readers full and authentic information on the internal state of the Empire and the acts of our gov[ernment], as well as everything that would serve to establish in the eyes of Europe the real progress of the social order in our country civilisation among us. (AVPRI, f. 1, razriad IV, op. 50, d. 1, part 1, fols 396 r. and v.) The choice of French as the language for these official periodicals was no doubt determined by its status as the lingua franca of the European elite and the continent’s main diplomatic language. A paper in French would afford the government the best opportunity to present its preferred image of the empire both to an international readership7 and to the Russian cultivated public. At the same time, Nesselrode’s deletion of the phrase ‘in the language most universally used’ in the passage we have quoted seems to suggest that he preferred to omit the explanation for this language choice, possibly because he did not want to draw attention to the pre-eminence of French on the continent in which Russia was now a major power. Political comments, not to mention political discussions, were discouraged in the press in Russia even before the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, and they were absolutely forbidden after it. Nicholas I set up the Third Section of his Chancery, the secret police, which was also intended to guide public opinion through governmental periodicals. One such periodical was the private newspaper Severnaia pchela (The Northern Bee, 1825–64), founded and edited by Faddei Bulgarin and Nikolai Grech (Reitblat 1999). The ‘political news’ that appeared in the few periodicals which had the right to publish it was nearly always restricted to a bare statement of facts.8 That was also the case with Le Journal de St.Pétersbourg, though between 1825 and 1828 its position was exceptional, in that it was the place where official decrees were published before they were published anywhere else. Thus a newspaper produced in a foreign language in fact served as the main official periodical publication of the Russian Empire. In one of his surveys of public opinion addressed to the Third Section, Bulgarin commented on the absurdity of this situation in the eyes of the public: ‘Everyone is asking why it is that all treaties and the most important things in the kingdom of Russia are published in the

94  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd nat a li a s p e r a n s k a i a first instance in French and only afterwards in Russian […]’ (Reitblat 1998: 278; Bulgarin’s italics). As use of the French language restricted the readership of a publication, francophone periodicals were sometimes able to include certain material to which the wider public was denied access. Even if this practice was not systematic, it shows that the public reading this press was identified by the authorities as cultivated and politically mature. A case in point was the speech delivered by Nicholas I to the Warsaw municipal deputies in 1835, in which he threatened the Poles with repression, and described Russia as the only country enjoying internal peace and Europe as a seat of chaos and political turmoil. This speech caused a scandal in Europe. It was published in Le Journal de St.-Pétersbourg together with some critical comments made by the French journalist Saint-Marc Girardin in order to show that the government was open to public debate, but it did not appear in Russian-language periodicals until 1872 (Mil’china 2004: 357–8; see also Speranskaia 2013c). High-ranking officials sometimes supported privately run francophone periodicals, as they had in the eighteenth century. Le Bulletin du Nord, for example, was financed by the governor of Moscow, Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn. The journal published Russian literature in French and aspired to play the role of a ‘mediator between Russia and other civilised countries’ (Bulletin du Nord, 1828, no. 1: 3). Golitsyn was probably acting in this instance as a private individual interested in making Russian literature better known in Western Europe. Other such initiatives undertaken by Russian aristocrats included Count Orlov’s edition of the fables of Ivan Krylov in French and Italian (Krylov 1825). There are several reasons why the Russian authorities supported the francophone press. First, this press was seen as a useful cultural tool, at least in the early stages of its existence, both because French was an elite language throughout Europe and because it was considered a language of culture. Second, the existence of such a press was felt to be essential for a country which aspired to be the equal of the major European countries and which had a court to match the courts of those countries. For this reason, the Russian francophone press was supported by some Russian aristocrats who wished to present Russian literature to the Western reader, literature being an important sign of civilisation. Third, some francophone periodicals were directly used by the government as propaganda tools with which to convey officially approved information about Russia both to foreigners and to educated Russian readers.

the f ra nco p ho ne p r e s s i n r u s s i a   95

TH E FRANCOP H ONE PRESS AS A B RIDG E B ET WEEN CUL T U RES Produced in the main international lingua franca for the discussion of cultural subjects, the Russian francophone press also served as an instrument for the transfer of foreign culture into eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Russia in at least two important ways. In the first place, it helped to disseminate knowledge of French literature and to introduce Russian readers to French literary polemics. As early as 1755, Le Caméléon was publishing critical articles on works by eminent French writers and devoting much space to debates in French literary circles, such as Voltaire’s debates with Crébillon and La Beaumelle. At the end of the century, Le Journal littéraire considered Voltaire’s legacy, in recognition of the popularity he had achieved in Russia in spite of the fact that under Paul I his works had been banned (Zaborov 2011: 79–80). In the early part of the age of Nicholas, Le Furet published Balzac, Hugo, Mérimée, Nodier and Sue, and also critical essays, written mainly by the newspaper’s editor, Charles de Saint-Julien (who, after leaving the paper, took up the post of lecturer in French language and literature at the University of St Petersburg) (Speranskaia 2005: 116–225; Speranskaia 2013a). Serving as a bridge between the Russian reader and the French press, Le Furet also republished articles from French periodicals such as Le Globe (The Globe), La Mode (Fashion), La Revue de Paris (The Parisian Review) and Le Voleur (The Thief) (Speranskaia 2005: 28). La Revue étrangère (The Foreign Review, 1832–63) published articles on the arts, history and fashion as well as literature, including poetry. The range of French authors to whom Russian readers were thus introduced was very broad: Balzac, Dumas-père, Gautier, Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, Nodier, Sainte-Beuve, George Sand, Vigny and so forth. Sometimes, as in the case of Balzac, their works were published in this journal even before they appeared in France (Zaborov 2013). In the second place, Russia’s francophone press served as a vehicle for the transmission of works from other European literatures to a Russian readership. New publications in English – a language virtually unknown in Russia until the late eighteenth century – were regularly announced by Le Journal des sciences et des arts at a time when hardly any other periodical in Russia touched upon recent English literary and scientific works, not even Ezhemesiachnye sochineniia, which republished old English works translated from German (Rak 2008: 96–126; Rjéoutski 2013). The francophone press also illustrates the function of French as an intermediary language of translation. Works of English literature (for example, works

96  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd nat a li a s p e r a n s k a i a by Charles Dickens and the minor but popular novelist, poet and playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton) were published by Le Journal littéraire de St.-Pétersbourg and La Revue étrangère (Zaborov 2013). Francophone periodicals also published translations and French imitations of masterpieces by classical authors (Zaborov 2009). This transmission of the classical heritage through French may have had a useful cultural effect in Russia, where the nobility rarely learned Latin and Greek, at least before the end of the eighteenth century (Rzheutskii 2010a). At the same time as informing Russian readers about Western European cultures, the Russian francophone press began to address Russian historical and cultural subject-matter and to attempt to promote knowledge of Russian history and culture abroad, where in earlier times the reading public had regarded Russia as backward and benighted. Even before Voltaire’s book on Peter the Great was published (1759, 1763), Tschudy had used his journal to initiate a debate about Russian civilisation and the merits of Peter (Rzheutskii 2010b). One might think that the editors of periodical publications, dependent as they were on the favour of the Russian authorities, expressed positive views about Russian culture only because they wanted to display their loyalty, but in fact some of them did genuinely admire the works of Russian writers who were barely known in the West. Le Mercure de Russie published in French translation a number of texts written by Feofan Prokopovich, an important ecclesiastical, political and literary figure of the early eighteenth century and an ardent supporter of the Petrine reforms. Le Journal littéraire incorporated works by the ambitious Russian Sentimentalist writer and future historian Karamzin. Publication in the francophone press, either inside or outside Russia, was important for the establishment of Karamzin’s international reputation. Karamzin himself was a correspondent of the Hamburg journal Le Spectateur du Nord (Northern Observer), which published a French translation of his story ‘Julia’ (Iuliia) and a letter he wrote about Russian literature, in which he discussed his own works (Karamzin 1964; Somov 2014). Le Bulletin du Nord even proclaimed that its main aim was to make Russian culture and literature better known outside Russia. Thus the author of an advertisement for this journal, written in French and placed in Le Journal de St.-Pétersbourg, contended that the publication of a paper to make the literary and scientific situation in Russia known to other states of Europe is necessary, as it were, since the sciences now have more or less equal lustre in all the civilised countries and since this country in particular seems to have caught everybody’s eye. (Le Journal de St.-Pétersbourg 1828, no. 1, 3 (15) January)

the f ra nco p ho ne p r e s s i n r u s s i a   97 Le Bulletin published translations of works by the Russian poets Evgenii Baratynskii, Konstantin Batiushkov, Krylov, Pushkin and Vasilii Zhukovskii. In a sense, it took part in Russia’s literary polemics, responding to articles in Le Journal de St.-Pétersbourg (Galitzin 1828; Oulibicheff 1828) and urging Pushkin to celebrate Russian victories in Russia’s war of 1826–8 with Persia (Lestrelin 1828). The position of the journal was close to that of Nikolai Polevoi’s Moskovskii telegraf, one of Russia’s best literary reviews of the time (1825–34), and articles from that review appeared in French translation in nearly every issue of the Bulletin du Nord. In their attempt to make Russian literature better known in Europe, the Russian contributors to Le Bulletin were aided by a number of Frenchmen, such as Hippolyte Masclet, a translator of Krylov and the eighteenth-century fabulist Ivan Khemnitser. Le Journal de St.Pétersbourg also published articles by Ulybyshev on Russian literature, theatre and music, although its main function was to report political news and official decisions. (These articles on music, incidentally, were among the first examples of professional musical criticism in Russia.) Literary reviews dealt mostly with European books, but up until 1829 some of them concerned the latest works of Russian poets such as Ivan Dmitriev, Ivan Kozlov and Krylov and included extensive quotations in Russian. However, in 1829 this rubric was discontinued and reviews of local cultural life ceased to be published in Le Journal de St.-Pétersbourg for as long as twenty years. Thus we see that whereas in the eighteenth century the Russian francophone press was rarely used by Russians as a medium for literary debate with other Russians, in the nineteenth century it really did begin to play a part in Russian literary life. Le Conservateur impartial published Kiukhel’beker’s ‘Glance at the Present State of Russian Literature’ (Kiukhel’beker 1817), in which the poet claimed that French literary influence in Russia was decreasing and giving way to the influence of English, German and classical literature. Kiukhel’beker’s article was soon translated into Russian and republished. Le Furet in particular sought to become a significant force in the literary life of the capital. Not only did it introduce regular theatre reviews, which were permitted by the Censorship Statutes of 1828, and which were an innovation in the Russian press of the time; it also introduced a column on Russian literature and attempted to take part in journal polemics (Speranskaia 2008). Whether out of genuine conviction or a wish to flatter Russian readers, Le Furet showed great interest in Russian national traditions, publishing descriptions of popular customs and celebrations. In its sketches of St Petersburg’s high society, Le Furet mocked the way the St Petersburg beau monde imitated the French and it reproved members of that society

98  vladis la v r jé o ut s ki a nd nat a li a s p e r a n s k a i a for their preference for the French language over Russian. Thus we see a francophone journal coming to be used, early in the reign of Nicholas I, for criticism of Russian francophonie and the more general Francophilia of which it was symptomatic. * * * Most of the periodicals we have examined were founded on the initiative of French émigrés in Russia. Nonetheless, the Russian francophone press met a certain social need and answered to a Russian political agenda. French was the language in which international readers could be addressed and its use enabled Russians to fulfil the ambition expressed in many periodicals, to give Europe accurate information about Russia. The francophone press could present Russian society, and particularly Russian literature, to a Western public and serve as a tool with which to improve the image of Russia in the rest of Europe. It also functioned as a bridge between Western European cultures (and not only French culture), on the one hand, and the Russian cultivated public, on the other, bringing the European literary heritage to Russia in a language understood by readers in the Russian elite. For this reason, high Russian officials also regarded it as a useful tool with which to raise Russia’s level of cultural development. Last but not least, a francophone press was probably seen as an attribute of a civilised society and its existence helped to improve Russia’s image both abroad and inside the Russian Empire itself. It is therefore no surprise that the Russian authorities supported this press and sometimes used it for their own political ends. The circles which took an interest in the francophone press in Russia were not large, as we can deduce from the numbers of subscribers. For a long time after Peter I had ‘opened a window’ on the West,9 the noble elite played the leading role in Russian culture. However, over the period we have examined, these circles expanded considerably and became more demanding. In the middle of that period, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, Russian writers, who at that time were nearly all francophone, began to produce the corpus of literary works we now associate with the beginning of the golden age of Russian literature. The role of the francophone press in this transformation may have been small, but it did help to create in Russia a multilingual atmosphere of communication with other European cultures which ultimately provided fertile soil for the new Russian cultural elite.

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NOTES 1. We still find many francophone periodicals in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century, e.g. Dimanche (1857–8), Revue amusante (1864–5), Le Grelot (1865–6), Le Courrier russe (1866–71/​2), La Néva (1872–3), Le monde musical/​Muzykal’nyi svet (1847–78) and so forth. 2. However, some literary texts had been published before that in the periodical issued by the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, Primechaniia k Vedomostiam (St Petersburg, 1728–41). 3. After Le Furet had been forbidden to publish reviews of French plays staged in St Petersburg, the interest of the public in it declined. In 1831, it was taken over by another editor, Auguste Saint-Thomas, who renamed it Le Miroir and then in 1832 handed it over to Veuve Pluchart. The paper started printing nothing but material borrowed from French periodicals. Its demise in 1833 was most probably due to the appearance of La Revue étrangère, managed by the ‘court booksellers’ Bellizaire and Dufour. La Revue étrangère, which was very popular, was published for over thirty years, from 1832 till 1863. 4. The official newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti (The St Petersburg Gazette), along with its German version (St. Petersburgische Zeitung), was printed in 6,000 copies in 1806 and Moskovskie Vedomosti in 2,000 (AVPRI, f. 1, razriad IV, op. 50, part 1, d. 1, fol. 50). In 1829, the latter newspaper boasted the largest printrun, amounting to 9,000 copies (Bulletin du Nord, 1828, no. 1: 82). 5. See Chapter 5, by Derek Offord, in Volume 2. 6. In 1833, Uvarov would formulate the official conception of Russian identity as based on Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality (православие, самодержавие, народность). 7. However, the circulation of the Russian francophone press abroad was very limited. No copies of any eighteenth-century francophone periodical published in Russia can be found in Western libraries. The nineteenth-century Journal de St.-Pétersbourg is held in some Western libraries but, according to contemporaries, it was hardly read in Paris (Jahn 1986: 278). Although it has been claimed that ‘some European journals have borrowed articles from the Bulletin du Nord’, which was edited by Lecointe de Laveau (Journal de St.-Pétersbourg, 3 January 1829, no. 2), we do not know of any subscriptions to this literary journal from abroad. In one case, though, the Russian francophone press did play an important role outside Russia. A periodical published in French by the Russian army in Moldavia, Le Courrier de Moldavie (The Moldavian Courier, 1790), described Potemkin’s policies in this region to Moldavian elites and provided them with news of European events, including the French Revolution. This periodical was an important source of information for this region, which had no press of its own at that time (Haupt 1966). 8. Permission for periodicals to publish political information had gradually been restricted by the government since 1818. By 1833, only three out of twenty-six private periodicals – the total number of newspapers and reviews amounting to forty-five – had this right (Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshchenia, part I, 1834, p. 100). They were allowed to borrow political news from official publications such as SanktPeterburgskie Vedomosti or the Journal de St.-Pétersbourg. 9. The phrase ‘window into Europe’ was first used by the Venetian polymath Francesco Algarotti in the eighteenth century, but it was given wide currency by Pushkin in the nineteenth.

100  vladi s la v r jé o ut s ki a nd nat a li a s p e r a n s k a i a

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the f ra nco p ho ne p r e s s i n r u s s i a   101 Mil’china [Miltchina], V. A. (2004), Rossiia i Frantsiia: Diplomaty. Literatory. Shpiony, St Petersburg: Giperion. Östman, M. (2014), ‘French in Sweden in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, in V. Rjéoutski, G. Argent and D. Offord (eds), European Francophonie: The Social, Political and Cultural History of an International Prestige Language, Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 273–306. Oulibicheff, A. (1828), ‘Réponse par ordre des Nos aux observations […]’, Bulletin du Nord, no. 12: 384–93. Polevchtchikova, E. (2013), ‘Les Français dans “La Société d’économie rurale de la Russie méridionale”: Jean Isnard’, in A. Tchoubarian, F.-D. Liechtenhan, V. Rjéoutski and O. Okouneva (eds), Les Français dans la vie intellectuelle et scientifique en Russie au XIXe siècle, Moscow: Institut d’histoire universelle, pp. 340–57. Popova, A. N. (1929), ‘Teodor-Genrikh Chudi i osnovannyi im v 1755 g. zhurnal “Le Caméléon littéraire”’, Izvestiia AN SSSR. Otdel gumanitarnykh nauk, no. 1, 17–48. Rak, V. (2008), Stat’i o literature XVIII veka, St Petersburg: Pushkinskii dom. Reitblat, A. I. (ed.) (1998), Vidok Figliarin: Pis’ma i agenturnye zapiski F. B. Bulgarina v III otdelenie, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Reitblat, A. I. (1999), ‘Russkie pisateli i III otdelenie (1826–1855)’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 40: 158–86. Rétat, P. (ed.) (2001), La Gazette d’Amsterdam: Miroir de l’Europe au XVIIIe siècle, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Rjéoutski, V. (2010), ‘Les Périodiques francophones édités en Russie au siècle des Lumières. Projet de recherche franco-russe’, 2000. The European Journal, 2: 1–4. Rjéoutski, V. (2012), ‘Les Libraires français en Russie au Siècle des Lumières’, Histoire et civilisation du livre: revue international, 8: 161–83. Rjéoutski, V. (2013), ‘Cas de transfert culturel triangulaire: Grande-Bretagne–France– Russie: le Journal des sciences et des arts de Philippe Hernandez, Moscou, 1761’, in L. Andries, F. Ogée, J. Dunkley and D. Sanfey (eds), Intellectual Journeys: The Translation of Ideas in Enlightenment England, France and Ireland, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, pp. 309–21. Rzheutskii [Rjéoutski], V. (2010a), ‘Mezhdu Rossiei i Zapadnoi Evropoi. Antichnoe nasledie v Rossii v vek Prosveshcheniia i tvorchestvo barona de Chudi’, in C. VolpihacAuger (ed.), Vek Prosveshcheniia, vol. 4, Antichnoe nasledie v evropeiskoi kul’ture XVIII veka, Moscow: IVI RAN, pp. 258–79. Rzheutskii [Rjéoutski], V. (2010b), ‘V teni Shuvalova. Frantsuzskii kul’turnyi posrednik v Rossii baron de Chudi’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 105: 91–124. Sgard, J. (1991), Dictionnaire des journaux, 1600–1789, 2 vols, Paris: Universitas and Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Somov, V. A. (2011), ‘Pressa frantsuzskikh ėmigrantov (Gamburg, Braunshveig, SanktPeterburg)’, Trista let pechati Sankt-Peterburga. Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii, St Petersburg: Izd. Gos. muzeia istorii S.-Peterburga, pp. 267–73. Somov, V. A. (2014), ‘Rossiia na stranitsakh frantsuzskikh ėmigrantskikh zhurnalov (Gamburg, Braunshveig, Sankt-Peterburg)’, in D. Dahlman and G. Smagina (eds), Nemetskii mir Sankt-Peterburga, St Petersburg: Rostok, pp. 371–84. Speranskaia, N. M. (2005), ‘Peterburgskaia gazeta Le Furet – Le Miroir i russkaia literatura kontsa 1820-kh–nachala 1830-kh godov’, unpublished PhD thesis, Tver’ State University. Speranskaia, N. M. (2008), ‘Peterburgskaia gazeta Le Furet – Le Miroir (1829–1833)’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 94: 391–406.

102  vladi s la v r jé o ut s ki a nd nat a li a s p e r a n s k a i a Speranskaia, N. (2013a), ‘Sharl’ de Sen-Zhiulien, frantsuzskii zhurnalist v Rossii’, in A.  Tchoubarian, F.-D. Liechtenhan, V. Rjéoutski and O. Okouneva (eds), Les Français dans la vie intellectuelle et scientifique en Russie au XIXe siècle, Moscow: Institut d’histoire universelle, pp. 95–113. Speranskaia, N. (2013b), ‘Aleksandr Dmitrievich Ulybyshev i ego dramaticheskie opyty’, in A. S. Bodrova, S. N. Zenkin, Ė. E. Liamina, N. N. Mazur, V. A. Mil’china and N. M. Speranskaia (eds), A.M.P. Pamiati Alekseia Mikhailovicha Peskova, Moscow: RGGU, pp. 431–62. Speranskaia, N. (2013c), ‘Iiul’skaia revoliutsiia 1830 goda v rossiiskikh gazetakh’, in D. Aleksandr [Alexandre], E. Gal’tsova, A. Diukre [Ducrey], N. N. Mazur et al. (eds), Rossiia i Frantsiia: XVIII–XX vv., Lotmanovskie chtenia, Moscow: RGGU, pp. 135–52. Speranskaia, N. (forthcoming), ‘La Vie culturelle de la société russe dans la presse francophone éditée en Russie: les articles d’Alexandre Oulybychev (1825–1830)’, in V. Rjéoutski and A. Stroev (eds), La Russie et la presse francophone en Europe (XVIIe– première moitié du XIXe siècle). Stroev, A. (2010), ‘Zashchita i proslavlenie Rossii: istoriia sotrudnichestva sheval’e d’Ėona i abbata Frerona’, in A. Tchoubarian and F.-D. Liechtenhan (eds), Les Français dans la vie intellectuelle et scientifique en Russie (XVIIIe–XXe), Moscow: Olma Media Group, pp. 164–74. Svodnyi katalog [i.e. Svodnyi katalog knig na inostrannykh iazykakh, izdannykh v Rossii v XVIII veke] (2004), vol. 4 (Periodika), St Petersburg: Nauka. Volmer, A. (2000), Presse und Frankophonie im 18. Jahrhundert: Studien zur französischsprachigen Presse in Thüringen, Kursachsen und Rußland, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Zaborov, P. (2009), ‘Le Journal littéraire de Saint-Pétersbourg et les échanges culturels entre la Russie et l’Europe’, in W. Berelowitch and M. Porret (eds), Réseaux d’esprit en Europe des Lumières au XIXe siècle. Actes du colloque international de Coppet, Paris: Droz, pp. 203–16. Zaborov, P. (2011), Voltaire dans la culture russe, Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle. Zaborov, P. R. (2013), ‘K istorii zhurnala “Revue étrangère”’, in A. Tchoubarian, F.-D. Liechtenhan, V. Rjéoutski and O. Okouneva (eds), Les Français dans la vie intellectuelle et scientifique en Russie au XIXe siècle, Moscow: Institut d’histoire universelle, pp. 114–21. Zapadov, A. V. (ed.), (1973), Istoriia russkoi zhurnalistiki XVIII–XIX vv., 3rd edn, Moscow: Vysshaia Shkola.

c h apter 5

Russian Noblewomen’s Francophone Travel Narratives (1777–1848): The Limits of the Use of French Emilie Murphy

T

he Russian nobility’s mastery of the French language is, without a doubt, the most striking element of French influence in Russia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And yet, to date, scholars have accorded relatively little attention to this period of Russian francophonie, the relationship that existed between French and Russian and the domains the two languages occupied, although in recent years it has become clear that Russian noblewomen’s francophone life-writing is fruitful ground for such investigations. Placing particular emphasis on the use of Russian, Elena Gretchanaia and Catherine Viollet have investigated noblewomen’s code-switching and language mixing in their French-language personal diaries (Gretchanaia 2009; Viollet 2010) and, with a focus on women in the context of the nobility’s cultural bilingualism, Michelle Lamarche Marrese has examined alternation between French and Russian in correspondence (Marrese 2010). However, little is known about the circumstances in which women abandoned the use of French in favour of other European languages, including Russian, while they were travelling. The published and manuscript French-language travel narratives under discussion in the present chapter, (epistolary) diaries, reminiscences and memoirs1 authored between 1777 and 1848, contain valuable information on women’s use of and capacities in various languages, as during travel they found themselves in a number of different language zones and had increased opportunities to use languages other than French and Russian. In unfamiliar environments the use of certain languages, taken out of their usual contexts in the lives of the women, became more or less appropriate, useful or adequate. This chapter, then, acknowledges the dominance of French among the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian elite, but also

104  emilie mu rp hy reveals that, in fact, multilingualism was not unusual. For Russian noblewomen in particular, knowledge of foreign languages was required for social success and was a direct result of women’s education. They learnt a number of languages from an early age from their mothers and governesses and in schools. Some also spent much of their childhood abroad. Their travel narratives show that as well as French and Russian, they also knew, in ascending order of the number of cases, German, English and Italian. In this chapter, I shall consider the circumstances in which elite Russian women used languages other than French during travel to Western Europe. I shall aim both to shed light on the limits of these women’s use of French and on the position of French in relation to other languages, including Russian. The study of noblewomen’s use of and switching between more than two languages is interesting for several reasons: the choice of one language or another is a communicative skill, a social strategy and a tool for identification. It provides insights into linguistic and social aspects of elite women’s communications and illuminates the nature and characteristics of their life-writing, which is the largest category of female-authored francophone writing produced during the period in question and within which travel narratives are the best-represented branch. For the most part, the texts examined were penned by obscure members of the nobility who did not play a role in public life or have their work published, but I also consider the writings of some well-known figures in Russian literature of the period, such as Ekaterina Dashkova (1743–1810). The same patterns of language use are apparent in all the texts examined and similar evidence in other European corpora of life-writing suggests that, in linguistic terms, these travel writers are representative of women of their class and era (Gretchanaia et al. 2012). In my investigation of the circumstances in which the women switched from French to another language, I consider the main purposes of and motives behind such alternations, whether they switched by choice or through necessity and whether or not the women used other languages in the same way as French. I examine in turn the following: conversing in languages other than French in cases when the interlocutor does not know French or prefers to use a different language; the women’s codeswitching; their reports on reading in different languages; their foreignlanguage education; and their use of quotation. Where evidence permits, I also comment on the women’s command of and attitude towards the use of English, German, Italian and Russian. It is interesting to note that the use of French seems to require no comment from the women, whereas they draw attention to their use of other languages. First of all,

f r a nco p ho ne t r a v e l n a r r a t iv e s   105 though, as background to my readings of the travel narratives, I shall briefly survey the linguistic and literary environment within which these narratives were produced.

TH E L I N G U I STI C AN D L I TERAR Y ENV IRON MENT Russian francophonie spanned roughly a century beginning around 1740 but the nobility, and particularly women, continued to use French until the October Revolution of 1917. As the lingua franca of European high society and a marker of social status in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, French played an important and ubiquitous role in the everyday lives of the Russian nobility and was commonly used in both written and spoken transactions. Social etiquette required the use of French and created unified fields of exchange and communication across Europe. In order to shed light on the relationship between French, Russian and other Western European languages, the domains they occupied and the limits placed on the use of French during travel, it is productive to consider the nature of Russian francophonie, that is to say the status and function accorded to French in Russian society (Yaguello 2010). French was freely adopted in Russia. The French language did not have a formal status; it was not the official or national language. French was a noble vernacular, a vehicular language and a literary language. It did not provide for the whole range of communicational needs in Russia. While French was used for social relations, education and artistic expression (though not to the exclusion of Russian), Russian was required to facilitate communication with the lower classes, in administrative organs and for commerce. At the same time, Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox Church, was necessary for religious purposes. It was not practical to make French one’s only language as its speakers were in a minority and it was used mainly in the metropolises, St Petersburg and Moscow, because that was where the elite who used it were concentrated. The status and function of the French language and its associated culture meant that it coexisted with Russian and that its influence was connected to specific spheres of life. Before discussing how this linguistic situation applied to women during travel in Western Europe and in which domains other languages were used alongside Russian and/​or French or replaced them, it will be informative also to consider the literary environment in which French-language life-writing was produced. Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Russian f­rancophonie, which stimulated the production of French-language writings by Russians, coincides with the rise of the importance of the individual in

106  emilie mu rp hy literature associated with Sentimentalism. It also encompasses the birth and key period of development of life-writing as we know it today in both Western Europe and in Russia, which followed the publication, in 1782, of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. Life-writing became an important part not only of contemporary female literary activity, but of Russian elite textual production more generally. It constitutes the largest known category of Russian francophone writing, the greater part of which remains unpublished. As an umbrella term, life-writing encompasses diverse sub-genres including diaries and memoirs, which were often composed for personal use or for distribution within a small family or social circle. Gender is an important factor to consider in the study of Russian francophone life-writing, not only because social prescriptions for female modesty largely confined women to the production of private genres of writing but also because French was the default language for women in texts of this kind. It should be noted, moreover, that there was a clear gender divide in language use in men’s and women’s life-writings. Women more commonly employed French than men. This fact can be attributed to the social environment, the emphasis placed on French in women’s education and the reasons for which they wrote. Whereas men, in their life-writings, often recorded official matters relating to professional, military and diplomatic life which required the use of Russian, for women life-writing was generally a social practice that enabled them to record personal and domestic matters, for the expression of which French was considered most suitable. Added to this, women favoured epistolary forms of writing which were influenced by contemporary French literature and considered to be particularly feminine. Throughout the eighteenth century, non-fictional travel writing, which often assumed the form of one or another sub-genre of lifewriting, was one of the most popular types of literature and many leading European authors produced examples of it. Texts such as the Frenchman Charles Dupaty’s Letters on Italy (Lettres sur l’Italie, 1788) served as models for Russian authors. Travel writing gained in popularity in Russia during the last third of the eighteenth century as a result of the country’s increasing familiarity with Western culture and following the development of leisured travel after the decree issued in 1762 by Peter III on the Freedom of the Nobility, which relieved the elite from the obligation to perform state service. A tradition of travel writing in Russian began to develop but this was dominated by men who were beginning to view literature as a professional activity, not as the more or less private activity that it was for women. The Russian tradition came to be represented by Denis Fonvizin’s Letters from France (1777–8)2 and Nikolai Karamzin’s largely fictional Letters of a Russian Traveller

f r a nco p ho ne t r a v e l n a r r a t iv e s   107 (Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 1791–1801), which is considered the first major contribution to the Russian travel-writing genre. However, the great majority of known works of travel writing produced by Russian noblewomen were non-fictional; more often than not, they were written in French, and most of them were not intended for publication. The production of Russian noblewomen’s French-language travel narratives can be situated within the European practice of the Grand Tour, a ritualised private practice of elite leisured travel that was in vogue between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries and was ‘intended to familiarize young members of the nobility […] with modern languages, contemporary society, and monuments of Western culture’ (Dickinson 2006: 27). Records of the Grand Tour were fashionable and ‘attempted to demonstrate that the desired social and cultural education had indeed been acquired by furnishing quantities of social, cultural, and historical data about visited territories’ (2006: 27). The practice of composing their texts in French in the private genres of life-writing enabled women, whether they had literary aspirations or not, to participate in the travel genre while simultaneously allowing them to remain within appropriate bounds of feminine expression. Despite the dominance of French among the Russian elite at this time, francophone countries were not the main destination for Russian noblewomen. In fact, geographical location was almost irrelevant to the women’s use of the French language. In line with the formalised itinerary of the Grand Tour, the women visited numerous Western European countries, but the most popular destinations were Italy and the German states. Geographical location did, however, play a role in the travellers’ decision to employ languages other than French. As we shall see, English, German and Italian were used almost exclusively in England, the German-speaking lands and the Italian states respectively, though not as the main means of communication and only in specific circumstances. Etiquette did not dictate their use and some of the women considered that while they had a good command of these languages they still did not know them as well as they knew French. Geographical location was not a factor in the women’s decision to switch to Russian, rather their mother tongue was reserved for specific circumstances.

CON V ERSI N G I N L AN GUA GES OTH ER TH AN FRENCH The most common reason for using languages other than French in conversation with non-Russians during travel in Western Europe was

108  emilie mu rp hy that the women’s interlocutor could not speak French. Naturally, the vast majority of such cases occurred when the women needed to communicate with people of lower social status. A number of women spoke the local language and were able to interact with local people, where necessary making their own travel and accommodation arrangements as well as purchasing provisions en route. Sof’ia Murav’eva (1825–51), for example, used Italian to ask directions in Rome while her aunt dealt with accommodation arrangements. However, Murav’eva was critical of the attempts made by her aunt (with whom she had a strained relationship) to express herself in Italian, and her criticisms seem to imply that she herself was able to use the language at a higher level: Arrivés dans ce logement, Catiche a commencé à parler Italien avec une femme et cela m’impatientait beaucoup, parce qu’elle parle d’une manière si ennuyeuse cette langue et puis elle la prononce si mal (Murav’eva 1842: 6).3 Princess Bariatinskaia (dates unknown) and her mother had direct dealings with their English cook and housemaid on the Isle of Wight regarding household matters (Bariatinskaia (date unknown): 24 v.). Dashkova decided on her journey down the Rhine that her German was better than that of the designated interpreter and so conducted purchases of provisions with local peasants herself: Parfois il nous arrivait, par manière d’amusement, d’acheter des provisions pour notre table aux paysans qui s’approchaient au bord de l’eau. M. Campbell nous servait de trucheman dans ces occasions-là; mais à force de l’entendre commettre des bévues, je finissais par prendre courage et parler allemand, ce que, faute de pratique, j’hésitais toujours à faire. Cependant après quelques essais en ce genre, je fus nommée par le suffrage universel interprète général pour tout le reste du voyage. (Dashkova 1989: 116)4 This expression of reluctance to speak German and to take on the role of interpreter because she had not had enough practice is a form of ‘feminine’ modesty, although actually Dashkova is boasting of her competence. As Murav’eva and Dashkova demonstrate, the travellers believed that it was important to display a good level of competence in a language with native speakers in public, even if those native speakers belonged to the lower classes. For some women the use of languages other than French was accompanied by unconventional behaviour. They condescended to their lowerclass acquaintances and interacted with them as they would with friends of their own social class and members of their own sex. Bariatinskaia, for example, enjoyed conversation in English with her boatman, with whom

f r a nco p ho ne t r a v e l n a r r a t iv e s   109 she travelled alone, as she went each morning to take the waters on the Isle of Wight (Bariatinskaia (date unknown): 26). On occasions when members of the upper classes did not know French the women switched to a different language in order to ease social interactions. Ekaterina Liubomirskaia (1789–1870) and her mother, for instance, communicated in Italian and English with a non-francophone English family that visited them in Piuma (Anon. [Liubomirskaia] 1805: 19 v.–20). In high society some of the travellers switched to another language as they stood to gain more personal benefit in social situations. Thus Natal’ia Kurakina (1766–1831) noted that speaking Italian endeared her to new Italian acquaintances and ensured that she was treated and received well in their society (Kurakina 1903: 271). The women communicated with their foreign friends and acquaintances in languages other than French in writing as well as conversation. While in Rome, for example, Murav’eva engaged in correspondence with acquaintances made in Italy in Italian (Murav’eva 1842: 34 v.). The women also employed languages other than French in ecclesiastical situations. In one such case, when Kurakina was introduced to Pope Pius VII the interview was carried out in Italian because he preferred to speak his native language despite having a perfect mastery of French (Kurakina 1903: 260). The reason for the language switch in this case was deference. The use of French could also be undesirable in certain situations when the travellers were in the company of their compatriots. The women could take advantage of the fact that the people around them did not know Russian and use Russian as a secret language. Their reasons for switching to their mother tongue varied but could include a desire to be circumspect or to mock, joke or express discontent. Varvara Golovina (1766–1819), for example, spoke Russian with a certain Protasova in the street in Paris in order to be discreet and observe the correct etiquette for an introduction with Madame de Charost (Golovina 1910: 345). In Warsaw, Varvara Turkestanova (1775–1819) shared a joke with her compatriots in Russian about Izabela Czartoryska’s appearance and character: La vieille p-sse Czartoryska est ce qu’on appelle Киевская ведьма. On ne peut rien voir de plus laid. Le grand-duc prétend que c’est le feu Николай Иванович Салтыков habillé en femme; je ne le trouve pas, mais elle est au moins tout aussi jaune et aussi maigre qu’il l’était. Elle était habillée avec une robe grise et coiffée d’un chapeau de même couleur, le tout arrangé d’une manière ridicule; elle portait aussi un petit mantelet en blonde ou dentelle noire, comme on le voit sur la scène

110  emilie mu rp hy de la comtesse Pimbiche dans les Plaideurs; enfin il y avait du burlesque dans toute sa toilette. (V. I. Turkestanova 1884: 18)5 It is interesting to note in this connection that Turkestanova draws on both Slavic and French cultural references to convey her impressions of Czartoryska. Russian is employed when she alludes to witchcraft, part of her native ‘low’ culture of folklore, while French is used when she alludes to ‘high’ literary culture and the figure of the Countess de Pimbesche in the comedy by Racine, The Litigants (Les Plaideurs), which she mentions. The combination of cultural references heightens the burlesque picture that Turkestanova paints of both Czartoryska’s appearance and attitude. She is frightful, unattractive, unpleasant, haughty, self-important and lacking in taste. There is evidence in several of the texts I have examined that when the women were in a community composed solely of their compatriots in Western Europe they communicated in their mother tongue. On arrival at Reichenbach im Kandertal for Easter celebrations in 1821 Elizaveta Turkestanova (b. 1778), for instance, indicated her pleasure at hearing and speaking Russian in a ‘colony’ of her compatriots (E. Turkestanova 1820–4: 28 v.). Murav’eva noted that speaking Russian with compatriots in Rome was expected and that she was instructed to do this by her aunt: la Comtesse Bobrinski arriva avec ses deux filles et son amie; ce sont des dames russes que je voyais pour la première fois de ma vie, et comme elles sont Russe, Catiche m’a ordonné de lui adresser la parole et de faire connaissance avec elle. Je m’adressais donc en Russe au premier moment cela m’a causé une impression très agreable, car il est toujours très doux d’entendre et de parler sa langue natale surtout aux pays étrangers. (Murav’eva 1842: 19)6

COD E - S W I TCH I N G The women frequently inserted words and phrases in languages other than French into their travel narratives. They did this not because the words and phrases they used did not exist in French or were untranslatable, but rather because they wanted by using English, German and Italian to lend an air of authenticity and exoticism to the text as well as to demonstrate knowledge of local realia and customs. The women also used English, German and Italian for nicknames and pet names for their travelling companions or acquaintances they made en route. The use of these languages could also be a way of making a word stand out or

f r a nco p ho ne t r a v e l n a r r a t iv e s   111 drawing attention to some point. Praskov’ia Miatleva (1772–1859), for instance, wished to underline the fact that she was moving in the highest, most fashionable circles in London. The use of the English word ‘fashionable’ in the French text highlights both her motive in this respect and her intention to mock the English for allowing their habits to be affected to such an extent by fashion: mon fils […] nous a menés faire un tour à hide Parc à l’heure fashionable ou l’on rencontre le beau monde dans toutte sorte d’Equipages, et beaucoup de Dames à Cheval. c’est un très beau parc; mais on n’en fait pas le tour, parcequ’il y a de fashionable que le coté droit, où l’on va et vient tant qu’on veut. (Anon. [Miatleva] 1836: 5 v.–6)7 While there is no evidence that the women were more competent or comfortable in Russian than French, it was far more common for them to turn to Russian than to other languages when they either did not know the French word or phrase or had temporarily forgotten it. There are also a few indications that Russian was the more dominant language in the minds of the women. Elizaveta Vasil’eva (dates unknown), for example, writes down Genoese dialect in Cyrillic transliteration, presumably as a pronunciation aid (Vasil’eva 1836–7: 59 v.). Some women mixed up the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets on the pages of their texts and the influence of Russian pronunciation can, at times, be seen in their spelling. Miatleva thus writes ‘фrappé’, substituting the Cyrillic for the Latin ‘f’. When recording Western European proper nouns and toponyms she also retains the Russian practice of replacing Latin ‘H’ with Cyrillic ‘Г’: ‘Golbein’ instead of (Hans) Holbein (the Younger) and ‘la Dsse de Gesse-Gonbourg’, instead of Hesse-Hombourg, for instance (Anon. [Miatleva] 1836: 20 v., 13 v., 16 v.). On the whole the use of Russian, unlike the use of these other languages, indicates the inadequacy of the French language in the situation in question, rather than deliberate stylistic decisions on the part of the authors, and fills a linguistic need for words and expressions. It is also possible that Cyrillic script was used to avoid the difficulty of transliteration and/​or translation. This said, it should be noted that the women’s written Russian is, at times, phonetic and inaccurate. Russian was employed in the travel narratives to record Russian proper nouns, toponyms, proverbs, nicknames and pet names as well as to express specifically Russian reality in cases where French did not provide an adequate translation or no equivalent French term existed. It is used, for example, to record names of carriages, dishes, literary works, building materials, institutions, units of currency and flora and fauna. Cyrillic was

112  emilie mu rp hy used in particular to record terminology relating to Orthodoxy and to inscribe ritual blessings to loved ones when closing diary entries. Where the women were able to attend Orthodox church services across Europe they employed Russian and Church Slavonic when participating in those services, saying prayers and interacting with the clergy. Languages other than French also appear on the pages of the travel narratives when the women provide reports of speech from conversations they had in those languages, thus adding both a sense of immediacy and a touch of the picturesque to descriptions and anecdotes. Evidently, the women assume that the intended readers, primarily Russian relatives and friends, can comprehend the quoted speech, for they provide no translation. This would seem to suggest that knowledge of several foreign languages was not unusual in Russian high society. On the sea voyage from Constantinople to Trieste, for instance, Vasil’eva was terrified by storms. She reported an exchange with a sailor in Italian, thus using a device to heighten the tension she was feeling and add drama to her account: Quel bienfait que les ports, qu’aurions nous fait s’il n’en existait point? je ne le sais pas, car dès que la mer est très agitée, nous disons d’abord aux matelots: andiamo in porto, dove è il porto et Anastasi bon vieux matelot nous console en nous disant perchè pauro, non pauro, questa se una buraschina, e voi sempre burasca, burasca, questa se cattiva veda mi niente pauro. (Vasil’eva 1836–7: 26)8

REA D I N G I N D I FFERENT L ANG U AG ES Another way in which languages other than French were used during travel was for reading. Reading in foreign languages was an important part of noblewomen’s education and it was also one of the travellers’ favourite occupations. While in Western Europe the women made a note of what they had read in English, French, German, Italian and Russian. Just over half of all the reading the women did, as recorded in their texts, was of writings in French. These included works by François de Malherbe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Madame de Staël and Stendhal as well as English and German works in French translation, such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Red Rover and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine. About a quarter of the material they mentioned was in Italian and English, split almost equally between those two languages, and included works by Walter Scott and Dante. Only a few of the women reported that they read works in German, in which case the authors with whom they were familiar included E. T. A. Hoffmann and Friedrich Gottlieb

f r a nco p ho ne t r a v e l n a r r a t iv e s   113 Klopstock. The women read a mix of genres, everything from classical and religious texts to novels. Only Varvara Turkestanova made a note of reading done in Russian. As part of the suite of Dowager Empress Mariia Fedorovna (1759–1828), she received newspapers while travelling (V. I. Turkestanova 1884: 113). To a large extent the reading the travellers did would have been dictated by what was available to them on the road and at their destinations, hence the relative lack of Russian-language reading matter mentioned. This information is valuable not only because we know little about what women read in general but also because it reveals that the women were competent multilingual readers.

FOREI G N - L AN GUA GE E D UCAT I ON Learning languages played an important role in Russian noblewomen’s education. Elite women’s travels in Western Europe did not have the same educational purpose as those of their male compatriots who, in line with the practices of the traditional Grand Tour, studied in foreign institutions with the aim of finishing their education and returning to Russia to begin or advance a civilian or military career. Russian women nevertheless invested time whilst travelling in furthering their education by the study of different languages, a topic which they addressed in their travel narratives. Some of the younger girls studied the language of the country in which they were staying. Liubomirskaia, for example, who took Italian lessons from a tutor in Italy, claims that she wrote without difficulty in Italian and was reading Japanese history in that language and understanding almost everything (Anon. [Liubomirskaia] 1805: 5). Thus she was learning Italian and simultaneously using it as a medium for learning, which implies that she was capable of using the language at a relatively high level. Murav’eva had reached a standard in her study of Italian that allowed her to work on it independently and she dedicated time to maintaining her language skills during her stay in Rome: je comte conte [sic] maintenant composer chaque jour en Italien afin de ne pas oublier cette langue si douce et si harmonieuse et qu dans laquelle je peux très bien m’expliquer et comprendre quelque chose de ce qu’on dit, par conséquent je peux la continuer maintenant à moi seule. (Murav’eva 1842: 21 v.)9 Some of the women also studied English. Liubomirskaia and her brother, for example, had an English nanny or governess who a­ ccompanied them

114  emilie mu rp hy on their travels in Italy. The fact that Dashkova studied English in France provides further evidence that learning new languages was not confined to the younger girls and that the women did not just concentrate on learning the language of the country in which they were staying. It is interesting to note that French, as we might expect, and German were the languages of tuition when Dashkova was learning English (Dashkova 1989: 104). As an educational exercise, Bariatinskaia, who was learning English, switched to that language when recording a visit to her mother’s family in Germany. She provides no justification for this language switch, which occurs in the middle of an account of a trip to the Harz Mountains, and the rest of her account is written entirely in English. This is the only text in my corpus that has more than short passages in a language other than French. Bariatinskaia’s command of English is excellent. It is generally both idiomatic and grammatically correct. She was capable of expressing herself in all the same subjects as in French. It is only on rare occasions that her phrasing is awkward or that she seems to have been unable to think of a suitable word and leaves a blank space in her text. In contrast to her French-language account of her stay in Germany, Bariatinskaia’s English-language descriptions of England include what appear to be lengthy quotations but at no point does Bariatinskaia identify her sources. The style in these passages is far more literary and sophisticated than her own English, and quoting them may itself have been an educational exercise: copying was an important part of learning at this time for Russian noblewomen.

T HE U SE OF Q UOTAT I ON Bariatinskaia is not the only travel writer to have included quotations in languages other than French in her text. While all the women used French as their default language and eloquently expressed themselves using their own words in this language, where they did resort to other languages in passages or sections of their texts they tended to use other people’s words rather than their own. This represents a very important difference from the way they used French, but it does not necessarily mean that the women’s command of other languages was at a much lower level. On the contrary, quotations of works in languages other than French demonstrated how well read they were and reflected their good education and social standing. The reasons for these brief excursions into other languages vary from traveller to traveller but the passages in question commonly emphasised values such as religious piety, friendship,

f r a nco p ho ne t r a v e l n a r r a t iv e s   115 family ties and domesticity or expressed ideas that the women wished to convey. In the diary of her Highland tour, Dashkova, for example, quotes the Epistle to the Right Honourable Richard Earl of Burlington (1731) by the poet and amateur landscape gardener Alexander Pope to express the view that the park at Dunkeld House should not have been embellished to the detriment of what nature and history had already given it. Despite the overall picture of beauty and romance the park provides, she is extremely disappointed by the landscaping at the hermitage and waterfall: Enfin nous quittâmes cette Place enchantées des productions que la nature s’y est éfforcée de faire, et dégoûtée de celles de l’art, et je conclus, que si les ouvrages de votre immortel Pope, se trouvoient dans la Bibliothéque des Ducs d’Athol, ils n’en ont point été lus, sans quoi, ils auroient été frappé de la verité, et de l’ellegance de la description picturesque, suivante.10 To swell the Terras, or to sink the grot,   In all, let Nature never be forgot! But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,   Nor over dress, nor leave her wholly bare.

(Dashkova 1995: 244)

The use of English quotation allowed Dashkova to achieve a number of things: she demonstrated how well read she was in English literature; she showed her familiarity with contemporary aesthetic trends in picturesque landscape gardening; she indirectly affirmed her authority in matters of aesthetic taste relating to landscape and architecture; and finally, she justified her criticism, which comes from a higher (masculine) authority. However, the use of Russian quotation in the travel diaries serves a different function from quotation in other languages. The women seem to consider their mother tongue more appropriate than French for the expression of deep emotion. Russian also offers familiarity, comfort and intimacy in times of sorrow, as Miatleva demonstrates when she inserts into her diary a Russian-language poem composed by her son, the humorist and poet Ivan Miatlev (1796–1844). The poem expresses the painful memories and powerful emotions evoked by the sight of the sea in the moonlight at Bognor Regis as she reminisces about home, loved ones now departed and an estate no longer in her possession. The use of Russian also gives Russia a materiality it might otherwise lack during travel (Anon. [Miatleva] 1836: 43 v.–45). * * *

116  emilie mu rp hy The choice of languages other than French in the travel narratives I have examined is related to situation, speech partners, the writers’ proficiency and identity construction. When the travellers switch back and forth between French and other languages, they are not being careless or clumsy but rather facilitating communication by lowering language barriers as well as consolidating their cultural identity as educated women of the social elite. They experience alternation between languages during travel as routine. The limits placed on the use of French were predominantly social rather than geographical or strictly linguistic. The use of other languages allowed the women to cross social frontiers, further their education, improve their linguistic skills or develop new ones, achieve greater social success and address ‘risqué’ topics. The women used English, German and Italian for speaking, reading and writing and took pleasure in doing so. They alternated between languages as a communicative or social strategy, to mark group identity, exclude someone, highlight their status, alter the tonality of their writing and display a level of accomplishment and expertise. Languages other than French could be more suitable for expressing certain notions or concepts and maximised communicative possibilities, in certain cases serving to strengthen not only the content but also the essence of the message. Russian was used differently from the other languages. The women’s use of their mother tongue reveals that it was perceived inadequacies and the unsuitability of the French language itself that placed limits on its use during travel and in their travel narratives, namely in cases when there was no French equivalent for particular terms. The universality of French also caused the travellers to impose limits on its use in favour of Russian when they did not want to be understood by other Frenchspeakers. At the same time, extended sojourns outside Russia often intensified the women’s desire to employ their native language. Their use of Russian further serves to invalidate the stereotypical image of Russian noblewomen as unable to master their native tongue and as therefore tending to operate entirely in French. In the branch of women’s writing I have examined in this chapter, then, there is a hierarchy of frequency of use of languages with French at the top. The unique status of French in Russia in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth is evident in these travel narratives: although many of the women were multilingual and recorded that they read, wrote and conversed in English, German, Italian and Russian, they nevertheless selected French as their primary language of spoken and written communication. And yet, while the

f r a nco p ho ne t r a v e l n a r r a t iv e s   117 demands of life abroad often led them to use French as their main language, the practicalities of life in Western Europe placed limits on its use. Switching between languages was both a flexible strategy with which to meet the complex communicative demands of foreign travel and an important feature of Russian women’s francophone travel narratives.

NOTES The author is grateful to Elena Gretchanaia, David Murphy and Wendy Rosslyn for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.   1. Some memoirs are not exclusively dedicated to travel but feature travel as a dominant theme or important event in the author’s life.  2. Pis’ma iz Frantsii is the title under which these letters are now best known, but it was not the title under which they were first published.   3. ‘When we arrived at our lodgings Catiche began to speak with a woman in Italian, which vexed me greatly because she speaks this language in such an irritating manner and, what is more, she pronounces it so badly.’ French quotations in this chapter remain in their original form and reproduce any of their authors’ crossings-out, underlinings, misspellings and questionable grammatical forms. All English translations are my own.   4. ‘By way of amusement, we would sometimes purchase provisions for our table from peasants who came to the water’s edge. On these occasions Mr Campbell served as our spokesman, but after hearing his blunders I became emboldened to speak German which, owing to lack of practice, I was always hesitant to do. Following some further attempts of this kind, however, I was appointed by universal suffrage as general interpreter for the rest of the voyage.’   5. ‘Old Princess Czartoryska might be likened to a witch from Kiev. There is nothing more ugly. The Grand Duke claims that it is the late Nikolai Ivanovich Saltykov dressed as a woman. I do not share his opinion, but she is certainly equally sallow and gaunt. Both her dress and hat were grey and the way she wore them looked ridiculous. She was also wearing a little blonde or black lace mantelet, just like that worn by the Countess de Pimbesche in The Litigants. In short, there was something of the burlesque in her whole attire.’   6. ‘Countess Bobrinski arrived with her two daughters and her friend. I had never seen these Russian ladies before and, as they were Russian, Catiche instructed me to speak to her and make her acquaintance. Accordingly, I addressed her in Russian at the first opportunity, which created a most favourable impression for it is always very sweet to hear and speak one’s mother tongue, especially in foreign countries.’   7. ‘My son […] took us on an excursion to Hyde Park at the fashionable hour when one encounters the beau monde in all manner of equipages as well as many ladies on horseback. It is a very beautiful park, but one does not journey around it fully because it is fashionable only on the right side, where one comes and goes as much as one wishes.’   8. ‘What a blessing ports are. What would have become of us if there were none? I do not know, for as soon as the sea becomes very rough, the first thing we say to the s­ ailors is let us go in to port, where is the port, and the good old sailor Anastasi

118  emilie mu rp hy consoles us by saying why are you frightened, don’t be afraid, this is only a little gale yet to you it is always a storm, a bad storm. Look at me, I’m not afraid.’   9. ‘I intend to write something in Italian every day in order not to forget this language which is so gentle and so harmonious and in which I am very well able to express myself and understand something of what is being said, enabling me now to continue my study alone.’ 10. ‘We finally left that place enchanted by the creations that nature had endeavoured to produce there and repelled by those of art, and I concluded that if the works of your immortal Pope are to be found in their library, the Dukes of Athol have not read any of them, otherwise they would have been struck by the truth and elegance of the following picturesque description.’

REFERENCES Anon. [on internal evidence, Ekaterina Nikolaevna Liubomirskaia] (1805), ‘No. 7. Journal depuis le 14 Juin jusqu’au 15 d’Aout 1805 à Piuma près de Gorice’, RNB, OR, f. 961, Q. IV. 205, 1. Anon. [on internal evidence Praskov’ia Ivanovna Miatleva] (1836), [anonymously authored diary], RGADA, f. 1271, op. 1, ed. khr. 497. Bariatinskaia, Princess [on internal evidence Ol’ga, Mariia or Leonilla Ivanovna] (date unknown [on internal evidence 1830s or 1840s]), [travel diary, mid-nineteenth century], RNB, OR, f. 1000, op. 2, ed. khr. 96. Dashkova, E. R. (1989), Mémoires de la princesse Daschkoff dame d’honneur de Catherine II impératrice de toutes les Russies, Paris: Mercure de France. Dashkova, E. R. (1995), ‘Le Petit tour dans les Highlands’, in A. G. Cross, ‘Poezdki kniagini E. R. Dashkovoi v Velikobritaniiu (1770 i 1776–1780 gg.) i ee “Nebol’shoe puteshestvie v gornuiu Shotlandiiu” (1777)’, XVIII vek: Sbornik 19, St Petersburg: Nauka, pp. 223–68 (see pp. 239–53). Dickinson, S. (2006), Breaking Ground: Travel and National Culture in Russia from Peter I to the Era of Pushkin, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Golovina, V. N. (1910), Souvenirs de la comtesse Golovine née princesse Galitzine 1766– 1821, Paris: Plon-Norrit. Gretchanaia, E. (2009), ‘L’Usage du français et du russe dans les journaux féminins XVIIIe–premier tiers du XIXe siècle’, Cahiers du Monde russe, 50: 1, 21–32. Gretchanaia, E., A. Stroev and C. Viollet (eds) (2012), La Francophonie européenne aux XVIIIe–XIXe siècles. Perspectives littéraires, historiques et culturelles, Brussels: Peter Lang. Kurakina, N. I. (1903), Souvenirs des voyages de la Princesse N. Kourakine 1816–1830. Suivis d’un extrait des souvenirs autobiographiques de Mme. Vigée-Lebrun, ed. F. N. Kurakin and V. N. Smol’ianinov, Moscow: Tipo-litografiia Grosman i Vendel’shtein. Marrese, M. Lamarche (2010), ‘ “The poetics of everyday behavior” revisited: Lotman, gender, and the evolution of Russian noble identity’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 11: 4, 701–39. Murav’eva, S. A. (1842), ‘Journal. – Mai 1842’, RGB, OR, f. 336 razd. 2, k. 78, ed. khr. 3. Turkestanova, E. (1820–4), ‘Mon Journal de l’année 1820’, RNB, OR, f. 1000, op. 2, ed. khr. 1417. Turkestanova, V. I. (1884), Journal tenu par la princesse Barbe Tourkestanow demoiselle

f r a nco p ho ne t r a v e l n a r r a t iv e s   119 d’honneur de sa Majesté l’Impératrice Maria Fedorowna 1818 (Lettres adressées au comte et à la comtesse de Litta), Moscow: Imprimerie de l’université Impériale. Vasil’eva, Elizaveta (1836–7), [travel diary], RGALI, f. 1337, op. 1, ed. khr. 24. Viollet, C. (2010), ‘Praktika i funktsii mul’tilingvizma v russkikh dnevnikakh na fran­ tsuzskom iazyke (konets XVIII–nachalo XIX veka)’, in O. Anokhina, T. Balachova, N. Velikanova, E. Gretchanaia and A. Kudelin (eds), Mul’tilingvizm i genezis teksta: materialy mezhdunarodnogo simpoziuma 3–5 oktiabria 2007, Moscow: IMLI RAN, pp. 273–85. Yaguello, M. (2010), ‘Vivre la francophonie: le français et la langue maternelle’, in K. Malausséna and G. Sznicer (eds), Traversées francophones: géopolitique(s), H/​ histoire(s), langue(s), littérature(s), Geneva: Editions Suzanne Hurter, pp. 148–51.

chapter 6

Russian or French? Bilingualism in Aleksandr Radishchev’s Letters from Exile (1790–1800) Rodolphe Baudin

T

he publication of the Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu) in May 1790 infuriated Catherine II and prompted Radishchev’s immediate arrest and detention. Behind an apparently benign travelogue after the manner of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, the aging empress had seen a pamphlet against her politics. Bad timing was the main cause of her anger, as the political evolution of contemporary France had made her intolerant of the expression of social and political criticism she had once admired in the works of her friends the French philosophes. Radishchev was first sentenced to death, then the verdict was commuted to ten years of detention in the fort of Ilimsk, in Eastern Siberia. The writer left the Russian capital in chains on 8 September 1790, and after a sixteen-month journey to the point of his detention, spent five years in Ilimsk, before Catherine’s death and the accession of Paul I, who set him free from his Siberian exile in 1797. Radishchev survived the harsh material and climatic conditions of his detention largely thanks to the support of his former superior and patron, Aleksandr Romanovich Vorontsov (1741–1805), who had served as president of the College of Commerce from 1773 to 1792. Vorontsov not only provided Radishchev with books and money, but also offered him the chance to stay in touch with the outside world, through the correspondence which he exchanged with him during his detention. The fate of Vorontsov’s letters to Radishchev is unknown. However, we do know Radishchev’s letters to his patron. They form the larger part of the writer’s surviving correspondence, published in the third volume of the Soviet Academy edition of Radishchev’s works.1 Both French and Russian were used in these letters. The aim of the present chapter is therefore to examine the factors determining the choice of language in the letters. Before examining Radishchev’s letters, though, I shall briefly

bilin guali sm in a le ks andr r a di s hch e v ’s l e t t e r s   121 consider when and how each language was used in Russian aristocratic correspondence more generally in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

TH E R U LES OF L AN GUA GE C H O I CE IN RU SSIAN AR I STOCRAT I C CORRESPON D ENCE Scholars who have studied bilingual French and Russian letters have come to the conclusion that the choice of one or the other language depended on three factors: first, the social and/​or sexual identity of the addressee; second, the content of the letter; and third, various textual strategies aimed at shaping the reaction of the addressee to the letter. For example, French was the proper language when writing to a lady (Paperno 1975: 148; Maimina 1981: 60; Dmitrieva 1994: 74; Rosenzweig 1994: 68), to one’s fiancée (Lotman 1994: 34), to a lesser known addressee (Maimina 1981: 60), to one’s parents or to any older addressee (Rosenzweig 1994: 68). Russian, on the contrary, was appropriate when writing to friends (1994: 68) or to one’s spouse (Paperno 1975: 152; Lotman 1994: 36). Indeed writing in French to close friends would have been a sign of coldness towards the addressee, since French was the language of social relations expressed in codified forms in salons, at the court and so forth, where open-heartedness and intimacy were not really allowed. Writing in French to one’s spouse, on the other hand, would have sounded like a misplaced attempt to flirt (Dmitrieva 1994: 83). Russian was also the language of the administration, and as such was mandatory when writing to a civil servant, especially one with a higher rank (Paperno 1975: 151; Lotman 1994: 36). The content of a letter also influenced the writer’s choice of language. French was preferred when writing business letters, especially those addressing financial matters, a topic which would have sounded too petty in Russian (Dmitrieva 1994: 74, 83). Again, French was used when discussing intellectual matters, such as philosophy or literature. However, this changed in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when the members of the Arzamas group adopted Russian to discuss their own literary achievements (Mills Todd 1976: 10–12, 65; Maimina 1981: 60). French remained the language of intellectual debate, though, notably in Pushkin’s letter to Chaadaev on the publication of the latter’s first ‘Philosophical Letter’ (‘Lettre philosophique’) in 1836. French also seems to have been favoured for introspective letters (Dmitrieva 1994: 79). It was the language of wit and, as I said above, was preferred for flirting (Paperno 1975: 152; Dmitrieva 1994: 83), whereas Russian was

122  rodo lp he ba udi n the language of marital love. According to Lotman, French was also the language of honour, and as such seems to have been favoured when performing rituals closely attached to the ethos of the aristocracy, such as demanding satisfaction from an offender (Lotman 1994: 46). As Maimina points out, only the use of a specific language made it possible to address certain topics. For instance, joking about ladies was permitted in French but not in Russian, in which it might have sounded rude (Maimina 1981: 62). Finally, as said above, letters with an official character were supposed to be written in the official language of the empire, that is to say, Russian (Lotman 1994: 36). Violation of the accepted norms dictated by the identity of the addressee or the content of the letter allowed letter writers to influence the reception of their letters by their addressees. For instance, using French to discuss a topic which would have normally required Russian helped minimise its importance or gravity (Dmitrieva 1994: 83). Writing in French also helped hide the letter writer’s true intentions or ideas behind French clichés (Paperno 1975: 150; Lotman 1994: 46) and borrowed role models (Paperno 1975: 152; Maimina 1981: 60; Dmitrieva 1994: 83). Again, using French allowed one to conceal real closeness behind a conventional intimacy, which was often provided by French literature (Dmitrieva 1994: 81). As I have already said, it was also a way of showing coldness to a friend, who would have expected a letter in Russian (1994: 83). Finally, using French instead of Russian in an official letter to a hierarchical superior could be a means of claiming one’s moral equality regardless of rank, as attested by Pushkin’s letters to Benckendorff (Lotman 1994: 36).2 Scholars working on bilingualism in Russian correspondence have also addressed the problem of letters written partly in one language and partly in the other. Despite a commonly held belief (Lotman 1994: 44), Pushkin, for instance, was not against mixing the two languages. He required only that it should not be the consequence of laziness, and that it should be justified by the context (Maimina 1981: 61). Nevertheless, mixing languages was a sign of familiarity, and as such was forbidden in formal exchanges (1981: 62).

LAN G U A GE C H O I CE I N RAD I SH CH EV ’ S L ETTERS FRO M E X I L E How does usage in Radishchev’s letters from exile accord with these rules? Of the seventy-two letters from exile published in the Academy edition, forty-seven were written in French, twenty in Russian, and only

bilin guali sm in a le ks andr r a di s hch e v ’s l e t t e r s   123 five in both languages. Obviously Radishchev was reluctant to mix the languages, and when he did mix them, he often separated them by using them in different parts of the letter. For instance, in letter 33, dated 20 October 1790, the main part of the letter is in Russian, and the postscriptum is in French. As in this example, shifting from one language to the other was a way of changing the subject and, as such, attests to the effect that a rule which is frequently referred to in Russian and foreign letter-writing manuals had on Radishchev’s letters. The rule in question demanded the visual separation of the various topics addressed in the letter. In the 1822 edition of The Latest, Fullest and Most Detailed Guide to Letter-Writing, or the Universal Secretary (Noveishii, samyi polnyi i podrobnyi pis’movnik, ili vseobshchii sekretar’), for instance, the rule reads as follows: ‘When addressing a new topic, one must mark it distinctly’ (Noveishii, samyi polnyi i podrobnyi pis’movnik 1822: 11). While serious about separating paragraphs written in different languages, Radishchev obviously tolerated lesser infractions of the nonmixing rule. For instance, he frequently used isolated words from language B in letters written in language A. These minor infractions seem to follow three different patterns. The first pattern of code-switching consists in using a Russian word in a letter written in French. Radishchev resorts to this pattern when referring to Russian realia, which he obviously considers impossible to translate. Such a pattern was common in eighteenth-century Russia and appears in numerous corpora of correspondence, for instance in Princess Dashkova’s letters to her brother Aleksandr Vorontsov, Radishchev’s patron (AKV 1870–95, vol. 5), on which Jessica Tipton touches in the following chapter. Realia might include either toponyms (Нижней for ‘Nizhnii Novgorod’ in letter 81, dated 26 May 1797) or indications of social status (сын боярской3 in letter 67 of 13 July 1793, or извозчик for ‘Russian coachman’ in letter 94 of 9 January 1798). Terms denoting social status or professions may be used with a French article, in keeping with a rule pointed out by Irina Paperno (Paperno 1975: 153). Realia may also include objects (лыжи for ‘skis’ in letter 61, dated 17 February 1792 or мамонтова кость for ‘mammoth bone’ in letter 66, dated 14 September 1792) and proper names, such as Елисавета Васильевна in letter 75 of 3 June 1795. In addition, Radishchev uses Russian to refer to famous characters from Russian literature, such as Kuteikin and Tsyfirkin in Fonvizin’s comedy The Minor (Nedorosl’, 1782), mentioned in letter 55, dated 26 November 1791. Radishchev seems, though, not to have liked to resort to the Cyrillic alphabet in letters written in French. Consequently, when using Russian words, he often transliterates them into Latin characters (Paperno 1975:

124  rodo lp he ba udi n 153) or even Gallicises them. For instance, in letter 66, written in 1792, Radishchev uses the words kopeik, verstes or poude.4 In another letter, when referring to a type of fabric, he transliterates the Russian word into Latin characters and supplies his addressee with a definition of the word he is using: daba ou toile peinte bleue (blue-coloured cloth; letter 76, dated 20 November 1795). The third and last pattern used by Radishchev is the opposite of the first one. It consists in using a French word in a letter written in Russian. See, for instance, letter 38 of 15 March 1791: Хотя они оба сибиряки, однако же во многих вещах они между собою толико различествуют, как англичанин от француза, proportion gardée.5 The use of language B here is limited to an idiom, the Russian equivalent of which either does not exist or is thought by Radishchev to be less expressive. This was not uncommon at the time (Paperno 1975: 153). Such instances occur in Pushkin’s correspondence too. According to Maimina, they aim to revive the attention of the addressee, in case it is weakening (Maimina 1981: 61). In Radishchev’s case, the insertion may also be an attempt to be witty by emphasising the somewhat unexpected nature of his comparison. French being the language of wit (Paperno 1975: 155), this would explain the shift from Russian into it. Finally, Radishchev’s letters to Vorontsov show an interesting case of interference between languages. In a letter of 10 April 1792, he writes: Время здесь иногда хорошо, иногда дурно. Вчера день был очень теплой.6 The Academy Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century Russian does not mention any use of the word время in the sense of ‘weather’ (Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XVIII veka 1988, vol. 4). It seems therefore to be an example of interference from French, where temps means both ‘time’ and ‘weather’. Though it can be traced in other Russian texts of the period, like Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller (Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika)7, in Radishchev’s correspondence it can be interpreted as a Freudian slip, as time, no less than weather, was a concern to the exiled writer during his detention in Siberia. As one of the main linguistic features of his letters, Radishchev’s general reluctance to mix the two languages informs us about the nature of his relationship with his main addressee, Vorontsov. However close the two men may have been, Radishchev never allowed himself familiarity, as he always bore in mind that he was writing to his former superior and patron. Therefore, the epistolary connection between the two men was obviously not based on friendship, which allowed the mixing of languages in the epistolary communication process. While it did not go so far as friendship, the relationship was nevertheless close enough for there to be an assumption, on Radishchev’s part,

bilin guali sm in a le ks andr r a di s hch e v ’s l e t t e r s   125 that he would not conceal any aspect of his inner life from his patron. Such an understanding originated in Radishchev’s sentimental and Rousseauesque striving for transparency and in his desire to recompense his patron symbolically for his protection.8 However, the intimacy thus offered was not totally transparent and was fabricated in order to present a positive image of Radishchev that would be acceptable for his patron. This explains why Radishchev fully described the moral sufferings imposed upon him by exile but carefully concealed the relationship which he conducted in Siberia with his sister-in-law (see Baudin 2008a) which, if not actually incestuous, seemed so according to the Russian Orthodox Church. This peculiar kind of intimate relationship, then, is not fake, but selective. It is demanded by the semi-official type of relationships which tie together a patron and his protégé. It is the privileged expression of what Kirill Ospovat has called ‘bureaucratic sentimentalism’. For the purposes of this chapter, we must ask which language is most appropriate for this specific kind of relationship. In order to do so, we first examine which language Radishchev uses in his letters to his relatives and close friends, to whom he is tied by real intimacy. A quick look at Radishchev’s letters to these addressees shows that he writes to them in Russian. The following, for example, are all in Russian: letter 83 of July 1797 to Radishchev’s father Nikolai Afanas’evich, letters 85 and 89 of July 1797 and 18 August 1797 respectively to his brother Moisei, and his letters to his friends from the years spent at Leipzig University, Aleksandr Ushakov, who eventually became his brotherin-law (letter 86, dated 25 July 1797), and the famous freemason and friend of Karamzin, Aleksei Kutuzov (letter 56, dated 6 December 1791). The reasons prompting the choice of Russian in these letters are quite clear. Radishchev’s father was a traditional middling landlord living in the provinces, an old-school man with a strict code of conduct like Starodum in Fonvizin’s Minor. This man expressed anger at his son and called him a ‘Tatar’ when he heard that Radishchev had had children with his sister-in-law during his Siberian exile (Baudin 2008b). While he definitely mastered French, as we know from Pavel Radishchev’s recollections about his father (Radishchev 1959: 50), Nikolai probably rejected it as the language of the petits-maîtres (fops) of the two capitals and of the philosophers who had turned his poor son’s head. A somewhat similar explanation applies to Kutuzov too. Moscow masons wrote in Russian or German as a sign of their ideological estrangement from rationalist French culture. Typically, Kutuzov’s letters to Radishchev were written in Russian (Barskov 1915: 194–6). As for the writer’s

126  rodo lp he ba udi n brother and brother-in-law, writing to them in French, according to the rules I referred to earlier, would have introduced into the letters a sort of coldness incompatible with the expression of true feeling. It seems tempting, then, to see Russian as the language of real intimacy, used by correspondents connected by family ties or deep mutual knowledge, as well as by equal status in terms of social position and age. Conversely, French could be regarded as the language of the selective and fabricated intimacy of bureaucratic sentimentalism, since numerous letters from Radishchev to his patron are in French. However, this pattern fails to describe the complexity of Radishchev’s epistolary bilingualism in a completely satisfactory way. Indeed, Radishchev’s letter 87, dated 13 August 1797 and addressed to his two elder sons, was written in French. And, significantly, many of his letters to Vorontsov were written in Russian. Therefore the choice of the language is obviously not determined solely by the identity of the addressee. Content seems only slightly more effective as a criterion for language choice. Certainly, Radishchev favours French as a medium for talking about literature, especially French literature (letter 40), or for discussing intellectual matters such as education (letter 55) or physics (letter 72), thus apparently designating French as the intellectual language of his correspondence. And yet, he resorts indiscriminately to French or Russian to discuss all the main topics of his correspondence with Vorontsov: his health and the health of his family, his moral sufferings, his gratitude towards his patron, the tale of his journey to Ilimsk, the description of the geography of Siberia and its economy, his own pitiful financial situation and his family worries. Thus neither the identity of the addressee nor the content of the letter, it seems, invariably explains the choice of language in Radishchev’s letters. As Paperno has pointed out, shifting from one language to the other did not always serve a definite purpose or obey an established rule. Sometimes it was just the expression of the letter-writer’s own subjectivity (Paperno 1975: 155). This means that resorting to one or the other language was a way of expressing one’s state of mind. In Radishchev’s case, we can suggest that the choice of language may have depended on the various feelings of anxiety he was experiencing in Siberia. For instance, it is clear from Radishchev’s letters that he favours French when he feels at ease with Vorontsov. He switches back to Russian, though, when he feels guilty towards him, generally because he has delayed fulfilling or has even failed to fulfil an order from his patron. In letters 57 and 58, dated 10 and 19 December 1791 respectively, for instance, Radishchev begs Vorontsov in Russian to forgive him for not obeying his order to leave Tobol’sk at once. By

bilin guali sm in a le ks andr r a di s hch e v ’s l e t t e r s   127 reverting to Russian, the official language of the Russian administration, Radishchev restores the hierarchical relationship which used to tie him to his patron, and shows him his submission. He thus returns to the language he used in his letters to Vorontsov prior to his exile, which were concerned primarily with service matters. Once the storm is behind him, he switches back to French, the language which creates the utopian equality between correspondents that is typical of bureaucratic sentimentalism. This difference is nowhere more visible than in the forms of address used in the two languages. When addressing Vorontsov in French, Radishchev uses a simple and dignified Monsieur. When writing in Russian, on the other hand, Radishchev uses a longer form, specifying his addressee’s noble title, and therefore his social superiority: Милостивый мой государь, граф Александр Романович (Dear Sir, Count Aleksandr Romanovich).9 The equal dignity of both correspondents, conveyed by the use of the form Monsieur, is what Pushkin demanded when addressing Benckendorff in French, as Lotman pointed out (Lotman 1994: 36). The other factor playing a role in the choice of language is obviously geography. Apparently, the anxiety caused by the growing feeling of estrangement and loneliness experienced by Radishchev as he pursued his journey eastwards, deeper and deeper into Siberia, had a direct influence on the choice of language used in his letters. While still in Tobol’sk, the main urban centre of Western Siberia, Radishchev wrote to Vorontsov in Russian, although he was probably using French for his interactions with the local elite. Indeed, his letters to his patron mention that he is calling upon the governor and that he visits the theatre (letters 41, dated 19 April 1791, and 42, dated 2 May 1791). There he socialised with local civil servants and exiles, many of whom were from the Russian upper class, as can be seen from John Parkinson’s travel diary to Siberia in 1793 (Parkinson 1971: 124–41). On the other hand, when he reaches Ilimsk, his final destination, he starts writing to Vorontsov in French exclusively. Certainly this difference has to do with the factor, cited above, of guilt. It is known that Vorontsov was unhappy with Radishchev’s decision to make a long stop in Tobol’sk, where he feared Catherine might investigate Radishchev’s relationships, as she was convinced that the writer had accomplices, including someone from that town, since Radishchev had called his famous 1790 text ‘A Letter to a Friend living in Tobol’sk’ (‘Pis’mo k drugu, zhitel’stvuiushchemu v Tobol’ske’; Tatarintsev 1977: 133). Reaching Ilimsk, the writer complied with his patron’s will, and could therefore restore the utopian equality among correspondents to which I referred above.

128  rodo lp he ba udi n Nevertheless, it seems very likely that the total lack of civilised society in Ilimsk made Radishchev crave the use of French, seen as a tie with civilisation. Radishchev’s situation, in this regard, was very reminiscent of that of Ovid who, exiled in Pontus, wrote in Tristia: Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis (I, X, verse 37).10 Surrounded by people who did not understand Latin, Ovid felt deprived of his humanity, and therefore compared himself with a barbarian. Similarly, Radishchev wrote to Vorontsov in French in letter 61, dated 17 February 1792: Vivant dans les vastes forêts de la Sibérie, parmi des bêtes fauves et des peuplades, qui souvent n’en diffèrent que par les articulations d’un langage, dont ils ne savent pas même apprécier la valeur, je finirai, je crois, par devenir l’homme heureux de Rousseau et je marcherai à quatre pattes. (Radishchev 1952: 425)11 The expression l’homme heureux de Rousseau (Rousseau’s happy man) should not fool us. As Thomas Barran pointed out, Rousseau’s vision of primitive humankind in his First Discourse (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, 1750) was disturbing to the Russian elite, and conveyed a feeling of insecurity at the idea of losing the status of civilised people brought to the Russian nobility by the reforms of Peter the Great (Barran 2002: 14). The comparison therefore conveyed an image of regression which was frightening to Radishchev who, later in the same letter, wrote: […] en maudissant mon étourderie, qui me confine en la société des ours, des élans et autres bêtes fauves […].12 The ‘primitive people’, hardly differing from ‘beasts’, to whom Radishchev refers, were the people with whom he had interactions in Ilimsk. And they were Russian-speakers. Therefore, speaking Russian was not enough to secure Radishchev’s fading sense of being human, and he resorted to French in his letters to keep his humanity. Reasserting his human status by speaking French, Radishchev was evidently reasserting his position as a Europeanised Russian nobleman,13 a status of which he had been deprived when he was tried for publishing his Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (McConnell 1964: 108). * * * We may say that shifting from one language to the other in Radishchev’s letters from exile had much to do with anxiety, which was fuelled by two different factors. Firstly, it was the usual anxiety experienced by service noblemen dealing with their hierarchical superiors. As David Ransel has rightly pointed out, letters and letter-writing manuals published in eighteenth-century Russia clearly voiced the deep disquiet experienced by the members of this social group, as they both relied on and

bilin guali sm in a le ks andr r a di s hch e v ’s l e t t e r s   129 despised patronage (Ransel 1973). Europeanised service noblemen were torn between a sense of their own dignity, which, in Radishchev’s case, prompted him to write to his patron in French, and an awareness of the instability of their own social position, prompting our writer to seek protection from Vorontsov by reminding him of his dependency upon him, which is something he would do in Russian. Secondly, he was experiencing the anxiety of exile, as he saw himself confronted with the loss of his privileged social status and estranged from the people with whom he was socialising in Siberia. By resorting to French to escape the harsh reality surrounding him, Radishchev clearly showed his estrangement from the Russian folk of Ilimsk. A barbarian to them, he refused to change places symbolically from linguistically dominant to dominated, as Ovid had done, and used French to reassert his status of civilised Europeanised Russian nobleman. He therefore fully deserves the title of first intelligent (socially engaged intellectual) awarded to him by Nikolai Berdiaev (1969: 35), because he sympathised with the Russian people, of course, but also because, in a way, he did not speak their language.

NOTES  1. This edition brought together 108 letters written between 1779 and 1802, 86 of which were addressed to Vorontsov. When quoting the letters in the present chapter, I cite the numbers used to designate them in the Academy edition.   2. See also Chapter 9, by Nina Dmitrieva, in this volume.   3. A rank in the Muscovite state service system which survived in the eighteenth century in Siberia.    4. I.e. Russian kopeika (a small monetary unit, one hundredth of a rouble), versta (a measurement of distance, approximately equivalent to a kilometre) and pud (a prerevolutionary measure of weight, equivalent to a little over sixteen kilos).   5. ‘Though they are both Siberian, in many respects they are as different from each other as an Englishman from a Frenchman, proportion gardée [making due allowance].’   6. ‘The weather here is sometimes nice, sometimes bad. Yesterday was a very hot day.’   7. Karamzin (1984: 152 (letter 73, ‘Lozanna’); and 181 (letter 84, ‘Zheneva’)).   8. On Rousseau’s ideal of transparency, see Starobinski (1976).   9. Similarly, Paperno noted that writing in French to the tsar allowed one to use a dignified ‘Sire’, which was far less humiliating for the letter-writer than the official formulae used at the Russian court. See Paperno (1975: 152). 10. ‘Here it is I who am a barbarian, understood by nobody.’ 11. ‘Living in Siberia’s vast forests, among wild beasts and tribes who differ from the beasts solely by being able to speak a language whose value they cannot even appreciate, I will end up, I suppose, becoming Rousseau’s happy man and will start walking on all fours.’ 12. ‘[…] cursing my thoughtlessness, which confines me in the society of bears, moose and other wild beasts […].’ 13. Paperno suggests that mastering diglossia, rather than mastering French, was the

130  rodo lp he ba udi n aristocratic social marker: see Paperno (1975: 155). In Radishchev’s case, mastering French was more important, as he obviously avoided mixing the two languages.

REFERENCES AKV (1870–95), ed. P. I. Bartenev, Moscow: Tipografiia A. I. Mamontova, vol. 5 (1876). Barran, Th. (2002), Russia Reads Rousseau, 1762–1825, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Barskov, Ia. L. (ed.) (1915), Perepiska moskovskikh masonov XVIII veka 1780–1792 gg. Petrograd: Imperatorskaia akademiia nauk. Baudin, R. (2008a), ‘The public self and the intimate body in Radishchev’s letters of exile’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 50: 3–4, 297–324. Baudin, R. (2008b), ‘Semiotika skandala v zhizni i tvorchestve Radishcheva’, in N. Buks (ed.), Semiotika skandala, Moscow: Evropa, pp. 156–78. Berdiaev, N. (1969), L’idée russe, Paris: MAME. Dmitrieva, E. (1994), ‘La correspondance française de Pouchkine. Ruptures mentales et ruptures littéraires’, Philologiques, III, Qu’est-ce qu’une littérature nationale?, Paris: MSH, pp. 72–94. Karamzin, N. M. (1984), Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Leningrad: Nauka. Lotman, Y. (1994), ‘La littérature russe d’expression française’, in Y. Lotman and V. Rosenzweig (eds), La littérature russe d’expression française. Textes français d’écrivains russes. XVIIIe–XIXe siècles, Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, pp. 10–52. Maimina, E. (1981), ‘Stilisticheskie funktsii frantsuzskogo iazyka v perepiske Pushkina i v ego poėzii’, in E. Maimin (ed.), Problemy sovremennogo pushkinovedeniia, Leningrad: Leningradskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii universitet imeni A. I. Gertsena, pp. 58–65. McConnell, A. (1964), A Russian Philosophe: Alexander Radishchev 1749–1802, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Mills Todd III, W. (1976), The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Noveishii, samyi polnyi i podrobnyi pis’movnik, ili vseobshchii sekretar’ […] [1812–13] (1822), St Petersburg: v Tipografii Imperatorskikh Teatrov. Paperno, I. A. (1975), ‘O dvuiazychnoi perepiske pushkinskoi ėpokhi’, Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 358: 148–56 (Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii, 24). Parkinson, J. (1971), A Tour of Russia, Siberia and the Crimea 1792–1794, ed. W. Collier, London: Frank Cass and Company Limited. Radishchev, A. N. (1952), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3, Moscow and Leningrad: Akademiia nauk SSSR. Radishchev, P. A. (1959), ‘Biografiia A. N. Radishcheva’, in Biografiia A. N. Radishcheva, napisannaia ego syniov’iami, Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, pp. 47–106. Ransel, D. L. (1973), ‘Bureaucracy and patronage: the view from an eighteenth-century Russian letter-writer’, in F. Cople Jaher (ed.), The Rich, the Well Born, and the Powerful: Elites and Upper Classes in History, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 154–78. Rosenzweig, V. (1994), ‘Un siècle de bilinguisme littéraire’, in Y. Lotman and

bili n gu a li sm i n a l e ks a n d r r a di s hc h e v ’s l e t t e r s   131 V. Rosenzweig (eds), La littérature russe d’expression française. Textes français d’écrivains russes. XVIIIe–XIXe siècles, Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, pp. 54–72. Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XVIII veka (1988), vol. 4, Leningrad: Nauka. Starobinski, J. (1976), Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle, Paris: Gallimard. Tatarintsev, A. (1977), Radishchev v Sibiri, Moscow: Sovremennik.

chapter 7

Code-Switching in the Correspondence of the Vorontsov Family Jessica Tipton

F

rom the reign of Catherine the Great onwards we come across codeswitching in the writings of educated francophone Russians. Users move from one language to another in their correspondence, diaries and memoirs. This chapter is devoted to an analysis of this linguistic phenomenon as it is manifested in the form of switching between French and Russian in the correspondence of one Russian noble family, the Vorontsovs, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This case study of historical code-switching is facilitated by the abundance of published and unpublished material in the Vorontsovs’ family archives, by the diversity of the types of document in this corpus and by the fact that these documents were written over a long period from the 1730s until the 1850s (AKV 1870–95: see especially vols 5, 10, 21, 27, 31 and 32; RGADA, f. 1261).1 The reasons for code-switching are not very well known and there is no agreed definition of the phenomenon. In modern sociolinguistics, codeswitching mostly refers to the spoken language within contemporary fully bilingual mixed communities (Romaine 1989: 110–64; Myers-Scotton 1997; Wardhaugh 1998; Holmes 2001). ‘Historical code-switching’ has only recently developed into a topic of research in its own right, with the current focus on medieval and early modern Britain (Schendl 2012: 520). For my purposes here, code-switching simply means the practice of writers, who may or may not be fully bilingual, when they move from one language to the other in the same document. Sometimes the codeswitching concerns a single name or word, at other times whole phrases or passages. The letters from and to members of the Vorontsov family who were born in the 1710s and 1720s show that even in the reign of Catherine the Great, when francophonie was becoming more widespread among

code-switc hi ng in vo r o nts o v c o r r e s p o n d e n c e   133 the Russian nobility, much correspondence was conducted entirely in Russian among the Russian aristocracy. The use of French as the main language for communication among this elite, moreover, was a new fashion in the eighteenth century, so it is not surprising that we see different code-switching habits among the different generations and individuals. The examples of the phenomenon that are given in this chapter are taken from some of the most linguistically mixed correspondence in the Vorontsov archives; most letters in the archives are either wholly in French or Russian. (Occasionally the Vorontsovs code-switch into other European languages, but French and Russian are their primary languages.) It should be stressed, finally, that frequent code-switching was not the rule but the exception even in the letters of those Vorontsovs who did switch from one language to the other. However, the relative scarcity of the phenomenon among the Vorontsovs, as in the correspondence of francophone Russians more generally, makes code-switching all the more interesting from the sociolinguist’s point of view, because it helps us to identify specific contexts and triggers that drove the switching, and these contexts and triggers may afford insights into the correspondents’ linguistic, social and cultural mindset.

TH E V ORONTSOV FAMI L Y AN D CO DE-SWITCH ING The Vorontsovs were a highly influential, well-connected family. The family was large, and so provides us with an opportunity to analyse writing by individuals with different careers and backgrounds, both men and women, over several generations. The eldest member of the family whom I examine is Chancellor Mikhail Illarionovich (1714–67), one of the most influential Russian diplomats during the reign of Empress Elizabeth. His well-educated francophone niece Princess Dashkova (1743–1810), a protégée of Catherine the Great and Director of the Russian Academy of Sciences,2 travelled widely in Europe and was well-known in European Enlightenment circles. Dashkova’s brothers Aleksandr (1741–1805) and Semen (1744–1832) both served as diplomats in Europe, while their sister Elizaveta (1739–92) had been a mistress of Peter III. Semen’s children grew up in Britain where he served as Russian ambassador from 1785 until 1806 and remained until his death. His son Mikhail (1782–1856) served as Governor of the Caucasus and his daughter Ekaterina (1784–1856) married into the English aristocratic Pembroke family. The Vorontsovs corresponded with numerous contacts, including Russian and foreign diplomats, military leaders and monarchs, as well as

134  jessic a t ipt o n writers and thinkers from the Age of Enlightenment. It is on the private correspondence between family members that I focus in this chapter, because that is where code-switching is most likely to occur. Analysing private correspondence between family members enables us to gain insights into linguistic behaviour that tends to be more natural: external drivers such as epistolary etiquette or diplomacy are not so critical here, and the writers will have been less inclined to censor or check themselves than they might have been in more official documents. Figure 7.1 gives an overview of the Vorontsovs’ code-switching habits spanning four generations. Lines with one arrow indicate that only correspondence in one direction has survived in the Vorontsov archives; two-way arrows signify that there is extant correspondence in both directions. Where there is code-switching in correspondence, which is indicated in the figure by dashed lines, the main language is nearly always French. This family tree shows that code-switching is mainly a phenomenon of the Dashkova generation and younger generations, that there were personal preferences and that many family members used either Russian or French and avoided code-switching altogether. Dashkova and her siblings did not usually code-switch in correspondence with their elders, only with one another, with their peers or with their younger relations. The most common type of code-switching in the Vorontsovs’ correspondence is switching into French or Russian for an opening or Illarion Vorontsov (1674–1750) m. Anna Maslova (168?–1740)

Anna Mikhail I. Karlovna Vorontsov m. Skavronskaia (1714–67) (1723–75) R

Marfa Surmina m. Roman Vorontsov (1717–83) (1718–45)

R+F

Elizaveta Polianskaia (1739–92)

Aleksandr (1741–1805)

Ekaterina Semen m. Dashkova (1744–1832) (1743–1810)

Anna Stroganova (1743–69)

Ekaterina Seniavina (1755–84)

F

Mikhail S. (1782–1856)

Ekaterina S. (1784–1856)

R+F

R F R+F

Semen M. (1823–82)

Key

Wrote in Russian only Wrote in French only Wrote in Russian and French Some code-switching (main language F) More frequent code-switching (main language F)

F

Figure 7.1  Family tree showing the code-switching habits of the Vorontsov family

code-switc hi ng in vo r o nts o v c o r r e s p o n d e n c e   135 closing line or for a discrete post-scriptum to a letter. As Rodolphe Baudin points out in Chapter 6 on Aleksandr Radishchev in this volume, visually separating a section or topic of a letter by shifting language is an epistolary technique to which letter-writing manuals frequently referred. Such manuals were not typically kept in the private libraries of cultured, well-educated, noble families like the Vorontsovs, which probably indicates that they acquired such epistolary techniques through contact with other learned correspondents, tutors and governesses (Joukovskaïa 1999: 679–80). The other widespread type of code-switching in the Vorontsov correspondence is use of the secondary language of the letter for names of people or places, such as when the Cyrillic script is found within French text to render a patronymic, a name in the diminutive form or a Russian place. Many Vorontsovs, particularly those who were less inclined to code-switch and/​or were not writing to close family or friends, would not mix the two languages any more than this. Informal letters by people who confidently wrote in both languages may include more extensive code-switching, such as switching from French into Russian for a quotation or for subject-matter seemingly more suited to Russian. Where there is mixing within letters, there are differences in how often, why, when and where in the text code-switching occurs. For example, sometimes the transition between French and Russian is intersentential (at a sentence or clause boundary) and sometimes intrasentential (within a sentence or clause). Use of the latter type of code-switching is a sure indication that the writer was subconsciously switching between languages, and that both writer and reader were fully bilingual (Romaine 1989: 4, 112–13). The rich material in the Vorontsov archives will illustrate these various types of code-switching. Each of the following four sections of this chapter is devoted to one of the main drivers for code-switching within a letter: to quote somebody; to comply with epistolary etiquette; to express certain subject-matter in Russian; and to discuss abstract concepts in French. At the same time, the material may help us to address certain questions of broad historico-sociolinguistic significance, difficult as it may be on the basis of our relatively limited knowledge of the spoken language of the time. Does certain subject-matter trigger code-switching? Are there particular phrases that seem more appropriate to one language or the other? What does code-switching tell us about Russian francophone authors and their identity? Does codeswitching depend mainly on the personal linguistic habits of the writer and/​or reader? What does the material tell us about the relationship between correspondents? Are there different code-switching habits relating to gender, age, place of writing, social status or education? Does

136  jessic a t ipt o n c­ ode-switching in written ­correspondence reflect spoken language, and does practice vary depending on whether the correspondence is formal or informal?

D I RECT AN D I N D I RECT Q UOTATIONS Perhaps the most straightforward use of code-switching examined in this chapter is for direct and indirect quotations. Most often the switch takes place when writers need to quote words originally spoken or written in Russian within a letter that is mostly in French. Often they are quoting an older relative or non-noble who would generally have spoken in Russian, and in so doing they offer a rare insight into the spoken language of the time. For example, Semen switches into Russian to quote his uncle Mikhail, the former Chancellor, in a letter of 11 December 1764 sent from Berlin to his brother Aleksandr. Bacounine, Semen writes, me marque que m-r Stroganoff continue à parler mal de sa femme et du chancelier même. J’ai montré cette lettre à mon oncle qui m’a répondu: Ведь и мы браним его также! (AKV, vol. 32, letter 5, p. 88).3 Although correspondence in RGADA and the published Vorontsov archives suggests that Mikhail did have sufficient knowledge of French to communicate with his francophone nephew Aleksandr and to fulfil his foreign policy duties as imperial chancellor, he would have mostly spoken Russian like the rest of his generation.4 In a letter to her brother Aleksandr which probably dates from the mid-1780s, Dashkova draws attention to the fact that the francophone Count Morkov, ambassador in Paris, was speaking to her in Russian about her other brother Semen. Je lui [Count Morkov] ai demandé, Dashkova writes, si l’on était content encore de Сенюша; il m’a dit oui, mais dis-je, je crois qu’il a eu des réprimandes, mais c’est qu’il est aussi trop entier et trop chaud; et puis il me dit en Russe: ‘давно здесь не были, так не знают или забыли здешний образ мыслей’. (AKV, vol. 5, letter 25, p. 200; underlining in original; my use of bold)5 Morkov would probably have spoken French to Dashkova as a rule. Perhaps Dashkova was emphasising Morkov’s switch into Russian to show her solidarity with Morkov and Aleksandr against those (perhaps foreigners) who had slandered Semen. Dashkova also switches into Russian to refer to Semen by his diminutive name Сенюша (Seniusha).

code-switc hi ng in vo r o nts o v c o r r e s p o n d e n c e   137 A common practice in francophone Russian nobles’ correspondence, moving out of French into Russian for diminutives and patronymics, is often the only linguistic vestige of the correspondents’ shared Russian background. More rarely, reported speech can be found in French within predominantly Russian text, as in another undated letter from Dashkova to her brother Aleksandr. Петр Иванович приехал в Рождество; мне кажется старее и дряхлее, нежели отъезжая в Петербург его оставила. Я страшусь видеть, что он опаснее день от дня становится; il dit sentir les douleurs dans les entrailles et dans la tête aussi bien que dans les os, et cette goutte violente pourroit bien nous l’enlever subitement. Adieu, mon cher frère. Mes enfants vous baisent les mains. (AKV, vol. 5, letter 14, p. 183)6

Dashkova is reporting the description she has been given of the medical condition of her relative Petr Ivanovich; as a Russian nobleman Petr would have been treated by a francophone Western doctor and therefore his condition would have been discussed in French. These three examples of direct and indirect speech show the writer code-switching into the language used by a third party. In other words, it is an external driver, or in this case voice, which triggers the switch.

FRENCH EP I STO L ARY ETI Q UETTE The opening and closing lines of letters, or other set phrases, are often in French, particularly amongst Dashkova’s generation. This is to be expected as Russian nobles, like other European social elites of this time, learned French through numerous literary sources, particularly novels in letters such as Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse) or publications of authentic letters such as Bussy-Rabutin’s correspondence with his friends and family. Code-switching driven by epistolary etiquette can be seen in a letter written by the teenage Semen to his brother Aleksandr in 1760 during a trip around the family’s estates in Siberia. Оттуда отправились в Тобольск чрез Ирбитскую ярмарку и Тюмень; потом чрез теже города возвратились на Егошихинские заводы, где теперь находимся. Впрочем, как мы теперь в диком месте и вестей о Европейских делах не имеем,

138  jessic a t ipt o n то пожалуй награди сей наш недостаток. Enfin, mon cher frère, je finis pour vous demander la continuation de votre amitié, chose plus chère pour moi que vous ne sauriez vous imaginer. Je reste votre trèsfidèle serviteur, ami et frère. (AKV, vol. 32, letter 1, pp. 79–80)7

Semen describes his travels in Russian but closes the letter in French, as was the custom for letter writing. It should be noted, however, that Russians were perfectly able to express similar sentiments in Russian. The examples below show Russians who appear not to be francophone writing standard French epistolary formulae in Russian and expressing abstract concepts in their native language. In a letter dated 10 April 1781 from Count Ivan Orlov to Semen’s then fiancée, Ekaterina Seniavina, Orlov uses such expressions as приятное ваше письмо; радуюсь от чистого моего сердца; вот истинные желания того человека, которой вас любит и почитает; and заключа сие, называюся ваш покорный слугa (AKV, vol. 27, p. 8).8 Again, in a letter dated 15 April 1767 written by Anna Karlovna, wife of the recently deceased Mikhail Illarionovich, to her nephew Aleksandr Vorontsov, Anna expresses sentiments and emotions associated with the death of her husband that francophone Russians would usually discuss in French. Зная же, как он покойник горячо тебя любил и зная честность и благодарность твоего сердца […] Я знаю твое доброе сердце, знаю твои честныe мысли, знаю, как ты любил и почитал нелицемерно покойного […] С сими мыслями остаюсь навсегда доброжелательная и друг графиня Анна Воронцова. (AKV, vol. 32, pp. 99–100)9

These examples show Russian versions of such set epistolary phrases in French as merci pour votre lettre (thank you for your letter), votre humble serviteur (your humble servant) and je reste votre très-fidèle ami (as ever your faithful friend), and also Russian equivalents of such words as aimer (to love), fidélité (fidelity), cœur (heart) and pensée (thought) that were widely used in French writing. Some of the French and Russian set phrases are so similar that it seems possible that the Russian versions are direct translations of the French. The use of such Gallicisms suggests that the French language and French social norms even influenced the linguistic practice of those who did not know French well but were nonetheless living in a francophone society.

code-switc hi ng in vo r o nts o v c o r r e s p o n d e n c e   139

RUSS I AN FOR C UL T URE-SPEC I F I C TH ING S Subject-matter, as well as epistolary etiquette, could influence switching by francophone Russians from French into Russian. Generally it may be assumed that if French is the main language of a document, Russian will be used when it is difficult for an author to express an idea in French. But what seems difficult to say in French and why do certain ideas seem to be expressed only in Russian? In most of the instances of code-switching in the Vorontsov letters, Russian is used sporadically to refer to Russian culture-specific things within text that is mainly in French. Such things include objects and phrases relating to topics such as estate management, officialdom, court life, Russian Orthodoxy, units of measurement, clothing and food. The following examples show bilingual Vorontsovs of Dashkova’s generation switching into Russian for single words or longer passages, in most cases intrasententially, which demonstrates that the correspondents were fully bilingual. I begin with some phrases from letters written by Dashkova to her brother Aleksandr in the 1790s, which include Russian words for various everyday Russian things within predominantly French text. Quand je reçus l’ukaze de prolongation, j’écrivis à Овсов. (AKV, vol. 5, letter 37, p. 227)10 Le gouverneur m’a fait remarquer qu’il n’y a ni указ, ni avis même. (AKV, vol. 5, letter 51, p. 248)11 Avant hier j’ai prêté serment en présence du capitaine-исправник. (AKV, vol. 5, letter 44, p. 238)12 The first two examples above show Dashkova switching into Russian for the word ‘order’, in the sense of a legal edict. The first time she continues to write in Latin script (ukaze), which reflects the word’s partial integration into the French language as used by Russians, while in the second example she writes the same word in Cyrillic script (указ). It should be stressed that generally Russian noble writers did not try to transcribe such words into Latin script but switched into Cyrillic. In the third example Dashkova translates the first half of the term for head of police, capitaine, which exists in French, but not the second, исправник (head of the district constabulary), which is more difficult to translate into French. The two examples below show other Russian words that the fully bilingual Dashkova could probably have translated into French.

140  jessic a t ipt o n […] avant de me coucher avec des тараканы […] le 3-eme cheval de nos кибитки (AKV, vol. 5, letter 49, p. 244)13 Si mon éxil doit durer, envoyez moi, je vous prie, des semences, огурцов, моркови, гороху, капусты, кресс-саладу et quelques autres. (AKV, vol. 5, letter 51, p. 248)14 In these cases Dashkova probably switched into Russian automatically, revealing the linguistic spontaneity that can be found in private family letters. It is notable that these letters were mainly written from Dashkova’s estates or her place of exile in northern Russia when she would have been immersed in the Russian way of life and using Russian on a daily basis. Nonetheless, French is clearly the dominant language in Dashkova’s letters to Aleksandr in the 1790s; French articles, prepositions and demonstrative pronouns often directly precede Russian words, as can be seen in the penultimate example above (des (some) and nos (our)). Perhaps French is still the main language for her correspondence, as it was for Aleksandr Radishchev during his exile (see Baudin’s chapter in this volume): by using French she could remind herself or others of her elevated role in civilised society. Units of measurement are another trigger for switching into Russian, as shown in a letter dated 17 April 1784 that Aleksandr wrote to Semen from St Petersburg about financial troubles and a dinner service: je me suis résérve très-peu d’argent comptant pour cette année; mais en échange il me restera de dette et une belle vaisselle. A propos de vaisselle je dois vous dire qu’il est restè après mon père без несколько фунтов, ибо я дал только три пуда серебра за покойной матушки Аглинской работы, которой, впрочем, даром что давно сделан, очень не дурен. (AKV, vol. 31, letter 3, pp. 431–2; my use of bold)15 Aleksandr switches into Russian mid-sentence when still talking about the same subject as before, a dinner service (vaisselle); no doubt this is so that he will be able to state a weight in Russian (пуд серебра) for the sake of precision. He probably makes a sub-conscious decision to switch, two words before фунт, in order to avoid conflict between the grammar of the two languages. Later in the letter he refers to the same dinner service in Russian as the сервиз (originally a transliteration into Cyrillic of the French word service, which had by then become an integrated loanword, as suggested by its coincidental reappearance in the following unrelated example), showing that some vocabulary was interchangeable between French and Russian.

code-switc hi ng in vo r o nts o v c o r r e s p o n d e n c e   141 Terms relating to court life also sometimes triggered switching into Russian, as in the following example taken from a letter dated 19 March 1784 which Elizaveta wrote to her brother Semen and his wife from St Petersburg: mais la fortune d’Anna Stépanowna est bien réelle: elle a été faite камер-фрейлина, avec deux mille roubles d’appointements, à ce que l’on dit, и у нея превеликий штат камер-пажей, два лакея, и все ей комнаты отданы, где жила покойница княжна Голицына. Стол с государственной кухни и на вызолоченом сервизе; enfin elle est dans la plus grande faveur, elle a toutes ses nièces avec elle, et il ne lui manque rien. La fille de Soukhatine demeure à la cour; c’est Lanskoy qui l’ai fait et a promis de la faire aussi frelle. Si on prenait vos soeurs sur ce pied, je crois que cela ne vous plairait. Mais je ne sais pas pourquoi on ne les ferait pas frelles, если бы было кому за них просить. Voilà aussi une frelle qui se marie, Катерина Львовна avec Golowkine. (AKV, vol. 21, letter 3, p. 460; my use of bold)16 Elizaveta switches into Russian after ce que l’on dit for no obvious reason: both камер-паж and лакей are partly of French origin. But she probably feels that page de la chambre does not suit Russian court life very well, while камер-паж has become an untranslatable word. The same explanation is valid for the second excursion into Russian, если бы было кому за них просить. The word просить (in this context ‘to petition’ the court or monarch) is so closely connected with the life of the Russian nobility that it was not worth trying to express the idea in French. Code-switching into Russian may also take place when writers are referring to more abstract features of Russian life, as when they use phrases relating to the Russian Orthodox religion. In these instances, Russian seems to indicate an emotional attachment. The excerpt below, taken from a letter written towards the end of Semen’s life, on 16 (28) April 1826, to his son Mikhail which perfectly illustrates Semen’s cosmopolitanism, multilingualism and loyalty to Russia, shows him switching into Russian to express his admiration of the mighty Russian God, the manifest protector of Russia. At one point, Semen switches into Russian but continues to use Roman script to refer disparagingly to French tutors (transliterated by Semen as outchitels, a French plural form of учитель) who have supposedly corrupted the minds of Russian pupils. il y a un homme que vous et moi nous connaissons beaucoup c’est le Baron Dornberg Ministre d’Hanovre a Petersbourg neveu et ami du

142  jessic a t ipt o n Cte Munster avec le quel il est en correspondance suivie et officielle et com[m]e le Cte est mon ami depuis 25 ans il me montre les lettres qu’il reçoit de son neveu. Elles sont toutes par poste ou par courrier anglais surtout constament remplies d’Eloge de notre Empereur, mais des Eloges faites comme disent les Italiens con amore on voit qu’ils portent de coeur et d’ame […] c’est ce 3 freres que des selerats abominables avoient complo[t]és d’Egarger avec toute la famille Imperialle, quelle honte inefassable pour la Nation! car si ce n’etoit qu’une poigné de jeunes Etourdis Elevés par des outchitels Français ce ne seroit pas Etonent Mais on dit que la [ramification] a Eté tres Etendue et qu’elle a eté tres nombreuse meme dans les armés surtout dans le seconde. Il n est pas possible de ne pas soupçoner que quelques voisins n’ai eu une participation a ce complot. nous en avons un qui nous craint et par conssequent qui nous scai et qui est gouverné par un ministre tres habil et tres peu scrupuleux. Но велик Бог Руской. Он всегда был явной Покровитель России. Il nous consservera notre bon souverain. Je suis bien aise de vous dire que le journal ou Gazette française de Petersbourg ainssi que la Северная Пчела me parvienent regullierement m’etens aboné pour les avoir ici avec le Bureau de la Poste Generale de Londres. (RGADA, f. 1261, op. 3, d. 271, fols 31v.–33v.; underlining in original; my use of bold)17 Most of Semen’s letters to his son, which were all sent from England, include references to his Russian Orthodox faith, usually expressed in Russian within French text. For example, in a letter written to Mikhail on 2 January 1813, Semen switches into Russian at least four times to praise the mighty Russian God, as when he exclaims велик Бог Руской! (RGADA, f. 1261, op. 3, d. 271, fols 5–6). Semen’s faith, which he associates with the Russian language, was clearly a strong part of his Russian identity while he was living abroad. Sometimes a single word can trigger a more extensive switch into Russian. In an early letter of March 1764 from Semen to his brother Aleksandr, written from Florence while on a European tour with his uncle Mikhail, Semen describes the treatment he received from docteur Haledy for a violent headache. Il m’a saigné donc du bras droit et très-heureusement, et au bout de deux jours je fus quitte du mal de tête; mais j’en ai été quatre sans pouvoir mettre l’habit et rien faire avec la main droite: car, comme c’était la première fois de ma vie que cela m’arrivait, je ne savais après comment m’y prendre, и на другой день, заснувши, я так ее разбередил, что два дни после того правою рукою я действовать был не в

code-switc hi ng in vo r o nts o v c o r r e s p o n d e n c e   143 состоянии и другого надевать как шлафрок. Pardonnez moi, mon cher, tous ces détails ennuyeux, mais je ne les ai faits qu’en connaissant votre amitié pour moi. Nous devions partir demain de Florence […] (AKV, vol. 32, letter 2, p. 81; my use of bold)18

The letter is entirely in French except for the above brief departure into Russian halfway through a sentence still describing the treatment. It seems that in this instance the trigger for switching into Russian is the Russified German word шлафрок (Schlafrock in German) for a type of dressing gown. In Dashkova’s Russian Academy dictionary of 1789–94 this word (spelled slightly differently as шлафорок) is listed as of German origin, meaning халат in Russian, so at the time it was an integrated loanword but there was a Russian alternative (Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi 2006: 894). The word would have been used in everyday parlance in Russian and would have been difficult to transcribe into French. Semen must have had the word in mind before he used it at the end of the sentence, and no doubt switched into Russian beforehand in preparation after a natural break in order to avoid grammatical mixing. He then moves back into French after a full stop to address a new topic. The same word, spelled in the same way as in the Russian Academy dictionary, also triggers code-switching from French into Russian in an 1827 diary entry by Anastasiia Iakushkina (1806–46), who had been born into the wealthy noble Sheremetev family and was married to the Decembrist Ivan Iakushkin (GARF, f. 279, op. 1, d. 119, fol. 1).19 The examples of code-switching given in this section have shown fully bilingual Vorontsovs from Dashkova’s generation using French as their base language. However, so immersed were these Vorontsovs in the Russian way of life that they frequently switched into Russian to mention objects and phrases relating to their surroundings. Sometimes, though, code-switching in the opposite direction seemed necessary, when in a basically Russian text a concept had to be expressed for which French seemed a more appropriate vehicle. I shall therefore turn, finally, to instances of code-switching from Russian into French.

FRENCH FOR A B STRACT CONCEPTS In the most linguistically mixed letters of the siblings Ekaterina Dashkova, Aleksandr Vorontsov and Semen Vorontsov, we may detect a clear pattern of choosing Russian for certain culture-specific things and French for abstract concepts. This pattern is evident in a particularly

144  jessic a t ipt o n mixed letter dated 4 May 1784 from Aleksandr to his brother Semen about his decision to rent out a family estate. Я буду стараться Ульянку в наймы отдать, дабы содержание ея ничего не стало; онажь с прошлой зимы крайне запущена, а содержать ее для кабака и лавки, туть бы счету не нашли доходов в числе генерального дохода. Je n’avais aucun besoin de la vendre; d’ailleurs, vous savez que je ne suis pas dans les principes de vendre ou de jeter: что сегодня имеется ненужным, может назавтра пригодиться. (AKV, vol. 31, letter 4, p. 436)20

In this passage, Russian is used to discuss the practicalities and finances of a transaction, and also for a Russian proverb. French, on the other hand, is reserved for discussing the general principle of dispensing with possessions. Similarly, the extract below shows Dashkova using Russian for reference to religious holidays and the Russian administrative and class system, then switching into French to complain to her brother Aleksandr about health and sacrifice. Представь себе, что для сбору пятнадцатилетней недоимки с однодворцев из всех городов Уездные Суды отправлены с самой Страшной недели по Троицын день, а между тем никаких дел не делается. Конечно Бог во гневе противу Российских дворян попустил существовать вредную тварь, называемую однодворцы. Ma santé souffre de mon séjour ici. Aucune considération pécuniaire ne me ferait rester ici, mais quand il s’agit du bien-être de 2950 êtres des deux sèxes de la même espèce que moi et que le sort a commis à mes soins, je dois me sacrifier; peut-être devrais-je même ne pas murmurer de cette corvée. (AKV, vol. 5, letter 20, p. 191)21

Again, Russian is often used for financial topics, whereas French is the language for diplomacy. This divide between the languages can be seen in a letter dated 4 (15) November 1785 from London-based Semen to his brother Aleksandr. Я получил, мой друг, письмо твое 3го октября и вложенной в оном двухтысечной вексель. Благодарю тебя искренно […] Ты сам подвержен был нынешней год лишним издержкам. Ты перестроивал дом, ты же мене моего имееш доходу, ибо я имею боле жалования. En cas qu’on voudrat renouveller chez nous le traité de comerce avec l’Angleterre, il est tres necessaire d’ajouter a

code-switc hi ng in vo r o nts o v c o r r e s p o n d e n c e   145 l’[indecipherable word]11. ce que je propose dans ma lettre No 32. au vice chancelier. Je vous envois ici un petit tablaux des avantages dont jouissent meme apresent les americains sur nous, quoiqu’ils n’ayent pas de traité de comerce avec ce Pais. (RGADA, f. 1261, op. 3, d. 272, fols 10–11)22 Semen begins in Russian about a promissory note but then moves into French for the topic of a trade treaty with England, presumably as this is more a diplomatic matter than a financial one. As we have seen in the section above on epistolary etiquette, Russian equivalents of French words and expressions were often available. Indeed, many of the abstract topics explored above, such as health, morality and diplomacy, were of course also discussed in Russian by non-francophone Russians and in official correspondence by both francophone and non-francophone Russians. It seems, then, that francophone Russians corresponding informally with family members would switch in and out of French and Russian for ease rather than out of necessity, using whichever language seemed most appropriate to them for the subject in question. * * * The examples analysed above provide some insight into the codeswitching habits within a large and influential aristocratic family. They have shown a variety of reasons for code-switching: to quote somebody directly or indirectly using another language; to highlight places and people’s names, in particular diminutives and patronymics; to conform to epistolary norms; to use words and phrases related to estate matters, units of measurement, Russian Orthodoxy, officialdom, food and other typically Russian things when translation was difficult or inappropriate; or to discuss more abstract concepts such as morality or health where it was easier to switch into French as its vocabulary was well developed in these fields and this was the language in which these Russian aristocrats had most often heard or read these subjects being discussed. Age and education are important factors in the Vorontsovs’ language use, as this was an era of significant, and rapid, changes in the linguistic habits of noble Russians. More seamless code-switching between the two languages, in particular intrasentential code-switching, is generally only seen in letters written by Dashkova’s generation where the writer and reader are both fully bilingual thanks to a francophone Westernstyle education and active involvement in Russian affairs. Although we do not have a particularly large collection of letters written by female Vorontsovs, except for Dashkova, we may tentatively conclude that

146  jessic a t ipt o n most female francophone Vorontsovs included in their letters only occasional words and names in Russian. Even Dashkova rarely mixed the two languages any more than her female relations did, while the male Vorontsovs of this generation were more likely to switch for whole passages. The place in which the writer is residing also seems to play a role in code-switching. A good example of the influence of place can be seen in the letters Dashkova wrote when she was living on her estates or in exile in a remote part of Russia; in these letters she frequently switches from French into Russian when she refers to Russian objects and culture-specific things. Code-switching reflected the need to refer to a reality that was difficult to express in one language. It is not a coincidence that the most frequent code-switching can be found in letters written between the Vorontsov siblings of Dashkova’s generation. First, the informal nature of these letters meant that code-switching was acceptable: more official correspondence is less likely to contain code-switching. Second, the occasional mixing of languages could have been a way for these francophone Russian siblings to show solidarity with one another, as they were all bilingual. Third, the daily routines of this generation of Vorontsovs combined both Western and Russian traditions and practices, which is reflected directly in their relatively mixed language use in comparison with older generations. These conclusions do not pretend to describe the situation within all Russian francophone noble families of this time: the use of French and Russian depended greatly on such factors as social status, education and outlook. However, a brief comparison with a selection of letters by other francophone Russian nobles reveals similar code-switching patterns. Letters from Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov (1733–90) to his son Dmitrii dating from the 1780s show him preferring to use Russian but switching into French to paraphrase a passage by Montesquieu, to cite a French proverb and to express abstract concepts relating to moral judgements, love, respect and virtues (Shcherbatov 2011: 376, 434, 445). Although the exiled Aleksandr Radishchev was reluctant to mix languages in letters written in the 1790s to his patron Aleksandr Vorontsov, there are instances, as Baudin has shown in the previous chapter, when he does code-switch from French into Russian to refer to Russian toponyms, proper names, social ranks and objects, often disguising the Russian word by transcribing it into Latin script or attempting to make it look more like French. Again, correspondence from the early nineteenth century shows the Bakunins, a noble family living in the province of Tver’, writing either in Russian or French but occasionally codeswitching from French into Russian (GATO, f. 103, op. 1, d. 1395).

code-switc hi ng in vo r o nts o v c o r r e s p o n d e n c e   147 They too switch into Russian when they write place names, patronymics and diminutives of forenames, when they mention units of measurement (the temperature), when they deal with concrete Russian subject-matter, such as estate matters and finances, and when they cite Russian proverbs or religious mottos or convey name-day greetings. Similarly, the aforementioned diary kept in 1827 by Anastasiia Iakushkina shows her code-switching into Russian when she quotes somebody else’s words or wishes to use some colloquial or idiomatic expression (GARF, f. 279, op. 1, d. 119, fols 1, 3, 4, 7; Argent and Offord 2013). Although further analysis of the language use of a wider range of other Russian nobles is necessary, this brief survey suggests that the code-switching habits of the Vorontsovs were by no means exceptional among Russian nobles from the 1760s to at least the 1820s.

NOTES I am grateful to the following: Evgenii Rychalovskii of RGADA for his invaluable assistance in the Russian archives I have used and with transcriptions; to Vladislav Rjéoutski for his input into this chapter, which is based on a joint paper we gave at a conference at the Dashkova Institute of the University of Edinburgh in August 2012; and to Gesine Argent for drawing my attention to examples of code-switching in the writings of other francophone Russian nobles (Anastasiia Iakushkina and the Bakunin family), whose correspondence she has studied in the course of her own archival research.   1. The published Vorontsov archives consist of forty volumes of correspondence and other documents relating to four generations of the Vorontsov family, edited by Petr Bartenev. F. 1261 in RGADA holds the largest collection of original sources relating to the Vorontsovs. There is not much secondary material available in English on the family, apart from passing references in histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, Dashkova’s memoirs (Dashkova 1995) and a Masters dissertation devoted to her life (Longmire 1955). The Moscow Gumanitarnyi Institut im. Dashkovoi has published several books and essays in Russian about the lives of the Vorontsovs. A. N. Alekseev (2002) has compiled the most comprehensive biography of the entire Vorontsov family and Galina Smagina (2006) has written one of the most informative accounts of Dashkova’s life.   2. On Dashkova, see also Volume 2, Chapter 2, by Michelle Lamarche Marrese.  3. ‘Bakunin tells me that Mr Stroganov is still speaking ill of his wife and of the Chancellor himself. I showed this letter to my uncle, who replied: we’re cursing him as well!’ NB: my use of bold in the translations in these endnotes indicates use of Russian in passages in which both French and Russian occur.  4. It is unlikely that Mikhail Illarionovich received assistance either with writing numerous private letters in French to his nephew Aleksandr (AKV, vol. 31, pp. 84–404) or for brief code-switching into French within Russian letters to other francophone Russians. The unpublished and published archives show that for his regular correspondence in French with non-Russians he could produce rough drafts in French himself but that he received linguistic help in the form of translation, copy-

148  jessic a t ipt o n ing, correcting and editing (RGADA, f. 199, op. 2, port. 546, ch. 7, d. 25; RGADA, f. 199, no. 245, dd. 1, 2, 12; AKV, vol. 1, pp. 417–50; AKV, vol. 4, p. 173).   5. ‘I asked him [Count Morkov] if they were still happy with Seniusha; he replied yes, but I said I thought he had had some scoldings, but that the problem is that he’s also too headstrong and hot-headed; and then he said to me in Russian: ‘they haven’t been here for a long time, so they don’t know the way we think round here, or they’ve forgotten.’   6. ‘Petr Ivanovich arrived at Christmas; he seems to me older and frailer than when I left him to go to St Petersburg. I watch with horror as his condition becomes more dangerous day by day; he says that he feels pains in his bowels and his head as well as his bones, and this severe gout could well suddenly take him away from us. Farewell, my dear brother. My children kiss your hands.’   7. ‘From there we set off for Tobol’sk via Irbitsk trade-fair and Tiumen’; then we returned through the same towns to Egoshikhinskie Zavody, where we are now. By the way, as we are now out in the wilds and have no news of what is happening in Europe, please put right this lack of ours. Finally, my dear brother, I sign off by asking that we maintain our friendship, which is the dearest thing for me that you can imagine. As ever, your very faithful servant, friend and brother.’   8. ‘your agreeable letter’; ‘I rejoice from the bottom of my heart’; ‘with the true wishes of somebody who loves and respects you’; ‘concluding this, I am your humble servant’.   9. ‘Knowing how dearly the deceased loved you and knowing the fidelity and gratitude of your heart […] I know your kind heart, I know your honourable thoughts, I know how you loved and sincerely respected the deceased […] With these thoughts I remain forever your supportive friend, Countess Anna Vorontsova.’ 10. ‘Once I received the extension order, I wrote to Ovsov.’ 11. ‘The governor brought it to my attention that there is neither an order nor even a notification.’ 12. ‘The day before yesterday I took an oath before the head of police.’ 13. ‘[…] before going to bed with the cockroaches […] the third horse of our covered carriages’. 14. ‘If my exile must continue, please send me some seeds, cucumbers, carrots, peas, cabbages, cress and a few other things.’ 15. ‘I have very little cash left for this year; but in return I have debt [that is owing to me] and a beautiful dinner service. On the subject of dinner services, I must tell you that we were left after my father’s death without a few pieces, for I gave only three puds of silver for our deceased mother’s English service, which, by the way, is not bad at all, even though it was made a long time ago.’ Aleksandr is probably talking here about two dinner services. One of these he inherited from his father. The other service had belonged to Aleksandr’s mother and he had bought it for three puds of silver (пуда серебра). Porcelain was very expensive and it was typical, it should be explained, to quote prices for it in silver, using measures of weight such as a pud (equivalent to a little over sixteen kilograms). I am grateful to Natalya Gogolitsyna and Yuri Gogolitsyn for help with translation and elucidation of this passage. 16. ‘but Anna Stepanovna’s good fortune is definitely real: she has been made a lady-inwaiting, with a salary of two thousand roubles, so they say, and she has been given a great staff of a page and two lackeys, and all the rooms where the deceased

code-switc hi ng in vo r o nts o v c o r r e s p o n d e n c e   149 Princess Golitsyna lived, were given to her. She eats from the state kitchen and on a golden dining service; in short, she is in the greatest favour, she has all her nieces with her and wants for nothing.   Soukhatin’s daughter resides at court; it is Lanskoy who brought this about and has promised to make her a lady-in-waiting too. If your sisters were taken on this footing, I don’t think you would like it. But I don’t know why they would not be made ladies-in-waiting if there was someone to ask this favour for them. There is another lady-in-waiting who is getting married, Ekaterina L’vovna, to Golovkin.’ 17. ‘there is a man that you and I know well, Baron Dornberg, the Minister of Hanover at St Petersburg, the nephew and friend of Count Munster, with whom he conducts regular and official correspondence, and as the Count has been my friend for twentyfive years he shows me the letters that he receives from his nephew. They are all sent by post or by an English courier, mostly, and they’re constantly full of praise for our Emperor, but the praise is given as the Italians say con amore [lovingly], it is clear that it comes from the heart and soul […] these dreadful villains plotted to cut the throats of these three brothers [Emperor Alexander I, Emperor Nicholas I and Grand Duke Constantine] and the entire imperial family [Semen is referring to the Decembrist Revolt of 1825]. What an indelible disgrace for the nation! It would not be surprising if it were just a handful of thoughtless youths raised by French tutors. But they say that the ramification was very widespread and that it was rife even in the armies, particularly in the second. You cannot help suspecting that some neighbours were part of this plot. There is one who fears us and as a result knows us and is managed by a very clever and very unscrupulous minister. But the Russian God is great. He was always the manifest Protector of Russia. He will take care of our good monarch for us.   I am delighted to let you know that the French broadsheet or newspaper of St Petersburg, as well as the Northern Bee, reach me regularly as I subscribe to receive them here through the General Post Office in London.’ 18. ‘So he bled my right arm and very successfully too, and after two days my headache went away; but I had four [days] when I couldn’t put on my clothes or do anything with my right hand: because, as it was the first time in my life that this had happened to me, I didn’t know how to cope afterwards, and the next day, after falling asleep, I aggravated it so much that for the next two days I couldn’t move my right arm and put on anything other than a dressing gown. Excuse me, my dear, for all these trying details, but I only include them because I know your friendship for me. We were due to leave Florence tomorrow […]’ 19. For an introduction to Anastasiia Iakushkina’s diary and excerpts from this text, see Argent and Offord (2013). 20. ‘I am going to try to let Ul’ianka, so that its upkeep should cost me nothing; since last winter it has been extremely neglected, and if we kept it for the inn and the shop, we wouldn’t see any revenue from them in our income as a whole. I had no need to sell it; moreover, you know that I am not one to sell or throw anything away: what is of no use today might come in handy tomorrow.’ 21. ‘Imagine that the Regional Courts were assigned from Holy week to Whitsun to the task of collecting fifteen years of arrears from the single homesteaders [class of armed farmers] in every town, and meanwhile no cases got heard. Of course God, in his wrath at the Russian nobles, allowed this vermin called the single homesteaders to come into being. My health is suffering from

150  jessic a t ipt o n my stay here. There is no financial incentive for me to stay here, but when it is a question of the well-being of 2,950 souls of both sexes who are of the same species as me and whom Fate has committed to my care, I must sacrifice myself; maybe I shouldn’t even complain of this burden.’ 22. ‘My friend, I received your letter of 3 October and the enclosed promissory note for two thousand. I thank you sincerely […] You yourself have had to meet additional costs this year. You’ve been rebuilding the house and you have less income than me, because I’ve got a higher salary. In the event that we wish to renew the trade treaty with England, it is really necessary to add to [indecipherable word] 11 what I suggest in my letter no. 32 to the vice chancellor. I am sending you herewith a small list of the advantages that the Americans enjoy over us even now, even though they do not have a trade treaty with this country.’

REFERENCES AKV (1870–95), ed. P. I. Bartenev, Moscow: Tipografiia A. I. Mamontova, vols 1 (1870), 4 (1872), 5 (1876), 10 (1876), 21 (1881), 27 (1883), 31 (1885) and 32 (1886). Alekseev, A. N. (2002), Grafy Vorontsovy i Vorontsovy-Dashkovy v istorii Rossii, Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf. Argent, G. and D. Offord (2013), ‘Ego-writing in French: the diary of Anastasiia Iakushkina’, at https://​frinru.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/​introduction/​ego-writing-french-diaryanastasiia-iakushkina (last accessed on 12 August 2014). Dashkova, E. R. (1995), The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova: Russia in the Time of Catherine the Great, trans. and ed. K. Fitzlyon; introduction by J. M. Gheith, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. GARF, f. 279, op. 1, d. 119 (diary of Anastasiia Iakushkina, 1827). GATO, f. 103, op. 1, d. 1395 (correspondence of the Bakunin family, early nineteenth century). Holmes, J. (2001), Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Essex: Pearson Education. Joukovskaïa, A. (1999), ‘La naissance de l’épistolographie normative en Russie [Histoire des premiers manuels russes d’art épistolaire]’, Cahiers du monde russe, 40: 4, 657–89. Longmire, R. A. (1955), ‘Princess Dashkova and the intellectual life of eighteenth century Russia’, unpublished Masters thesis, University College London. Myers-Scotton, C. (1997), ‘Code-switching’, in F. Coulmas (ed.), The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 217–37. RGADA, f. 199, op. 2, port. 546, ch. 7, d. 25 (correspondence of Mikhail Illarionovich Vorontsov with German-born historian Gerhard Friedrich Müller); no. 245, dd. 1, 2 and 12 (correspondence of Mikhail Illarionovich Vorontsov with Prime Minister of Saxony Count Heinrich von Brühl and others); f. 1261, op. 3, dd. 271–2 (letters of Semen Vorontsov to his son Mikhail, 1803–28). Romaine, S. (1989), Bilingualism, Oxford: Blackwell. Schendl, H. (2012), ‘Multilingualism, code-switching, and language contact in historical sociolinguistics’, in J. M. Hernández-Campoy and J. C. Conde-Silvestre (eds), The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 520–33. Shcherbatov, M. M. (2011), Perepiska kniazia M. M. Shcherbatova. Publikatsiia so vvedeniem, kommentariiami i imennym ukazatelem, ed. S. G. Kalinina, Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche.

co d e-s wi tc hi n g i n v o ro nts o v co r r e s p o n d e n c e   151 Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi [1789–94] (2006), vol. 6, Moscow: MGU im. E. R. Dashkovoi. Smagina, G. (2006), Spodvizhnitsa Velikoi Ekateriny, St Petersburg: Rostok. Wardhaugh, R. (1998), ‘Choosing a code’, in Wardhaugh, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 86–115.

chapter 8

French and Russian in Ego-Documents by Nikolai Karamzin Liubov Sapchenko

N

ikolai Karamzin is known in Russian culture as the author of sentimental tales and the multi-volume History of the Russian State (Istoriia Gosudarstva Rossiiskogo) and as the creator of a ‘new literary style’ (novyi slog) modelled on the norms of French. However, egodocuments were also an extremely important part of his legacy, and in these his moral and linguistic personality found its clearest expression. Like the ego-documents of most cultivated Russian noblemen of that time, these texts of Karamzin’s were distinguished by their French and Russian bilingualism. We can pick out two basic types of text from Karamzin’s French manuscripts: first, Karamzin’s own letters and notes, and second, excerpts that he collected in his handwritten albums and notebooks from the works of French thinkers. I shall deal with the first of these types of text in the first and second sections of this chapter (the second section will be devoted entirely to Karamzin’s letters to his second wife), and in the third and fourth sections I shall examine albums he addressed to two women in the imperial family. The aims of the chapter are to outline the range of Karamzin’s French manuscripts, note the general patterns of Franco-Russian bilingualism reflected in them and bring out the traits of Karamzin’s linguistic personality against the background of  the bilingualism of the Russian nobility.1 The chapter should show how the  writer proceeds from the laws of etiquette and genre to functionally differentiated authorial use of French and Russian.

K ARA M Z I N ’ S B I L I N GUA L L ETTERS Letters make up the bulk of Karamzin’s French texts and a significant proportion of them are bilingual. Philologists who have examined the

f r e n ch an d rus s ia n in e go - do cum e nts by k a r a m z i n   153 question of bilingualism among the Russian nobility have noted the following patterns: Russian was used in official papers, documents addressed to the sovereign and letters to friends, while French was used in society correspondence, letters to women, especially one’s fiancée, and so forth. At the same time ‘bilingualism was the norm for the educated Russian’ (Paperno 1975: 155), and many letters therefore contain codeswitching, that is to say interpolations in the other language. Choice of language was determined by a number of sociolinguistic factors: level of education, family traditions, degree of closeness between the people communicating, the sex of the correspondents, speech etiquette and the aims of those who were writing or speaking (Blinokhvatova 2005: 162). Karamzin’s letters conform to these patterns, but closer examination of them reveals some distinctive features in his linguistic position.2 Karamzin wrote in French, an internationally known language, to Europeans with whom he corresponded and who had no Russian. These correspondents included the natural scientist and philosopher Charles Bonnet, the theologian and poet Johann Caspar Lavater, the archaeologist Baron Wilhelm von Wolzogen, the Russian and Greek Count Capo d’Istria and others. It was also natural that he should use French in public writings that were addressed to a foreign readership, that is to say his articles ‘Un mot sur la littérature Russe’ (‘A Word about Russian Literature’) and ‘Lettre au Spectateur sur Pierre III’ (‘A Letter to the Spectator on Peter III’), which appeared in Le Spectateur du Nord (The Spectator of the North), a French periodical published in Hamburg (Kochetkova 1999: 38). Karamzin also used French, incidentally, in a pamphlet, Les amusemens de Znamenskoé (Entertainments at Znamenskoe) (Karamzin 1794: 7–9), addressed to friends, which contained records of oral improvisations and literary games in French (Lotman 1987: 246–7). More importantly for our purposes here, Karamzin also used French in some circumstances in ego-documents and letters to and conversations with fellow-Russians. For example, in one of his letters to his close friend Ivan Dmitriev, to whom Karamzin usually wrote in Russian, there is a fragment which is something in between a literary text and an ego-document. This is a piece written in 1797, entitled ‘Quelques idées sur l’amour’ (‘A Few Thoughts on Love’). In his following letter to Dmitriev, dated 31 December 1797, Karamzin described the state of mind which had given rise to this impromptu piece: I put my thoughts about love down on paper in just a few minutes; I was not aiming to write a treatise, I only wanted to say, in the way I felt it at that time, that love is more powerful, sacred and ineffable than anything else. (Karamzin 1866: 89)

154  liubo v s a p c he nko Karamzin expressed his thoughts through the person of a lady, a French ‘md. de Lim***’. He was very familiar with the work of French female writers and was interested in the question of the ‘woman-author’. ‘In the world of Karamzin the Sentimentalist’, it has been observed, ‘woman comes across as the ideal of sensibility in the apprehension of art and as the ideal of heartfelt sensitivity and responsiveness in human relations’ (Alpatova 2013: 92). In this instance, it is significant that the actual author of the text turns to French without reflection (that is to say, this was a subconscious choice for a person experiencing something strongly), because French, with its rich gallant culture, had ready-made phrases in the domain in question (Grechanaia 2010: 8) and because no such tradition existed in Russian literature and epistolary practice, or at least it was under-developed.3 Karamzin also used the thoughts of French writers, incidentally, as arguments and counter-arguments in this piece. Thus, taking issue with Buffon about the essence of love, he cited the point of view Buffon had expressed in his Discours sur la Nature des Animaux (Discourse on the Nature of Animals) in his own critical terms: Un grand écrivain a dit, qu’excepté le plaisir physique il n’y avoit rien de bon, rien de naturel dans l’amour. Ce grand écrivain avoit une bien petite âme. Le plaisir physique n’est rien dans le véritable amour; l’objet en est trop saint, trop divin à nos yeux, pour exciter des désirs; les sens sont tranquilles quand le coeur est agité et il l’est toujours dans cette passion. (Karamzin 1866: 87)4 However, when his feelings changed, as we shall see, Karamzin turned again to Buffon for support, albeit to a different statement by him. In his letters to the Emperor Alexander I, on the other hand, Karamzin used Russian. In these letters, he constantly reminded the sovereign of his duty and responsibility to future generations. Karamzin’s conversations with Alexander about the history of the fatherland (отечество) were also conducted in Russian, as borne out by archival material. In the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), for example, we find the following recollections of Karamzin’s servant: Over tea Karamzin asked his majesty how the reign of Catherine […] and his own reign should be outlined for the future historian. The Sovereign said [it should be outlined] as it was and is, history does not lie, and posterity will judge you as if you are its contemporary, this was said in Russian, without anyone else present. (Lotin 1857: 6)

f r e n ch an d rus s ia n in e go - do cum e nts by k a r a m z i n   155 And yet, even in his dealings with the sovereign Karamzin did on occasion use French. Take, for example, a frank conversation Karamzin had with Alexander about reforms that were being proposed, in which he wished to express a disagreement about a matter of principle. In a record he prepared for ‘posterity’, Karamzin noted his shift from one language to the other: I do not want to describe the whole of this conversation that I had with the Sovereign, but this, incidentally, is what I said to him in French: Sire, Vous avez beaucoup d’amour-propre… Je ne crains rien. Nous sommes tous égaux devant Dieu. Ce que je Vous dis, je l’aurais [dit] à Votre Père… Sire, je méprise les liberalistes du jour: je n’aime que la liberté qu’aucun tyran ne peut m’ôter… Je ne Vous demande plus Votre bienveillance: je Vous parle, peut-être, pour la dernière fois. But on the whole I didn’t say very much and didn’t want to speak. My heart had grown cold. (Karamzin 1862: 9)5 French in this case removed the distance between sovereign and subject, as it were, putting the interlocutors on an equal footing and thus enabling Karamzin to express himself with the utmost candour. This was a conversation between people who were equal before God and who loved their fatherland to the same degree. Bilingualism was also in evidence in Karamzin’s correspondence with the Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna and the Empress Elizaveta Alekseevna (Karamzin 1862: 39–83, 87–123). They studied Russian with Karamzin, but being diffident about their knowledge of it they often wrote to him in French. Their Russian letters to their teacher were a sort of exercise and a way of expressing their liking for their instructor. However, Karamzin’s own language choice was determined by more complex factors. To Elizaveta Alekseevna Karamzin wrote in Russian, as he did to the emperor himself. Ekaterina Pavlovna, on the other hand, he treated as someone who shared his way of thinking, rather than as a representative of power. He therefore wrote to her in French, which served for him as a language of deep reflection about earthly things and the divine, about life and death (Sapchenko 2008). He uses French, for example, to formulate ideas of a religious–philosophical nature about suffering, which elevates the soul, in letters to the grand duchess that relate to the demise of her first husband, Duke George of Oldenburg, in 1812 and the death of his own first son, Andrei, in 1813 (Sapchenko 2008: 259–66; Sapchenko 2013).

156  liubo v s a p c he nko

K ARA M Z I N ’ S CORRESPON D ENCE WITH H IS F I ANCÉE AN D SECON D W I FE Karamzin also wrote in French to Ekaterina Andreevna Kolyvanova, whom he courted after he had become a widower, following the death of his first wife, and who married him in 1804. In letters filled with entreaties and tender assurances Karamzin addressed his beloved as vous and exclusively in French: Les premières lignes de votre main, adressées à celui qui veut vivre pour vous aimer, seront couvertes de mes baisers, je vous en avertis d’avance,6 or again: Sans aucune exagération, je peux dire que je vous aime déjà plus que tout. Jamais, jamais je n’ai été plus heureux7 (Karamzin 1805–16: 8), and so forth. When she became his wife, Karamzin wrote to Ekaterina Andreevna in both French (replacing the respectful society pronoun vous with the warmer and more friendly tu) and in Russian, and he would use both languages within the same text. Bilingualism within a text is particularly characteristic of Karamzin’s letters to his wife (and in his whole epistolary legacy these letters are the most candid).8 Letters to other addressees are restricted, as a rule, to a single variety, that is to say either to French or to Russian, sometimes with just a sprinkling of the other language; language choice in them is determined by who is being addressed and by subject-matter. The letters that Karamzin wrote to his wife in 1805, when she had gone away to St Petersburg with her father on family business, were full of passionate declarations and written in French as before, but now they also contained details, about practical everyday matters, that were formulated in Russian. When he spoke about love, the writer evidently made use of ready-made expressions, certain clichés that were accepted in that sort of letter. Some of them were rather reminiscent of lines from Saint Preux from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse), of which Karamzin was very fond, such as Charmante amie de mon coeur, vivons pour nous aimer, et que le Ciel dispose du reste9 (Rousseau 1788: 281) or Croyez-moi […], croyez-en ce coeur sensible qui ne vit que pour vous10 (1778: 87) and so on. At the same time Russian reality, for example the serf-owning way of life, might at times rule out the use of fixed linguistic formulae and make the letter-writer choose another language in order to convey his thoughts about this or that difficult situation. Here is a typical example, in which Karamzin switches suddenly from French to Russian: Mon épouse, mon ange, sens-tu combien je t’aime? Si tu pouvois voir tout ce qui se passe dans mon âme, tu te promettrois assurement de ne me jamais dire que j’aime mes occupations autant que toi! Give the

f r e n ch an d rus s ia n in e go - do cum e nts by k a r a m z i n   157 prince’s hand and our little daughter a tender, tender kiss for me. I bless our daughter in my thoughts. Tell the prince that the village bailiff is assailing me about money. I gave him 300 roubles, but he says he needs about two thousand a month or work will come to a complete standstill. The major-domo has taken 140 roubles from me to buy iron for the roof of the summer-house: they would never have handed it over without the money, and the summer-house would have been left uncovered. Won’t the prince authorise me to get a thousand or more from a banker? Otherwise what am I to do? – avec quelle impatience et inquiétude j’attends de tes nouvelles, ma bonne amie! (Karamzin: 1805–16: 69)11 Karamzin also used French to describe his health problems (he suffered from a bowel disease). Thus French continued to be a language for intimate, confidential communication; moreover, it enabled one to speak in a simple and comprehensible way about a very delicate matter, which in Russian would have seemed coarse and even indecent. During the war of 1812 Karamzin’s wife and children left Moscow and were evacuated to Iaroslavl’. Karamzin himself remained in the old capital right up until Napoleon’s Grande Armée entered it in the early autumn. The foreign invasion and the patriotic fervour that seized him explain why the letters he wrote to his wife in 1812 were in Russian. This was the language in which he now chose to express his steadfast and passionate love for his wife, his longing for her and his anxiety: I have received two dear letters from you, thank God! They both made me weep with emotion. I feel your tenderness and magnanimity more than ever. Every word touches me to the bottom of my heart. Priceless friend! God must love me, as he has given me such a wife. (Karamzin: 1805–16: 95) Nonetheless, some Russian phrases from letters of this period remind one of the letters of previous years that had been written in French and they sound like a free translation of a familiar text, as the following examples show: ‘You are my treasure and life, I love you much more than myself’ (1805–16: 93 v.); cf. Adieu, mon trézor unique sur la terre 1805–16: 68) and Je t’aime plus que moi-même (1805–16: 16 v.); ‘I kiss your lines with tears’ (1805–16: 95); cf. Ma douce amie, mes yeux se remplissent de larmes (1805–16: 8);

158  liubo v s a p c he nko ‘I kiss you with all the tenderness and warmth of my heart’ (1805–16: 93 v.); cf. Je t’embrasse avec toute la tendresse de mon cœur (1805–16: 16 v.). These letters, which Karamzin wrote in 1816 from St Petersburg, where he had gone for an audience with the sovereign about publication of his History of the Russian State, always begin in Russian, but they too include a considerable number of fragments of varying length that were written in French. Karamzin has recourse to French when he tells his wife about his encounters in St Petersburg society and at court, reporting dialogues (verbatim or in his own words) in the language in which they took place. Thus the language of communication prescribed by etiquette is properly and naturally used, as the haut monde of St Petersburg is being described.12 Long days and weeks passed while Karamzin waited for his audience with Alexander. He pined for his family and languished while he was parted from his beloved wife, and his pride was wounded by the indifference of the sovereign to the arrival of Russia’s historiographer in the capital and to the eight volumes of Russian history he had now completed. Karamzin expressed his irritation at his protracted sojourn in Petersburg society in French: J’ai assez bien vu les choses étant encore à Moscou; j’ai fait ce que j’ai dû faire et je ferai ce que dois faire; ton ami sait ce qu’il doit à son souverain, mais il sait aussi ce qu’il doit à sa propre dignité morale. (Karamzin 1911: 572)13 In order to speak about his love of Russia in his letters to his wife Karamzin used Russian, as one might expect, but he shifted to French to sum up the religious and moral dimensions of this feeling: everything is done in the way that is pleasing to God; that is what always calms my spirit, which is filled with love of Russia and its benevolent monarch. Comme les gens d’esprit sont bêtes quand ils s’éloignent de ce grand principe! La religion de mon cœur m’a fait presque trouver la Pierre philosophale. (Karamzin 1911: 583)14 It was as if French deepened the upper layer of a text or brought to the surface a sub-text, supplementing or adding detail to what had previously been heard in Russian, or, on the contrary, making a generalisation out of it. Thus Karamzin tells his wife in Russian that he has stopped making social visits, but he uses French to convey the deeper causes and effects of this:

f r e n ch an d rus s ia n in e go - do cum e nts by k a r a m z i n   159 I am in no hurry to go to visit Count Capo d’Istria and I haven’t seen Prince Golitsyn for about a fortnight now […] Just imagine, I haven’t been able up until now to go to Prince Lopukhin’s for the evening, although he has been pressing me to come; je suis presque barbare. Chasse Pétersbourg et la cour de tes idées; n’y vois que ton ami qui n’aspire qu’a retourner auprès de toi; oublie jusqu’à mon Histoire même. Revenu à Moscou, je continuerai pourtant cet ouvrage: il appartient à mes enfans et à ma patrie. Vive le travail! (Karamzin 1911: 579)15 The functions of the two languages are noticeably differentiated in Karamzin’s letters: French is the language of thoughts and feelings, whereas Russian is the language of events, deeds and actions. The Russian phrases seem tougher and more decisive; the French ones seem softer and more lyrical and they are endowed with a philosophical or elegiac tone. As he switches from facts to the emotional perception of them, Karamzin shifts language too: ‘They are feeding me with sweet snacks, but my natural taste demands the wife and children whom God gave me. Je commence un peu à fatiguer, quoique je ne me gêne pas beaucoup et conserve ma franchise ordinaire (1911: 576).16 Or again: ‘Your friend has no protectors. You’ll understand me: Hélas! J’ai déjà peu de tems à vivre: changerois-je de caractère? Je ne suis rien aux yeux de mon Dieu; mais les hommes ne me feront pas baisser les yeux (1911: 576).17 We see the same thing when Karamzin communicates his wish to leave St Petersburg with dignity without having waited for his audience with the tsar: Call it curious, but I hope to leave St Petersburg around 10 March and, actually, I’m very happy with St Petersburg. Everybody is indeed very kind to me: what more could you want? By God’s grace we shall not starve even without my history; c’est un bonheur que de n’y plus penser: nous serons libres. Je supporterai avec patience toutes les bêtises de notre chère Moscou. Pétersbourg est une belle ville; j’y ai vu quelques gens d’esprit; mais il m’est plus doux d’être au sein de ma famille, dusse-je tous les jours aller moi-meme au marché pour y acheter mon bois. Je suis très tranquille et je me porte à merveille: rends grace au Ciel. (1911: 578)18 We should not be too categorical, of course; there may be deviations from the pattern we have described. For one thing, many fragments were omitted when Karamzin’s letters of 1816 were published (Karamzin

160  liubo v s a p c he nko 1911). Among the things left out were words of love and affection, expressions of Karamzin’s longing for people dear to him and anxiety about them, and a desire he could not overcome to go home. Study of manuscripts in Karamzin’s hand has made it possible to fill in such omissions and to see that the great stress experienced by a man separated from his beloved wife could be expressed in Russian too, especially at the end of letters, in words of farewell: ‘I kiss you tenderly and ardently. May the Lord bring us together in joy. Yours, and only yours, N. Karamzin’ (Karamzin 1805–16: 28 v.). Or again: God be with you and with me. For the sake of my love, do not give in to sorrow. Goodbye, my angel, my priceless one, my life. […] I press you once more to my heart. Yours for evermore, N. Karamzin (1805–16: 23 v.) At the same time, well-known French phrases often appear alongside the Russian ones: ‘My dear wife, treasure of my heart! The Lord be with you. Amie chère et unique, adieu!’ (1805–16: 42 v.).19 And again: ‘Come to my heart! Kiss me a thousand times, tenderly, tenderly! Goodbye. The Lord be with you and with all of us. Adieu, chère, amie chère. Je suis plein de toi. Adieu’ (1805–16: 33 v.).20 Here the two languages have equal status for the person writing. Code-switching may be brought about by a mental relocation in space. For example, Karamzin moves from the private world of the family and ties of kinship to the public world of the drawing room of high society, when he writes as follows, using first Russian then French: ‘I declare to Soniushka the pleasure I take, as her father, in her little letter: c’est bien dit et bien tourné: je l’ai lu à quelques personnes; tout le monde en a été content’ (Karamzin 1911: 588).21 Or he may move in the opposite direction, from alien Petersburg to the society of his dear wife and children: Often they don’t let me write, but I can’t refuse to see them: they see that I’m at home because my carriage is here; I don’t wish to be rude and ungrateful. Je te serre mille fois contre mon cœur. Bénis les enfans pour moi; je compte sur ta bénédiction plus que la mienne. Ne sois pas fière de mes succes: prie Dieu et attend ton bon ami. Je te reviendrai plus que jamais dégoûtè du monde; tu n’as jamais doutè de ma sincerité. Adieu, my darling! (Karamzin 1805–16: 39 v.)22

f r e n ch an d rus s ia n in e go - do cum e nts by k a r a m z i n   161

FRENCH I N KARA M Z I N ’ S A L B UM FOR TH E G RAN D D U C HESS Karamzin’s moral and religious views were formed under the influence of the French moralists and philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and it was in the French language that the categories and ideas of those writers were embedded in Karamzin’s consciousness. Pushkin noted how widespread this phenomenon was: We are forced to draw everything, news and concepts, from foreign books; thus we even think in a foreign language (at least, all those do who think and follow the thoughts of the human race). Our best known men of letters have admitted as much to me. (Pushkin 1960: 138)23 As a historian of Russia, Karamzin wanted to communicate his ideas about the structure of the state and about virtue as the highest moral value to those who wielded power. In 1811 he compiled a handwritten album containing statements by some of the greatest European thinkers (Montaigne, Pascal, Buffon, Rousseau) about God, the state, love of one’s fatherland, marriage, virtue and friendship (Lyzhin 1858). He addressed it to the Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna, the favourite sister of the Russian tsar, hoping, no doubt, that the album would reach the emperor himself. However, Karamzin was aware of the following remark by the Italian abbé Ferdinando Galiani, to which he would refer from time to time in his letters: ‘Do you know what my definition of sublime oratory is? It is the art of saying everything without being put in the Bastille in a country where you are not allowed to say anything’ (Karamzin 1866: 0126). Wanting to say everything to Russian autocrats without ending up in prison, Karamzin resorted to French statements, thus expressing his own position in other people’s words in another language. As a literary phenomenon of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the album was a collection of texts designed for communication. Indeed, it was an ‘integral written text’, which at bottom was a communication in which ‘the writer confided in the owner of the album […] or even a simultaneous “conversation” among a number of people’ (Petina 1988: 6). Karamzin’s album, in the opinion of Vadim Vatsuro, was ‘a work that was quite distinct in genre and difficult to compare with [other] nineteenth-century albums. It was not so much an album as a notebook with excerpts [from other writers] and his own verse’ (Vatsuro 1979: 6). Nonetheless, it did have features of the album as such. It is notable for its multilingualism, containing not only passages in French but also

162  liubo v s a p c he nko passages in English, German, Russian, Italian and Church Slavonic. ‘Multilingualism in the album’, Larisa Petina observes, ‘is invoked to lend variety and complexity to a verbal channel of contact’ (Petina 1985: 30). Through ‘repeated communication and a multiplicity of means of communicating’ (1985: 30), Karamzin manages insistently to repeat the truths he considers most important and wishes to put across to the addressee. By placing statements in different languages alongside one another, the compiler of the album implicitly compares points of view, conducts a discourse among many persons and at the same time foregrounds views (other people’s and his own) which are similar to one another and which concern matters of vital importance to the state and mankind in general. These matters include the forms that political power may assume, foreign and domestic policy, the ideal ruler and relationships between people. Karamzin’s album opens with an excerpt from Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, who contends that the rise and fall of states depends on the will of Providence: it governs the actions of wise sovereigns, it gives victory to conquerors and prepares their downfall when they have risen to the height of their glory and power; so that rulers themselves must acknowledge a power over them that is stronger than they are. (Lyzhin 1858: 161) Through the words of Rousseau, Karamzin formulates his ideas about the duty of the ruler and about God and virtue. In Montaigne’s Essays (Essais), he finds reflections that are in keeping with his own about the sovereign as a person who is susceptible, like everybody else, to weaknesses. He was also concerned with the need for firm traditions in the governance of the state. Montaigne had written about the pernicious effects of all innovations and about the way in which changes in the state produce confusion and tend to lead only to lawlessness and tyranny. These views of Montaigne’s had shaped Karamzin’s attitude to the French Revolution: Every civil society that has been affirmed over the centuries is something sacred for good citizens; even in the most imperfect one we should marvel at its harmony and good order […] All violent upheavals are disastrous and every insurgent prepares a scaffold for himself. (Karamzin 1987: 226–7) Reality, according to Montaigne and Karamzin, is imperfect and the ideal is simply unattainable; it is therefore not worth changing traditions

f r e n ch an d rus s ia n in e go - do cum e nts by k a r a m z i n   163 that have taken root. There follow reflections about the best form of government. Karamzin adduces statements by Rousseau about monarchy and autocracy, quoting at length from Rousseau’s treatise ‘Of the Social Contract’ (‘Du contrat social’), from which he selects what is consonant with his own views: Le gouvernement monarchique est celui d’un magistrat unique, dont les autres tiennent leurs pouvoirs. Le plus actif d’un gouvernement est celui d’un seul (Lyzhin 1858: 178).24 Karamzin includes some lines from the Marquis de Pompignan that seem to express his own ideal of human and political existence: Soyons de notre esprit les seuls législateurs, Vivons libres du moins dans le fond de nos cœurs: C’est le trône de l’homme; il règne, quand il pense. (Lyzhin 1858: 181)25 Karamzin also copies out ideas from Montaigne and Rousseau about virtue, marriage, friendship and love. Virtue consists not in following one’s inclinations or in good deeds that are in keeping with them but in mastering oneself and in doing what duty dictates. This is followed by a poem by Karamzin himself ‘To Virtue’ (‘K dobrodeteli’), about its force and power. The Russian and French texts speak to and supplement one another. From Montaigne Karamzin selects further thoughts that were dear to him, to the effect that there is nothing more natural or at the same time more elevated and unselfish than true friendship: Si on me presse de dire, pourquoi j’aimois mon ami, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer qu’en répondant: parceque c’est lui, parceque c’est moi (Lyzhin 1858: 189).26 Thus by means of selection and arrangement of French texts Karamzin presents a philosophical and psychological portrait of himself to the grand duchess, emphasising the principles that underpin his outlook and counting on her understanding and on his affinity with her. Karamzin’s album to Ekaterina Pavlovna preceded the appearance, in 1811, of his memoir On Ancient and Modern Russia (O drevnei i novoi Rossii […]; Pipes 1959), which was addressed directly to Ekaterina’s brother, Alexander I. This important work of conservative political thought (see Martin 1997) was written at the instigation of the grand duchess. Conceived as a means of discouraging the emperor – who countenanced radical reforms in the early part of his reign – from favouring projects that were too bold from the point of view of the conservative party in Russian politics of the time, the memoir chimes in many respects with the thoughts contained in the album Karamzin had compiled for the grand duchess herself. The main subjects examined in it were the same: the monarch’s duty, loyalty to the traditions that had come into

164  liubo v s a p c he nko being, love of the fatherland and the supreme virtues. It contained sharp criticism of policies pursued by Alexander and his predecessors, considered from the viewpoints represented in his album. In his assessments of Russian history and contemporary Russia in the memoir, Karamzin reconstructed the same hierarchy of values and focused attention on the same problems. ‘A people’s laws’, he wrote, ‘must be derived from [that people’s] own conceptions, mores and habits’ (Karamzin 1998: 318). We should recall the following statement from Karamzin’s album: Ce, qui rend la constitution d’un état véritablement solide et durable, c’est quand les convenances sont tellement observées, que les rapports naturels et les lois tombent toujours de concert sur les mêmes points et que celles-ci ne font, pour ainsi dire, qu’assurer, accompagner, rectifier les autres. (Lyzhin 1858: 181)27 Thus the album addressed to Ekaterina Pavlovna and the memoir On Ancient and Modern Russia addressed to Alexander I both expressed the values and moral and political ideals of this Russian writer and historian, but in different languages (Sapchenko 2013).

K ARA M Z I N ’ S A L B UM FOR T H E EMPRESS EL IZA V ETA A L E K SEE V NA Some years ago I brought into the scholarly domain another manuscript album written by Karamzin (Sapchenko 2008). This was written in 1821 and addressed to the Empress Elizaveta Alekseevna, with whom Karamzin corresponded and to whom he was bound by mutual liking and spiritual kinship. This album, which is kept in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), had never before been published, but it is of undoubted interest for an understanding of Karamzin’s linguistic position from the point of view of bilingualism. It contains forty-five sheets of passages copied out from Bossuet, Rousseau, Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Montesquieu, Pascal and other authors with their thoughts on humankind, nature and society (there are no passages in German, English or other languages), and at the end of the album there is a large selection of proverbs in Russian. This album shows us what most troubled Karamzin in his final years, namely the problem of power in Russia, and also Karamzin’s sincere attachment to Elizaveta Alekseevna. Treating Elizaveta Alekseevna ‘not only with reverence but also with love’ (Karamzin 1862: 42), the compiler of the album used the languages that were closest to him.

f r e n ch an d rus s ia n in e go - do cum e nts by k a r a m z i n   165 In 1802, Karamzin had published material in Vestnik Evropy (The Herald of Europe) under the heading ‘Buffon and Rousseau’, in which he had contrasted their opinions about love: They both wrote about love: describing its sweetness and torments with warmth and touching truthfulness, Rousseau delighted the hearts of the sensitive; Buffon offended them by asserting that only physical love was good and that moral love was an evil. (Karamzin 1802: 340) As I have already said, Karamzin had taken issue with Buffon in his ‘Thoughts about Love’ (‘Mysli o liubvi’) in 1797. Now, though, in his album dedicated to Elizaveta Alekseevna, in a section entitled ‘Love’, he placed only one passage, and it was from Buffon: Amour, désir inné, âme de la nature, principe inépuisable d’existence, puissance souveraine qui peut tout, et contre la quelle rien ne peut, par qui tout agit, tout respire et tout se renouvelle, divine flamme, germe de perpétuité, que l’Eternel a répandu dans tout avec le souffle de vie, precieux sentiment qui peut seul amollir les cœurs féroces et glacés, en les pénétrant d’une douce chaleur, cause première de tout bien, de toute société, qui réunit sans contrainte et par les seuls attraits les natures sauvages et dispersés; source unique et feconde de tout plaisir, de toute volupté… Amour! pourquoi fais-tu l’état heureux de tous les êtres et le malheur de l’homme? (Karamzin 1821: 29)28 Thus a French quotation served for Karamzin as a means of expressing his innermost feelings for the person to whom the album was addressed, but without breaching the rules of decorum or propriety. The writers of France were attractive to Karamzin not only on account of their views but also because of the expressive and aphoristic form of their statements. For the latter sort of statement, he set aside a separate section, ‘Miscellaneous Thoughts’ (‘Raznye mysli’). The quotations he included in it, viewed in the context of Karamzin’s corpus of letters, enable us to refine and add to the list of French authors and works read in Russia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At the same time, Karamzin’s albums may be examined as ego-documents: from the apothegms he selected one can judge his attitude to work, history, the duty of the court historiographer, reading, people, friendship and solitude, reason and feelings, sincerity and falsehood, duty and freedom, life and death and even the genre of aphorisms itself. The statements Karamzin picked out were close to statements in his

166  liubo v s a p c he nko own letters, where his religious revelations resonated. Thus in one of his last letters to Capo d’Istria, Karamzin almost exactly reproduced Rousseau’s reflections on God and humans: Sans craindre extrémement la mort, l’envisageant quelquefois avec une certaine affection et aimant à répéter avec Rousseau, ‘qui s’endort dans les bras d’un père, n’est pas en souci du réveil’ (Karamzin 1835: 8).29 This letter, written in French, is in essence Karamzin’s confession and testament. French remained for Karamzin a language of sincere communication and a vehicle for summing up moral and philosophical conclusions. Brevity of form, depth of thought, the vividness of comparisons, the paradoxical nature of the evidence – all these things impressed Karamzin, as his notebooks confirm: On dit que le bonheur sur la terre n’est qu’une ombre: il faut donc que le bonheur réel existe quelquepart, car il n’y a point d’ombre sans objet. Mériter le bonheur vaut encore mieux que d’être heureux. Le bonheur parfait dans ce monde serait une parfaite résignation. Oui, la vie n’est qu’un rêve; mais celui qui rêve, existe. Si je pouvais douter de ma propre existence, encore ne douterais-je pas de celle de Dieu. Dieu est un grand musicien, l’univers un superbe clavecin, et nous ne sommes que d’humbles claviers. Les anges passent l’éternité à admirer ce concert divin, qu’on appelle hasard, fatalité, sort aveugle. (Karamzin 1862: 196)30 Extensive quotations from French authors, as I have said, are supplemented by a large selection of Russian proverbs. Apothegms representing popular wisdom – Царством владеть на Бога надежду иметь,31 Милее всех, кто любит кого32 (Karamzin 1821: 46), Нам добро и никому зло, то законное житье33 (1821: 47), Женою доброю и муж честен,34 Посеянное взойдет35 (1821: 50), and so forth – are selected in such a way that Karamzin’s soul, thoughts and beliefs begin to open up in them too. So we have here two different ways in which the writer presents himself. Each language, for Karamzin, establishes its rights and finds its niche and function, without losing its own merits or eclipsing the beauties of the other. * * * The French language, then, features strongly in ego-documents written by Karamzin, such as letters, albums and notebooks. It functions on many levels in these texts. It is used in letters addressed to foreign friends. It is a language dictated by etiquette in certain sorts of communication. It

f r e n ch an d rus s ia n in e go - do cum e nts by k a r a m z i n   167 expresses ardent feelings in letters to Karamzin’s fiancée, who became his wife. It is a sign of the utmost candour in his conversations with the tsar. French is also used to formulate aphoristic statements which sum up conclusions about life. In letters in which bilingualism occurs, the functions of French that relate to content and style are more varied. French helps to throw light on the ‘society chronicle’, transmits dialogues and individual utterances word for word and serves as a means by which the speaker or writer characterises himself, creating a certain distance and detachment. A change of language, finally, may signal the author’s mental relocation to another space and also a shift to a deeper level of candour, or it may signal the opposite, a shift to a higher level of generalisation.

NOTES   1. On bilingualism and diglossia in the early nineteenth-century Russian literary community see also Chapter 12, by Nina Dmitrieva and Gesine Argent, in this volume.  2. Scholarship on writers’ epistolary legacies has concentrated mainly on Pushkin, Viazemskii and A. I. Turgenev (Maimina 1981: 58–65; Tynianov 1993: 132; Dmitrieva 2000: 85–93). As for Karamzin, articles about his letters are few and far between (but see Vatsuro 1991; Lazarchuk 1996; Karnishina 2005), although much has been written about his literary work and linguistic reform. Nor have any special studies been devoted to the functions of French in his ego-writing.   3. On eighteenth-century attempts to endow Russian with the lexicon of gallantry, see Volume 2, Chapter 12, by Victor Zhivov.   4. ‘A great writer has said that there is nothing good or natural about love, apart from physical pleasure. This great writer had a very small soul. Physical pleasure is nothing in true love; the object of that love is too sacred, too divine in our eyes, to excite desires; the senses are calm when the heart is agitated and it is ever thus in this passion.’ Karamzin has in mind the passage that is to be found in Buffon (1864): pp. 416–17.   5. ‘Sire, You have great self-esteem… I fear nothing. We are all equal before God. What I say to You I would have said to Your Father… Sire, I despise the liberals of the day: I love only that liberty that no tyrant can take away from me… I do not any longer ask You for Your good-will: I am speaking to you, perhaps, for the last time.’   6. ‘The first lines in your hand, addressed to him who wants to live in order to love you, will be covered in my kisses, I warn you in advance.’   7. ‘I can say without exaggeration that I already love you more than anything. Never, never have I been happier.’   8. On the phenomenon of code-switching, see also Chapter 7, by Jessica Tipton, in this volume and Chapter 2, by Michelle Lamarche Marrese, in Volume 2.   9. ‘Charming friend of my heart, let us live to love one another, and may Heaven take care of everything else.’ 10. ‘Believe me […], believe in this sensitive heart that lives only for you.’ 11. ‘My wife, my angel, are you aware how much I love you? If you could see everything that is going on in my soul you would surely vow never to tell me that I love my occupations as much as I love you! […] How impatiently and anxiously I await news from you, my good friend!’

168  liubo v s a p c he nko 12. Karamzin tells his wife that when the Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna turned to Count Rostopchin with the words Notre historiographe court la ville, mais pourquoi est-ce qu’on le cajole? (Our historiographer goes all round the city, but why do they make a fuss of him?), Rostopchin replied: C’est qu’il est le Suisse de l’immortalité (It is because he is the Swiss of immortality). This utterance became well known, was translated into Russian and secured Karamzin’s reputation with a title that in translation sounded – because of the similarity of the Russian words for ‘Swiss’ (швейцарец) and ‘doorman’ (швейцар) – like ‘usher to immortality’ (проводник к бессмертию) or ‘concierge at the gates of immortality’ (швейцар у ворот бессмертия) or, grander still, ‘gatekeeper of immortality’ (привратник бессмертия). 13. ‘I saw things well enough while I was still in Moscow; I have done what I was obliged to do and I shall do what I have to do; your friend knows what he owes to his sovereign, but he also knows what he owes to his own moral worth.’ 14. ‘How stupid great minds are when they deviate from this principle! The religion of my heart has made me almost find the philosopher’s stone.’ 15. ‘I’ve become almost like a barbarian. Cast St Petersburg and the court out of your mind; see only your friend there who wants nothing but to come back to be close to you; forget even my History. Once I have returned to Moscow I’ll continue with this work, though: it belongs to my children and to my country. Long live work!’ 16. ‘I am beginning to get a little tired, although I do not hesitate to speak with my usual frankness.’ 17. ‘Alas! I do not have much time left to live. Could I change my character? I am nothing in the eyes of my God; but men will not make me cast down my eyes.’ 18. ‘It makes me happy not to have to think about it any more: we shall be free. I shall patiently put up with all the follies of our dear Moscow. St Petersburg is a beautiful city; I have seen some intelligent people here; but it is sweeter to me to be in the bosom of my family, even if I had to go to the market myself every day to buy my wood. I am very calm and am in excellent health, thanks be to God.’ 19. ‘My dear and only friend, farewell!’ 20. ‘Farewell, my dear, my dear friend. I am full of you. Farewell.’ 21. ‘it is well said and well turned: I have read it to a number of people, and everybody has been pleased with it.’ 22. ‘I press you a thousand times to my heart. Bless the children for me; I count on your blessing more than mine. Don’t be proud of my success: pray to God and wait for your good friend. I shall come back to you more sick of society than ever; you have never doubted my sincerity, Farewell […]’ 23. See also Volume 2, Chapter 11, in which Derek Offord examines Pushkin’s treatment of Russian francophonie in his fictional prose. 24. ‘Monarchic government is government by a single magistrate, from whom others hold their powers. The most active government is that of a single person.’ 25. ‘Let us be the sole legislators of our mind, /​Let us live freely at least at the bottom of our hearts, /​That is the throne of man; he reigns when he thinks.’ 26. ‘If I were pressed to say why I loved my friend, I feel that it could only be expressed by replying “because it is him, because it is me”.’ 27. ‘What makes the constitution of a state truly solid and durable is when the conventions are so [closely] observed that natural relations and the laws are always in concert on the same points and the latter merely back up, accompany and rectify, so to speak, the former.’ 28. ‘Love, innate desire, nature’s soul, inexhaustible principle of existence, sovereign

f r e n ch an d rus s ia n in e go - do cum e nts by k a r a m z i n   169 power which can do everything and against which everything else is powerless, through which everything acts, breathes and renews itself, divine flame, seed of perpetuity that the Eternal has diffused through everything with the breath of life, precious feeling which is the only thing that can soften savage and frozen hearts by spreading sweet warmth through them, prime cause of all good things and all society which brings wild and scattered natures together without compulsion and by its attractions alone; sole and fertile source of all pleasure and delight… Love, why do you make all beings happy and human beings unhappy?’ 29. ‘Without great fear of death, facing it sometimes with a certain fondness and liking to repeat with Rousseau, “who goes to sleep in the arms of a father and does not worry about waking up”.’ 30. ‘It is said that happiness on Earth is nothing but a shadow: it must therefore be that real happiness exists somewhere, for there is no shadow without an object. To deserve happiness is worth yet more than to be happy. Perfect happiness in this world would be perfect resignation. Yes, life is but a dream; but those who dream exist. If I were able to doubt my own existence, would I not also doubt the existence of God? God is a great musician, the universe a superb harpsichord, and we are merely humble keys. The angels spend eternity admiring this divine concert, which we call chance, fate, blind destiny.’ 31. ‘If somebody has a kingdom, he should hope for God’s help/​mercy.’ 32. ‘The dearest person is the one who loves somebody else.’ 33. ‘If we do good to ourselves and no harm to others, then that is the right way to live.’ 34. ‘A virtuous woman [is] a crown to her husband’ (Proverbs 12: 4). The biblical text continues: ‘but she that maketh ashamed [is] as rottenness in his bones.’ 35. ‘What has been sown will come up.’

REFERENCES Alpatova, T. (2013), ‘Problemy khudozhestvennoi antropologii N. M. Karamzina (povest’ “Iuliia”)’, in A. Pashkurov, L. Vorontsova and A. Gallimullina (eds), Mikhail Murav’ev i ego vremia, Kazan’: Gosudarstvennoe biudzhetnoe uchrezhdenie ‘Respublikanskii tsentr monitoringa kachestva obrazovaniia’, pp. 88–94. Blinokhvatova, V. (2005), Russko-frantsuzskii bilingvizm rossiiskogo dvorianstva pervoi poloviny XIX veka: na materiale pisem, Stavropol’: Stavropol’skii gosudarstvennyi universitet. Buffon, G.-L. L. (1864), Chefs-d’œuvre littéraires de Buffon, vol. 1, Paris: Garnier Frères. Dmitrieva, N. (2000), ‘O bilingvizme v rukopisiakh Pushkina’, in Iazyki rukopisei. Sbornik statei, St Petersburg: RAN IRLI, pp. 85–93. Grechanaia, E. (2010), Kogda Rossiia govorila po-frantsuzski: russkaia literatura na fran­ tsuzskom iazyke (XVIII–pervaia polovina XIX veka), Moscow: IMLI RAN. [Karamzin, N.] (1794), Les amusemens de Znamenskoé, Moscow: chez Rudiger et Claudius. Karamzin, N. (1802), ‘Biuffon i Russo’, Vestnik Evropy, 8: 339–43. Karamzin, N. (1805–16), ‘Pis’ma k E. A. Karamzinoi’, in RGB, OR, f. 488, k. 1, ed. khr. 1. Karamzin, N. (1821), ‘Al’bom s razlichnymi vypiskami (Stikhi, poslovitsy i dr.)’, in GARF, f. 728, op. 1, vol. 1, index 567.

170  liubo v s a p c he nko Karamzin, N. (1835), ‘Pis’mo k grafu Kapodistria’, Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 1: 7–9. Karamzin, N. (1862), Neizdannye sochineniia i perepiska Nikolaia Mikhailovicha Karamzina, vol. 1, St Petersburg: Tipografiia Tiblena. Karamzin, N. (1866), Pis’ma k I. I. Dmitrievu, St Petersburg: Imperatorskaia akademiia nauk. Karamzin, N. (1911), ‘Pis’ma N. M. Karamzina k ego supruge iz Peterburga v Moskvu 1816 g.’, Russkii arkhiv, 8: 565–93. Karamzin, N. (1987), Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika (‘Literaturnye pamiatniki’), Leningrad: Nauka. Karamzin, N. (1998), Sbornik, ed. V. A. Shamshurin, Moscow: Novator. Karnishina, L. (2005), ‘N. M. Karamzin: Pis’ma 1812 goda k zhene’, Ostaf’evskii sbornik, 10: 12–20. Kochetkova, N. (1999), ‘Karamzin Nikolai Mikhailovich’, in Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka, vol. 2, St Petersburg: Nauka, pp. 32–43. Lazarchuk, R. (1996), ‘Perepiska N. M. Karamzina s A. A. Petrovym (K probleme rekonstruktsii “romana v pis’makh”)’, XVIII vek. Sbornik 20, St Petersburg: Nauka, pp. 135–43. Lotin, V. (1857), ‘Vospominaniia proshedshego, pisannye kuptsom Vladimirom Lotinym 1857-go goda, noiabria 1-go dnia’ (copy), in RGALI, f. 2591, op. 1, ed. khr 195. Lotman, Iu. (1987), Sotvorenie Karamzina, Moscow: Kniga. Lyzhin, N. (1858), ‘Al’bom N. M. Karamzina’, in Letopisi russkoi literatury i drevnosti, ed. N. S. Tikhonravov, vol. 2, Moscow: Tip. Gracheva i komp., pp. 161–92. Maimina, E. (1981), ‘Stilisticheskie funktsii frantsuzskogo iazyka v perepiske Pushkina i v ego poėzii’, in E. Maimin (ed.), Problemy sovremennogo pushkinovedeniia: mezh­ vuzovzkii sbornik nauchnykh trudov, Leningrad: Leningradskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institut im. A. I. Gertsena, pp. 58–65. Martin, A. M. (1997), Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Paperno, I. A. (1975), ‘O dvuiazychnoi perepiske pushkinskoi ėpokhi’, Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 358: 148–56 (Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii, 24). Petina, L. (1985), ‘Strukturnye osobennosti al’boma pushkinskoi ėpokhi’, Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 645: 21–36. Petina, L. (1988), ‘Khudozhestvennaia priroda literaturnogo al’boma pervoi poloviny XIX veka’, dissertation abstract, Tartu University. Pipes, R. (1959), Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, 2 vols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pushkin, A. (1960), Roslavlev, in Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, vol. 5, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, pp. 136–47. Rousseau, J.-J. (1788), Œuvres complètes de J. J. Rousseau, vol. 8 (1), Paris: Poinçot Claud. Sapchenko, L. (2008), ‘Vypiski iz frantsuzskikh myslitelei v neopublikovannom al’bome N. M. Karamzina’, at http://​ institut-est-ouest.ens-lyon.fr/​ spip.php?article116& lang=fr (last accessed on 7 October 2014). Sapchenko, L. (2013), ‘ “Ona byla odnim iz blagodetel’nykh sushchestv dlia dushi moei” (O perepiske N. M. Karamzina s Velikoi Kniaginei Ekaterinoi Pavlovnoi)’, Vestnik Moskovskogo gosudarstvennogo oblastnogo universiteta, 1, http://​ evestnik-mgou.ru/​ Articles/​View/​301 (last accessed on 13 October 2014). Tynianov, Iu. (1993), Literaturnyi fakt, Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, pp. 121–37.

f r e n c h an d r u s s i a n i n e g o - d o c um e nt s by k a r a m zi n   171 Vatsuro, V. (1979), ‘Literaturnye al’bomy v sobranii Pushkinskogo Doma (1750–1840-e gody)’, Ezhegodnik rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo Doma na 1977 g., Leningrad, pp. 3–56. Vatsuro, V. (1991), ‘Iz neizdannykh pisem Karamzina (publikatsiia V. E. Vatsuro)’, Russkaia literatura, 4: 88–98.

chapter 9

Pushkin’s Letters in French Nina Dmitrieva

T

he letters written by members of the Russian literary world of the first half of the nineteenth century are worthy of attention in their own right. They were read in literary circles on the same footing as works of art and, like works of art, were discussed and evaluated. The following lines from a letter written by the statesman and future historian Aleksandr Turgenev to the poet Petr Viazemskii in 1819 clearly illustrate the point: I received your letter of 1 May […] Zhukovskii liked the letter very much and he wanted to take it from me, but that would have meant taking it away from immortality, because I keep your letters, so that in time, under a free sky, I may be able to publish them to the world. (Ostaf’evskii arkhiv kniazei Viazemskikh 1899–1913: vol. 1, p. 232) The writing of a letter to a friend by the early nineteenth-century man of letters was ‘an “act” of literature’, as Nikolai Stepanov has put it (Stepanov 2007: 33). At a time when the Russian literary language was coming into being, the letter afforded writers an opportunity for experimentation. Writers’ drafts of letters attest to the significance of the epistolary genre, demonstrating meticulous, persistent labour, and in this respect the drafts of Pushkin’s letters are exceptionally revealing. Pushkin often devoted as much effort to the writing of a letter as he did to the creation of a work of art: in one of his draft letters, written in October 1824, for example, there are as many as fifteen versions of a single phrase (Kazanskii 1937; Levkovich 1979). In his poem of 1820 ‘To My Inkwell’ (‘K moei chernil’nitse’) he calls his correspondence ‘postal prose’ (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 2, p. 184). Thus for Pushkin, Evgenii

pus hkin’s le t t e r s i n f r e n c h   173 Maimin has observed, ‘letters, besides having a direct purpose, are always to some extent a school for learning about style. A way of writing, a free and unconstrained form of language, is evolving in them’ (Maimin 1962: 78). Fortunately, a large number of Pushkin’s letters (more than 780 of them) have come down to us, about one fifth of which (163) were written in French. In terms of etiquette, the Franco-Russian bilingualism of the early nineteenth century demarcates spheres of social intercourse.1 Choice of language in letter-writing is determined by the nature of the writer’s relationship with the addressee. For the Russian nobleman of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, Iurii Lotman observed, ‘the sphere of inner, intimate and spiritual life is handed over to “western forms of expression”. This also reinforces the use of the epistolary etiquette of the French language in this social circle’ (Lotman 1992–3: 359). Pushkin’s letters yield rich material for a study of bilingual epistolary communication in this milieu, and at the same time they bear witness to Pushkin’s personal attitude to the opportunities that a bilingual context afforded. In this chapter, on the basis of the material provided by the letters Pushkin wrote in French, I shall try to ascertain what motivated his language choice, taking the nature of his relationship with his addressees as my point of departure. We shall see in which language he wrote, at certain points in his life, to various types of addressee: members of his own family; fellow writers and other friends (both male and female); his future mother-in-law and her daughter Natal’ia Goncharova (first, while Natal’ia was his fiancée, and then when she had become his wife); and, finally, the emperors Alexander I and Nicholas I and Count Alexander von Benckendorff, the head of Nicholas’s corps of gendarmes. In the process, I shall examine the possible implications of language choice in letter-writing, the influence of French literature on Pushkin’s epistolary practice and the relationship between letter-writing and the creation of literary works. Finally, I shall consider the light that Pushkin’s letters throw on code-switching and on French and Russian pronominal usage in bilingual correspondence.2

PUS HK I N ’ S L AN GUA GE C H O I CE I N CORRESPON D ENCE W I T H H I S FAMIL Y French was virtually ‘a second native language’ for Pushkin (Tomashevskii 1960: 62). As was usual among the early nineteenth-century Russian nobility, Pushkin was taught this language by French tutors: ‘in general there was little that was Russian in his upbringing: he heard only French;

174  n ina dmi tr ie va […] his father’s library had only French books in it. The child spent sleepless nights and surreptitiously devoured books one after another in his father’s study’, Pushkin’s brother Lev recalled (L. S. Pushkin 1974: vol. 2, p. 58). Likewise, Pushkin’s sister Ol’ga tells us in her memoirs: ‘It goes without saying that the children spoke and studied only in French’ (Pavlishcheva 1974: vol. 2, p. 45). Judging by the many letters that have come down to us, French was Pushkin’s language of communication with his parents. For example, at one of the most important moments in his life, as he was preparing to get married, he turned to his parents for their blessing and, rather than resort to his native language, Russian, he wrote to them in French. A draft of this letter is extant. The numerous versions that were begun and then crossed out tell us that Pushkin did not find it easy to write this letter, since he was not only (perhaps not so much) asking for blessing but also worrying about the material side of the matter: Je vous en conjure, ecrivez-moi ce que vous pouvez faire pour, he wrote in April 1830 (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 14, p. 77).3 The parents did bless their son: his father’s reply and his mother’s addendum to it, which were also in French, were written in a sentimental tone, with pathos: Béni soit mille et mille fois le jour d’hier, mon cher Alexandre, pour la lettre que nous avons reçue de toi. Elle m’a pénétré de joie et de reconnaissance. Oui, mon ami. C’est le mot. – Depuis longtemps j’avais oublié la douceur des larmes que j’ai versées en la lisant. (vol. 14, p. 79)4 The fact that Pushkin always used French when he was communicating with his parents seems to be confirmed in a letter he wrote to his brother on 4 September 1822. This letter was written in Russian and the only French sentence in it was one in which he was effectively making an indirect request to his father: Mon père a eu une idée lumineuse – c’est celle de m’envoyer des habits – rapellez-la lui de ma part (vol. 14, p. 46).5 (It was the usual practice in letter-writing to quote someone else’s words or to address a third person in the language in which the utterance had been or would have been made.) As we shall see in due course, Pushkin generally used Russian when he was writing to correspondents whom he saw as kindred spirits, people with whom he felt a personal sympathy. His use of French when he was writing to his parents, on the other hand, may be explained – judging by the evidence that has come down to us – by the fact that there was not much sincere mutual understanding in the Pushkin household. ‘The most striking feature of Pushkin’s childhood that we should recognise’, Lotman remarked, ‘is how little and how rarely he would recall those years later on […] He was a man without a childhood’ (Lotman

pus hkin’s le t t e r s i n f r e n c h   175 1997: 29). Lotman’s observation is probably somewhat exaggerated, but Pushkin plainly yearned for a real family haven, because he lacked what is called a ‘domestic hearth’. When at the age of twenty-one, having fallen ill on his way to his place of exile, Pushkin found himself in the friendly family circle of the Raevskiis, he wrote to his brother, on 24 September 1820: ‘a free and carefree life in a beloved family; a life I love so much, and which I never enjoyed’ (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 13, p. 19). And this is what he had written on 28 December 1816, also in Russian, to his uncle, the poet Vasilii Pushkin, whom he teased but whom he loved sincerely: ‘Dearest of all uncle-poets in this world here’ (vol. 13, p. 5). Pushkin’s use of French with his parents, then, may be dictated not so much by epistolary etiquette as by his feeling that there was a lack of warmth in his relationship with them. Pushkin was much closer to his brother Lev than to his mother and father. Indeed, in the 1820s the brothers were on very friendly terms. Pushkin wrote to Lev a great deal, and often in Russian. There was just one, very striking, exception – this was a letter in French in the autumn of 1822, which I shall consider in the antepenultimate section below. One of his relatively early letters to his brother, from Kishinev on 27 July 1822, was addressed to both Lev and his sister Ol’ga. To his brother he wrote in Russian: Я тебе буду отвечать со всевозможной болтливостью, и пиши мне по-русски, потому что, слава богу, с моими конституционными друзьями я скоро позабуду русскую азбуку (vol. 13, p. 30).6 The ‘constitutional friends’ were members of a secret society which supported constitutional government; they included Mikhail Orlov, Pavel Pestel’, Vladimir Raevskii and the circle of the Davydov brothers. One of them, Aleksandr Davydov, was married to a French woman, and in their circle, to which Pushkin was close in 1821, ‘everyone spoke French’ (Pushkin 1907–15: vol. 2, p. 586). Pushkin’s letter to his brother is full of serious observations and questions concerning literary matters: Lev Pushkin was carrying out his brother’s instructions in connection with an edition of Aleksandr’s works. However, by the beginning of the 1830s Pushkin’s relations with his brother had become noticeably cooler. Aleksandr wrote to Lev much less often and the tone of his letters changed. The fact of the matter is that Lev had managed his brother’s affairs very carelessly while Aleksandr had been in exile. Furthermore, Pushkin was irritated by Lev’s idle way of life and had to pay off his debts. With the change in their relationship there came a change of language too – letters began to be written in French. The unavoidable change to a form of address in the second-­ person plural in a letter of April 1835 that was written in French (a change required by epistolary etiquette) added to the coldness:

176  n ina dmi tr ie va Il est probable qu’alors vous vous occuperez de vos affaires et que vous perdrez de votre indolence et de facilité avec laquelle vous vous laissez aller à vivre au jour la journée. De ce moment adressez-vous à vos parents. Je n’ai pas payé vos petites dettes de jeu, car je ne suis pas allé chercher vos compagnons […] (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 16, p. 20)7 To his sister, on the other hand, it was more usual for Pushkin to write in French. In this respect, Pushkin was observing etiquette, inasmuch as men were supposed to write to women in French. (It is noteworthy that he would write to Ol’ga’s husband in Russian.) French was the language Pushkin used, for example, in the addendum addressed to his sister in the above-mentioned letter written to his brother on 27 July 1822. This addendum contained a continuous sequence of questions: Etes-vous de retour de votre voyage? aimez-vous toujours vos promenades solitaires? que lisez-vous? and so forth (vol. 13, p. 31).8 The questions all remind one of the empty ‘chatter’ of society. Pushkin ends the sequence with what are no doubt ironical questions: êtes-vous mariée? êtes-vous prête à l’être? doutez-vous de mon amitié? 9 Is he being ironical about his sister or about the way in which it was customary to communicate with a lady in society? Perhaps both. However, in a Russian letter of 4 December 1824 to his brother there is a Russian addendum to Ol’ga which sounds much more intimate than the texts of the letters he wrote to her in French: Милая Оля, благодарю за письмо, ты очень мила, и я тебя очень люблю (vol. 13, p. 126).10 Pushkin’s use of the second-person singular form of address (ты), apart from anything else, lends the letter an intimate character.

P U S HK IN ’ S CORRESPON D ENCE WITH FR IEN DS Pushkin’s letters to men, apart from his father, and not only his letters to men who were friends, were in the overwhelming majority of cases written in Russian. There were exceptions to this practice, of which his letters to his friend the Catholic thinker Petr Chaadaev, the author of the famous Philosophical Letters (Lettres philosophiques), were a striking example. Pushkin himself drew attention to this fact when on 6 July 1831 he wrote to Chaadaev (with whom he had, in his own words, long ‘prophetic arguments’): Mon ami, je vous parlerai la langue de l’Europe (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 14, p. 187).11 He also wrote in ‘the language of Europe’ to Nikolai Raevskii fils, who was a connoisseur of European literature. His letters to Raevskii, from 1825 and 1829, were devoted to his work on his tragedy Boris Godunov and to reflections on the genre of

pus hkin’s le t t e r s i n f r e n c h   177 tragedy more generally. These letters are sometimes regarded as versions of a plan for a preface to the tragedy.12 As a rule, though, Pushkin would use Russian when he wrote to fellow writers, including those with whom he was not on the best of terms. Viazemskii, to whom Pushkin wrote very frequently, Anton Del’vig, Vasilii Zhukovskii, Vil’gel’m Kiukhel’beker, Petr Pletnev, Sergei Sobolevskii – to all these friends and men of letters Pushkin wrote in Russian. This was no doubt because in friendly correspondence, as Maimin has put it, where Pushkin felt more independent and free, where he was not bound by conventions of genre or of any other literary sort, where he would simultaneously remember and forget that he was a writer, he could more boldly experiment with words and more boldly seek things out. (Maimin 1962: 78) It is instructive, incidentally, that the members of the literary community to whom Pushkin wrote included women, such as Nadezhda Durova and the poetess Aleksandra Fuks, as well as men. In fact, the last letter that Pushkin wrote, on 27 January 1837, just a few hours before his fateful duel, was addressed to a woman, Aleksandra Ishimova, a translator and writer of children’s stories, and it was written in Russian. Thus, the sense of belonging to a fellowship of writers may have proved stronger than conventional social etiquette in determining Pushkin’s choice of language for letters to other members of the literary community. Pushkin’s letters in French, on the other hand, are rarely distinguished by any stylistic questing and the epithets used in them are for the most part of a traditional nature (charmante boudeuse; âme charmante; votre dernière lettre est charmante; cette charité toute chrétienne et charmante; triste jeunesse; un sort aussi triste; un aussi triste malade que moi).13 When hyperbole occurs in them – for instance, les paroles seraient trop froides et trop faibles pour vous exprimer mon attendrissement et ma reconaissance (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 13, pp. 113–14)14 – it is, for the most part, a trivial device of the social world, rather than a means of increasing expressiveness. The example I have just given is from the draft of a letter to Vera Viazemskaia, who was the wife of Pushkin’s friend Petr Viazemskii and with whom Pushkin had a very good relationship. The letter was written in 1824 in his village at Mikhailovskoe, when Pushkin had many unpleasant things to contend with and grounds for grief, so its tone is warranted. However, it is laden with poetic stock phrases of the ‘high style’, such as le bruit d’une fontaine me fait mal à la lettre – je crois qu’un beau ciel me ferait pleurer de rage (vol. 13, p. 114).15 It is as if the ­letter-writer is ­assuming

178  n ina dmi tr ie va the role of Romantic hero, which the French language helps him to do. When everything goes wrong, the author complains of ‘a cold muse’ (une froide Muse), although in fact he worked a great deal, and fruitfully, during this period. Here, as Ekaterina Dmitrieva has observed, ‘we may see Pushkin’s distinctive protean quality, as regards language as well as addressee, with the “elegiac” and “romantic” version of the author’s cast of mind being more closely associated with the letter in French’ (Dmitrieva 2010: 76). Pushkin uses the possibilities that French offers to poeticise reality. Sometimes, it is true, high-flown lexis may turn out to be a means of being ironic. In a short note of spring 1825 to Anna Vul’f on a prosaic subject, use of this lexis sounds like ridicule: De grâce, les plumes que vous avez eu la magnanimité de me tailler et que j’ai eu l’insolence d’oublier! (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 13, p. 177).16 The note to Anna Vul’f from which I have just quoted belongs to a period of Pushkin’s life when the exiled poet, living in Mikhailovskoe, found a release by mixing a great deal with his neighbours on the estate of Trigorskoe, to whom he became close. The atmosphere of that period is best described in the following lines written by Pushkin himself: В Троегорском до ночи, А в Михайловском до света; Дни любви посвящены, Ночью царствуют стаканы, Мы же – то смертельно пьяны, То мертвецки влюблены. (vol. 13, p. 109)17

These lines were written in a letter to a friend of Pushkin’s, Aleksei Vul’f, who was Anna’s brother and the son of the woman who owned Trigorskoe, Praskov’ia Osipova. (This was her name after her remarriage, following the death of her first husband, Nikolai Vul’f, in 1813.) The atmosphere that reigned in Trigorskoe’s little society was one of friendship, mild flirtation, light-hearted love and real love, and it was ‘extremely conducive to the general enthusiasm for correspondence’ (Vol’pert 2007: 54). Praskov’ia, Anna, Aleksei and Praskov’ia’s nieces were all writing letters to each other. To a considerable extent, the whole ‘playful’ situation, in which correspondence had an important place, was inspired by the epistolary novel Dangerous Liaisons (Les liaisons dangereuses, 1782) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, ‘the most “playful novel” of the age’, as it has been called (Vol’pert 2007: 55). Pushkin, like the heroes of this novel, easily masters the epistolary game, freely changing the tone of his letters. For example, there is a pronounced respectfulness in his

pus hkin’s le t t e r s i n f r e n c h   179 letters to Praskov’ia, while his letters to his brother (who is also included in this game of correspondence) are written as friendly didactic missives. ‘The “fake” letter’, in Larisa Vol’pert’s words, ‘the cunning addendum to someone else’s letter, the merry “report in verse” – all these pranks in the “realm of correspondence” are [Pushkin’s] element’ (p. 61). It was in the context of this ‘field of play’ that Pushkin also wrote his letters to Anna Kern, Praskov’ia’s niece, who was staying at Trigorskoe in the autumn of 1825 and to whom he addressed his famous poem ‘I Recall a Wondrous Moment’ (‘Ia pomniu chudnoe mgnoven’e’). In five letters written in French in a surge of sincere passion, we may nonetheless detect signs of ‘play’. Thus on 28 August 1825, for example, Pushkin dispatched two letters to Anna Kern in Riga, one for her and the other, supposedly, to her aunt, Praskov’ia. However, Pushkin knew very well that Praskov’ia was not actually in Riga, so both letters were intended for Kern herself. Nevertheless he forewarned her: Ne décachetez pas la lettre ci-jointe. Ce n’est pas bien. M-me votre tante s’en fâcherait (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 13, p. 214).18 This letter was fake, full of accusations made in jest about Anna Kern’s flirtatiousness: Elle est étourdie, mais patience: encore une vingtaine d’années et elle se corrigera, je vous le promets; quant à sa coquetterie, vous avez tout-à-fait raison, elle est désolante (vol. 13, p. 215).19 Afraid that this letter might just fall into the hands of Anna’s aunt, though, Pushkin wrote to Kern again: Au nom du ciel n’envoyez pas à M-me Ossipof la lettre que vous avez trouvée dans votre paquet. Ne voyezvous pas qu’elle était écrite pour votre éducation particulière? Gardez-la pour vous ou vous allez nous brouiller (vol. 13, p. 228).20 Pushkin truly enjoyed this ‘epistolary game’: Mais admirez comme le bon Dieu mêle les choses: M-me Ossipof décachette une lettre à vous, vous décachettez une lettre à elle, je décachette une lettre de Netty – et nous y trouvons tous de quoi nous édifier – vraiment c’est un charme! (vol. 13, p. 215)21

PUS HK I N ’ S L ETTERS TO H I S F UT URE MOT H ER -INLAW AND TO NATAL ’ I A GONC H AROV A There is no doubt that Pushkin’s letter-writing, as well as his artistic creation, was influenced by French literature. Letters written in French in which he expressed his feelings and declared his love are very reminiscent of the texts of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French novels (Vol’pert 2007: 147–50; Dmitrieva 2010: 71–5). Among his rough drafts there are two extant texts that it is usual to treat as drafts of love

180  n ina dmi tr ie va letters and whose tone echoes the declaration of love made by the hero of Benjamin Constant’s novel Adolphe, published in 1816, a novel that Pushkin valued very highly. The letter in Adolphe contains the following passage: Lorsque le moment arrive où je puis vous voir, je […] retarde l’instant du bonheur. Tout près de vous je crains encore quelque obstacle.22 And here are the lines from Pushkin’s draft: Quoique vous voir et vous entendre soit pour moi le bonheur, j’aime mieux vous écrire que vous parler. Votre présence m’attriste et me décourage.23 There are further textual parallels. In the text of the letter from Adolphe we find this: Pendant des heures qui nous séparent, j’erre au hasard.24 And in Pushkin’s draft we find: Que je vienne errer autour de vous and Je pourrai venir en pèlerinage errer autour de votre maison.25 The obvious closeness of Pushkin’s texts to the French literary tradition in the second half of the eighteenth century has prompted one modern scholar to have doubts about the genre of these texts and to suggest that we may be dealing here not with letters but with the outline of some work of prose fiction on a ‘society’ theme (Larionova forthcoming).26 We may also cite the example of another ‘literary’ letter, which stands out sharply against the background of Pushkin’s Russian letters to his brother in the autumn of 1822. This is a letter of moral admonition that he wrote to Lev in French: Vous êtes dans l’âge où on doit songer à la carrière que l’on doit parcourir (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 13, p. 49).27 This letter is to a considerable extent confessional. Pushkin talks in it about the attractions of friendship, the need to avoid patronage and relationships with women – Les principes que je vous propose, je les dois à une douloureuse expérience (vol. 13, p. 50).28 In stylistic tone, this letter too can be compared to the hero’s letter in Constant’s Adolphe (Dmitrieva 2010: 73–4). Parallels also come to light between Pushkin’s letter to Lev and the novel Strayings of the Heart and Mind (Les égarements du cœur et de l’esprit, 1736–8) by Crébillon-fils. Among the lessons the young hero is taught by a society lion, for example, there is the following injunction: sacrifier votre vanité à vos interêts.29 Pushkin advises his brother in his letter: Les petites friponneries de la vanité nous rendent ridicules et méprisables (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 13, p. 50).30 In this letter, which in essence is the code of a man of society, we may detect, incidentally, a possible rough outline of the subject-matter of Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin (Evgenii Onegin) (Levicheva 2001: 41). This use of French literary models in letters, as well as the use of French as a language of flirtation and courtship, is also well illustrated in Pushkin’s pursuit of his future wife, Natal’ia Goncharova. This pursuit was full of drama. Pushkin’s first proposal to Natal’ia received an evasive reply, but he drew some hope from the fact that he was not categorically

pus hkin’s le t t e r s i n f r e n c h   181 rejected, and he hastened to write to Natal’ia’s mother, on 1 May 1829: C’est à genoux, c’est en versant des larmes de reconnaissance que j’aurais dû Vous écrire (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 14, p. 45).31 This may be compared with the beginning of a letter from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1757–60): Pénétré d’une douleur qui doit durer autant que moi, je me jette à vos pieds, madame […]32 One cannot imagine Pushkin writing such sentimental words in Russian. After all, in the 1820s, as Dmitrieva has explained, any sort of sentimentality seemed a ludicrous, absurd anachronism in Pushkin’s milieu and way of life. Accordingly, the signs of sentimentality that are just coming into view in Pushkin’s Russian letters were ‘removed’ there and then by the introduction of motifs of quite a different sort, so great at that time was the taboo against self-revelation. Only in letters written in French was there no fear of expressing feelings and seeming ridiculous, since sentimentality and a capacity and enthusiasm for self-confession had become firmly established through French literature in the second half of the eighteenth century. (Dmitrieva 2010: 71) We also find Pushkin adopting the practice of reusing material from his own earlier letters, as well as literary material. Thus in an even more ‘self-revealing’, confessional letter to his future mother-in-law, he writes on 5 April 1830, the day before he proposed to Natal’ia a second time: J’ai tant de choses à dire et plus j’y pense, plus les idées me viennent tristes et décourageantes. Je m’en vais vous les exposer toutes sincères et toutes diffuses, en implorant votre patience, votre indulgence surtout (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 14, p. 75).33 The structure of this letter in terms of subject-matter and meaning is foreshadowed by a letter of 1826, when he had been courting Sof’ia Pushkina and had turned for help to his friend Vasilii Zubkov, who was married to her sister. In that letter, which he had written in French with some Russian interpolations, he asked Zubkov to act as an intermediary and reflected on his desire to marry and on his life: Ma vie jusqu’à présent si errante, si orageuse, mon caractère inégal, jaloux, susceptible, violent et faible à la fois – voilà ce qui me donne des moments de réflexion pénible (vol. 13, p. 311).34 This passage may be compared with the following lines from the letter to Natal’ia Goncharova’s mother: Les torts de ma première jeunesse se présentèrent à mon imagination; ils n’ont été que trop violents, et la calomnie les a encore aggravés (vol. 14, p. 75).35 In both letters, Pushkin expresses a worry about whether he can make his chosen partner happy: je tremble de ne pouvoir la rendre aussi heureuse que je le désire, he writes in 1826,36 and in 1830, Toutefois ne murmurera-t-elle

182  n ina dmi tr ie va pas si sa p­ osition dans le monde ne sera pas aussi brillante qu’elle le mérite et que je l’aurais désiré? (vol. 14, p. 76).37 It is interesting that in his brief note to Zubkov in November 1826 Pushkin, who was not sure that his courtship would succeed, wrote: je pars la mort dans le coeur (vol. 13, p. 301),38 while in the letter to Natal’ia’s mother we read: je n’eus pas le courage de m’expliquer, j’allais à Pétersbourg la mort dans l’âme (vol. 14, p. 76).39 We find Pushkin reusing a passage from a letter, this time for a plainly literary purpose, in this same period of his life, in May 1830, when he wrote an outline of an obviously autobiographical nature, which was accompanied by a note ‘from the French’: ‘My fate is decided: I am getting married … The one I have loved for two whole years …’ (vol. 8, p. 406; my use of bold). Compare this with the phrasing in the letter (mentioned in the first section above) that Pushkin wrote to his parents telling them about his intention to get married: Mes très chers parents, je m’adresse à vous dans un moment qui va fixer mon sort pour le reste de ma vie. Je veux me marier à une jeune personne que j’aime depuis un an (vol. 14, p. 77; my use of bold).40 Thus Pushkin had mastered the tradition of the French literary letter to such an extent that it became in a sense a ‘commonplace’ for him and emerged without his being conscious of it when he described situations along with feelings and experiences. Pushkin’s letters to his fiancée herself, like his letters to her mother, were written in French. However, unlike the letter written to her mother that we examined above, his letters to Natal’ia Goncharova show no obvious signs of French literary influence – they are written in a very restrained manner and without sentimentality and high-flown turns of phrase. Pushkin does write in French, as etiquette requires, but his feeling is stronger than this requirement: he breaks the rule, addressing his fiancée in Russian, and the text becomes less formal, as we see from a letter of 30 September 1830: Мой ангел, votre affection est la seule chose de ce monde qui m’empêche de me pendre à la porte cochère de mon triste château (vol. 14, p. 114).41 Even when he addresses her in French, in a letter of 11 October 1830, it sounds affectionate: Adieu, mon bel ange. Je baise le bout de vos ailes, comme disait Voltaire à des gens qui ne vous valaient pas (vol. 14, p. 116).42 In August 1830, Pushkin left St Petersburg for Nizhnii Novgorod Province via Moscow, to go to his father’s estate at Boldino, from which he wrote letters to Natal’ia. In September, cholera broke out in Moscow and access to the old capital was cut off. Pushkin was confined to Boldino, in quarantine. He made attempts to leave for Moscow, but they were in vain. He was very concerned for the safety of his fiancée, who had remained in the ‘plague-ridden’ city, and when a long time went

pus hkin’s le t t e r s i n f r e n c h   183 by without a letter from her he put aside the niceties of society and wrote to her, around 29 October 1830, in Russian: Милостивая государыня, Наталья Николаевна, я по-французски браниться не умею, так позвольте мне говорить вам по-русски, а вы, мой ангел, отвечайте мне хоть по-чухонски, да только отвечайте (vol. 14, p. 118).43 Russian, for Pushkin, was the language of personal, confidential communication. After his marriage, he therefore wrote to Natal’ia only in Russian, often deliberately using demotic forms, as, for example, in 1834: Жена моя милая, женка мой ангел – я сегодня уж писал тебе, да письмо мое как-то неудалось. Начал я было за здравие, да свел за упокой. Начал нежностями, а кончил плюхой (vol. 15, p. 136; I have rendered the colloquialisms in bold).44 As a bilingual, of course, Pushkin does sometimes use individual French words and phrases, but the number of them is minimal. He uses French to convey other people’s remarks (that is to say, remarks that were uttered in French) and certain fixed expressions, such as toute réflexion faite, en bon parent and dans l’interêt de.45 His persistent attempt to make Russian the language of communication in his family went together with an ironic and patronising attitude towards his wife’s ideas and opinions, as we see from the following passage in a letter of 11 June 1834: Мой совет тебе и сестрам быть подале от двора: в нем толку мало […] меня бы в П.[етер]Б.[ург] не заманили и московским калачом. Жил бы себе барином. Но вы, бабы, не понимаете счастия независимости и готовы закабалить себя навеки, чтобы только сказали про вас: Hier Madame une telle était décidément la plus belle et la mieux mise du bal. Прощай, Madame une telle. (vol. 15, p. 159; colloquialisms in bold)46

The proximity of the demotic Russian word баба and the French madame speaks volumes. There is more here, of course, than an attack on the French language of high society; Pushkin is also intensely irritated by a life of dependency in the capital.

PUS HK I N ’ S L ETTERS TO T H E SOV EREIG N AND TO CO U NT B ENCKEN D ORFF Choice of language in letters of an official nature, particularly the language of letters to Russian emperors, was quite a different matter from language choice in private correspondence. If it was natural, as Iurii Lotman thought, to address oneself to Alexander I in French, because

184  n ina dmi tr ie va Alexander’s court acknowledged the ‘equality of secular people of “good society”’, Nicholas I, in Lotman’s words, ‘took a letter written by a subject in French as an impertinence’ (Lotman 1992–3: 361). This interpretation may be applied very successfully to the history of Pushkin’s missives to the upper spheres. Pushkin wrote twice to Alexander I in 1825, and both letters were written in French. The first letter was a request for permission to go abroad for medical treatment (the letter was not actually handed to the emperor). The second, in draft, was plainly written at a moment of exaltation, since it contains some very candid reflections: je vous ai dit la vérité avec une franchise […] (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 13, p. 228).47 The text of a petition that Pushkin addressed to Nicholas in May or the first half of June 1826 has also survived, but this request was written in Russian. That is not to say, all things considered, that language choice in this area was strictly fixed. A contemporary of Pushkin’s, the writer Antonii Pogorel’skii, for example, wrote to both sovereigns, Alexander I and Nicholas I, in French. His letter of 1 (13) January 1826 to Nicholas is the letter of a loyal subject and contains no hint of an impudent tone, even though it was in French. Language choice in official correspondence, then, is not always easily explained. Perhaps it would be most accurate to say, as Irina Paperno suggests, that ‘Russian, as the language of state service, was prescribed for letters to the sovereign and high-ranking officials. French in a letter to the sovereign was a sign that the letter was not official but an approach to the tsar as a private individual’ (Paperno 1975: 148). Pushkin’s communication with Nicholas took place through the head of the gendarmerie, Benckendorff, with whom he had to conduct quite a steady correspondence. This correspondence began after Pushkin had returned to Moscow from his exile and had had an audience with the tsar on 8 September 1826. At first, Pushkin addressed himself to Benckendorff only in Russian. Initially, his mood was positive: he expected his communication with Nicholas to bring benefits. ‘The tsar has freed me from censorship’, he wrote in a letter of 9 November 1826 to the poet Nikolai Iazykov. ‘He himself will be my censor. That’s an immense advantage, of course’ (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 13, p. 305). Pushkin wrote his first letter in French to Benckendorff (and therefore, in fact, to the tsar) on 10 November 1829. This was a letter in which he justified himself for an unauthorised trip he had made to the Caucasus, which had incurred the tsar’s displeasure. It was a response to a letter Benckendorff had written to him, in Russian: The Sovereign Emperor […] deigns to ask you with whose permission you undertook this journey. I for my part humbly ask you to

pus hkin’s le t t e r s i n f r e n c h   185 inform me why you did not deign to keep your word to me and set out for the Transcaucasian regions. (vol. 14, p. 49) It was difficult and unpleasant for Pushkin to have to vindicate himself when he had broken a promise to the supreme authority and it may be that it seemed easier to do this in French than in Russian. In subsequent letters, Pushkin quite often resorted to French in his correspondence with Benckendorff. As a rule this was in complicated circumstances, which were frequently unpleasant too. When Pushkin was preparing to get married, for example, he approached the tsar through Benckendorff with a request that he be allowed to affirm his political reliability: Je suis tout embarassé de m’adresser à l’Autorité dans une circonstance purement personnelle […] M-me Gontcharof est effrayée de donner sa fille à un homme qui aurait le malheur d’être mal vu de l’empereur.48 He also requested permission to publish his tragedy Boris Godunov without cuts: Les circonstances actuelles me pressent et je viens supplier Sa Majesté de me délier les mains et de me permettre d’imprimer ma tragédie comme je l’entends (vol. 14, p. 78).49 Having received notification from Benckendorff that the emperor ‘deigned to read [Boris Godunov] with particular pleasure’, Pushkin replied in Russian, on 18 January 1831: written in the previous reign, Boris Godunov owes its appearance not only to the private patronage that the sovereign has conferred upon me but also to the freedom boldly granted by the monarch to Russian writers at a time and in circumstances when any other government would have tried to restrict and fetter the printing of books. (vol. 14, p. 146) But as soon as the next complication or unpleasantness arose, French was called for again. In a letter accompanying the poem ‘My Pedigree’ (‘Moia rodoslovnaia’), on 24 November 1831, Pushkin cited the reasons why he had written the poem, which was directed at Faddei Bulgarin, who had published a coarse lampoon against Pushkin, in which it was said in particular that a certain poet […], an imitator of Byron, descended from a black man, or was it a black woman, I don’t recall, tried to prove that one of his ancestors was a negro prince […] the skipper claimed he had bought the negro for a bottle of rum. (Bulgarin 1830) It is of interest that Nicholas wrote a note in pencil on this letter, in French:

186  n ina dmi tr ie va Vous pouvez dire de ma part à Пушкин, que je suis parfaitement de l’avis de feu son ami Delvig des injures aussi basses aussi viles que celles dont on l’a régalé, déshonorent celui qui les prononce, et non celui à qui on les adresse; la seule arme contre est le mépris; voilà ce qu’à sa place j’aurais fait. – Quant à ces vers, j’y trouve de l’esprit, mais encore plus de fiel qu’autre chose. Il eut mieux fait pour l’honneur de sa plume, et surtout de sa raison de ne pas les faire courir. (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 14, p. 377)50 Among Pushkin’s letters to Benckendorff there is one particularly interesting item, namely a letter of 24 April 1827 in which Pushkin makes a request to be allowed to leave St Petersburg to go to Moscow. The letter was written in Russian, but the draft of it had been written in French. In terms of register and subject-matter the two versions are identical: this is a formal petition and the only difference lies in the fixed turns of phrase that are used in one or other language. We have before us a graphic example of thinking in two languages. Why Pushkin chose Russian rather than French for his final version remains unclear in this instance.

COD E - S W I TCH I N G AN D PRONOMINAL U SAG E I return, finally, to two questions of language use that have arisen at several points in this chapter. In general, Pushkin did not approve of the mixing of two languages in the same letter. In a letter of 1822, for example, he told his brother: ‘you ought to be ashamed of yourself, my dear, for writing a letter half in Russian and half in French; you’re not a Moscow cousin’ (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 13, p. 35). However, Pushkin was guilty of this sin himself. In fact, language mixing occurs quite frequently in his correspondence. In some cases Pushkin’s code-switching reflected common Russian epistolary practice, for instance the use of the original language, as we have seen, to quote or report the utterances of someone else. Thus in one of his letters to his sister (a letter of August 1825, which was otherwise written entirely in French), he inserts a few lines in Russian: Няня заочно у вас, Ольга Сергеевна, ручки цалует [sic] – голубушки моей (vol. 13, p. 209).51 No doubt this is an exact transmission of his nanny’s words. Again, after he had had a serious row with his father, who had accused him of teaching his brother and sister atheism, Pushkin wrote about this to his friend Zhukovskii, on 31 October 1824, conveying his father’s rebukes in French: Отец призывает брата и повелевает ему не знаться avec ce monstre, ce fils dénaturé (vol. 13, p. 116).52 Similarly, in a letter of 18

pus hkin’s le t t e r s i n f r e n c h   187 October 1830, which he wrote to Natal’ia in French, there is a large interpolation in Russian, reporting a conversation Pushkin had had with a station-master when he was trying to leave Boldino. The conversation with this non-noble man was conducted, of course, in Russian. Pushkin probably quotes the station-master’s remarks quite accurately: Мы не виноваты-с (It’s not our fault, sir). As often happens in such cases, the writer then continues his narrative in the language into which he has switched, in this case Russian: нечего делать – еду назад […] сижу в Болдино да кисну (vol. 14, p. 125).53 This Russian interpolation in a colloquial register introduces an element of authenticity into the letter, lowering the tone that etiquette required. In other cases, though, the code-switching seems to suggest particular closeness to the addressee, as in letters of 26 April 1828 and 4 August 1830 to Vera Viazemskaia and a letter of 22 January 1830 to his friend, a ‘comrade of [his] bachelor’s life’, Mikhail Sudienko. Likewise, interpolations in Russian in Pushkin’s letters in French to Anna Kern attest to the sincerity of Pushkin’s feelings for her. Ах вы чудотворка или чудотворица!, he wrote to her on 25 July 1825 (vol. 13, p. 193).54 And again, in August that year: Je relis votre lettre en long et en large et je dis: милая! прелесть! divine! … et puis: ах, мерзкая! Pardon, belle et douce; mais c’est comme ça (vol. 13, p. 207).55 As far as pronominal usage was concerned, it would seem that the second-person plural form of address in French, vous, which had become established by epistolary etiquette, was not supposed to introduce any emotional or evaluative nuance. On the whole, Pushkin observed this rule. Thus he would write a letter in Russian to a close friend addressing him as ты, but if he happened to use French in the letter – for example, to send his regards to the addressee’s wife – then at that point he would switch to the second-person plural form vous. However, we do know of one instance in which the rule is broken. In one of his letters to Anna Kern, to whom he wrote only in French, we find an example of the second-person singular French object pronoun: Votre conseil d’écrire à S[a] M[ajesté] m’a touché comme une preuve de ce que vous avez songé à moi – je t’en remercie à genoux (vol. 13, p. 229; my use of bold).56 This secondperson singular form immediately strikes the reader: undoubtedly it is a markedly emotional form of address. Once the rule was broken, it would seem, correspondents could continue in the same vein. Thus Pushkin’s close friend Viazemskii addresses his fiancée as tu in a letter he wrote to her in French, and subsequently, as his wife, she always wrote to him in French but addressed him as tu as well. A contrast between vous and tu, then, was bound to exist in the consciousness of Russian bilinguals. * * *

188  n ina dmi tr ie va In 1864, Pushkin’s daughter, Natal’ia Merenburg, gave the letters her father wrote to his fiancée, her mother, to the novelist Ivan Turgenev to publish. In his preface to the publication, Turgenev wrote: ‘In spite of his French upbringing, Pushkin was not only a talented man but also the most Russian person of his time’ (Turgenev 1878: 7). Pushkin’s letters bear out this idea. In a sense, Pushkin is a hostage to his French upbringing. French literature exerted a very strong influence on him. Moreover, as we have seen, in many instances he could not manage without French. Nevertheless, he tried his utmost – at any rate when he was communicating with people close to him – to write in Russian. And although his letters in French, on the lexical and stylistic level, were more ‘sensitive’, his most open and candid letters were written in Russian. This apparently paradoxical situation can be explained by the fact that he was able to take ready-made forms from the resources of the French language, ‘whose mechanical forms are already at hand and known to everyone’ (the words are Pushkin’s own: see Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 11, p. 21). Texts could be constructed from those resources that are in a sense based on a template. Such templates are very convenient for official letters, awkward explanations and those occasions when one can make do with established formulations or when one is reluctant to take the trouble to search for original versions. But when it is necessary to say something that is not trite, something of one’s own that is particularly personal, Pushkin begins to be creative, and for this he needs Russian. For this reason, his Russian letters are more ‘alive’.

NOTES   1. See also Chapter 12 in this volume, in which Nina Dmitrieva and Gesine Argent discuss bilingualism and diglossia.   2. On the first of these sociolinguistic topics, code-switching, see also Chapters 6 and 7 in this volume, by Rodolphe Baudin and Jessica Tipton respectively.  3. ‘I implore you, write to tell me what you can do to’. The extant manuscript of Pushkin’s draft breaks off at this point. Further quotations from Pushkin’s works and letters are from this edition, and the volume and page numbers are given in brackets in the text of the chapter.   4. ‘May yesterday be blessed a thousand times, and a thousand more, my dear Alexandre, for the letter we have received from you. It has filled me with joy and gratitude. Yes, my friend. That’s the word. For so long I had forgotten the sweetness of the tears I shed when I read it.’   5. ‘My father had a brilliant idea – to send me some clothes – could you remind him from me.’   6. ‘I’ll reply to you as garrulously as possible, and write back to me in Russian, because, thank God, with my constitutional friends I’ll soon forget the Russian alphabet.’

pus hkin’s le t t e r s i n f r e n c h   189   7. ‘You will probably then attend to your affairs and lose your indolence and your facility for letting yourself go and for living from one day to the next. From now on, you should turn to your parents. I have not paid your petty gambling debts, because I have not gone to seek out your companions.’   8. ‘Have you come back from your journey? Do you always enjoy your solitary walks? What are you reading?’   9. ‘Are you married? Are you ready to get married? Do you doubt my friendship?’ 10. ‘Dear Olia, thank you for your letter, you’re very kind and I love you very much.’ 11. ‘My friend, I shall write to you in the language of Europe.’ 12. The letter as preface belongs in a European tradition; for example, it preceded tragedies by the neo-classical dramatists Corneille and Racine and by Voltaire. 13. I.e. ‘a charming sulky woman’, ‘a charming soul’, ‘your last letter is charming’, ‘this very Christian and charming charity’, ‘sad youth’, ‘such a sad fate’, ‘a sick person as sad as I am’. 14. I.e. ‘words would be too cold and weak to express to you the emotion and gratitude I feel.’ 15. ‘The noise of a fountain is making it difficult for me to write – I think a beautiful sky would make me cry with rage.’ 16. ‘Be so kind as to send me quills that you have been magnanimous enough to sharpen for me and that I have been so insolent as to forget.’ 17. ‘In Troegorskoe till nightfall, /​In Mikhailovskoe till daybreak; /​Days devoted to love, /​At night drinking glasses reign, /​We are either dead drunk, /​Or mortally in love.’ 18. ‘Don’t open the attached letter. That would not be good. It would make madame your aunt angry.’ 19. ‘She is thoughtless, but be patient: in about twenty years from now she’ll be cured of it, I promise you; as for her coquetry, you are absolutely right, it’s appalling.’ 20. ‘In heaven’s name don’t send Madame Osipova the letter you found in your package. Don’t you see that it was written for your private education? Keep it to yourself or you’ll confound us.’ 21. ‘But admire the way the good God mixes things up: Madame Osipova opens a letter to you, you open a letter to her, I open a letter to Netty – and we all find something to edify us – it really is a delight!’ 22. ‘When the moment comes at which I can see you, I […] postpone the instant of happiness. When I am near to you, I fear some new barrier will confront me.’ 23. ‘Although it is a joy for me to see you and hear you, I prefer to write to you rather than to speak to you. Your presence saddens and disheartens me.’ 24. ‘During the hours that we are apart, I wander aimlessly.’ 25. I.e. ‘That I may come to wander near you’; ‘I shall be able to come in pilgrimage to wander round your house.’ 26. Doubts about what genre the texts belong to have been expressed before, by P. A. Efremov and B. L. Modzalevskii. 27. ‘You are of an age where one may dream of the career one should follow.’ 28. ‘I owe the principles that I commend to you to painful experience.’ 29. I.e. ‘sacrifice your vanity to your interests.’ 30. I.e. ‘The little roguish tricks of vanity make us ridiculous and contemptible.’ See Dmitrieva (2010: 73–4). 31. ‘I ought to write to you on bended knees, shedding tears of gratitude.’ 32. ‘Consumed by a grief that will last as long as I live, I throw myself at your feet,

190  n ina dmi tr ie va Madam […]’ The quotation is from the second letter of Part 3 of Rousseau’s work. 33. ‘I have so many things to say, and the more I think about them, the ideas that come to me get sadder and more disheartening. I’m going to reveal them to you, all sincere and diffuse, begging your patience and above all your indulgence.’ 34. ‘I have led such a roving and stormy life up until now, my character is so uneven, jealous, touchy, intense and weak, all at the same time – that is what gives me moments of painful reflection.’ 35. ‘The faults of my first youth presented themselves to my imagination; they were just too intense, and calumny made them worse still.’ 36. ‘I tremble at the thought that I might not be able to make her as happy as I want to.’ 37. ‘And yet, will she not complain if her position in society is not so brilliant as she deserves or as I would have wanted?’ See also Dmitrieva (2010: 71–2). 38. ‘I am leaving with death in my heart.’ 39. ‘I didn’t have the courage to explain myself, I was going to St Petersburg with death in my soul.’ 40. ‘My very dear parents, I am turning to you at a moment which will determine my fate for the rest of my life. I wish to marry a young person whom I have loved for a year.’ 41. ‘My angel, your affection is the only thing in the world that prevents me from hanging myself at the main entrance to my sad castle.’ 42. ‘Farewell, my beautiful angel. I kiss the tips of your wings, as Voltaire used to say to people who were not worthy of you.’ 43. ‘Dear Madam, Natal’ia Nikolaevna, I can’t swear in French, so allow me to speak to you in Russian, and you, my angel, please reply to me in Finnish [i.e. the language of the original inhabitants of the St Petersburg region] or whatever you like, but just reply.’ 44. ‘My darling wife, wifey my angel, I’ve already tried to write to you today, but my letter didn’t come out quite right. I started off well but finished badly. I began with terms of endearment and ended up with a slap.’ 45. I.e. ‘all things considered’, ‘like a good relation’, ‘in the interests of’. 46. ‘My advice to you and your sisters is to get away from the court. There’s not much good sense in it […] you wouldn’t get me there for anything [literally “even a Moscow loaf wouldn’t lure me there”]. I’d rather live my own life as a lord of the manor. But you womenfolk don’t appreciate the blessing of independence and you’re prepared to enslave yourselves for ever just so that people will say about you: ‘such and such was definitely the most beautiful and the best turned out lady at the ball’. Farewell, madam such and such.’ 47. ‘I have told you the truth with a frankness […]’ 48. ‘I am very embarrassed to address myself to the Authority about a purely personal matter […] Madame Goncharova is frightened of giving her daughter away to a man who has had the misfortune to be viewed with disfavour by the emperor.’ 49. ‘My present circumstances are difficult and I beg His Majesty to untie my hands and allow me to publish my tragedy in the form I mean it to be in.’ 50. ‘You may tell Pushkin from me that I am entirely in agreement with his late friend Del’vig. Insults as base and vile as those with which he has been assailed dishonour the person who utters them, not the person at whom they are directed; the only weapon against them is contempt; that is what I would have done if I were in his position. As for his poem, I find some wit in it, but more spleen than anything else. It

pus hkin’s le t t e r s i n f r e n c h   191 is better for the honour of his pen and above all his mind not to circulate the poem.’ Del’vig dissuaded Pushkin from publishing a reply to Bulgarin. 51. ‘Nanny kisses your dear little hands in your absence, Olg’a Sergeevna, my little darling.’ 52. ‘My father has summoned my brother and ordered him to have nothing to do with this monster, this unnatural son.’ 53. ‘There’s nothing that can be done about it. I go back […] I’m cooped up in Boldino and mope.’ 54. ‘Oh, you’re a miracle-worker!’ 55. ‘I re-read your letter in every detail and I say; [she’s] sweet! A charm! Divine! ... and then: ah! She’s foul! Pardon me, my sweet and beautiful woman; but that’s how it is.’ 56. ‘Your advice that I write to His Majesty touched me as a proof of what you thought of me and I thank you on my knees.’

REFERENCES Bulgarin, F. (1830), ‘Vtoroe pis’mo iz Karlova’, in Severnaia pchela, no. 94 (7 August 1830). Dmitrieva, E. E. (2010), ‘O nekotorykh voprosakh bilingvizma pushkinskogo pis’ma i pushkinskogo ėpistoliariia’, in O. D. Anokhina (ed.), Mul’tilingvizm i genesis teksta. Materialy mezhdunarodnogo simpoziuma 3–5 oktiabria 2007, Moscow: IMLI RAN, pp. 62–81. Kazanskii, B. (1937), ‘Pis’ma Pushkina’, Literaturnyi kritik, 2: 98–105. Larionova, E. A. (forthcoming), ‘Imitatsiia frantsuzskogo liubovnogo pis’ma u Pushkina’. Levicheva, T. I. (2001), Pis’ma A. S. Pushkina iuzhnogo perioda (1820–1824), Moscow: Nauka. Levkovich, Ia. L. (1979), ‘Iz nabliudenii nad chernovikami pisem Pushkina’, in Pushkin, Issledovaniia i materialy, St Petersburg: Nauka, vol. 9, pp. 123–40. Lotman, Iu. M. (1992–3), ‘Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke’, in Lotman, Izbrannye stat’i, 3 vols, Tallinn: Aleksandra, vol. 2, pp. 350–68. Lotman, Iu. M. (1997), ‘Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. Biografiia pisatelia’, in Lotman, Pushkin, St Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB. Maimin, E. A. (1962), ‘Druzheskaia perepiska Pushkina s tochki zreniia stilistiki’, in M. Efimova (ed.), Pushkinskii sbornik, Pskov: Pskovskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institut, pp. 77–87. Ostaf’evskii arkhiv kniazei Viazemskikh (1899–1913), ed. V. I. Saitov, St Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, vol. 1 (1899). Paperno, I. A. (1975), ‘O dvuiazychnoi perepiske pushkinskoi ėpokhi’, Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 358: 148–56 (Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii, 24). Pavlishcheva, O. S. (1974), ‘Vospominaniia o detstve A. S. Pushkina (so slov sestry ego O. S. Pavlishchevoi), napisannye v S.-P.-burge 26 oktiabria 1851’, in A. S. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, vol. 1, pp. 43–52. Pushkin, A. S. (1907–15), Sobranie sochinenii, St Petersburg, Petrograd: izdanie Brokgauza Efrona.

192  n ina dmi tr ie va Pushkin, A. S. (1937–49), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 16 vols, Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR. Pushkin, L. S. (1974), ‘Biograficheskoe izvestie ob A. S. Pushkine do 1826 goda’, in A. S. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, vol. 1, pp. 58–65. Stepanov, N. (2007), ‘Druzheskoe pi’smo nachala XIX veka’, in Ia. Levchenko (ed.), ‘Mladoformalisty’: Russkaia proza, St Petersburg: Petropolis, pp. 32–53. Tomashevskii, B. V. (1960), ‘Pushkin i frantsuzskaia literatura’, in Tomashevskii, Pushkin i Frantsiia, Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, pp. 62–174. Turgenev, I. S. (1878), ‘Ot izdatelia’, in Vestnik Evropy, no. 1, pp. 7–8. Vol’pert, L. I. (2007), Pushkinskaia Frantsiia, St Petersburg: Aleteiia.

c h apter 10

Instruction in EighteenthCentury Coquetry: Learning about Fashion and Speaking its Language Xénia Borderioux

F

oreign languages exerted an influence on Russian throughout the eighteenth century. The number of foreign words assimilated into Russian, taking all foreign languages together, is thought to have been at least 8,500 (Birzhakova et al. [1972] 1999: 83). French had a central place among the foreign languages known in Russia, but it did not have the same impact on Russian in all spheres. Its contact with Russian would seem to have been particularly intense in the female domain, in things to do with beauty, clothes and fashion. What role did fashion play in the acquisition of French lexis by Russian? I shall aim to provide material for an answer to this question from two types of source: first, fashion advertisements in the Russian press, which in truth were translations of material taken from French sources; and secondly, satirical publications and comedies, which parodied the special variety of Franco-Russian in which lovers of fashion expressed themselves. Taken as a whole, these texts enable us to paint a rounded picture, at one and the same time, of fashion, its vocabulary and its reception.

TH E F I RST P UB L I CAT I ONS ON FRENCH FASH IONS IN R U SS I AN Under pressure from Peter the Great, the Russian nobility adopted European costume, making use of German, French and even Hungarian and Polish models. From Peter’s time the роба (a loanword from the French robe) was one of the main models for ladies at court. This was a dress with a corset and a very wide skirt supported on both sides by a sort of frame called a ‘pannier’. This item of clothing was reserved for great

194  xén ia bo r de rio ux occasions, whereas a робронт was worn on so-called ‘ordinary’ holidays. The word denoting this latter design also comes from a French expression, robe ronde (literally, ‘round dress’), which was the name for a relatively comfortable and simple dress whose skirt was shaped like a bell. The робронт had pride of place in the female wardrobe in the reign of Catherine II. In an inventory of the dowry of Varvara Razumovskaia, dated 1774, for example, we find twenty-two of them. Taken as a whole, this document shows that the vocabulary of the ceremonial wardrobe borrowed a great deal from French: робронт с юпкою сюрсака [sur sac] золотою выложено кружевом пон де аржантон [Pont d’Argenton], 1,440 рублев; робронт с юпкою атласной капюсень [capucine], с белыми полосами, 191 рубль; робронт с юпкою гранитуровой [garniture] белой с малиновыми бархатными полосами, 162 рубли; робронт с юпкою ботде [brodée] желтой с цветочками с флеровой выкладкой, 58 рублев; робронт с юпкою тафтяной белой с серебреными и алыми полосками и с алыми цветочками с такимиж агрементами [agréments], 70 рублев; робронт с юпкою флеровой дикой с голубыми полосками с серебром с эгрементами [agréments], 50 рублев; робронт с юпкою круазе [croisée] белой полосатой голубые и алые полоски с цветочками, 25 рублев; для выкладок на плати блонт [blondes] француских шинелевых [en chenilles] белых, на 124 рубли; […] юпка фижменная белая шагриновая [chagrin], 22 рубли. (Semeistvo Razumovskikh 1880: 538)1

Thus items of clothing, fabrics and decorations migrated to the Russian court together with their names. Hence the numerous lexical borrowings that I have deciphered in brackets in the above quotation. Nonetheless, there was a growing tendency to Russify foreign words in order to make them conform to Russian morphological norms, as we see from the addition of a Russian adjectival suffix in the forms шинелевых, марливая and шагриновая. From the 1770s at the latest, Russian francophone readers were able to make use of texts in French to help them work on their personal appearance. They also learned from those texts how to talk about the subject of fashion that so preoccupied the social world. A number of French publications devoted to fashion, including periodicals, very

in structio n in e ight e e nth- ce ntu r y c o qu e t r y   195 quickly became available to them. We may cite the following by way of example: Guillaume-François-Roger Molé’s Histoire des modes françaises, ou Révolution du costume (History of French Fashions, or Revolution in Costume, 1777, which appeared in Russia in that same year); Recueil général de coiffures de Paris (General Collection of Parisian Hair-Styles, 1779, which appeared in Russia too in 1779); Manuel de la toilette et de la mode (Handbook of Toilet and Fashion, 1779 (1780)); Alphonse Leroy, Recherches sur les habillements des femmes et des enfants (Researches on Women’s and Children’s Clothes, 1772 (1780)); Cabinet des modes nouvelles (Cabinet of New Fashions, 1785 (1785)); Costumes et annales des grands théâtres de Paris (Costumes and Records of the Great Theatres of Paris, 1786–9 (1790)) (Borderioux 2013: 459). The multitude of bookshops and the variety of means of access to books (reading-rooms, loans to people in their homes, catalogue sales) made it easy for Russian readers to make use of the wares of foreign booksellers. As for Russian, the first publications devoted to description of what was new in fashion began to appear systematically in the 1780s. In the course of that decade, women everywhere in Europe began to benefit from the availability of periodicals on fashion in their native language. As a rule, these publications started out as translations of French fashion journals, in particular Cabinet des modes nouvelles. In Italy this journal supplied material for the Giornale delle nuove mode di Francia e d’Inghilterra (Journal of the New Fashions of France and England, 1786–94, published in Milan), in Venice for the Donna galante ed Erudita, giornale dedicato al bel sesso (Gallant and Learned Lady, a Journal Dedicated to the Fair Sex, 1786–8), in Holland for the Kabinet van mode en smaak (Cabinet of Fashion and Taste, 1791–4, published in Haarlem), in the German states for the Journal des Luxus und der Moden (Journal of Luxury and Fashions, 1787–1812, published in Weimar) and in England for The Fashionable Magazine; or Lady’s and Gentleman’s Monthly Recorder of New Fashions (1786, published in London). Russia too took its place in this system for distributing texts from the Cabinet des modes nouvelles. What language did the authors of these texts choose in order to present the descriptions of jewellery, hair-styles, clothes and leisure activities that they contained to a Russian readership? In fact they chose both French and Russian at the same time, as we may see from the periodical Lekarstvo ot skuki i zabot (A Cure for Boredom and Anxiety), which was edited by Ekaterina Dashkova. In 1786–7, this periodical offered four articles about the fashions of the day. The translators (there may have been more than one of them) were using not only texts about Parisian fashions but also texts about the particular taste that reigned in London and Berlin, and with good reason. The direct source of these texts was

196  xén ia bo r de rio ux not the French Cabinet des modes nouvelles but the German Journal des Luxus und der Moden, which had taken the texts from the Cabinet and from which Russian translators drew things that they thought would entertain and enrich their Russian readers. A learning process was taking place at the level of vocabulary, since fashions which were not known bore unusual names. Knowing the name of this or that article was a prerequisite if one wanted to follow fashion. In fact, it often happened that an item of clothing changed little in form, but having a new name made it into a new fashion. The Russian men or women who were translating were confronted with a text in German which retained French headings to name clothes, hair-styles and jewellery. They would translate into Russian, but putting the original word in brackets after the Russian word, as if inviting their readers to replace a widely used French word with a Russian equivalent. Парижские женщины для лета сего 1786 года избрали цвет белый […] Волоса причесывают невысоко и с навесом ко лбу; уборка же обыкновенная двоякого рода: простосердечная (à l’ingénue), с помощью несколько назад выдавшимися буклями и ежевая (en hérisson en crochet) с непримазанною расческою и одною буклею по ниже уха. (Lekarstvo ot skuki i zabot 1786: 19)2

The translation strategy that the translator of this text has chosen is to uphold the purity of the Russian language. In fact, the journal editor, Dashkova, was a savante, a lady of learning at the European level and a leader of the project to standardise the Russian language through compilation of a dictionary and grammar. The establishment of new norms for Russian is therefore one of the goals of her periodical publication. In 1787, Moskovskie vedomosti (The Moscow Gazette) offered about twenty publications on fashions, always in a section headed ‘Miscellaneous News’.3 Following the promise it had made, the journal advertised new Parisian fashions, with each item describing two or three subjects. The famous Cabinet des modes nouvelles lay behind all the texts in this series and in this case material was taken directly, without being mediated by the German journal. The translator adopted a much greater variety of strategies than the translator in Lekarstvo ot skuki i zabot had done. Six strategies were possible, as shown in Table 10.1. The translators working for Moskovskie vedomosti have plainly elected in one way or another to retain the original name of an item of fashion. They have tried to bring out the exact meaning of the French term, as in the following example: au Damier, на которых представлены шахматы различными цветами.4 It was characteristic of the Cabinet de modes

in structio n in e ight e e nth- ce ntu r y c o qu e t r y   197 Table 10.1  Possible strategies for ‘converting’ a word

Examples

Number of cases of the strategy

arc en ciel, то есть радужные (rainbow) In French, accompanied by шляпы à l’Angloise или английские (English hats) translation into impromptu, то есть не приготовившись (impromptu) Russian

23

In Russian, with 2 рожка (cornes) (two horns) круглый чепец (bonnet rond) (round bonnet) the French зеленый гораздо темноватый, иначе называемый Vert original Dragon (dark green, otherwise called dragon green) indicated понсовый или Nakara (poppy-coloured, or Nakara)

15

In French only

прическа à la Conseillère (coiffure in the councillor’s-wife

11

In translation only

цвет сажи (lamp-black) цвет чижового хвоста (colour of siskin’s tail) вермишелевые кафтаны (vermicelli-coloured kaftans)

6

style) пучок à la Panurge (bun in the style of Panurge [Panurge is a Rabelaisian character]) шляпы à la Randan, à la Sultan, à l’Androsmane (hats in the Randan/​Sultan/​Androsmane style) чепец à la Béarnoise (bonnet in the Béarnois style)

prunes de Monsieur (прюн де мосье) (of noble purple In French, colour) accompanied by transcription in à la captive (а-ля-каптиф) (captivated [by beauty]) Cyrillic letters French words assimilated by Russian

фалбала (frill, flounce) карако (caraco [sort of woman’s jacket]) гроденапль (Gros de Naples [a fabric]) неглиже (négligé) шемиз (chemise) фуро (frock)

8

7

nouvelles, which lay behind these texts, to explain the advantages and particular features of new fashions, but the Russian periodical also tried to familiarise its readers with the new vocabulary and to make the words in question known in their various forms. For example, an author, describing the same item of clothing, suggests the following possibilities within a single article: en chemise, ан шемиз, шемиз and рубашкою (to describe a blouse or shirt) or again, redingote, роденгот ажусте and реденготы или дамские сюртуки (to describe a type of coat). On the other hand, translators are inclined to cite only a French name when referring to coiffure (the

198  xén ia bo r de rio ux ensemble of hair, arranged and adorned, together with a hat). They make this choice because of the importance of the subject: it is coiffure, rather than dresses, that represents and epitomises changes in fashion (Sapori 2003). We may wonder about the logic used by the translator in each specific case. (It should be said again that we are not dealing, we think, with the work of a single individual: the translator probably changes from one publication to another, hence the multitude of solutions to the problem of naming things.) At first sight, then, the periodical publications of the years 1786–7 are instructing readers on the subject of language and favour the use of Russian to talk about fashion. However, they are only just starting to establish norms. At this stage, they themselves cannot decide between Russian and French and, when they use French, they cannot decide between the Latin alphabet and Cyrillic. The most important event in the domain of the Russian-language fashion press in the years that followed was the appearance of the monthly Magazin angliiskikh, nemetskikh i frantsuzskikh novykh mod (Magazine of New English, German and French Fashions) in 1791. It is not known who the editor of this periodical was. It was devoted entirely to the subject of fashions and taste and carried descriptions, reviews, articles and advertisements. Each number had three colour illustrations taken from the Journal des Luxus und der Moden with a lag of only two or three months. It was the first time that the Russian public had received images of fashions with comments on them. The captions directed the reader’s gaze and sometimes pointed out details that could not actually be seen in the illustrations.5 As for the periodical’s readership, it consisted of members of wealthy aristocratic society and ladies of the court. (One of the extant copies of the periodical has the binding of the Hermitage, Catherine’s private palace.) The journal’s title echoed the title Magasin des modes nouvelles, françaises et anglaises (Magazine of New Fashions, French and English) that had been adopted by the celebrated Cabinet des modes nouvelles in 1786. As in the case of Lekarstvo ot skuki i zabot, we are dealing with material that was being reproduced from the Journal des Luxus und der Moden. We do not have any sources that would enable us to establish with certainty why the German edition was preferred to the French original, but the reasons may have been of a practical kind. The German journal may have been easier to obtain, or it might have been delivered more quickly, or the translator may have had a better command of German. There may also have been a commercial reason for this choice, in that the Russian editor wished to reach the widest possible public. However, it is more likely, I think, that an ideological consideration was uppermost in his mind: the critique of French life-style that informed the German edition

in structio n in e ight e e nth- ce ntu r y c o qu e t r y   199 was faithfully reproduced in the Russian journal. In any event, it was in the spirit of the age to make use of an intermediary publication. The Russian Spectator, for example, was produced from the French translation of the English periodical. Reliant as it was on a German source, Magazin angliiskikh, nemetskikh i frantsuzskikh novykh mod adapted the contents of its source to Russian reality. In particular, the editor introduced modifications in the field of language. The advertisement in the June and December numbers of the periodical for a shop owned by Mme Teillard, who sold Parisian fashion products, is an interesting case in point.6 While the German editor merely copied an advertisement that Mme Teillard had placed in French, the Russian editor chose to translate it. His translation, more­over, was quite free. (The piece was no longer an advertisement that Mme Teillard paid a journal to publish.) The text underwent a transformation which turned the publicity into a satire on the excesses of fashion among the French: Twice a year [Mme Teillard] publishes the latest evidence of clothes in fashionable style, materials and colours and the names of the items in a European woman’s wardrobe, which continues to recognise Paris as the supreme arbiter of a wardrobe. It is not desirable that this should continue much longer, because as soon as our tailors, fashion vendors, hair-curlers and cooks go out of Fashion, then at least half the population of Paris will die of starvation. (Anon. 1791: 158) Thus the Russian reader was invited to look severely, contemptuously even, on the French fashions that had spread throughout Europe. They were excessive, embarrassing and ridiculous, whereas comfort, practicality and economy were the German virtues being commended to female Russian readers. The various articles in this magazine were more favourably disposed towards German fashions, which were more reasonable and sensible than those coming from other places such as Paris, Vienna and London. The concerns of the Magazin angliiskikh, nemetskikh i frantsuzskikh novykh mod went beyond the domain of fashion in clothes. The magazine represented an attempt to define a stylistic pathway that was fitting for the nation, and in the process helped to develop patriotic spirit in two complementary ways. First, the Russian reader was made to feel superior to the Germans, who, striving to be in fashion, were thought to have remained too fixed in their national characteristics and therefore to have created, in terms of style, a curious mismatch between elegance

200  xén ia bo r de rio ux and stinginess (Baudin 2002). The Russians recognised themselves in the Germans but at the same time contrasted themselves with them in order to rediscover their own authenticity. Secondly, the Russians disavowed French values and savoir-vivre, the unrestrained luxury, the vagaries of fashion, the dominance of seeming over being and the frivolity of behaviour that were supposedly associated with the French. We may even say that excesses in clothing epitomised this imagined moral decadence. The notion of rejecting France as a model for Russia had been pronounced in works produced by writers in the preceding decades, especially Denis Fonvizin’s Letters from France (1777–8).7 The choice of a German journal as the most immediate source for this Russian fashion periodical was therefore timely, and not coincidental: the Magazin angliiskikh, nemetskikh i frantsuzskikh novykh mod was the fruit of the Russian Enlightenment and an attempt to make a statement about the path, French or German, that this enlightenment should take.

T HE L AN GUA GES OF E L E GANT WOMEN Alongside the use of standardised French, we find French also being mixed with Russian for comic or satirical effect, particularly in reported speech or written texts by invented characters who are infatuated with fashion. For men of letters such as Fonvizin who wished to record their unease at French cultural influence, the coquette, portrayed as neither discreet nor sensible in anything she did, was easy prey. Her attachment to fashion made her prone not only to adopt French clothes and coiffure but also the language associated with fashion and to shift spontaneously and clumsily to use of French when using Russian. Before examining the nature of the links between Russian coquettes, the French language and the vocabulary of fashion, though, we should make a few other remarks. First, regarding the origin of the critique of Russian coquettes: in so far as this critique is aimed at the way they speak, it is important to make clear that the criticisms came from Russian writers, whereas other strands in satire directed at coquettes were often borrowed from the writings of French authors who attacked French manners and morals. Secondly, Russian authors rebuked the coquette more on account of her licentious conduct than her linguistic practice. Thirdly, criticism of the coquette, as I have indicated, fell within a more general critique of the influence of France, which imposed on all members of high society a very elaborate dress code and manners that conformed to the Parisian taste of the day. Superficial and pretentious, the coquette is very much preoccupied

in structio n in e ight e e nth- ce ntu r y c o qu e t r y   201 with her appearance. Being à la mode is the sure way for her to gain empathy and excite admiration, in other words to be loved. That is why fashion is her ultimate and probably her only interest. Her favourite subject requires a language which assimilates French elements. We see this conflation of obsession with fashion and predilection for language mixing at an early stage in Fonvizin’s play The Brigadier (Brigadir, completed in 1769), in which the two most modish characters conduct a dialogue that is as remarkable for its linguistic forms as for its content. The brigadier’s son Ivanushka, ‘a fool who is stuffed only with French idiocies’,8 is a caricature of the French petit-maître (fop). His values, behaviour and words take Paris as the ultimate point of reference. His parents want to marry him off, but he reproaches his fiancée for being Russian, rather than French, and gets on better with his future motherin-law. It is she, the ageing provincial coquette, who is his interlocutor in the following dialogue: Советница:  Переменим речь, je vous en prie: мои уши терпеть не могут слышать о чертях и о тех людях, которые столь много на них походят. Сын: Madame! Скажите мне, как вы ваше время проводите? Советница:  Ах, душа моя, умираю с скуки. И если бы поутру не сидела я часов трех у туалета, то могу сказать, умереть бы все равно для меня было; я тем только и дышу, что из Москвы присылают ко мне нередко головные уборы, которые я то и дело надеваю на голову. Сын:  По моему мнению, кружева и блонды составляют голове наилучшее украшение. (Fonvizin 1769: Act I, Scene 3)9

Like allusions to over-elaborate coiffure, with which the above quotation from Fonvizin’s comic drama ends, examples of language mixing and seemingly absurd Gallicisms of the sort that pepper the speech of Ivanushka and the councillor’s wife abound in satirical journals in the 1760s and 1770s. They occur, for example, in ‘An Attempt at a Dictionary of Fashion in the Fop’s Dialect’ (‘Opyt modnogo slovaria shchegol’skogo narechiia’), which was probably inspired by Dreux de Radier’s Dictionnaire de l’Amour (Dictionary of Love)10 and which was published in Nikolai Novikov’s satirical periodical Zhivopisets (The Painter) (Zhivopisets 1772: no. 1, pp. 43–55). This ‘dictionary’, consisting of just three articles, mockingly sheds light on the meaning of the exclamation ‘Ah!’, which seems to characterise coquettes. It parodies – and yet at the same time aligns itself with – the practice of accompanying the

202  xén ia bo r de rio ux publication of work on some subject or other with a dictionary of foreign words. This practice was very common in the first third of the eighteenth century and became even more widespread in the press from the 1770s to the 1790s. Zhivopisets also published a parodic ‘letter’ supposedly written by a coquette to the editor, telling her story, as a girl from the provinces, and explaining how she had been tutored since arriving in the city on how to become a person à la mode. When she makes a point about her private life, though, a serious problem arises: her husband is much more in love with her than she is with him. The problem lies in the fact that conjugal affection is in poor taste for people in the social world. This text ridiculing coquettes, which is typical of its genre, is replete with French words and grammatical structures that belong to French and is written in a style that is close to oral expression and even quite vulgar at times. Mon cœur, живописец! Ты, радость беспримерный Автор. – По чести говорю, ужесть как ты славен! читая твои листы, я бесподобно утешаюсь; как все у тебя славно: слог расстеган, мысли прыгающи. – По чести скажу, что твои листы вечно меня прельщают: клянусь, что я всегда фельетирую их без всякой дистракции [from Fr. distraction: XB]. Да и нельзя не так, ты не грустен, шутишь славно, и твое перо по бумаге бегает бесподобно. – Ужесть, ужесть как прекрасны твои листы! (Zhivopisets 1772: no. 1, p. 37) P. S. Услужи, Фреринька, мне, собери все наши модные слова и напечатай их деташированною [from Fr. détaché: XB] книжкою под именем «Модного женского словаря»: ты многих одолжишь, и мы твой журнал за это будем превозносить. Только не умори, радость, напечатай его маленькою книжкою и дай ему вид; а еще бы лучше, если бы ты напечатал его вместо чернил какою краскою. Мы бы тебя до смерти захвалили. (p. 42; bold font indicates italics in original)11 The text I have quoted from Zhivopisets is part of a tradition of fake epistolary works supposedly written by elegant ladies. We find another example in the pages of Novikov’s Truten’. Just like the previous young lady, its authoress is ignorant of the rules of grammar and style. She shows herself to be superficial in her utterances, hasty in her judgements and poorly qualified when she reflects on poetic or dramatic art. It is important to emphasise that it is not the use of French as the language of elegant ladies that is being attacked in the satirical periodi-

in structio n in e ight e e nth- ce ntu r y c o qu e t r y   203 cals but coquettes’ combination of the two languages, which produces a mishmash, a random mélange of linguistic varieties. A contributor to the periodical Adskaia pochta (The Post from Hell), for example, mentions a character who includes ‘a broken French word among every five Russian words, in short behaves like a person à la mode’ (Adskaia pochta 1769: 33). Again, in what purports to be a personal diary, entitled ‘Daily Jottings of the Well-Known Beauty, the Late Miss Ch...’ (‘Pokoinoi izvestnoi krasavitsy devitsy Ch..., nekotorye ezhednevnye zapiski’), the author writes Russian clumsily, misuses French and employs phonetic spelling (Satiricheskii vestnik 1790: part 2, p. 74). Since coquettes write as they speak, as I have already stressed, this example of the type is bound to choose French words in her diary. She makes use of French mainly to describe her wardrobe and her feelings. ВпаНеделник паВечеру Была pour faire visite Госпоже Д. Все каторРыя ни находилсь Унеи были étrangement stupides. Mr Ч. тама был Perdu пятьдесят рублиоф. Приехала дамои de fort mauvaise humeur. Приметила што М. est amoureux de la petite Б. каторая хаТа и сТРанна толКа Son chapeau lui allait bien. Княсь Д. также amoureux в Ж. Ане такия люди шТо Княсь porte la tête haute а та СтуЧит ходя оПале. У графа М. кафтаН сЧит сНовыми boutons d’acier и очеННо хаРаШо, толка сам собою оН гадак, паТаму шТо ево menton touche всегда à la troisième boutonnière – Для паМяТи: сказать Ч. шТоп оН сШил себе такоиЖе habit. (Satiricheskii vestnik 1790: part 2, p. 74)12

In this parody of the personality of the coquette and the way she spends her time, the author of the ‘diary’, Nikolai Strakhov, is reworking a French article, published twenty years earlier in Le Manuel de la toilette et de la mode (Manual of Toilet and Fashion), which ridicules English ladies (Anon. [C. S. Walter] 1772). The events described are barely altered in the Russian version, but the subject of language is reworked and brought to the fore. For Strakhov, it was topical to make the coquette speak an absurd language strewn with errors and in which Russian and French were yoked together. Nor were men, incidentally, exempt from the general criticism of language mixing. Satiricheskii vestnik (The Satirical Herald) published two texts in the form of the personal diary of a man à la mode, M. Glupomotov, who is also concerned more than anything else with the choice and purchase of clothes and who very often uses French words without forethought (Satiricheskii vestnik 1790: part 8, p. 8). The sort of criticisms of language use that I have cited had didactic

204  xén ia bo r de rio ux purposes, of course. Publications which allowed coquettes to speak were plainly intended to educate readers and to teach them the correct language to use as well as good manners. Passages of the language ­supposedly used by coquettes which set a bad example were framed by pedagogical advice from the author of the piece. The mixing of Russian and French, as satirical authors saw it, also created a dangerous disorder which they needed to warn readers about. Normally quite distinct, the two languages represented an opposition between the traditional and the modern. This comes out, for example, in a work on The Correspondence of Fashion (Perepiska mody). Fashion is personified here as a new queen who, when she comes to power, will not accept Russian clothes that have gone out of fashion as her subjects (Strakhov 1791). The fact that these clothes are old and now seem inappropriate is conveyed through words that are obsolete. Fashion, for her part, displays all the linguistic skills of a contemporary person, using foreign words and turning phrases in the French manner. The juxtaposition of Russian and French could also highlight the distinction between noble culture and non-noble culture, creating further opportunities for satirical comment. Aristocrats and people of lower social estates may understand Gallicised language differently. The use of Russian words and French words that are phonetically close to one another, for instance, enables writers to create a comic effect, as in the following passage where the Gallicism revenu sounds like the dative case of the Russian noun ревень (rhubarb): Старосте нашему Потапу Ты самый человек вилен [vile], в тебе нет никакого ко мне респе [respect], никакого не имеешь ты ко мне зель [zèle], ис твоими расположениями я никакого не получаю с деревни ревеню [revenu]. Я не люблю много бадине [badiner]; опасайся самого жестокого пюнисьон [punition]. Впрочем по получении сего исполнить тебе а-ла-гат [à la hâte][…] Ответ, писанный приходским пономарем на подобие перевода и по одной догадке о Французских словах и сходственности оных с Российскими. Государю и отцу нашему. Приказ ваш государь с Сидором Михайловым в вотчину получен. Подлинно государь хотя я и самой пень, только никакого не имею по словам же вашим к вам зла. Ревеню государь в присылке к вам не имеется ради той причины, что оной здесь как ни сеян, да только не родится. (Satiricheskii vestnik 1791: part 4, p. 85)13

in structio n in e ight e e nth- ce ntu r y c o qu e t r y   205 Language mixing, then, is not confined to coquettes, who are mad about fashion, and its implications go beyond the world of dress and coiffure. The critique of it in satirical journals in the age of Catherine II merges into the more general critique of the manners and morals that reign in society, that is to say Francophilia, which – so the writers I have examined claim – detaches the country’s children from their roots. By the 1790s, though, the coquette was passing out of fashion. The age demanded new heroes: periodicals began to describe the adventures of the щеголь (dandy) and his female counterpart (щеголиха). The latter is a more neutral type, purged, so to speak, of the loose morals of the coquette. The щеголиха, an elegant lady à la russe, has advantages over the coquette, since she invents fashions herself. She often has positive connotations, although she is not without her faults (she does things to excess, for example). * * * The domain of fashion was favourable ground for the spread of the French language in Russia, mainly because of the nature of fashion itself. Russians, like all Europeans, deferred to Parisian taste in matters of clothing and manners and therefore French was inevitably the language required for naming items in a wardrobe. Moreover, in the period with which I have been concerned, from the 1760s to the 1790s, fashion embraced so much more than the domain of clothing: its influence, and consequently French linguistic influence as well, also extended to furnishings, leisure activities, cuisine, theatre and so forth. Consequently, acquisition of French counted for a great deal to a person who aspired to conform to the taste of the day. The Russian-language fashion press, which underwent a remarkable development in the period in question, made an important contribution to that process. Knowing how to speak about fashion by using French to a moderate extent, without seeming ridiculous or flirtatious, was an important skill for elegant Russian men and women in the second half of the eighteenth century. At the same time, fashion and the language associated with it, which was characterised – at least in the writings of their critics – by language mixing and the occurrence of conspicuous Gallicisms in Russian, were easy targets for Russians who had reservations about the creation of a new, Europeanised type of high society and the seeming threat that it posed to traditional morals and values. The French language came to be associated with seduction in elegant society: it was the language of beauty spots, fans and flowers, and of Fashion herself, who was personified as a capricious and fickle young lady who travelled and conducted a correspondence. This language of seduction, the language of coquettes, was

206  xén ia bo r de rio ux as informal in its written as in its spoken form. It may be summed up in the formula used by a writer in Zhivopisets in a passage quoted above: an ‘unbuttoned’ style and thoughts that ‘leap out’ (see note 11). Dramatists and contributors to satirical periodicals repeatedly mocked its users as people who had abandoned themselves to life à la française, people who slavishly followed fashion, intrigued and went from one amorous adventure to the next. The critique of coquettes may even have contributed to the development of the image of womanhood in Russia. Ideally, woman would adhere to the European style of dress and European norms of beauty but at the same time she would observe traditional morality and adapt her consumption of European fashion products to a budget her country could afford.

NOTES   1. ‘robe ronde with gold sur sac skirt faced with Pont d’Argenton lace 1,440 roubles; robe ronde with capucine satin skirt, with white stripes, 191 roubles; robe ronde with decorated white skirt with crimson velvet stripes, 162 roubles; robe ronde with embroidered yellow skirt, with little flowers with crape facing, 58 roubles; robe ronde with white taffeta skirt with little silver and scarlet stripes, and with little scarlet flowers with the same embellishments, 70 roubles; robe ronde with grey crape skirt with little pale blue stripes, with silver with embellishments, 50 roubles; robe ronde with whitestriped folded skirt, pale blue and scarlet stripes with little flowers, 25 roubles; for white lace chenille [a style of embroidery] appliqués on a dress, to the value of 124 roubles; […] white shagreen hooped skirt, 22 roubles.’   2. ‘For the summer of the current year, 1786, Parisian women have chosen white […] Hair is not piled up high and it comes down over the forehead; the hair is usually gathered up in one of two ways: in a simple artless manner (à l’ingénue), with the help of curls that protrude and point back a little, and in hedgehog style (en hérisson en crochet), sticking out, with a single curl a little below the ear.’   3. See nos 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 14, 16, 18, 20, 33, 41, 45, 65, 70, 73, 77, 90, 94.   4. I.e. ‘au Damier, on which chessmen are depicted in various colours’.   5. Shoes, for example, might be described in the caption but not be visible in the picture. This poses the question whether the image or the text was created first.  6. Mme Teillard’s business was truly European. She had customers in the French provinces as well as in foreign countries. Over the years 1789–95 she put out advertisements on several occasions, especially in Le Journal de Paris (The Paris Journal). Her selection was varied, but the prices she charged climbed steeply over the years. In fact, the sale of fashion goods and services was a practice that in Russia went back well before Mme Teillard’s advertisements. Certain foreign merchants and handicraftsmen were aiming at provincial customers from as early as the 1770s. The tailor Osten, the merchant Bayer and the laundry owner Brustfeld, for example, all advertised in periodical publications to explain the procedure for ordering their services to customers living outside the capitals (e.g. Moskovskie vedomosti 1774: no. 100, p. 6; 1792: no. 3, p. 46).

in structio n in e ight e e nth- ce ntu r y c o qu e t r y   207  7. Pis’ma iz Frantsii is the title under which these letters are now best known, but it was not the title under which they were first published.   8. The words belong to one of Fonvizin’s virtuous characters, Sof’ia, who resists her parents’ attempts to marry her off to Ivanushka. They are spoken in Act II, Scene 1 of the play.   9. ‘Councillor’s wife:  Let’s change the subject, I beg you. My ears cannot stand hearing about devils and people who are so like them. Son:  Madam, tell me how you spend your time. Councillor’s wife:  Oh, my dear, I am dying of boredom. If I didn’t sit for about three hours doing my toilet every morning then I dare say it would be all the same to me if I were to die; all I live for is to have hats frequently sent to me from Moscow and to put them on over and over again. Son:  I think lace and silk lace-work are the best adornment for one’s head.’ The notion that contrived coiffure is a sign of an impoverished mind and a neglected education frequently occurs in Russian literature in this period, often in the form of a metaphor which contrasts the outside and the inside of a character’s head. ‘It is as difficult to be an accomplished hair-curler’, writes a contributor to Truten’ (The Drone), for example, ‘as it is to be an accomplished philosopher; these sciences are alike, for one adorns the head on the outside and the other adorns it on the inside’ (Truten’ 1769: no. 5, p. 36). Likewise, in Vsiakaia vsiachina (All Sorts), a writer claims that ‘Those women who thus are always busy covering their heads with flowers prefer unnecessary and superficial things to what really constitutes sure happiness and tranquillity’ (Vsiakaia vsiachina 1769: no. 14, p. 42). Some twenty years later, in Satiricheskii vestnik (The Satirical Herald), we read: ‘One might think that because the head is very crowded reason had decided take up residence in those mezzanines that are annexes to it’ (Satiricheskii vestnik 1790: part 5, p. 10). 10. On this work, see Volume 2, Chapter 12, by Victor Zhivov. 11. ‘Sweetheart, painter, You, darling, are an Author beyond compare. I tell you frankly, how terribly nice you are! When I read your pages I feel wonderfully comforted; how nice everything is in them: your style is unbuttoned and the thoughts leap out. I’ll tell you frankly, your pages always attract me: I swear I always flip through them without being distracted. But it couldn’t be otherwise, you are not melancholy, you tell nice jokes, and your pen runs over the paper splendidly. How terribly, terribly splendid your pages are! PS Do me a service, little brother, collect all our words of fashion and print them as a separate book under the title A Woman’s Dictionary of Fashion: you’ll do a lot of people a favour and we’ll say nice things about your journal for it. Only don’t wear us out, darling, print it as a little book and make it look nice; or even better, print it in colour, rather than ink. We’d praise you to death.’ 12. ‘On Monday evening I went to pay a visit to Mrs D. Everybody who was there was extraordinarily dull. Mr Ch. was there. I lost fifty roubles. I came home in a very bad mood. I noticed that M. is enamoured of the younger Miss B., who is quite odd, only her hat suited her. Prince D. is also in love with Zh. They are the sort of people that make the Prince turn up his nose but she reports on people to the court. At the count’s place Mr Kaftan had a very nicely made costume with new steel buttons, but he himself is ugly, because his chin always hangs down to the third button. Remember to tell Ch. that he should have some clothes like that made.’ 13. ‘To our village elder Potap. You are the vilest man, there is no respect for me in you, you have no zeal for me, I don’t receive any revenue from the village from your dispositions. I don’t like a

208  xén ia bo r de rio ux lot of banter; beware of heavy punishment. By the way, carry out these instructions without delay as soon as you get them […] The reply written by the parish sexton like a translation and just guessing at the meaning of the French words on the basis of their similarity to Russian words: To our master and father. Your instruction, sir, has arrived at your estate with Sidor Mikhailov. Although, sir, I really am a dumb tree-stump [the sexton assumes that by вилен (vile) his master must mean пень], I don’t bear you any malice [the writer has taken зель (zeal) to mean зло (evil)], as you say I do. We can’t send you any rhubarb [the sexton has mistaken ревеню (revenue) for ревень (rhubarb)], sir, because although it’s been planted it hasn’t yet come up.’

REFERENCES Adskaia pochta (1769), ed. F. Emin, July 1769, letter 7, St Petersburg: Tipografiia Bogdanovicha. Anon. [C. S. Walter] (1772), ‘Tablettes d’une dame angloise’, Manuel de la toilette et de la mode, no. 4, pp. 33–9. Anon. (1791), ‘O novykh modakh’, Magazin angliiskikh, nemetskikh i frantsuzskikh novykh mod, no. 3 (June), pp. 150–73. Baudin, R. (2002), ‘Mode et modernité en Russie au XVIIIe siècle: Le Magasin de modes nouvelles, premier journal russe consacré à la mode’, Modernités russes, no. 4, pp. 57–68. Birzhakova, E. E., L. A. Voinova and L. L. Kutina [1972] (1999), Ocherki po istoricheskoi leksikologii russkogo iazyka XVIII veka, St Petersburg: Nauka. Borderioux, X. (2013), ‘La mode européenne en Russie à l’époque de Catherine II’, PhD thesis, Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle Paris 3. Lekarstvo ot skuki i zabot (1786), ed. E. Dashkova, 1 July, pp. 19–21. Moskovskie vedomosti (1787), Moscow, nos. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 14, 16, 18, 20, 33, 41, 45, 65, 70, 73, 77, 90, 94. Sapori, M. (2003), Rose Bertin, ministre des modes de Marie-Antoinette, Paris: l’Institut français de la mode. Satiricheskii vestnik (1790–1). Semeistvo Razumovskikh (1880), ed. A. Vasil’chikov, vol. 2, St Petersburg: Stasiulevich. Strakhov, N. (1791), Perepiska mody, Moscow: Okorokov. Truten’ (1769), no. 5, St Petersburg: Tipografiia Akademii nauk. Vsiakaia vsiachina (1769), ed. Catherine II, no. 14, St Petersburg: Tipografiia Akademii nauk. Zhivopisets (1772), no. 1, pp. 37–42, St Petersburg: Tipografiia Akademii nauk.

c h apter 11

The Role of French in the Formation of Professional Architectural Terminology in Eighteenth-Century Russia Sergei Klimenko and Iuliia Klimenko

I

t is only quite recently that specialists have begun to investigate architectural terminology, its place in the Russian language and the origin of various concepts and expressions. Historians of architecture and art historians as well as linguists and philologists have addressed the subject. Borrowings from French architectural terminology have been predominant in Russian since the early eighteenth century, but no special study of them has yet been undertaken.1 When a dictionary of eighteenthcentury Russian was being prepared back in the 1960s, the authors of the proposed volume stressed that it should include material from a ‘diverse range of business documents, scientific works and technical manuals’ (Sorokin 1965: 5–42). Likewise for the study of architectural terminology, we need a broad survey of publications, documents about architecture and construction, various types of manuscript and other eighteenth-century sources. No fewer than five architectural dictionaries have been published in Russia since the 1990s (Iusupov 1994; Partina 1994; Pluzhnikov 1995/​2012; Batorevich and Kozhitseva 1999/​2001; Vlasov 2003). However, the majority of them have ignored the etymology of the words they contain, even though in France, for example, the first etymological dictionary of architectural terms was published as long ago as 1753 (Gastelier de la Tour 1753). This chapter aims to go some way towards rectifying this gap in scholarship by examining translation and publication of books on architecture in Russian, the influence of French publications on Russian architectural terminology, the role of foreign architects in spreading French terminology and French influence on Russian urbanistics terminology. First, though, we shall give a brief overview of the origins of the French architectural terms themselves. The sources of the architectural terminology which came into being

210  serge i klim e nko a nd iuliia klime n k o over the period from the seventeenth century to the twentieth date from classical antiquity and the Renaissance. France turned its gaze on the architectural heritage of ancient Rome and the Italian Renaissance at an earlier date than other European countries, as far back as the sixteenth century and especially in the seventeenth. As a result of the study of antiquities and the publication of works depicting architectural monuments, a considerable number of Italian architectural terms entered French, especially when the rules of architectural orders were being described. It was in their French version (that is to say in the form in which they were pronounced and written in French) that some of these words later entered Russian. Most modern scholars agree that French, and to a lesser extent Italian, was the dominant influence in the formation of Russian terminology in the field of architecture and building in the eighteenth century. The architectural achievements of France in the Age of Louis XIV went together with a tightening up of the conceptual apparatus in the domains of architecture, construction and town planning. In the first half of the seventeenth century, no sections in works on architecture were as yet devoted to explanation of specialist terms. The designation of this or that part of a building may as a rule be found in explanations on drawings, as for example in the book by the architect Pierre le Muet (Muet 1623). From the mid-seventeenth century, on the other hand, dictionaries of terms relating to various aspects of architectural activity – civil architecture, fortification, hydraulics, laying out gardens – began to be published as appendices, as the works of Roland Fréart de Chambray, André Félibien des Avaux, Jacques-François Blondel, Claude Perrault and others show. Next, the appendices appeared as independent publications. It was above all in the works of the architect and first holder of a grant at the French Academy in Rome, Augustin-Charles d’Aviler, that the architectural and building terminology that had come into being in French was systematised and presented as a lexicon in its own right. The key publications, in this respect, were d’Aviler’s famous Course of Architecture (Dictionnaire d’architecture civile et hidraulique et des arts qui en dépendent, 1755) and the Explanation of the Terms of Architecture (Explication des termes d’architecture, 1691) that he compiled, which were republished in France several times in the course of the eighteenth century. The practice of bringing together architectural terms in the form of specialist glossaries or dictionaries no doubt helped to spread this terminology beyond the borders of France. Thus we already find examples of the use of French terms in publications appearing in German in the first half of the eighteenth century. This development is especially noticeable

fren ch in rus s ia n ar c hi t e c t ura l t e r mi n o l o gy   211 in works on fortification and engineering. The dictionaries published by the architect and engineer Johann Rudolph Fäsch are typical of this period: first the author gives a term in French and then he provides an explanation or a German equivalent (Fäsch 1723, 1726). We shall turn now to the way in which such terms were dealt with in translated books on architecture in Russia.

TH E TRANSLATI ON AN D P UB L I CAT ION OF B OOK S ON ARC HI TECT URE I N R USSI AN The foundation for the long cultural contact that took place between France and Russia was laid in the age of Peter the Great. Among the books in Peter’s library that were in foreign languages, books in French were the most numerous. These French works included a number of technical publications, mainly works on fortification, hydraulic engineering and gardening, some of which had been translated into Russian because they needed to be widely used as practical manuals. Thus in 1711 Blondel’s New Manner of Fortifying Cities (Blondel 1686) was printed on a Moscow press in a Russian translation by Ivan Zotov.2 Particular attention was paid in this publication to terms pertaining to fortification, which were explained in the text itself, for example куннеты (little ditches in a large ditch), траверсы (earthen traverses) and so forth. Some terms were given without translation but in Russian, on the model of the French original, for instance бастион (bastion), демигорж (demi-gorge), контрескарп (contrescarpe), куртина (courtine), равелин (ravelin), редут (redoute), ретраншемент (retranchement) and others.3 Then in 1724 the works of the Chevalier de Cambray were published in St Petersburg in a translation by Vasilii Suvorov. These works were devoted to the ideas on fortification put forward by the outstanding French engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (Cambray 1689).4 The Russian edition was augmented with a special glossary of terms used in this field, thus recording the entry of a number of French terms relating to fortification into the Russian language. Books on civilian architecture were translated into Russian less often than books on military fortification. The most popular books on civilian architecture were the works of the ancient Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (Vitruvius 1649) and the Canon of the Five Orders of Architecture (Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura) by the sixteenth-century Italian architect Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola. The latter work was published several times in Russia, thanks to the accessibility of the author’s manner of exposition, and it became a sort of

212  serge i klim e nko a nd iuliia klime n k o grammar for all eighteenth-century Russian architects. Not that French publications were rare; quite a number of them are found in the library of Peter the Great and other collections, such as those belonging to the Vice-Chancellor, Heinrich Johann Friedrich Ostermann, and FieldMarshal Burkhard Christoph von Münnich (Bobrova 1978; Lebedeva 2003). Only a few of these books are known to have been translated into Russian. Copies of writings by the architects d’Aviler, Sébastien Le Clerc (Le Clerc 1714), Félibien and Daniel Marot in Peter’s library, for example, were in the original French. A particularly noteworthy item in Peter’s collection was the work by the gardener and agronomist Jean de la Quintinie on the layout of gardens (Quintinie 1695). Around 1716, the tsar commissioned a translation of this book, which was to serve as a practical guide, from Boris Volkov, who evidently carried out the task. In the process the translator (транслатер, as he is called in documentation of the time) encountered considerable difficulties arising from the need to render so many specialist terms in Russian. An oft-cited (though not entirely accurate) story is told about this by the German diplomat Friedrich Christian Weber, as Petr Pekarskii relates it: Although Volkov was a very capable person, this labour was beyond him: at every turn he came across French expressions which were completely unknown in Russian. The translator was overcome with despair and he ended his life by severing one of his arteries. (Barenbaum 2006: 49) In fact, the story concerned not Boris Volkov himself but his brother. Nonetheless, translators of architectural books in Peter’s time, such as Grigorii Dolgorukov, Mikhail Shafirov, Volkov and Zotov, although they knew French well, often experienced difficulty when rendering specialist terms and, in Quintinie’s work, for example, placed them in a separate glossary. By the mid-eighteenth century, a terminological foundation had been laid. Subsequently, between the early 1770s and the end of the century, a number of theoretical works on architecture were published in Russian, including translations of French authors. Even the works of the Italian Vignola, which Russians already knew in editions of various sorts, came now to be translated more often from French than from the original. As a rule, these publications, which contained forewords by their translators, were practical guides aimed at customers as well as architects. It is notable that difficulties sometimes still arose with the translation of technical and architectural terms into Russian, as they had during the Petrine period. The unknown translator of a book by the French archi-

fren ch in rus s ia n ar c hi t e c t ura l t e r mi n o l o gy   213 tect Jacques-Raymond Lucotte, The Modern Vignola (Lucotte 1777), for example, explicitly speaks about the difficulties of translation and ends up asking the reader to forgive him for the ‘insufficient clarity of technical terms’ (Liukot 1778: 1–2). He resorts to terms of diverse origin, using French, German and Italian words and a good many Russian words that have been turned into architectural terms by various means, such as валик (fascia), жолобок (groove), полочка (plinth) and so forth. For some of the Russian terms he provides a French equivalent: bandelette for поясок (bandelet); denticulis for зубчики, from dent (tooth); larmier for слезник (dripstone), from larme (a tear); talon for каблук (ogee); trigliphes for троерезники (triglyphs); volute for завиток (volute, scroll) and so on (Barutcheva 1984: 157). The translator of a work by the French architect Le Clerc produces roughly the same sort of correlation between foreign and Russian terms (Le Klerk 1790). Essentially the same approach is taken by Mikhail Golovin, the author of an original manual on civilian architecture that was commissioned by Catherine II (Golovin 1789). Golovin tries as far as possible to replace foreign words, even those that had been in use for a long time, with Russian equivalents. At the same time, the author (or translator, in so far as large passages of Golovin’s work are translated from foreign originals) makes an unexpected attempt to introduce German architectural terms that had never been used in Russian before, rendering them in Russian orthography, for instance: Если свод состоит из двух себя пересекающих коробчатых сводов, то называется он клостергевель.5 However, we may see this as an attempt on Golovin’s part to ‘please’ the empress of German origin on whose order he wrote this work rather than as a desire to make architectural texts more comprehensible to readers. The eminent Russian man of letters Fedor Karzhavin, who had an excellent knowledge of French, was far more consistent in his attempts to replace all the borrowed architectural terms that had become entrenched in Russian, including even those that had been in use as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He translated the ten books about architecture by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius,6 whom he called the ‘father of architects’, from the French version of them that had been done by Claude Perrault. (Had he translated them from Italian, the architectural terms in them would have entered Russian in Italian pronunciation!) He also translated Perrault’s Abridgement of the Architecture of Vitruvius (translated in 1772; Perro 1789). In his translation of Perrault’s book, Karzhavin provided a glossary of foreign architectural terms, which was the first specialist architectural glossary in Russian to be published in Russia (Karzhavin 1789). Karzhavin went further than

214  serge i klim e nko a nd iuliia klime n k o the translators of the works we have already cited and other architectural works in his attempts to find a Russian equivalent for all foreign words. We may see this policy as an extreme form of opposition to foreign architectural vocabulary at a time when changes were taking place in the lexical composition of Russian in general and many specialist terms, such as арка (arch), архитрав (architrave), волюта (volute) and so forth, had already come into common use. The very fact that Karzhavin translated two classical works on architecture is of interest in this connection. He had studied from a young age in France and had travelled widely. It is not known whether he engaged in activities connected with architecture while he was in France, but on the boat home to Russia in 1765 he met the future well-known architect Vasilii Bazhenov, who had been studying in France at the Paris Academy of Architecture under Charles de Wailly. We may suppose that Karzhavin’s excellent knowledge of French, as well as his personality, helped him immediately to become Bazhenov’s assistant in work on a plan for a new palace for the Empress Catherine in the Moscow Kremlin (1767–75). It was Bazhenov who, while work on this grandiose plan was proceeding, initiated the publication in Russian of the architectural works that Karzhavin translated. Examination of the dictionary Karzhavin compiled, which contained not only an explanation of architectural terms but also lexis from the fields of history, politics, geography, art and other disciplines, seems to give us grounds for supposing that Karzhavin’s attempt to cleanse Russian of foreign words, including Gallicisms, was close also to the heart of Bazhenov, who had encouraged these translations. However, Karzhavin’s works, including his dictionary, run counter to the actual use of architectural terminology at the time, even though they were intended for practical use. Analysis of a substantial seam of working documents – descriptions of plans, building estimates, official correspondence – enables us to say that most of the terms for which Karzhavin tries to find an equivalent (a considerable proportion of which come from French) had begun to circulate freely and were widely used in the written language and, we must suppose, in the spoken language as well. Thus when Bazhenov, in his ‘Opinion’ (‘Mnenie’) about the Kremlin Palace (1773), describes the wooden model of the future edifice, virtually all the terms he uses are of French origin, although they are given in Russian transcription (Bazhenov 2001: 110). In the course of the eighteenth century, then, French architectural terminology was steadily entering the professional architectural lexicon and, by the end of the century, many other ‘lexicons’ (dictionaries) as well. In official documents, business papers, personal correspondence

fren ch in rus s ia n ar c hi t e c t ura l t e r mi n o l o gy   215 and diaries, Russian laymen, as well as architects, gradually began to use and continued to enlarge the set of architectural terms borrowed from French. Thus Nikolai Karamzin, in his Letters of a Russian Traveller (Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, first published over the period 1791– 1801), cannot manage without regular recourse to French architectural terms. He is plainly unable to find equivalents in his native language for such words as альков (from Fr. alcôve), арка (arc), аркада (arcade), база (base), балюстрада (balustrade), барельеф (bas-relief), галерея (galerie), колонна (colonne), купол (coupole), медальон (médaillon), мезонин (mezzanine), павильон (pavillon), пилястра (pilastre), плафон (plafond), портал (portail), фасад (façade) and фронтон (fronton) (Barutcheva 1984: 25).7 These words had to be used, because all the architectural elements that had become attributes of a comfortable way of life in the French manner were incorporated in the Russian noble manor house of the Age of Enlightenment. One could not imagine the house of that period without them. Admittedly, the mandatory use of such Classicist forms with French pronunciation would be mocked in society, as in the following well-known remarks in a poem of 1872–3, ‘The Portrait’ (‘Portret’), by Count Aleksei Tolstoi: В мои ж года хорошим было тоном Казарменному вкусу подражать, И четырем или осьми колоннам Вменялось в долг шеренгою торчать Под неизбежным греческим фронтоном. Во Франции такую благодать Завел в свой век воинственных плебеев, Наполеон, – в России ж Аракчеев.8

Nonetheless, French architectural terms which became firmly established at that time as part of the linguistic capital of Russian are still used today.

TH E I NF L U ENCE OF FRENC H P UB LICATIONS ON RUSS I AN ARC H I TECT URAL TER M I NOL OG Y Original French publications on architecture were widely circulated in Russia alongside translations into Russian. The works of the engineer Bernard Forest de Bélidor and the architect Blondel were among the most popular. Works by d’Aviler also had a particularly broad appeal, thanks to the fact that they contained a description of the five classical orders of

216  serge i klim e nko a nd iuliia klime n k o architecture and were furnished with glossaries. The above-mentioned Dictionary of the Terms of Civilian and Hydraulic Architecture compiled by d’Aviler was based on the writings of predecessors such as the Italian architects Andrea Palladio, Vincenzo Scamozzi and Vignola as well as the French architects Bélidor, Blondel, Chambray, Antoine Desgodetz, Philibert de l’Orme, Perrault and others. The plainly comprehensive nature of d’Aviler’s works, especially his dictionary, and their circulation outside France, in Russia among other places, make them an important source for elucidation of the ways in which French architectural terminology entered Russian. We should add that no attempt was made, as far as we know, to translate d’Aviler’s works into Russian. Knowledge of these writings helped to ensure that the architectural vocabulary that was being borrowed from French was gradually consolidated in Russia in the mid-eighteenth century. This vocabulary, it has been pointed out, ‘achieved a certain stability and fixity, shedding unnecessary, chance or awkward lexical items, […] but retaining the complexity and diversity of terms’ external forms’ (Barutcheva 1984: 140). Another way in which architectural terms entered Russian and became fixed in the language, apart from the translation of French works on architecture and circulation of such works in the original French, was through the system of special architectural education that was coming into being in Russia at this time. The architectural school attached to the Building Office in St Petersburg, the school set up by Prince Dmitrii Ukhtomskii in Moscow in 1749 and, finally, the Academy of Arts, which was founded in 1757, were centres where specialised architectural terminology was honed. Specialist libraries containing French publications, such as the works of the architects d’Aviler, Blondel, Charles-Etienne Briseux, Le Clerc and Jean-François Neufforge and of the artist and decorator Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier, began to be assembled in these schools. These publications were also found in the private libraries of individuals such as Ivan Shuvalov, whose collection became the basis for the library of the Academy of Arts. The architect Petr Eropkin, who directed the Department of Architecture of the Commission on the Construction of St Petersburg (1737–46) and who was the main author of ‘The Duties of the Department of Architecture’ (‘Dolzhnost’ arkhitekturnoi ėkspeditsii’), the first theoretical work on architecture in Russia (Arkin 1946: 1–100), also had French books in his library. It is noteworthy that although Eropkin had studied in Italy he used French terms in his work more often than Italian terms, and that when he did use Italian terms he rendered them in French transcription. Most of the French books in the libraries we have mentioned contained pictures of buildings and components of French architecture of the first half of the

fren ch in rus s ia n ar c hi t e c t ura l t e r mi n o l o gy   217 eighteenth century and were treated as illustrated dictionaries. Together with theoretical works, they provided a basis for the establishment of French architectural terminology in Russia. The library of Ukhtomskii’s architectural school in Moscow is a particularly fruitful source for the study of the influx of foreign-language architectural publications and terminology into Russia. Many of the theoreticians of architecture whose works were represented there were German, for example the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-­century German writers Paul Decker, Nicolaus Goldmann and Leonhard Christoph Sturm.9 (The works of these men circulated widely in Europe, where, as in Russia, they were used above all as illustrated guides and where they may have been in even greater demand during the Baroque period, in the first half of the eighteenth century, than the classical works of Italian theoreticians such as Palladio, Sebastiano Serglio, Vignola and others.) However, the school library possessed works by French authors as well, in particular d’Aviler’s Course of Architecture (Mikhailov 1954: 254–5, 363–4). ‘Blondel’s book in French with figures in five parts’ is mentioned too in the library’s inventory (p. 255). (This is Blondel’s Course of Architecture (Blondel 1698), the first part of which contained an explanation of the parts of the architectural order.) The school library also had a more contemporary publication, ‘in French, Blondel’s modern’ book, which was most probably his work on ‘houses of pleasure’ (Blondel 1737–8). Although Ukhtomskii made much use of German publications as guides, in his business correspondence he preferred terms borrowed from French publications, even in cases where a term was written in a similar way in French and German. On the basis of documents from Ukhtomskii’s office, we may say that terms of French origin were already quite firmly established in the mid-eighteenth century, for example архитрав, балкон, импост, картель, лантернин, плафон, рюстика and so forth.10 Thus in an explanatory note of 1743 on the plan for Triumphal Gates on Tverskaia Street in Moscow the architect used French words to describe his intention: аркада, балюстрада, калона (i.e. колонна), пиедестал, пилястр, плинт and фронтон (Mikhailov 1954: 342).11 By the mid-eighteenth century these terms, along with the words база, ордин (i.e. ордер), план, фасад (or фас), цокуль (base, order, plan, façade, socle) and others, had already firmly entered the everyday professional lexicon that was used not only by architects but also by people connected with institutions engaged in building and an even wider circle of people who commissioned buildings. Seen in a context in which French terms were so vigorously used, German architectural vocabulary seems to have been employed on a

218  serge i klim e nko a nd iuliia klime n k o much more modest scale. The word гзымс (гезимс, i.e. ‘cornice’, from German Gesums or Gesims), for example, often appears in eighteenthcentury documents, but it subsequently fell into disuse. However, certain German words which were used mainly to describe an architectural order became established in Russian and are still current today, for instance капитель (‘capital’; German Kapitell, via Italian capitello; cf. French chapiteau), карниз (‘cornice’, probably through German Karnies; cf. Italian cornice and French corniche), кронштейн (‘corbel’; German Kragstein), панель (‘wainscoting’; German Paneel), постамент (‘pedestal’, ‘base’; German Postament), филенка (‘panel’; German Füllung) and a number of others.12

T HE RO L E OF FORE I GN ARC H ITECTS IN TH E SPREA D OF FRENC H ARC H I TECTU RAL TERM I NO L O GY The recruitment of French specialists, especially for work in St Petersburg, helped considerably to entrench French architectural vocabulary in Russian professional activity. Peter himself prioritised building in the new Russian capital and had whole guilds and clans of craftsmen headed by eminent architects transported there. A contract was concluded in 1716 with two teams of professional architects, who were sent to St Petersburg immediately after Peter’s visit to the Royal Gobelin Manufactory in Paris (Dubois 1893) in the company of the first architect to the King of France, Robert de Cotte. It should be noted that JeanBaptiste Le Blond headed the second of these groups (pp. 4–513). Le Blond was already well known both as a theoretician and a practitioner, thanks to the projects he had completed, his contribution to The History of the Royal Abbey of Saint Denis (Histoire de l’abbaye royale de SaintDenis, 1706) and The Theory and Practice of Gardening (La Théorie et la pratique du jardinage, 1709) and also for his augmented edition (1710) of d’Aviler’s legendary Course of Architecture of 1691. With its ‘glossary of terms of civilian and hydraulic architecture’, this ‘augmented course’, which was sent to Russia by Jean Lefort, nephew of Peter’s trusted Swiss companion François Lefort, had particular value for Russia in the Age of Enlightenment, in that it made it possible to start to speak to the capital in French architectural language. Native speakers of French had a substantial effect on the reception of professional terminology by their Russian pupils through their role in architectural education. One such native speaker was the architect and graphic artist Nicolas Girard, who arrived in Russia with Le Blond

fren ch in rus s ia n ar c hi t e c t ura l t e r mi n o l o gy   219 in 1716 and worked there for a long period. He served under FieldMarshal Münnich up until the early 1740s and then as head of the school attached to the Building Office in the 1740s and 1750s. Another was Blondel’s cousin Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Architecture in Paris, who arrived in St Petersburg in September 1759 on the recommendation of Jacques-Germain Soufflot, the French architect who designed the Panthéon in Paris. The terms of his contract stipulated that Vallin de la Mothe was to execute a design for an Academy of Architecture in Moscow and then to work in it. However, after only a short stay in the old capital he preferred to work exclusively in St Petersburg. We may assume that all the classes given by this professor in the Academy of Arts took place in French; at any rate, no documents that would indicate that Vallin de la Mothe used Russian in the teaching process have come to light. This undoubtedly helped his students with their study of French and they would subsequently perfect their knowledge as academic boarders in Parisian architectural studios. Like Vallin de la Mothe, the French architect Thomas de Thomon, who arrived in St Petersburg in 1800, also ‘had no Russian’ (Shevchenko 2010: 20). Thomon was promoted to the rank of professor in the Academy of Arts, delivered lectures on the theory of civil architecture and published a coursebook for students in French. It is only very recently that this book, entitled A Treatise on Painting, Prefaced by a Discourse on the History of the Arts (2011), has been translated into Russian. In spite of the title, the court architect included in the work a ‘collection of plans and façades of the main monuments’ he had created in Russia with a description and analysis of the buildings. Thomon concluded his work with the following sentence: ‘When this work has come out the author intends to write a new treatise about architectural practice, which will contain a brief History of Architecture and the Art of Construction […] (Shevchenko 2010: 132). Unfortunately, the premature death of the architect, who fell off some scaffolding, cut short the plans of this talented French craftsman, who had given St Petersburg, among other buildings, the magnificent commodity exchange on the spit of Vasil’evskii Island, a memorial to the achievements of urban architecture in the age of Alexandrine Classicism.

TH E FORM ATI ON OF UR B AN I STI CS TER MINO L OG Y IN R U SS I AN The art of town planning has its own special place in architecture. It was in the Age of Enlightenment that Western European experience of

220  serge i klim e nko a nd iuliia klime n k o providing cities with amenities was most intensively incorporated into Russian architectural practice, and this process too was accompanied by the borrowing of associated terminology.14 What vocabulary did the architects of French Classicism and Neoclassicism use when they considered town-planning matters? We need to take account of the fact, as a French scholar has recently put it, that [t]here was no ministry under the ancien régime [in France] that was charged with town planning. Such matters were shared between the general comptroller of finances and the four secretaries of state. Moreover, if the word ‘embellishment’ best foreshadows the notion of town planning, the legal term that most closely approximates to it is voirie (administration of public thoroughfares). And this is itself included in what we now call the ‘police’. The latter term anticipates public administration. (Harouel 1993: 19) Among the main works which influenced Russian town-planning policy we should mention Nicolas Delamare’s four-volume Treatise on Police, which was published in Paris (Delamare 1705–38). The tenth chapter of the fourth volume of this treatise was entirely devoted to a description of steps to be taken to ‘embellish and decorate towns’ and was informed by the new aesthetic of ‘the art of town planning’. The association of town planning with the concept of policing is reflected in the Large French Dictionary (Le Grand vocabulaire français) of 1772, which prescribes the structure and basic duties of the ‘police’, where Voirie and L’embellissement & la decoration des villes are singled out. The tasks under the first of these headings were not confined to organisation of the network of streets and keeping order in them; on the contrary, this section was responsible for activity in and control of all aspects of building. Voirie was ‘a section of the Police covering everything that pertains to the safety and security of construction, the rules for control of the work of roofers, bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers, metal-workers and joiners’ (Le Grand vocabulaire français 1772: vol. 22, p. 477). The need for cleanliness and order in the town’s streets and squares was addressed here too. The powers of the police also included ‘everything that concerned the provision of amenities for towns and their embellishment and free zones, the maintenance of order in their public squares and ensuring free movement along their streets’ (vol. 22, p. 477). Many of the formulations of French legislation in the domain of urban construction were reproduced precisely in Russian town-planning edicts (Klimenko 2009). We know that Catherine II studied Delamare’s treatise on the police,

fren ch in rus s ia n ar c hi t e c t ura l t e r mi n o l o gy   221 because we have her notes in the margins of the copy of this book that was in her personal library and because she borrowed specific fragments of this text in her Instruction (Nakaz). Chapter 21 of the Instruction (which was added the year after the first edition, containing twenty chapters, had first been published), was entitled ‘O blagochinii. Nazyvaemom inako Politsieiu’ (‘On Good Order. Otherwise Called Police’) in the Russian version of the Instruction and ‘De la Police’ (‘On Police’) in the French version (Plavinskaia 2001).15 The name of the new institution, Police Board (Uprava blagochiniia), created by the empress in Moscow in 1782, should probably be seen as Catherine’s own translation of this term from the vocabulary of European town planning. Muscovites long continued to refer to the new Police Board which had been set up in place of the Politsmeisterskaia kantselliariia (Chancery of the Chief of Police) as Politsiia, treating the terms as synonymous. The numerous laws connected with town-planning policy in the eighteenth century, then, are underpinned by the extensive works of French theoreticians and encyclopédistes, from Delamare to Voltaire, who wrote texts ‘On the Embellishments of Paris’ and ‘On the Embellishments of the Town of Kashmir’ (Voltaire 1749a, 1749b) and whose interest in problems of town planning in the capital was reflected in his correspondence with Catherine II (Fucore 1909). The authors of this body of writings succeeded in formulating in quite a new way the need for a comprehensive definition of the ‘City’ which went back to the ancient Greek notion of the ‘Polis’. If we examine the documents of the French architect Nicolas Legrand, who headed Moscow’s town-planning institutions for over a quarter of a century from the mid-1770s, then we see him using the same terminology. In his capacity as chief architect of the Stoneworks Office (Kamennyi prikaz) and then of the Police Board as well, he wrote in a letter to one of his compatriots about the part he had played in the improvement of Moscow: C’est moi qui est chargé des nouveaux projets d’embellissement de la ville de Moscou (RGIA, f. 789, op.1, part 1, d. 704, fol. 2 v.).16 Thanks to his first urban development plan for Moscow, which Catherine approved in 1775, many ideas were realised which were advanced for Russian town planning at that time. In place of the ruins of the medieval defensive wall of Belyi Gorod Legrand built a ring of бульвары (from Fr. boulevards) with променады (promenades). The Moscow River became navigable after the construction of a bypass канал (canal). Squares with regular shapes appeared, along with spacious streets with convenient тротуары (trottoirs, pavements), edged by бордюры (bordures, borders), public parks with газоны (gazons, lawns), палисадники (palissades, hedged gardens visible to the public), green

222  serge i klim e nko a nd iuliia klime n k o пейзажи ­(paysages, landscapes) with аллеи (allées, paths) and all sorts of павильоны (pavillons, pavilions), декорированные (decorated) with берсо (berceaux, bowers), гроты (grottes, grottoes), вольеры (volières, aviaries), монплезиры (mon plaisir is a term meaning ‘amusement palace’) and эрмитажи (ermitages, hermitages). We even see the first examples of инженерные коммуникации (communications d’ingénierie, communications engineering), which brought комфорт (confort) to the residents of партикулярные отели (hôtels particuliers, private hotels). Thus all the new urban construction work was accompanied by the introduction of a great deal of new vocabulary into Russian. The steps taken to provide novel amenities transformed Russian cities and towns, and the entry of so many French neologisms into the Russian language preserves the memory of this foreign influence. Classicist Moscow cannot be described without a large palette of French architectural terminology from the Age of Enlightenment, as many subsequent literary descriptions of the city show in a compelling way.

T HE (U N ) POP UL ARI T Y OF FRENCH IN TH E R U SS I AN CAP I TAL S AFTER 1 81 2 St Petersburg and Moscow spoke different architectural languages in the Age of Enlightenment. Foreign architects preferred the newer capital to Moscow where, in the eighteenth century, one needed Russian in order to be able to work. By the early nineteenth century, when this difficulty may at last have been surmounted, the tragic events of 1812 in the old capital changed the state of equilibrium that had been reached. After the fire of Moscow, which destroyed over 70 per cent of the city’s buildings (6,532 out of 9,158 houses were burnt down), an intolerant attitude towards everything that was French led not only to the exclusion of French architects from the ancient Russian capital but even to the prolonged disappearance of their names from the annals of construction. The best of what they had built was attributed to Russian craftsmen such as Bazhenov, Matvei Kazakov and his pupils, and the name of Legrand was knowingly omitted from official documents. In spite of the ascendancy of the Napoleonic Empire style, further building in Moscow was carried out by local Muscovite architects and by Italian architects who came to Russia with sculptors, painters, stonemasons and decorators who were their compatriots. The absence of a French architectural colony can be keenly felt, from a stylistic point of view, in the quality and scale of architecture in Moscow after the Napoleonic Wars. At the same time, St Petersburg was turning into an oasis for a French

fren ch in rus s ia n ar c hi t e c t ura l t e r mi n o l o gy   223 professional community. Apart from Russian pupils who had been boarders at the French Academy in Rome or the former Royal Academy of Architecture in Paris, many of the best craftsmen of Western Europe sought to come here. The engineer Agustín de Bétancourt, a graduate of the Paris School of Bridges and Roads, was appointed head of a Commission for Construction and Hydraulics and assembled a team of French specialists in engineering, architecture and decorative arts that had had no like in Russia. The team included the above-mentioned Thomon, Pierre-Dominique Bazaine, Louis Carbonnier, Jean Antoine Maurice Destrem, Franz Devolant, Jacques Alexandre Fabre, Gabriel Lamé, Antoine Mauduit, Auguste de Montferrand, Charles Potier, Alphonse Résimont, Etienne-François de Sénovert and many others. These specialists founded the first engineering schools on a French model in order to train Russians. In this environment the capital took on a new French appearance. ‘After Paris’, a French traveller wrote in 1830, ‘St Petersburg is certainly the most French city in existence: my opinion is shared by all travellers’ (Dupré de St Maure 1830: 71). One sign of the active use of French as a working language among architects, painters, engineers, other representatives of specialists in the field of building and their customers is the substantial number of publications that appeared in St Petersburg in this international language of the arts. Apart from Thomon, whose Collection of Monuments (Recueil de monuments) was published in St Petersburg in 1806 and whose Treatise on Painting (Traité de peinture) came out there in 1809, many well-known Italian architects and designers preferred French to their native language as the medium for their publications. We may cite, for example, Giacomo Quarenghi’s Buildings Erected in St Petersburg (Quarenghi 1810), three volumes by Pietro Gonzaga (1807, 1811, 1817) and two volumes of engravings with comments in French by Luigi Rusca (1795, 1810). Meanwhile, the best Parisian architects, such as Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, dedicated their works to the Russian Emperor ‘Alexander of the North’ (Ledoux 1804). The numerous publications of this sort did not need to be translated into Russian. The architects who were associated with St Petersburg through their work had roots in different places, had studied in different schools and had different religious faiths, but they belonged to a professional commonwealth that was united by the language of French architecture. * * * We hope to have shown the extent to which Russian architectural vocabulary of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was enriched by terminology borrowed directly from French or indirectly through

224  serge i klim e nko a nd iuliia klime n k o French from Latin and Italian in French transcription. The increasing intensity of Franco-Russian architectural relations and the prolonged percolation of the ideas of French Classicism into Russian architecture ensured that by the age of Pushkin the language of such great practitioners as Mansart, Soufflot and Vauban was firmly established in the language of architecture in Russia. Taking precedence in this domain over words from other foreign languages which have also affected Russian vocabulary, French architectural terms have become an important part of the lexical stock of the Russian language, and use of them persists to this day.

NOTES   1. This is not the case with English architectural terminology: see Grinev (2004). There is another unpublished dissertation (Barutcheva 1984) which analyses borrowings in eighteenth-century Russian, particularly French architectural terminology: see chapter 2 ‘Zaimstvovannaia arkhitekturnaia terminologiia (konets XVII–XVIII veka)’.   2. The title of the Russian translation was Novaia manera, ukrepleniiu gorodov uchinennaia chrez gospodina Blondelia […] The translation was edited by Peter, who reworked the chapter entitled ‘Praktika gospodina Blondelia’. The Russian edition was augmented with a ‘Brief Instruction’ (‘Kratkaia instruktsiia’). In 1713 a work by Alain Mallet also came out in St Petersburg, under the Russian title Kniga Marsova ili voinskikh del […]; this work too was evidently translated by Zotov.   3. I.e. ‘bastion, demi-gorge, counterscarp, curtain [between bastions], ravelin, redoubt, entrenchment’.   4. The work became well known in Russian as Istinnyi sposob ukrepleniia gorodov, izdannyi ot slavnogo inzhenera Vobana na frantsuzskom iazyke […]   5. ‘If the vault consists of two intersecting cloistered vaults, then it is called a klostergewe’lb’ (from German Klostergewölbe, a coved vault). Quoted by Barutcheva (1984: 158).  6. Marka Vitruviia Polliona Ob arkhitekture, kniga pervaia i vtoraia, etc., St Petersburg: pri Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1790–7.  7. I.e. ‘alcove, arch, arcade, base, balustrade, bas-relief, gallery, colonnade, cupola, medallion, mezzanine, pavilion, pilaster, decorated ceiling, portal, façade, pediment’.   8. ‘In my day it was considered good form [Tolstoi uses the word ton here] to imitate barrack-room style, and it became de rigueur for four or eight columns [kolonnam] to protrude in a row beneath the inevitable Greek pediment [frontonom]. In France this refinement was introduced by Napoleon in his age of bellicose plebeians, in Russia it was introduced by Arakcheev.’ Arakcheev is a martinet who rose to prominence in the last decade of the reign of Alexander I.   9. It is possible that the library of Ukhtomskii’s school contained N. Goldmann and L. C. Sturm’s Nicolai Goldmanns vollständige Anweisung zu der Civil-Bau-Kunst (1699) and P. Decker’s Fürstlicher Baumeister, Oder Architectura Civilis (1713). 10. I.e. ‘architrave, balcony, tax, rocaille scroll, lantern, decorated ceiling, rusticity’. 11. I.e. ‘arcade, balustrade, column, pilaster, pedestal, plinth, pediment’.

fren ch in rus s ia n ar c hi t e c t ura l t e r mi n o l o gy   225 12. Although the words капитель and карниз were of German origin, it was from French versions (chapiteau and corniche) that they entered Russian. 13. The names of the craftsmen who travelled from Paris to St Petersburg in April and November 1716 are listed here. 14. The term ‘town planning’ (gradostroitel’stvo, equivalent to French urbanisme) did not appear in Russian until the early twentieth century. 15. Apart from Article 12, the regulations in Chapter 21 are derived in one way or another from Delamare’s work. On Catherine’s authorship of this chapter of the Instruction, see Grigor’ev (1917). 16. ‘It is I who have been charged with new plans for the embellishment of Moscow.’

REFERENCES Arkin, D. E. (1946), Dolzhnost’ arkhitekturnoi ėkspeditsii: Russkii arkhitekturnyi traktatkodeks XVIII veka, Arkhitekturnyi arkhiv, no. 1, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii arkhitektury SSSR. Aviler, A.-Ch., d’ (1691), Explication des termes d’architecture (suite du Cours d’Architecture), Paris: chez Nicolas Langlois. Aviler, A.- Ch., d’ (1755), Dictionnare d’architecture civile et hidraulique et des arts qui en dépendent, Paris: chez Charles-Antoine Jombert. Barenbaum, I. E. (2006), Frantsuzskaia perevodnaia kniga v Rossii v XVIII veke, Moscow: Nauka. Barutcheva, E. A. (1984), ‘Iz istorii russkoi zodcheskoi leksiki (XI–XVIII veka)’, unpublished dissertation, Moscow Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR. Batorevich, N. I. and T. D. Kozhitseva (1999/​ 2001), Arkhitekturnyi slovar’, St Petersburg: Stroiizdat. Bazhenov, V. I. (2001), Pis’ma. Poiasneniia k proektam. Svidetel’stva sovremennikov. Biograficheskie dokumenty, ed. Iu. Ia. Gerchuk, Moscow: Iskusstvo. Blondel, F. (1686), Nouvelle Maniere de Fortifier les Places, The Hague: chez Arnout Leers. Blondel, F. (1698), Cours D’Architecture Enseigné Dans L’Academie Royale D’Architecture, 2nd edn, 5 parts in 2 vols, vol. 1: Ou Sont Expliquez Les Termes, L’origine & les Principes d’Architecture, & les pratiques des cinq Ordres, Paris: chez l’auteur, et se vend à Amsterdam chez Pierre Mortier. Blondel, J. F. (1737–8), De la distribution des maisons de plaisance et de la décoration des édifices en général, 2 vols, Paris: Charles-Antoine Jombert (also referred to as ‘Traité d’Architecture dans le goût moderne’ on the title page). Bobrova, E. I. (1978), Biblioteka Petra I: Ukazatel’-spravochnik, ed. D. S. Likhachev, Leningrad: Biblioteka Akademii nauk SSSR. Cambray, C. de (1689), Maniere de fortifier de Mr. de Vauban […], Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier. Delamare, N. (1705–38), Traité de la Police, Paris: J. and P. Cot, 2 vols in folio, 1705–10; 2nd edn, ed. and augmented, Paris: chez Michel Brunet et chez J.-F. Hérissant, 4 vols in folio, 1719–38. [Dubois de Saint-Gelais, L. F.] (1893), Pierre Le Grand à la Manufacture des Gobelins. 12 mai–15 juin 1717. Relation contemporaine, Paris: Manufacture des Gobelins. Dupré de St Maure, E. (1830), Pétersbourg, Moscou et les provinces ou Observations sur les

226  serge i klim e nko a nd iuliia klime n k o mœurs et les usages russes au commencement du XIX siècle, suite de L’Hermite en Russie en VI volumes, vol. 1, Turin: chez les Frères Reycend. Fäsch, J. R. (1723), Joh. Rudolph Fäsches, Archit. Sr. Königl. Maj. in Pohlen und Churfl. Durchl zu Sachsen Ingenieur-Capitains Dictionnaire des Ingenieurs […], Dresden and Leipzig: Selbstverlag und A. Martini. Fäsch, J. R. (1726), Kriegs-, Ingenieur- und Artillerie-Lexicon […], Nuremberg: bey Johann Christoph Weigeln. Fucore, M. H. (1909), ‘Voltaire. Ses idées sur les embellissements de Paris’, in Bulletin d’Octobre de la Societé Historique et Archéologique du IV Arrondissement de Paris ‘La Cité’ […], Paris: La Société, pp. 4–47. Gastelier de la Tour, D.-F. (1753), Dictionnaire etymologique des termes d’architecture […], Paris: Vve. Pissot. Golovin, M. E. (1789), Kratkoe rukovodstvo k grazhdanskoi arkhitekture ili zodchestvu. Izdanie dlia narodnykh uchilishch, St Petersburg: Tipografiia Breitkopfa. Gonzaga, P. G. (1807), Information a mon chef ou Eclaircissement convenable du décorateur théâtral Pierre Gothard Gonzague sur l’exercise de sa profession, St Petersburg: Pluchart. Gonzaga, P. G. (1811), Du sentiment, du goût et du beau, St Petersburg: no publisher named. Gonzaga, P. G. (1817), Remarques sur la construction des théâtres par un artiste, St Petersburg: no publisher named. Grigor’ev, V. (1917), ‘Zertsalo upravy blagochiniia (Ėpizod iz istorii ustava blagochiniia 1782 g.)’, Russkii istoricheskii zhurnal, books 3/​4, pp. 73–103. Grinev, A. S. (2004) ‘Sopostavitel’nyi analiz angliiskoi i russkoi arkhitekturnoi terminologii: Na materiale tematicheskogo polia “Teoriia i istoriia arkhitektury”’, PhD dissertation, Institute of Linguistics and Inter-Cultural Communication, Moscow State Regional University. Harouel, J.-L. (1993), L’embellissement des villes. L’urbanisme français au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Picard. Iusupov, E. S. (1994), Slovar’ terminov arkhitektury, Moscow: St Petersburg: Fond ‘Leningradskaia galereia’. Karzhavin, F. V. (1789), ‘Slovar’ v kotorom po vozmozhnosti moei iz’’iasneny inoiazychnye obretaiaushchiesia v arkhitektonicheskikh sochineniiakh rechi […]’, in K. Perro [C. Perrault] (1789), Sokrashchennyi Vitruvii ili sovershennyi arkhitektor. Perevod arkhitektury pomoshchnika Fedora Karzhavina, Moscow: v Univ. tip. u Novikova, pp. 171–228. Klimenko, S. V. (2009), ‘Politseiskoe upravlenie v Rossii pervoi poloviny XVIII veka v ego sviazi s gradostroitel’nym zakonodatel’stvom’, Arkhitekturnoe nasledstvo, no. 51, pp. 169–79. Le Clerc, S. (1714), Traité D’Architecture: Avec Des Remarques Et Des Observations TresUtiles Pour les Jeunes Gens […], Paris: Giffard. Le Grand vocabulaire français […] (1772), Paris: Panckoucke, vol. 22. Le Klerk [Le Clerc], S. (1790), O piati chinakh arkhitekturnykh po pravilam Vin’iolovym; s pribavleniem frantsuzskogo china, St Petersburg: na izhdivenii T. P.[olezhaeva]: Pech. u I. K. Shnora. Lebedeva, I. N. (2003), Biblioteka Petra I: Opisanie rukopisnykh knig, St Petersburg: Biblioteka Akademii nauk SSSR. Ledoux C.-N. (1804), L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la legislation, vol. 1, Paris: de l’impr. de H. L. Peronneau. Levron, Zh. (1986), Luchshie proizvedeniia frantsuzskikh arkhitektorov proshlogo, Moscow:

fren ch in rus s ia n ar c hi t e c t ura l t e r mi n o l o gy   227 Stroiizdat (translation of J. Levron (1980), Grands travaux, grands architectes du passé, Paris: Editions du Moniteur). Liukot, Zh. [J. Lucotte] (1778), Novyi Vin’ola ili Nachal’nye grazhdanskoi arkhitektury nastavleniia s ob’’iasneniem pravil o piati chinakh ili ordenakh onoi po predpisaniiam Iakova Barotsiia Vin’oly, Moscow: v Universitetskoi tipografii. Lucotte, J.-R. (1777), Le Vignole moderne, ou Traité élémentaire d’architecture […], Paris: chez le Père et Araulez. Mikhailov, A. I. (1954), Arkhitektor D. V. Ukhtomskii i ego shkola, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo literatury po stroitel’stvu i arkhitekture. Muet, Pierre le (1623), Manière de bastir pour touttes sortes de personnes, Paris: Melchior Tavernier. Partina, A. S. (1994), Arkhitekturnye terminy, Moscow: Stroiizdat. Perro, K. [C. Perrault] (1789), Sokrashchennyi Vitruvii ili sovershennyi arkhitektor. Perevod arkhitektury pomoshchnika Fedora Karzhavina, Moscow: v Univ. tip., u Novikova. Plavinskaia, N. Iu. (2001), ‘ “Nakaz” Ekateriny II vo Frantsii v kontse 60–nachale 70-kh godov XVIII v.: perevody, tsenzura, otkliki v presse’, in Russko-frantsuzskie kul’turnye sviazi v ėpokhu Prosveshcheniia. Materialy i issledovaniia, Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, pp. 9–36. Pluzhnikov, V. I. (1995/​2012), Terminy rossiiskogo arkhitekturnogo naslediia, Moscow: Iskusstvo (Iskusstvo–XXI vek). Quarenghi, G. (1810), Edifices construits à Saint-Pétersbourg d’après les plans du Chevalier de Quarenghi et sous sa direction, St Petersburg: de l’Imprimerie du Sénat-Dirigeant. Quintinie, J. de la (1695), Le parfait jardinier, ou, Instruction pour les jardins fruitiers et potagers […], Paris: C. Barbin. RGIA, f. 789, op.1, part 1, d. 704, fol. 2 v. Rusca, L. (1795), Plans, élévations et coupes des édifices qui se trouvent sous la juridiction du bureau de tutelle générale du Gouvernement, St Petersburg: no publisher named. Rusca, L. (1810), Recueil des dessins de différents bâtimens, construits à St.-Pétersbourg […], St Petersburg: no publisher named, and Paris: de l’Imprimerie de Crapelet. Shevchenko, V. G. (2010), Proizvedeniia Toma de Tomona, St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Gosudarstvennogo Ėrmitazha. Sorokin, Iu. S. (1965), O slovare russkogo iazyka XVIII veka: Materialy i issledovaniia po leksike russkogo iazyka, Moscow and Leningrad: Nauka (Leningradskoe otdelenie). Thomon, T. de (2011), Traktat o zhivopisi, predvariaemyi rassuzhdeniem o proiskhozhdenii iskusstv, St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Gosudarstvennogo Ėrmitazha (translated from the French by V. G. Shevchenko). Vitruvius Pollio, M. (1649), De architectura libri decem […], Amsterdam: Louis Elzevier. Vlasov, A. G. (2003), Arkhitektura: Slovar’ terminov, Moscow: Drofa. Voltaire [1749a] (1835), ‘Des embellissements de Paris’, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, avec des Notes […], Paris: Furne, vol. 5, pp. 390–3. Voltaire [1749b] (1826), ‘Des embellissements de la ville de Cachemire’, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, avec des Notes […], Paris: Werdet et Lequien Fils, vol. 49, pp. 3–12.

chapter 12

The Coexistence of Russian and French in Russia in the First Third of the Nineteenth Century: Bilingualism with or without Diglossia? Nina Dmitrieva and Gesine Argent

T

he linguistic situation in Russian intellectual society at the beginning of the nineteenth century is markedly heterogeneous, with a number of foreign languages (French, German, Latin, Italian, English) being used, as well as Russian. In this multilingual environment, French, which had begun to be used in Russian noble society in the eighteenth century, played a prominent role. During the process of intensive engagement with Western Europe started by Peter the Great, French had become not only a language of communication with Europe and the medium of cultural transfer which was used to introduce European culture and literature to Russia, but also a language used by Russians to communicate with one another. French attained its position thanks to a number of factors: there were practical considerations (French was Europe’s main diplomatic language, for instance); French culture was predominant all over Europe; and, last but not least, French was considered a precise, balanced and clear language and thus deemed the ideal instrument for communication.1 By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the use of the French language in Russia was well established, as the rich holdings of extant archival sources in French testify.2 Even significant political developments such as the French invasion of Russia by Napoleon in 1812 did not stop the use of French. In certain settings French was prescribed by etiquette, as we shall show. But does the fact that French was prescribed by etiquette and that it was used in particular situations mean that Franco-Russian bilingualism amounted to a diglossic situation, in which the two languages had strictly separate functions? Iurii Lotman (1994: 354) invokes the notion of diglossia when he speaks of the phenomenon of cultural bilingualism in Russia

the coexi ste nc e o f r us s ia n and f r e n c h i n r u s s i a   229 at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He lists certain domains of cultural life in Russia which required the use of the French language and French literary models. However, it has been shown that the separation of languages for particular genres and situations was not as rigid as suggested by Lotman (Marrese 2010: 719–21) and needs further evaluation. This is the issue we shall examine in this chapter. Statements made by contemporary figures show that the use of French gave rise to metalinguistic commentary. The prolonged use of French was attributed, for example, to the range of communicative clichés that French readily supplied. As Aleksandr Pushkin said, ‘our laziness is more readily expressed in a foreign language, whose mechanical forms are already available and known to everyone’ (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 11, p. 34). Of course, despite comments bemoaning Russians’ supposed reluctance to speak Russian, the native language was indeed spoken and written in high society as well. What is more, the beginning of the nineteenth century saw major activity in the development of the Russian literary language. As is well known, contact with French was one of the sources of Russian language change (e.g. Vinogradov 2000: 213–349). Francophone speakers were able to function in both languages, and use of French did not automatically mean neglect of Russian. We need only remember the example of Pushkin, dubbed ‘the Frenchman’ at school (he wrote and spoke French fluently), who is widely considered the founder of the Russian literary language (see also Chapter 9 in this volume). In this chapter, then, we focus on the relationship between French and Russian, seeking to establish whether the bilingual situation we observe can be classified as a case of diglossia. To this end, we shall begin by considering definitions of bilingualism and diglossia and then provide examples of the use of French and Russian in the Russian literary community before discussing whether language choice was in this case due to diglossia.

BILI N G U A L I S M AN D D I GL OSS I A : T H EORETICAL CONS I D ERAT I ONS Bilingualism is by no means an uncommon phenomenon; many places in the world both in the past and the present were or are bilingual or multilingual. There are numerous different manifestations of bilingualism, and also numerous definitions of it. Bilingualism, most broadly speaking, is the competence of individuals in two languages. In the period we examine, many individuals had a very high level of competence in both Russian and French. Such speakers have been called ‘balanced bilinguals’, ‘ambilinguals’ and ‘equilinguals’ (Edwards 2005: 38). Their

230  n ina dmi tr ie va a nd ge s ine a r g e n t bilingualism may be ‘additive’ (Edwards (2005: 39), where one language is acquired through education (secondary bilingualism), but they may also have primary bilingualism (bilingualism acquired through contextual exigencies, informally). Edwards cites the bilingualism of social elites and aristocracies as a classic example of additive bilingualism. At the same time, he elsewhere highlights the difficulty of establishing clearly what someone’s ‘native language’ or ‘mother tongue’ is (Edwards 2009: 451). This difficulty applies in our case – children might have grown up from early childhood with governesses and educators speaking foreign languages to them, and thus are born into a foreign language, as Dostoevskii would put it towards the end of the nineteenth century ([1876] 1994: 246). Bilingualism is a phenomenon that can characterise not only the linguistic competence of individuals, but that of whole societies or sections of society too. Societal bilingualism, where large parts of the speech community use two languages, can take many different forms. When the languages are used for different, specified functions, the bilingual situation may be described as diglossic. Charles Ferguson, who first proposed a theory of diglossia (1959: 335), defined it as a relatively stable relationship between two language varieties spoken within one community: a high variety (H) and a low variety (L). The H variety is a highly codified language associated with a respected body of literature, often a sacred language (Ferguson cites Arabic or classical Greek as examples), which is used for written and formal purposes but never as a spoken language in informal situations, where the L variety is used. Ferguson sees the coexistence of H and L as a structure in which the two varieties have different, clearly delineated functions, and in which there is consequently no overlap. Since Ferguson brought diglossia to the attention of sociolinguists, a considerable body of work on the topic has been produced. Alan Hudson (1992) lists some 1,000 contributions in his 1992 bibliographical survey of work on diglossia, but notes that at that point there was still no integrated theoretical framework or universally agreed set of categories, a lacuna which according to Florian Coulmas (2013) has remained to this day. Ferguson’s model of diglossia has been criticised for the strict categorisation of varieties as ‘high’ and ‘low’, which is not universally applicable in this simplistic form (Fasold 1984). Hudson (1992; 2002: 156) argues that the choice between H and L is dependent on context, and that diglossia could be defined as a case of register variation: certain contexts seem to demand the use of a particular language, but the choice is not linked to the sacredness of H or the ‘everyday’ nature of L. The imbalance of power expressed by calling the varieties H and L can thus be misleading. In this chapter we shall not be dealing with a situation of

the coexi ste nc e o f r us s ia n and f r e n c h i n r u s s i a   231 H and L languages, but rather with the broader functional differences between languages, that is to say for what contexts or genres a particular language was thought to be the language that needed to be used, and by whom. In his seminal article ‘Bilingualism with and without Diglossia, Diglossia with and without Bilingualism’ (1967), Joshua Fishman broadened Ferguson’s definition of diglossia to include so-called non-genetic diglossia, which obtains when a community uses two or more languages that are not closely related for different functions. He considers diglossia a specific form of societal bilingualism (Fishman 2002: 100), where bilingualism is ‘essentially a characterization of individual linguistic behavior whereas diglossia is a characterization of linguistic organization at the socio-cultural level’ (Fishman 1967: 34). Fishman postulates that in the most common case bilingualism is present alongside diglossia, when all speakers are capable of speaking two varieties, which are used for different functions.3 The stability of the relationship between two varieties depends on whether the different codes do indeed serve distinct functions, and whether the relationship is accepted as legitimate by speakers. All the same, this stability is only relative and can change, and formerly diglossic language cultures may have lost this feature (Edwards 2005: 43–4). Boris Uspenskii (1985; 1987) studied the diglossic relationship of Church Slavonic and Russian as well as the history of language thought at the time of Nikolai Karamzin, the eminent writer and historian and active participant in the development of Russian language culture. Uspenskii, in his general definition of bilingualism and diglossia, sees the two notions as polar opposites, where bilingualism means the functional equivalence of languages and diglossia the use of languages for different functions. While his definition of diglossia conforms to the definitions set out above, Uspenskii’s conceptualisation of bilingualism is in fact what Fishman would call bilingualism without diglossia (since bilingualism concerns the competence of the speakers and not primarily the functional equivalence of languages). Shapir (1997) strongly criticises Uspenskii, among other things for drawing an artificially sharp distinction that only allows cases to be either diglossia or bilingualism (bilingualism understood here in Uspenskii’s sense of the functional equivalence of two languages). Shapir (1997: 365) points out that this rigid categorisation does not leave room for the majority of cases in which the functions of language partly overlap. It is precisely such a case of limited overlap in functionality that is found in the situation we examine, and in the following we aim to delineate the nature of this overlap and show to what extent the French and Russian languages were used for similar functions and to what extent they were not.

232  n ina dmi tr ie va a nd ge s ine a r g e n t

TRACES OF B I L I N GUA L I S M I N WRITING : COD E - S W I TCH I N G One of the most obvious signs of bilingualism is code-switching, where lexical or grammatical structures from two languages are used in one text or utterance. As Rodolphe Baudin and Jessica Tipton have examined this phenomenon in detail in this volume, we shall limit ourselves to a few examples here. Lexical and grammatical interference can be found in the correspondence of Antonii Pogorel’skii (1787–1836) (the nom de plume of Aleksei Perovskii), one of the first Russian followers of the German Romantic author E. T. A. Hoffmann. Pogorel’skii wrote in French to his brother Lev about their legal proceedings over an inheritance: L’acte de vente du хутор fait et enregistré à Сосницы et dans lequel il est nommément dit qu’il est de cet уезд (2010: 445).4 Within the French text of the letter, the names of Russian public administrative bodies and place names are given in Russian, a common occurrence in French texts written by Russians (Gretchanaia and Viollet 2008: 41), but they are embedded in the rules of French syntax: the contracted masculine article du (of the) is used before the masculine noun хутор (farm) and the masculine demonstrative adjective cet (a form with epenthetic t) is used before the masculine noun уезд (district) so as to avoid a hiatus, as the Russian word begins with a vowel. However, in other cases, the Russian grammatical form prevails: Le Губернское правление annule ce следствие et fait demande au губернский землемер dans quel district le хутор (Pogorel’skii 2010: 445), instead of dans quel district est le хутор (the copulative verb is omitted in Russian).5 In another example, the playwright, poet, composer and diplomat Aleksandr Griboedov writes to his friend Praskov’ia Akhverdova in French, but sometimes code-switches because French does not seem adequate for a particular task. In a letter of 1827 from Nakhichevan’, for instance, he complains about several things. No letters have reached him for four weeks: nous ne savons rien de ce qui se passe au-delà de notre horizon actuel (we know nothing about what happens beyond our present horizon). Furthermore, there are des chaleurs suffocantes, à 47 de Réaumur, mauvaise chère (a stifling heatwave, 47 degrees Réaumur, poor fare), pas de lecture, pas de piano (no reading, no piano). All this is set out in French, but Griboedov sums up his mood in Russian with the phrase тошно до смерти (sick to death) (Griboedov 2006: vol. 3, p. 127). Griboedov may have perceived a nuance in the word тошно that he did not find in any French word. A few lines further on, he switches into Russian again to complain about his room and the insufferable weather, so Russian may also serve here as a vehicle for conveying his despair.

the coexi ste nc e o f r us s ia n and f r e n c h i n r u s s i a   233 Another sign of bilingualism is the creation of calques. These are contained, for example, in a letter by Aleksandr Karamzin (1815–88, son of Nikolai Karamzin, who was mentioned above) to his brother Andrei, which will be discussed further in our section on language attitudes below. The phrase мысли забудятся derives from s’égarer dans ses pensées (to let one’s thoughts wander). (It should be noted that забудятся, strictly speaking, is an incorrect form, something between заблудятся (will go astray) and забудутся (will be forgotten)!) The phrase мысли надевают французский язык, meanwhile, comes from habiller sa pensée de mots (to clothe one’s thoughts in words). The language contact phenomena we have described supply conspicuous evidence of bilingualism. In the following, we discuss in what areas the use of one language is prescribed (code-switching notwithstanding), whether there are deviations from the norm and whether the linguistic conventions amount to diglossia. We shall look at three areas in turn: gendered language choices, language choices in creating intimacy and language attitudes. Language attitudes play an important role in a diglossic situation, because the functions of language must be negotiated and reinforced not just by making language choices accordingly but also by attitudes expressed in metadiscourse. After all, any language can fulfil any function, but in a diglossic situation the choice of one language or another is determined by sociocultural norms.

ETI Q U ETTE: DI FFERENCES B ETW EEN MEN ’ S AND WO M EN ’ S U SA GE Language choice was in certain cases determined by gender. Viktor Vinogradov has discussed the language of the society lady (2000: 229–58) and has found that women used French more than men did. In accordance with etiquette, men spoke to women in French and used French in their letters, especially in those addressed to women (Gretchanaia and Viollet 2008: 19). However, among themselves, with male friends and in informal gatherings, they often wrote in Russian, and we may well suppose they spoke it too. Their linguistic behaviour was characterised by playing with words, mixing registers and even using obscenities (strictly unacceptable for women). Pushkin, Griboedov, the poet and man of letters Petr Viazemskii (1792–1878), Pushkin’s close friend Sergei Sobolevskii, the above-mentioned Pogorel’skii and many other men of letters wrote to their friends in Russian (see also Chapter 9 in this volume). Irina Paperno (1975) has offered the following explanation for this difference between female and male usage. Since Russian

234  n ina dmi tr ie va a nd ge s ine a r g e n t was the maternal language, she argues, its use was considered more spontaneous and free. Men, whose social role permitted more extensive use of language that was considered natural, used it more often, whereas etiquette prescribed more situations in which ladies would have to use French (Paperno 1975). Michelle Lamarche Marrese, however, refutes Paperno’s explanation, arguing that the common view of men as having many choices and women none, which is also put forward by Lotman, needs modification (Marrese 2010: 716). Men were constrained by issues of money and hierarchy, and their linguistic choices were steered by social convention as much as women’s. At the same time, it is clear that there was a power imbalance: women’s language choices and behaviour were commented on by men, as we show below, and men evidently felt that they had the authority to dictate to women how to live their lives. Thus Viazemskii wrote to his wife, albeit in jest: во-первых, я муж, а ты жена, следовательно, мне все можно, а тебе почти ничего (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 14, p. 12).6 Vasilii Zhukovskii (1783–1852), tutor to the tsarevich Alexander (the future Alexander II) and the poet who is considered to have introduced Russia to Romanticism, adds a linguistic perspective on this inequality. He wrote to his goddaughter Aleksandra Voeikova: ‘All girls need is languages, and a few talents’ (Solov’ev 1916: vol. 2, p. 67). This letter, written in Russian, offers a detailed picture of the difference between the education of girls and boys. Zhukovskii concludes it, however, in French, although he rarely wrote in that language: ses vertus mêmes, ses grâces, ses succès doivent être une résignation, se résigner est le sort d’une femme, surmonter est celui de l’homme. Ainsi soit-il (1916: 67).7 The conception of the destiny of a woman of ‘noble society’, then, would seem to be so closely linked to the conception of French as the language of women in society that, when he speaks about women, Zhukovskii uncharacteristically resorts to French. The results of such admonitions to women to speak and write in French can be seen in the countless examples of the use of French in women’s correspondence. In one of Viazemskii’s Russian letters to his wife, for instance, there is a postscript from his niece Ekaterina Karamzina, the daughter of Nikolai Karamzin. Viazemskii ends the letter with the words Все здешние тебе кланяются,8 and Karamzina takes up this Russian phrase: А я, здешняя, хочу сама вам кланяться.9 But then she switches into French: et vous féliciter, chère et bonne tante (Ostaf’evskii arkhiv kniazei Viazemskikh 1899–1913: vol. 5, part 1, p. 50).10 The whole of this fairly long postscript, after the opening sentence we have quoted, is in French: Karamzina is following social conventions in language choice for this genre (a sign of diglossia). Viazemskii’s wife, Vera (née Gagarina), also

the coexi ste nc e o f r us s ia n and f r e n c h i n r u s s i a   235 prefers French in her letters to her husband, whilst he would reply to her in Russian. In one of her letters, for example, she quotes her husband’s previous letter in Russian, but his words are embedded in her French narrative and do not trigger a switch into Russian: Tu me dis: Расплатись с Пушкиным, как следует. А как следует? Ni lui ni moi, nous n’en savons rien (Ostaf’evskii arkhiv kniazei Viazemskikh 1899–1913: vol. 5, part 2, p. 134).11 Vera’s reiteration of her husband’s words, then, shows that she was capable of writing in Russian, but she chose French. However, by the 1820s, when Russian literature was beginning to develop and a feeling of national consciousness was growing, women began, as Grechanaia (2010: 176) shows, to profess love for the Russian language in their letters and to express excitement about speaking and writing in Russian.

LAN G U A G E C H O I CE FOR I NT I M ACY AND REL ATI ON - BUI L D I N G Literature on language choice in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia often indicates a clear division between public life, for which foreign European languages (including French) were used, and private life, in which Russian was used as a language of intimacy (Marrese 2010: 705). We shall examine some examples in order to consider whether one language was felt on the whole to be more intimate than the other, in which case we would have evidence of a diglossic situation. Literary figures like Pushkin and Viazemskii considered Russian, rather than French, better suited to the expression of more intimate subjects and it therefore predominated in contacts between friends, family members and spouses within these circles (it should be noted that this division does not by any means apply universally, beyond the literary world, as Baudin’s chapter in this volume also shows). Thus Pushkin and Viazemskii, for example, wrote letters in Russian to their wives. We do not know which language Pushkin’s wife Natal’ia used in her replies to her husband, because her correspondence has been lost, but we do know that Viazemskii’s wife, Vera, strictly kept to French, perhaps because the social convention dictating that women use French was more powerful than the inclination to use Russian as a language of proximity. Likewise, the wife of the Decembrist Ivan Iakushkin, Anastasiia Iakushkina, wrote to him in French, although her epistolary diary reveals that she spoke Russian at home (Argent and Offord 2013). The observation that couples, once married, would change their language of correspondence from French to Russian, as Karamzin did, it has been argued (see Lotman and Uspenskii 1984: 525), therefore needs some qualification.

236  n ina dmi tr ie va a nd ge s ine a r g e n t Further evidence of the linguistic possibilities afforded by bilingualism for relation-building is provided by examples of playful language mixing, which is a common type of bilingual behaviour (Caubet 2001; McCormick 2002). Pushkin, his friend Viazemskii (1792–1878) and their companions used a word originating in the speech of an employee of the Moscow theatre directorate whose main ambition was to be awarded a decoration and who wrote in his requests: Я не прошу кавалерии через плечо или на шею, а только маленького анкураже в петличку.12 Pushkin very much liked the word encouragé, used as a noun, and he and Viazemskii often employed it themselves (Pushkin 1928: 322–3). Thus in one of his letters to Viazemskii, in January 1829, Pushkin wrote: Баратынский у меня – я еду часа через 3. Обеда не дождусь, а будет у нас завтрак в роде en petit couragé [Pushkin turns the noun into a phrase] – Постараемся напиться не en grand cordonnier, как сапожники – а так чтобы быть en petit couragé, под куражем – Приезжай, мой ангел. (Pushkin 1937–49: vol. 14, p. 37)13

The expression en petit couragé does not exist as such. The Russian expression под куражем (tipsy), deriving from French à bon courage (tipsy), is calqued back into French by Pushkin as ‘en courage’. There is then interference between this calque and the above-mentioned expression encouragé, which Pushkin qualifies by inserting ‘petit’. The meaning of the expression en petit couragé is made clear by its juxtaposition with another expression that Pushkin has invented, en grand cordonnier (like a great cobbler), which is not a French idiom about drinking, but a calque from the Russian idiom напиться как сапожник (to be drunk as a cobbler), that is to say ‘to be drunk as a lord’. Thus Pushkin’s wordplay makes use of a French expression known to both correspondents, which creates intimacy, within the matrix language, which in this case is Russian. It should be noted that women too playfully mix languages in written texts, for example in their diaries, which may contain sentences that exhibit code-switching between as many as four languages (Gretchanaia and Viollet 2008: 44–5).

E VA L U AT I ON OF L AN GUA GE CH OICES Examining how particular language choices are commented on either by the person who made them or by those they correspond with sheds light,

the coexi ste nc e o f r us s ia n and f r e n c h i n r u s s i a   237 firstly, on how authority is claimed over language matters and also on how different languages are evaluated. Vera Viazemskaia’s proficiency in French, which is demonstrated in the examples we have cited, does not stop her husband from lecturing her on the rules of French epistolary etiquette. Thus on 12 June 1826 he wrote to her: Madame la Princesse не учтиво; Madame tout court, пишется и к царицам. L’Altesse нужно непременно, тем более, что принадлежит ей по праву (Ostaf’evskii arkhiv kniazei Viazemskikh 1899–1913: vol. 5, part 2, p. 24; Viazemskii’s emphasis).14 Viazemskii also corrects his wife’s French, as when he writes on 6 July 1824: А в самом деле надобно тебе приняться за грамоту. Пора! Ты уж такие отпускаешь со мною выходки, что ужас! Ты пишешь мне que le chapeau s’étire!!!!!! sur la tête. Господи Иисусе Христе! Это что такое! (Ostaf’evskii arkhiv kniazei Viazemskikh 1899–1913: vol. 5, part 2, p. 25; Viazemskii’s emphasis).15 But Vera protests: Si la phrase le chapeau s’étire te paraît ridicule, je la tiens de M-r Bauvais, négociant français, qui me l’a faite ainsi (vol. 5, part 2, p. 126; Viazemskaia’s emphasis).16 Vera seeks to demonstrate her knowledge of living French, supported by the authority of a French native speaker. Despite the fact that etiquette required women to write in French (note that in this exchange, Vera’s matrix language is French, while her husband’s is Russian), which would surely make them the experts, men are entitled to lecture them on their usage. Marrese (2010: 736) accordingly considers the control that men are exercising over the language use of women as a gendering of language choice by male authority. Although most Russian bilinguals seem to have been unable to explain their choice of one or the other language, or did not see a need to do so, metadiscursive comments are sometimes found. For example, Griboedov weighs up the possibilities of the two languages when he writes in a letter to Akhverdova: cette respectable infirmité me saisit l’âme (He infirmité, a благородно изувеченный, как это сказать?) (Griboedov 2006: 135).17 He thus asks the recipient what the French would be for a term which he can only find in Russian. Griboedov is evidently making a conscious linguistic choice in this instance. There were also those who recognised the need for the two languages to coexist and who reflected on the domains in which they were used. For example, the thinker Petr Chaadaev (1794–1856), who had composed his Philosophical Letters (Lettres philosophiques) in French, wrote in 1851 to the philosopher, writer and political essayist Alexander Herzen (1812–70), with French in mind: ни на каком ином языке современные предметы так складно не выговариваются (Chaadaev 1913–14: vol. 2, p. 272).18 Chaadaev requested that his correspondents write to him sometimes in Russian, sometimes in French.

238  n ina dmi tr ie va a nd ge s ine a r g e n t He asked the historian and statesman Aleksandr Turgenev (1784–1846), for instance, to write to him in French: mon ami, il faut que vous écriviez en français. Ne vous en déplaise, j’aime mieux vos lettres françaises que vos lettres russes. Il y a dans vos lettres françaises plus de laisser aller, vous y êtes plus vous-mêmes […] Le français est vraiment votre costume obligé. Vous avez éparpillé toutes les pièces de votre toilette nationale sur les grandes routes du monde civilisé. Donc écrivez le français et ne vous gênez pas. (Chaadaev 1913–14: vol. 1, pp. 170–1)19 To Pushkin, on the other hand, Chaadaev wrote thus: Ecrivez-moi en russe; il ne faut pas que vous parliez d’autre langue que celle de votre vocation (1913–14: vol. 1, p. 162).20 Chaadaev also comments on his own language use. Thus he wrote a letter in French to the Emperor Nicholas I about the shortcomings of education in Russia and subsequently apologised for his language choice to the Chief of the Corps of Gendarmes, Alexander von Benckendorff: писавши к Царю Русскому не по-русски, сам тому стыдился (vol. 1, p. 177).21 Despite the shame he experienced, Chaadaev had felt compelled to use French, as he explained to Benckendorff: я желал выразить Государю чувство, полное убеждения, и не сумел бы его выразить на языке, на котором прежде не писывал (vol. 1, p. 177).22 The notion of shame is also brought up in a letter by Aleksandr Karamzin to his brother Andrei, of which we made use earlier. Aleksandr had begun in French but then went on: Я опять забыл тебе писать по-русски, как хотел сперва. Право, стыдно, что когда забудятся, то всегда мысли надевают французский язык (Izmailova 1960: 118).23 Karamzin blames his language choice on ‘forgetting’ and represents his writing in French as almost an involuntary action. This notion is repeated by others as well.24 In sum, such examples of language commentary may serve as an indicator of a diglossic situation: the expression of firm ideas about which language is suitable for what context, and correspondents’ apologies for their inappropriate language choices, suggest that the languages’ functions are separated in users’ minds. * * * The examples we have given (and many others could be found) attest to the diversity of the ways in which French and Russian functioned among the early nineteenth-century Russian literary elite. Nonetheless we may observe a certain consistency. For most members of male literary society, the functions of French and Russian overlapped considerably: the two languages were equivalent for communication. However, the relationship

the coexi ste nc e o f r us s ia n and f r e n c h i n r u s s i a   239 bore some diglossic features. Speakers made choices between French and Russian and were able to justify that choice. Young ladies learned good manners, including the obligatory use of French in certain situations, just like young men; but for women the rules of linguistic choice were more clearly demarcated and there was more pressure on women to observe them. However, the widespread view that Russian ladies were ignorant of the mother tongue and ‘captivate[d] us with non-Russian sentences’, as Karamzin put it (1982: 102), is an exaggeration (Marrese 2010: 736). Women were able to speak and write Russian, as evidenced in their correspondence, but they chose French more often as it was required by etiquette and they considered it more suitable for conducting relationships in the social world. Language choices were made according to what symbolic capital, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, a certain language had for what situation – the value that was attached to it in the linguistic marketplace. Diglossia is a cultural, social arrangement, in accordance with which speakers choose varieties that are suitable in contexts and social domains or, as Coulmas (2013: 150–1) explains it: ‘diglossia is a social norm to which the individual speaker adheres.’ At the same time, the language norm may also allow users not to choose different languages for different functions, but to alternate. Indeed, in some linguistic situations code-switching can be the unmarked choice because speakers want to index both language identities for themselves (Myers-Scotton 1993: 294). What constitutes the unmarked choice is negotiated in language commentary. The division of languages by function is due to ‘linguistic characteristics, perceived and real, of the varieties rather than their speakers’ (Coulmas 2013: 160). Thus from metadiscursive comments it becomes clear that speakers consider that the various languages available to them have different functions. This state of affairs suggests diglossia, but the system is not rigid and is open to negotiation. Ultimately, it was by means of such negotiation that the diglossic features in the Russian linguistic sphere disappeared altogether.

NOTES   1. Cf. ideas put forward in Antoine de Rivarol’s famous treatise De l’universalité de la langue française (Rivarol 1991: 7).   2. See Grechanaia (2010) for an overview of such sources.   3. Note that Fishman deals with entire speech communities, whereas we deal here with elite speakers only, as they constitute a separate speech community in Russia at this time.   4. ‘The bill of sale of the farm drawn up and registered in Sosnitsy and in which it is expressly said that it is in this district.’

240  n ina dmi tr ie va a nd ge s ine a r g e n t   5. ‘The provincial administration annuls this outcome and asks the provincial landsurveyor in which district the farm’ (sic).   6. ‘in the first place, I am a husband and you are a wife, so I can do anything but you can do virtually nothing.’   7. ‘her very virtues, her graces, her successes must consist in submission; to submit is a woman’s lot, to overcome is a man’s. So be it.’   8. ‘Everyone here bows to you’ [i.e. ‘sends you their regards’].   9. ‘And I, who am one of the people here, want to bow to you as well.’ 10. ‘and to greet you, my dear, good aunt’. 11. ‘You tell me I should settle up with Pushkin as necessary. But what is necessary? Neither he nor I know anything about this.’ 12. ‘I don’t ask for a sash over the shoulder or round the neck but just a little ankurazhe for the buttonhole.’ 13. ‘Baratynskii is at my place. I’ll leave in about three hours. I won’t stay for dinner but we’ll have breakfast as a sort of en petit couragé. We’ll try not to drink en grand cordonnier, like cobblers, but just so as to be en petit couragé, emboldened. Come over, my angel.’ 14. ‘Madame la Princesse is not polite; just Madame can be written even to queens. Your Highness is what you must use, all the more because it belongs to her by right.’ 15. ‘You really need to get down to studying reading and writing. Right now! It’s awful what tricks you play on me! You write that your hat has stretched!!!!!! on your head. Good Lord! What is that!’ 16. ‘If the phrase the hat has stretched seems ridiculous to you, well I got it from Mr Bauvais, a French merchant, who said it to me like that.’ 17. ‘this respectable infirmity seized my soul (Not infirmity, but nobly maimed, how can one put it?).’ 18. ‘there is no other language in which contemporary subjects are so coherently articulated.’ 19. ‘My friend, you should write in French. Whether you like it or not, I prefer the letters you write in French to those you write in Russian. In your letters written in French there is less constraint, you are more yourself in them [. . .] French is truly the costume you must wear. You have scattered all the pieces of your national toilet over the great highways of the civilised world. So write French and make no bones about it.’ 20. ‘Write to me in Russian; you should not speak any language other than the language of your vocation.’ 21. ‘I was ashamed of not writing to the Russian Tsar in Russian.’ 22. ‘I wanted to express a feeling full of conviction to the Sovereign, and would not have been able to do that in a language in which I had not written before.’ 23. ‘I have again forgotten to write to you in Russian, as I had at first meant to. It really is a shame that when one’s thoughts start to wander they always clothe themselves in French.’ 24. Compare Iakov Galinkovskii’s preface to his novel Glafira (1807): ‘When I wrote my novel I wanted to think in Russian; and if faulty locutions which are not Russian have crept in, then truly that will have happened against my will or because of our deep-rooted habit of using French. This is our general misfortune’ (Russkii vestnik 1808: no. 6, p. 354). Similarly, Mariia Mukhanova, in a letter of 1828 to her brother, attributes her choice of French to ‘female capriciousness’ and asks him to forgive her (Marrese 2010: 701).

the coexi ste nc e o f r us s ia n and f r e n c h i n r u s s i a   241

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Conclusion Gesine Argent and Vladislav Rjéoutski

T

he coexistence, competition and commingling of the French and Russian languages in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia is a highly complex phenomenon, as the chapters of this volume have clearly shown. Authors have examined the language choices of a wide range of individuals, organisations and genres. This conclusion will draw together the functions of linguistic choices in various spheres, domains and genres that have emerged from the authors’ findings, summarise the manifestations and effects of Franco-Russian bilingualism in Russia which have been uncovered by this approach and then consider whether the Russian situation can be described as exceptional. Our authors’ contributions can be divided into two types. Firstly, case studies examine the linguistic choices of individuals, families or social groups like Catherine II, Nikolai Karamzin, Aleksandr Pushkin, Aleksandr Radishchev, the Stroganov and Vorontsov families, and young noblewomen who travelled abroad. Secondly, there are contributions on the use of French and Russian in wider contexts, namely in periodicals and the fields of fashion and architecture. The case studies and wider-ranging analyses complement each other to provide a historicising approach to language use in Russia from around the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. The contributors demonstrate the value of a materialist methodology of the study of language use and attitudes, which Blommaert defines as ‘an ethnographic eye for the real historical actors, their interests, their alliances, their practices, and where they come from, in relation to the discourses they produce – where discourse is in itself seen as a crucial symbolic resource onto which people project their interests, around which they can construct alliances, on and through which they construct power’ (Blommaert 1999: 7). Such analysis aims to reveal the concrete reasons for and significance of linguistic choices.

244  gesine a r ge nt a nd vl a di s la v r j é o u t s ki To begin with, it is worth stressing that, from the point of view of sociolinguistics, discussion of the effects of bilingualism should not attempt to evaluate those effects as beneficial or detrimental. This sort of judgement would rely on criteria that cannot be neutral, and it would therefore be a manifestation of our own language attitudes. What is more, we cannot legitimately claim with hindsight to know how the Russian language and linguistic culture would have evolved without the presence of French. That being said, the question of benefits and disadvantages can be addressed when it concerns individuals’ specific language choices. Speakers choose a particular way of expressing themselves – a language, a certain register within it – according to what they, consciously or not, consider most suitable for the pursuit of their communicative aims. Language choices are thus tied to personal gain, although speakers may be only partly aware, or even altogether unaware, of their communicative goals. The following examples from the chapters in this volume illustrate the variety of aims that motivate language choices. One criterion for language choice that emerges from several chapters is the creation of closeness or distance between a writer or speaker and her or his addressee(s). In Chapter 2 Georges Dulac has examined the function of French in the letters of Catherine II to Friedrich Grimm and found that the monarch’s language use was driven as much by the wish to build on the friendly, intimate conversations she had had with Grimm in person, in French, as by letter-writing etiquette and courtly norms. Liubov Sapchenko’s analysis of Karamzin’s ego-documents in Chapter 8 reveals that Karamzin used French to reduce distance between himself and the sovereign and that he also considered French a suitable language for intimate, confidential communication. The findings of other chapters, which focus on communication between Russians, however, demonstrate that the use of French could create distance, as well as diminish it. Rodolphe Baudin has shown in Chapter 6 that Radishchev used French to maintain a respectful space between himself and his patron Aleksandr Vorontsov, which would not have been possible had he used Russian. Similarly, one function of French in Pushkin’s correspondence is to indicate detachment from the addressee, Nina Dmitrieva has found (Chapter 9). Use of French reflects, for example, the lack of affection between the poet and his parents. And yet, such usage is not universal and depends on the personal circumstances of and relationship between correspondents. French, then, could function either as a marker of distance or as a way to create or preserve intimacy, depending on the context. It is also worth bearing in mind that use of foreign languages can of course be used to block communication altogether. In early eighteenth-century Russia, for example, the ability to keep secrets from servants by using foreign

c o n c lu s i o n   245 languages was presented to young Russian nobles as a good reason for learning them (Dahmen 2015: 23). The use of French was by no means limited to this purpose, though. Pushkin corresponded in French with some members of the literary community (to whom he generally wrote in Russian) when discussing moral, philosophical and historical questions. He also used French for light-hearted correspondence games. Karamzin not only expressed deep reflections and feelings in French, but also wrote things intended for posterity in that language. The variety of reasons underlying the choice of different languages emerges particularly clearly in Chapters 5 and 7 in this volume by Emilie Murphy and Jessica Tipton respectively. They have shown that individuals made language choices according to the language skills of each correspondent and code-switched when it was necessary to name specific items that seemed untranslatable, but that language choices could also be motivated by less obvious factors. Russian was used by members of the Vorontsov family and young women travelling abroad to express solidarity with compatriots, and noblewomen made playful use of different languages in their travel writing to fashion particular self-images. The chapters in the volume that examine language use on a wider scale have also dealt with the purposes and uses of French, but for the development of certain jargons and in the media. In Chapter 10 Xénia Borderioux has charted the role of French in the language of fashion and described the strategies of editors and translators of articles on this subject, ranging from inclusion of French words in their texts to transcription, explanation and translation. Likewise, Sergei and Iuliia Klimenko in Chapter 11 have outlined the development of the terminology of architecture in Russian and translators’ strategies for dealing with French loanwords. They have shown that translators adopted a purist stance towards French architectural terms and that they strove to introduce Russian equivalents, although not altogether successfully. The French influence in these domains, and reactions to it, indicate that the collective linguistic practice frequently came under scrutiny, but that ultimately the development of the Russian jargons was dependent on the influence of French culture and language. The development of a francophone press in Russia, unlike the development of periodicals on fashion and the publication of numerous French works on architecture, was not connected to the creation of a specialist language. It had a different, twofold function. As Vladislav Rjéoutski and Natalia Speranskaia have argued in Chapter 4, francophone periodicals not only met a social need for French people living in Russia, as well as for francophone Russians, but were also used as propaganda instruments

246  gesine a r ge nt a nd vl a di s la v r j é o u t s ki by the Russian court. Periodicals on literature, music and art benefited the progress of civilisation, but at the same time they could serve to broadcast to the Western public a favourable image of the Russian court as a European institution. Once the variety of language choices and their functions has been considered in this way, Dmitrieva and Gesine Argent pose the broader question in Chapter 12 of whether the language practice of the nobility was characterised by pure bilingualism, with Russian and French functionally equivalent, or whether this bilingualism was overlaid with a diglossic relationship, with different functions allocated to different languages. They find that language practice exists on a continuum of general bilingualism with some diglossic features, a continuum on which the functions of the languages overlap considerably, and individuals must make sophisticated choices to serve their communicative aims. Both our set of chapters on individuals and groups and our chapters on language practice in particular cultural fields and media, then, have shown that the purposes behind language choices were varied but clearly justified in most cases. Speakers had to negotiate their way competently through the linguistic landscape, in each instance making a choice that would convey exactly the intended message. Those who did not apply the correct language skills, as Murphy has demonstrated, could become objects of derision and might be felt not to belong to the in-group. The fact that the sort of navigation we have described is a fundamental characteristic of human communication and thus found in all language communities and settings (Joseph 2009: 4) should make us wary of arguing that Imperial Russia was a quite exceptional case in the sphere of language use. But although the principal mechanisms at work – people using linguistic practice to their advantage, for their communicative aims – are not unique, we still need to ask whether the specific language situation, involving the spread of French and its interplay with the vernacular, was exceptional. The historicising approach, we have argued, emphasises the need to focus on specific contexts and language use at a concrete, local level, but comparison with research on other language communities is also necessary to assess exceptionality. It is useful at this point to refer to some conclusions we have drawn at the end of a volume on francophonie throughout Europe during the period that we have been studying (Rjéoutski et al. 2014). Many of the reasons Russians had for choosing French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the interplay between French and the native language, were similar to those that affected language choice and language attitudes in other communities. In a considerable number of other European countries or regions too – for example, Bohemia, Holland,

c o n c lu s i o n   247 Italy, Poland, Prussia, Romanian lands and Sweden, among those examined by contributors to Rjéoutski et al. (2014) – French was used at courts and/​or among sections of the noble estate. Francophonie also fulfilled many of the same functions in other European countries as it did in Russia: French could be the language of high society and the salon, a language of intimacy, the medium for personal correspondence, diaries and travel accounts, the vehicle for an amateur, private aristocratic literature, a language of education and so forth (Rjéoutski et al. 2014: 434–6). Its use even elicited the same sort of responses that the authors of chapters in our second volume find Russians expressing. Again, French was widely used throughout Europe as a lingua franca. This function of French has not been discussed in detail in the Russian context in the present volume, because we have focused on the interplay of French and Russian and because in many cases interlocutors or correspondents were bilingual and therefore had no need for a lingua franca. However, we know – as the chapters by Murphy and Sapchenko have shown – that French was used by Russians to communicate with non-russophone foreigners anywhere, whether in social contexts, personal letters, diplomatic correspondence or writing for larger readerships. Finally, we should stress the fact that the use of French from the late seventeenth century to the nineteenth was strongly associated, as Marc Fumaroli (2001) has shown, with the spread of elite culture ( Rjéoutski et al. 2014: 440). Since this culture was not limited to separate nations but was disseminated across Europe, it was only to be expected that francophonie among the Russian elite would not be exceptional but part of a pan-European pattern. All this is not to deny, though, that there were distinctive features in the Russian case, as there are of course in every other European case. One such feature was the presence of a significant German ethnic element in the Russian ruling elite and widespread use of German for many practical, non-prestigious purposes. Another was the rapidity with which French spread among the Russian nobility in the second half of the eighteenth century and the enthusiasm with which it was adopted. No doubt this feature can be explained by the national backwardness of which rulers and the elite were acutely conscious, once Peter the Great, in the ways described in our introduction to this volume, had turned Russia’s gaze on the West. Using French was a first step towards participation in European civilisation and a means of beginning the task – required by the new imperial ambition – to catch up with and overtake the West. Seen in the context of Russia’s backwardness, knowledge of French enabled members of the Russian social elite – as Chapter 3 by Vladislav Rjéoutski and Vladimir Somov in particular has shown – to inscribe themselves in the imaginary community of enlightened Europeans. It enabled them to

248  gesine a r ge nt a nd vl a di s la v r j é o u t s ki fashion themselves as members of a European-wide social group, hence the desire among them to give their children an education which closely adhered to the model that had been widely adopted by the European aristocracy in general. Nor should we underestimate the importance that French had as a means of access to a great range of literature on any subject from any European source. Only German literature was read in the original in eighteenth-century Russia, because knowledge of German was widespread there; works of English, Italian, Spanish and classical literature, on the other hand, were all read mainly in French translation, as were – in most cases – books on mathematics, physics and fortification and (as Chapter 11 by Sergei and Iuliia Klimenko has shown) on architecture. French, then, was a crucial intermediary language for new notions in a country where a tradition of printing and publishing was exceptionally weak before the eighteenth century. * * * In our second volume, the focus will shift from language use to language attitudes. We shall consider how the presence and spread of French among the Russian elite, which we have examined in this volume, generated discussion that helped Russians to think about the functions, choice and use of languages, including their own, in new ways. It should become clear that use of a foreign language, in the eighteenth century, was not really at odds with pride in Russia, pace many comic dramatists and satirical journalists, as Rjéoutski and Somov’s discussion of the ardent patriotism of the multilingual Stroganov family has already shown. In the nineteenth century, on the other hand, language attitudes began to change with the rise of Romanticism and cultural nationalism and the growth of an intelligentsia whose loyalties were not to the noble estate. Using the literature that Russian francophonie had helped to stimulate as a vehicle for expression of such attitudes, as of so many other topical concerns, Russian writers began to develop their own social, political, cultural and, of course, linguistic identity as Russia began to present itself as a European nation and to flourish as an imperial state.

REFERENCES Blommaert, J. (1999), ‘The debate is open’, in J. Blommaert (ed.), Language Ideological Debates, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1–38. Dahmen, K. (2015), ‘The use, functions, and spread of German in eighteenth-century Russia’, The Russian Review, 74: 1, 20–40. Fumaroli, M. (2001), Quand l’Europe parlait français, Paris: Editions de Fallois.

c o n c lu s i o n   249 Joseph, J. E. (2009), Language and Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rjéoutski, V., G. Argent and D. Offord (eds), European Francophonie: The Social, Political and Cultural History of an International Prestige Language, Oxford: Peter Lang.

Notes on Contributors

Gesine Argent is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the AHRCfunded project on ‘The History of the French Language in Russia’ at the University of Bristol. She specialises in the study of Russian language ideologies, examining linguistic culture from a historical sociolinguistic perspective as well as studying contemporary debates about language, language use and the role and character a language has or should have. Rodolphe Baudin is Associate Professor of Russian and Head of the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Strasbourg. He specialises in the study of eighteenth-century Russian literature, focusing in particular on Sentimentalism, travel writing and private letters. He has written numerous articles and authored or edited several books, notably on Karamzin and Radishchev. Xénia Borderioux is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Modern Texts and Manuscripts of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS). She is an eighteenth-century specialist and an historian of fashion. She has written a dissertation on the influence of European fashion on the development of dress in Russia in the age of Catherine, as well as journalistic notes and articles on the history of the fashion press for the Russian journal Teoriia mody. Nina Dmitrieva is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskii Dom) at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg. She has authored numerous works on the influence of French literature on nineteenth-century Russian writers and on features of Franco-Russian bilingualism in the nineteenth century. She is co-

no te s o n c o n t r ibut o r s   251 editor of an academic edition of Pushkin’s works and has written about the textology, translation and reception of Pushkin’s writing in France. Georges Dulac is a former Research Director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, Classical Age and Enlightenment (IRCL) in Montpellier. He is preparing a critical edition of the political writings of Diderot’s ‘Russian period’ for Diderot’s Œuvres complètes and is helping to produce an edition of the correspondence between Catherine II and F. M. Grimm. Together with S. Karp, he has published Les Archives de l’Est et la France des Lumières. Guide et Inédits. Iuliia Klimenko is an architect and architectural historian and a member of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS). She was awarded a PhD in 2000 for her work on the French architect Nicolas Legrand and since then has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Scientific Research Institute for the Theory and History of Architecture and Urbanism in Moscow. She is also an Associate Professor at the Moscow Institute of Architecture. She has published over 150 scholarly articles on the history of Russian architecture during the Age of Enlightenment. Sergei Klimenko graduated from the Faculty of Reconstruction and Restoration of the Moscow Institute of Architecture in 1994 and is now Professor of the History of Architecture and Town Planning at this institute. His scholarly interests are in the history of Russian architecture in the first half of the eighteenth century. He has authored over seventy publications on the history of Russo-European architectural relations in the age of Peter the Great and on stylistic features of Russian architecture and town planning in the age of Empress Anne. Emilie Murphy is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham. Her main research interests are Russian francophonie, Russian women’s writing and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia. She is writing her thesis on Russian noblewomen’s francophone travel writing and has published articles on noblewomen’s francophone life writing and travel writing. Derek Offord is Research Professor in Russian at the University of Bristol and directs the AHRC-funded project on ‘The History of the French Language in Russia’ out of which these volumes mainly arise. He is a specialist in pre-revolutionary Russian history and culture and has

252  n ote s o n co ntr ibuto r s published books on the Russian revolutionary movement, early Russian liberalism, Russian travel writing and the broader history of Russian thought, as well as two books on contemporary Russian grammar and usage. Vladislav Rjéoutski is a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Moscow, having previously worked on the project team studying ‘The History of the French Language in Russia’ at the University of Bristol. He is a specialist in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian history and culture and the history of education and the press. He has published books on French emigration to Russia in the eighteenth century and on French-speaking educators in Europe. Lara Ryazanova-Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Russian and Academic Director of the Princess Dashkova Russian Centre at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on Russian sociolinguistics. Her publications include The Russian Language Today (with T. Wade, 1999), Collins English-Russian, Russian-English Dictionary (2000), The Russian Language Outside the Nation (2014) and (with P. Petrov) The Vernaculars of Communism: Language, Ideology and Power in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (2015). Liubov Sapchenko is a Professor of the Faculty of Literature at Ul’ianovsk State Pedagogical University. She is the author of over a hundred scholarly articles, an anthology on Karamzin in the estimation of Russian writers, critics and scholars (2006) and two monographs which focus on nineteenth-century views of Karamzin’s legacy (published in 2003 and 2013). She is a member of the Russian Society for the Study of the Eighteenth Century. Vladimir Somov is a Research Fellow in the Manuscript Department of the Rimskii-Korsakov State Conservatory in St Petersburg. He is the author of numerous publications on Russo-European contacts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the circulation of French books in Russia, the French emigration, the francophone periodical press and the history of musical culture. Natalia Speranskaia was awarded a doctorate at the University of Tver’ in 2005. She has published articles on francophone newspapers in Russia and has worked as a translator from French and English. Having served for a number of years in the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskii Dom) at the Russian Academy of Sciences, she is now

no te s o n c o n t r ibu t o r s   253 head of the Voltaire Library at the Russian National Library in St Petersburg. Jessica Tipton is a PhD student on the AHRC-funded project on ‘The History of the French Language in Russia’ at the University of Bristol. Her thesis is a case study of multilingualism in the noble Russian Vorontsov family from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s. She has given talks in the UK and Russia on Princess Dashkova and her interest in English gardens and has also published an article on Russia and climate change.

Index

absolutism see enlightened absolutism Academy of Architecture (in Moscow), 219 Academy of Arts (founded in Russia in 1757), 63, 216, 219 Academy of Sciences (founded in Russia in 1724, opened 1725), 12, 91, 133 Addison, Joseph (1672–1719), 85 address, terms of, 127; see also pronominal usage Adelung, Friedrich von (1768–1843), 91 Adskaia pochta (The Post from Hell; Russian periodical), 203 Age of Enlightenment see Enlightenment Akhverdova, Praskov’ia Nikolaevna, née Arsen’eva (1783–1851), 232, 237 Aksakov, Konstantin Sergeevich (1817–60), 16–17 albums, 9–10, 152, 161–6 Alekseev, Petr Alekseevich (1731–1801), Ecclesiastical Dictionary, 37 Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’ (1717–83), 28, 45, 70 Alexander I (Aleksandr Pavlovich, 1777–1825; Emperor of Russia 1801–25), 40, 63, 73, 85, 91, 92, 158, 163, 164, 173, 223; see also Karamzin: letters to Alexander I; Pushkin: letters to Alexander I Alexander II (Aleksandr Nikolaevich, 1818–81; Emperor of Russia 1855–81), 234 alienation see estrangement almanacs, 39 Amyot, Jacques (1513–93), 53 Anderson, Benedict, 4, 62 Anhalt, Friedrich von (1732–94), 31

Anne, Empress (Anna Ioannovna, 1693–1740; Empress of Russia 1730–40), 28 Année littéraire (The Year in Literature; French periodical), 85 Antoine, Jean (Huguenot tutor in eighteenth-century St Petersburg, d. 1771), 65 Antraigues, Marquis d’ (unidentified), 73 aping (as topos in cultural discourse), 33 Apraksins, 73 Arabic, 230 architecture dictionaries, glossaries or lexicons of architectural terms, 209, 210–11, 213–14, 216, 218 language of, 8, 209–24, 245 aristocracy, language use among, 61–83, 132–47 Arnaud, François (1721–84), 85 Arzamas group, 121 assemblies (assamblei, social gatherings in time of Peter I), 13 Austerlitz, Battle of (1805), 3 Aviler, Augustin-Charles d’ (1653–1701), 210, 212, 215, 216 Course of Architecture, 210, 217, 218 Explanation of the Terms of Architecture, 210 backwardness see national backwardness Bakunins, 146 Baltic nobility, 1–2, 31, 35 Balzac, Honoré de (1799–1850), 95 Baratynskii, Evgenii Abramovich (1800–44), 97 Barbour, Stephen, 4

i n d e x   255 Bariatinskaia, Princess Ol’ga or Mariia or Leonilla Ivanovna (dates unknown), 108–9, 114 Bariatinskii, Prince Ivan Sergeevich (1738–1811), 68 Bariatinskiis, Princes, 73, 79 Barran, Thomas, 128 Barsov, Anton Alekseevich (1730–91), Short Rules of Russian Grammar, 37 Bastille, 161 Batiushkov, Konstantin Nikolaevich (1787–1855), 97 Bazaine, Pierre-Dominique (1786–1838), 223 Bazhenov, Vasilii Ivanovich (1738–99), 213, 222 beau monde see high society Beccaria, Cesare, Marchese di Bonesana (1738–94), On Crimes and Punishments, 13 Bélidor, Bernard Forest de (1698–1761), 215, 216 Benckendorff, Count Alexander von (1783–1844), 2, 122, 127, 173, 184–5, 186, 238 Bennigsen, Levin August Gottlieb Theophil von (1745–1826), 1, 73 Berdiaev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1874–1948), 129 Berelowitch, Wladimir, 32 Berg family, 1 Berlin Academy of Sciences see Royal Berlin Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts Bétancourt, Agustín de (1758–1824), 223 Betskoi, Ivan Ivanovich (1704–95), 36 biculturalism (or cultural bilingualism), 18, 228–9 Bielfeld, Jacob Friedrich von (1717–70), Political Institutions, 50 bilingualism, 4, 6, 8, 103, 173, 228–39, 243, 246 additive, primary or secondary, 230 Franco-Russian, 8, 13, 17, 25, 26–7, 120–9, 152, 156, 183, 228, 243 individual or societal, 230, 231 supposedly pernicious effects of, 18 see also diglossia; multilingualism Bistroms, 1 Black Sea, 14 Blackstone, William (1723–80), Commentaries on the Laws of England, 50 Blommaert, Jan, 243 Blondel, Jacques-François (1705–74), 210, 215, 216 Course of Architecture, 217 New Manner of Fortifying Cities, 211

Boileau (Nicolas Boileau-Déspréaux, 1636–1711), Poetic Art, 28 Bonnet, Charles (1720–93), 153 booksellers, 39, 91, 195 borrowing see linguistic borrowing Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne (1627–1704), 70, 78, 162, 164 Bouhours, Dominique (1628–1702), 35 Bourdais, Pierre Nicolas (eighteenthcentury French actor), 69 Bourdieu, Pierre, 61, 239; see also cultural capital; symbolic capital Brancas, Marquis de, 68 Brantôme, Pierre de (c. 1540–1614), 53 Briseux, Charles-Etienne (1680–1754), 216 Brubaker, Rogers, 4 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de (1707–88), 154, 161 Discourse on the Nature of Animals, 154 Bulgarin, Faddei Venediktovich (1789–1859), 93–4, 185 Bulletin du Nord (The Northern Bulletin; Russian francophone periodical), 87, 89, 94, 96–7 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward (1803–73), 96 Burke, Peter, 4 Burnashev, Vladimir Petrovich (1812–88), 90 Bussy-Rabutin (Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy, 1618–93), 137 Buturlins, Counts, 79 Cabinet des modes nouvelles (Cabinet of New Fashions; French periodical), 195, 196–7 Cabinet of Fashion and Taste see Kabinet van mode en smaak Cabinet of New Fashions see Cabinet des modes nouvelles Cadet Corps see Noble Land Cadet Corps calques, 73–4, 233, 236; see also linguistic borrowing; loanwords; neologisms Caméléon littéraire (The Literary Chameleon; Russian francophone periodical), 85, 90, 91, 95 capital see cultural capital; symbolic capital Capo d’Istria, Count (Ioannis Kapodistrias, 1776–1831), 153, 159, 166 Carbonnier d’Arsit de Gragnac, Louis Barthélémy (1770–1836), 223 Cardel, Elisabeth (Huguenot governess of future Catherine II, 1712–?), 50, 54 card-playing, 13, 67 Carmichael, Cathie, 4 Cathcart, Charles, 9th Lord Cathcart (1721–76), 25

256  in de x Catherine II, the Great (Sophie-FriederikeAuguste von Anhalt-Zerbst, 1729–96; Empress of Russia 1762–96), 2, 13, 45–57, 63, 70, 72, 78, 85, 120, 132, 133, 194, 205, 213, 214, 221, 243 attitude towards France, 56 correspondence with Grimm, 25–41, 244 Instruction (Nakaz), 13, 15, 50, 57, 221 multilingualism of, 57 Oh Time! 57 use of French by, 2, 45–57: for ‘chitchat’ (jaserie), 47–9; the orality of Catherine’s French, 48–9; her reading in French, 50; her use of proverbial and idiomatic expressions, 51–3; her use of archaisms, 53; her use of the language of theatre, 53–4; her use of oaths, 54; the influence of French literature on Catherine’s French, 53–5; Catherine’s borrowings from Voltaire, 54–5; her use of French compared to use of it by other monarchs, 56–7; her wordplay in French, 55–6 use of Russian by, 2, 57 Caucasian peoples and languages, 2 Caucasus, Russian expansion into, 14 Censorship Statutes (of 1828), 97 Central Asian peoples and languages, 2 Chaadaev, Petr Iakovlevich (1794–1856), 176, 237–8 Philosophical Letters, 17, 121, 176, 237 Chambray, Roland Fréart de (1606–76), 210, 216 chancery language (prikaznoi iazyk, of Muscovite bureaucracy), 33 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1500–58), 34 Charpentier, Jean Baptiste (eighteenthcentury teacher of French in St Petersburg), 69 Charter to the Nobility (1785), 13, 28–9 Chernyshevs, Counts, 68 Chomsky, Noam, 5 Church Slavonic, 33, 36, 75, 105, 112, 162, 231 clarté see French: clarity of Classicism, 220, 224 coats of arms, 29 code-switching, 4, 8, 9, 10, 103, 153, 232–3, 239, 245 at the beginning or end of a letter, 134–5, 137–8 in Karamzin’s correspondence, 156–60 when mentioning people or places, 135, 145, 146, 147 in Pushkin’s correspondence, 173, 174, 186–7

for quotations in the original language, 114–15, 136–7, 187 in Radishchev’s correspondence, 122–9 stigmatisation of, 34 in the Vorontsov family, 132–47 in women’s writings, 104, 110–12 codification see Russian: codification of; Russian: standardisation of coiffure, 13, 197–8, 200; see also coquettes; fashion, language and College of Commerce, 120 College of Foreign Affairs, 62 colleges (government departments introduced by Peter I), 12 Comédie Française, 68 Comédie Italienne, 54, 68 comic drama, 10, 13, 34, 193 Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, 14 Conservateur impartial (The Impartial Conservative; Russian francophone periodical), 86, 88, 89, 92, 97 Constant, Benjamin (1767–1830), Adolphe, 180 Constantine Pavlovich, Grand Duke (1779–1831), 91 Cooper, James Fenimore (1789–1851), Red Rover, 112 coquettes, 200–6 Corberon, Marie Daniel Bourrée, Baron de (1748–1810), 46 Corfield, Penelope, 4 Corneille, Pierre (1606–84), 28, 50, 78 correspondence, as a primary source, 9, 73; see also French: in correspondence costume see dress Costumes and Records of the Great Theatres of Paris see Costumes et annales des grands théâtres de Paris Costumes et annales des grands théâtres de Paris (Costumes and Records of the Great Theatres of Paris), 195 Cotte, Robert de (1656–1735), 218 Coulmas, Florian, 230, 239 Courland, 1 Coxe, William (1747–1828), 25 Craon, Battle of (1814), 64 Crébillon, Claude Prosper Jolyot de (Crébillon fils, 1707–77), Strayings of the Heart and Mind, 180 Crébillon, Prosper Jolyot Sieur de (Crébillon père, 1674–1762), 95 Crimea, 14 cuisine, 15, 205 cultural bilingualism see biculturalism cultural capital, 61, 79, 239; see also symbolic capital cultural nationalism, 29, 248

i n d e x   257 Cure for Boredom and Anxiety see Lekarstvo ot skuki i zabot Cyrillic alphabet or script, 111–12, 123–4, 135, 139, 140, 197, 198 Czartoryski, Prince Adam (1770–1861), 69 Dalmas, Honoré-Joseph (d. 1829), 92 dancing, taught through French, 3, 32, 66 dandies, 205 Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), 112 Dashkova, Princess Ekaterina Romanovna, née Vorontsova (1743–1810), 35, 38, 104, 108, 114, 115, 123, 133 code-switching by, 134, 136, 137, 139–40, 143, 144, 145–6 see also Dictionary of the Russian Academy; Lekarstvo ot skuki i zabot; Vorontsovs Davydov, Aleksandr L’vovich (1773–1833), 175 Davydov, Denis Vasil’evich (1784–1839), 1 Dawe, George (1781–1829), 1 Decembrist Revolt (1825), 93 Decembrists, 75 Decker, Paul (1685–1742), 217 Deffand, Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du (1697–1780), 68 Delamare, Nicolas (1639–1723), 220–1 Treatise on Police, 220 Del’vig, Anton Antonovich (1798–1831), 177 Derzhavin, Gavrila Romanovich (1743–1816), 14, 38, 39 Desgodetz, Antoine Babuty (1653–1728), 216 Destrem, Jean Antoine Maurice (1788–1855), 223 detachment, from native soil see estrangement Devolant, Franz (1752–1818), 223 diaries, 9, 103, 106 Dickens, Charles (1812–70), 96 Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century Russian, 124 Dictionary of Middle French, 53 Dictionary of the French Language, 54 Dictionary of the Russian Academy, 38–9, 71, 143, 196 didactics, of noble education, 75 Diderot, Denis (1713–84), 28, 46, 55, 57, 62, 68, 69 diglossia, 4, 6, 228–39, 246; see also bilingualism; multilingualism diminutives see Russian: in diminutives Dmitriev, Ivan Ivanovich (1760–1837), 97, 153 Dmitrieva, Ekaterina, 178, 181

Dolgorukov, Prince Grigorii Fedorovich (1657–1723), 212 Donna galante ed Erudita, giornale dedicato al bel sesso (Gallant and Learned Lady, a Journal Dedicated to the Fair Sex; Italian periodical), 195 Dostoevskii, Fedor Mikhailovich (1821–81), 17, 18, 230 drawing, taught through French, 3 dress, 13, 15, 193–206 Dreux du Radier, Jean-François (1714–80), Dictionary of Love, 201 Drone see Truten’ Du Lussy see Tschudy Duhan (or Du Han) de Jandun, Jaques Egide (1685–1745), 50 Dumas, Alexandre (Dumas père, 1802–70), 95 Dupaty, Charles Marguerite Jean Baptiste (Mercier-Dupaty, 1746–88), Letters on Italy, 106 Durova, Nadezhda Andreevna (1783–1866), 177 Dutch, 2, 15 ego-writing, 9–10, 106, 152–67, 244; see also albums; diaries; French: in egodocuments; travel writing Ekaterina Pavlovna, Grand Duchess (1788–1819), 155, 161–4 elegies, 13 elite, multi-ethnicity of, 2 Elizabeth, Empress (Elizaveta Petrovna; 1709–61 (–1762 NS); Empress of Russia 1741–61 (–1762 NS)), 2, 12, 27, 28, 66, 85, 91, 92, 133 Elizaveta Alekseevna (Louise of Baden, wife of Alexander I, 1779–1826), 155, 164–6 Elspaß, Stephan, 8 emancipation (of nobility in 1762), 13, 15, 28–9, 32, 106 emperor (title imperator), 14 empire-building, 4, 14 Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné […], 47 encyclopédistes, 28, 221 English, 15, 228 in albums by Karamzin, 162, 164 knowledge, study or use of in Stroganov family, 71, 73, 75, 77–8, 79 women’s knowledge or use of, 104, 107–9, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116 enlightened absolutism, 13 Enlightenment, 13, 67, 78, 79, 84, 134, 215, 218, 219, 222 epic poetry, 13, 14 Epinay, Mlle Louise d’ (1726–83), 74

258  in de x Ermolov, Aleksei Petrovich (1777–1861), 1 Eropkin, Petr Mikhailovich (1698–1740), 216 Estland, 1 estrangement (supposed alienation or detachment, of Russian elite from native tradition), 77, 79 etiquette, language and epistolary, 67, 121–2, 134, 135, 137, 138, 152–3, 158, 173, 175, 177, 182, 187, 237, 244 social, 105, 159, 173, 177, 228, 233–5, 239 see also Bussy-Rabutin Euler, Johann Albrecht (1734–1800), 47 Euler, Leonhard (1707–83), 90 Euler, Mlle (teacher of French in Russia), 31 Europeanisation see Westernisation Evans, Robert, 4 exceptionalism, of Russian cultural and linguistic situation, 4, 17–18, 246–8 Ezhemesiachnye sochineniia (Monthly Works; Russian periodical), 85, 95 Faber, Gotthilf-Theodor von (1766–1847), 90 fables, 13 Fabre, Jacques Alexandre (1782–1844), 223 Falconet, Etienne-Maurice (1716–91), 12, 57, 68 Fäsch, Johann Rudolph (1680–1749), 211 fashion, language and, 4, 15, 193–206, 243, 245 Fashion see Mode Fashionable Magazine (English periodical), 195 fatherland (otechestvo, as concept), 76, 154 Faure, abbé Otto-Anne, 70 Favart, Charles Simon (1710–92), 54 Favart, Marie-Justine-Benoîte, née Marie Duronceray (1727–72), 54 The Love Feast, 54 Félibien, André, Sieur des Avaux (1619–95), 210, 212 fencing, taught through French, 3, 32, 66 Fénelon, François (1651–1715), 50, 70 Ferguson, Charles, 6, 230 Ferret see Furet Ferté-Imbault, Marquise de la (daughter of Madame Geoffrin), 68 Figes, Orlando, 18 fire of Moscow (1812), 222 Fishman, Joshua, ‘Bilingualism with and without Diglossia, Diglossia with and without Bilingualism’, 6, 231 Fletcher, Giles, the Elder (c. 1548–1611), 15 Foligny, Guillaume François de (tutor in St Petersburg), 65

Fontainebleau, Edict of, see Revocation of Edict of Nantes Fonvizin, Denis Ivanovich (1744 or 1745–92), 29, 34, 39, 200, 201 Brigadier, 29, 201 Letters from France, 106, 200 Minor, 29, 123, 125 fops, 201 Foreign Journal see Journal étranger Foreign Review see Revue étrangère fortification, books, dictionaries or treatises on, 9, 210, 211 Francomania see Gallomania Francophilia (or Gallophilia), 56, 64, 70, 98, 205; see also Gallomania Francophobia see Gallophobia francophone literature see French: as language of literature francophone press, 7, 9, 84–98, 246 censorship of, 93 centres of, in Russia, 86–7 compared to the press in German in Russia, 87 as cultural intermediary, 95–8 editors of, 90–1, 97 in Egypt, England, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Turkey, 86 and French literature, 95 influence on the spread of French in Russia, 87–91 as platform for literary discussions, 90, 97 readership of, 88–91, 94, 98 and the Russian authorities, 91–4 and Russian literature, 96–7 supported by Russian aristocrats, 94 as tool of cultural propaganda, 96–7 see also periodicals; Russian press; satirical journals Frederick II, the Great, of Prussia (1712–86), 51, 57 francophonie of, 47, 50 scorn for German, 47, 56 freemasons, 125–6; see also masonic lodges French for abstract concepts, 143–5 at the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, 47 in albums, 161–6 for amateur (unprofessionalised) literature, 247 in architectural education, 216–18 for architectural terminology, 209–24, 243 clarity (clarté) of, 28, 228 in correspondence, 9, 72, 73, 77, 245, 247: in the letters of Catherine II to Grimm, 45–57; in Radishchev’s letters

i n d e x   259 to Aleksandr Vorontsov, 120–9; among the Vorontsovs, 132–47; in Karamzin’s letters to his second wife, 156–60; in Pushkin’s letters, 172–88 at court, 2, 27, 46 for cultural or political propaganda, 15–16, 26, 45, 69, 91–4, 98, 245–6 for cultural transfer, 84, 95–7, 98, 228 differences between men’s and women’s use of, 9, 106, 233–5, 238–9: see also women’s use of below for diplomacy or in diplomatic service, 2, 28, 93, 228 in ego-documents, 9, 74, 78, 103–17, 152–67, 247 foreigners’ descriptions of Russians’ use of, 25 grammars of, 65 historiography on use in Russia, 6–7 as an ‘intellectual’ language, 126 as an intermediary or vehicular language for translation, 15, 28, 32, 50, 71, 74, 75, 90, 95–6, 112, 199, 248 as language of ‘bureaucratic sentimentalism’, 126, 127 as language of ‘civilisation’, 62, 129 as language of culture, 94, 247 as language of education or tuition see teaching and learning of below as language of Enlightenment, 62 as language of fashion, 193–206 as language of friendship, intimacy or proximity, 49–51, 67–8, 78, 126, 244, 247 as language of honour, 122 as language of literature, 2, 6, 10–11, 26, 28, 105–7, 126 as language of nobility, 2–3, 16, 29 as language of sociability, 6, 30, 67, 70 in letters to rulers, 73, 154–5, 183–6, 238 as lingua franca, 2, 26, 66, 70, 78, 93, 105, 153, 247 in masonic lodges, 32, 68 for medical topics, 126, 137, 145, 157 for memoirs, 50, 73, 103, 106 in men’s letters to women, 156–60, 176–83 in Moscow University, 30 at the Noble Land Cadet Corps in St Petersburg, 30–2 in press see francophone press as prestige language or language of distinction, 27, 105 in the reign of Peter the Great, 26 rejection of, 125–6, 183, 213–14 in the Republic of Letters, 2, 15, 28, 67, 78

in salons, 10, 48, 70, 247 for self-fashioning, 29, 78, 247–8 for social differentiation, 29, 67 as society language, 2, 26, 62, 68, 70, 105, 183, 205, 247 supposed qualities of, 28: see also clarity above; universality below teaching and learning of, 3, 7, 30–2, 65, 66, 75–6, 113–14, 247: see also dancing; drawing; fencing; geography; history; mathematics; music textbooks on, 8 in theatre, 54 in travel diaries or journals, 9–10, 68, 72–3, 103–17, 247 universality (universalité) of, 28 use by monarchs, 47, 50, 56 women’s use of, 10, 103–17, 233–5, 245 see also address, terms of; Catherine II: use of French by; cultural capital; etiquette; francophone press; Frenchspeaking tutors; Grand Tour; interference between French and Russian; libraries; loanwords; primary sources; Rivarol; translation French National Assembly, 63, 74 French Revolution (from 1789), 3, 63, 64, 74, 88, 162 French-speaking tutors, 3, 9, 31–2, 65–6, 74, 135, 173 image of, 34, 141–2 Fréron, Elie-Catherine (1719–76), 85 Froissart, Jean (c. 1337–c. 1405), Chronicles, 53 Fuks, Aleksandra Andreevna, née Alekhtina (1788 or c. 1805–53), 177 Fumaroli, Marc, 247 Furet (The Ferret; Russian francophone periodical), 86, 89, 90, 95, 97–8 Galiani, abbé Ferdinando (1728–87), 161 Gallant and Learned Lady, a Journal Dedicated to the Fair Sex see Donna galante ed Erudita, giornale dedicato al bel sesso gallant culture, 154 Gallicisms, 138, 201, 204, 205, 214; see also loanwords Gallien de Salmorenc, Timoléon (c. 1740– after 1786), 90, 91 Gallomania, 40; see also Francophilia; Gallophobia Gallophobia, 29 during Napoleonic Wars, 3 see also linguistic Gallophobia Gaston, Chevalier Marie Joseph Hyacinthe de (1767–1808), 88, 91–2

260  in de x Gautier, Théophile (1811–72), 95 Gazette de St. Pétersbourg (The St Petersburg Gazette; Russian francophone periodical), 91 gender differences in use of French see French: differences between men’s and women’s use of General Collection of Parisian Hair-Styles, 195 gentry see nobility Geoffrin, Marie Thérèse Rodet (1699–1777), 45, 46, 47–8, 68 geography, taught through French, 66 George, Duke of Oldenburg (1784–1812), 155 Georgians, 2 German, 30, 32, 46, 72, 247 in the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, 47 in albums compiled by Karamzin, 162, 164 architectural terms borrowed from, 213, 217–18 in competition with French, or relative value of, 26, 27, 30, 47 as a domestic language, 2 as language of education, 2 mother tongue of and use by Catherine II, 2, 56–7 at the Noble Land Cadet Corps in St Petersburg, 37 not much used among the Stroganovs, 78, 79 in the reign of Peter the Great, 26 Russians’ knowledge of, 66, 228, 248 scorned by Frederick II, 47, 56 supposed qualities of, 34, 35 taught through French, 66, 71 as vehicle for secular knowledge, 15 women’s knowledge or use of, 104, 107, 108, 110, 112, 113, 116 Gertsen, Aleksandr Ivanovich see Herzen, Alexander Giornale delle nuove mode di Francia e d’Inghilterra (Journal of the New Fashions of France and England; Italian periodical), 195 Girard, Nicolas (French architect in early eighteenth-century Russia), 218–19 Girardin, Saint-Marc (Marc Girardin, 1801–73), 94 Glinka, Sergei Nikolaevich (1776–1847), 64, 75, 90 Globe (The Globe; French periodical), 95 Goldmann, Nicolaus (1611–65), 217 Golitsyn, Prince Aleksandr Mikhailovich (1723–1807), 32–3, 69

Golitsyn, Prince Boris Vladimirovich (1769–1813), 63 Golitsyn, Prince Dmitrii Alekseevich (1734–1803), 57 Golitsyn, Prince Dmitrii Vladimirovich (1771–1844), 94 Golitsyn, Prince Nikolai Borisovich (1794–1866), 90 Golitsyna, Princess Natal’ia Petrovna, née Chernysheva (1741–1837), 63 Golitsyna, Princess Sof’ia see Stroganova, Sof’ia Vladimirovna Golitsyns, Princes, 1, 73, 79 Golovin, Mikhail Evseevich (1756–90), 213 Golovina, Varvara Nikolaevna (1766–1819), 109 Golovkins, Counts, 79 Goncharova, Natal’ia Ivanovna, née Zagriazhskaia (1785–1848), 181–2 Goncharova, Natal’ia Nikolaevna (1812–63; married to Pushkin 1831–7), 173, 180–3, 187, 235 Gonzaga, Pietro di Gottardo (1751–1831), 223 Gorham, Michael, 7 Gottsched, Johann Christoph (1700–66), Das Neueste aus der anmuthigen Gelehrsamkeit (What is New in Graceful Learning; German periodical), 85 governesses, 31, 135; see also Frenchspeaking tutors grammars see French: grammars of; Russian: grammars of Grand Tour, 25, 32, 62, 66, 68, 107, 113 within Russia, 71 Grande Armée (of Napoleon), 1, 157 Great Northern War (with Sweden, 1700–21), 14 Grech, Nikolai Ivanovich (1787–1867), 93 Grechanaia (also Gretchanaia), Elena, 7, 103 Greek, 34, 35, 75, 96, 230 Gresset, Jean-Baptiste-Louis (1709–77), 70 Gretchanaia see Grechanaia Griboedov, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1795–1829), 232, 233, 237 Grimm, Baron Friedrich Melchior (1723–1807), 45–57, 63 Literary Correspondence, 49, 51, 54 Gustav III of Sweden (1746–92), 51, 56 francophonie of, 47, 50 H see high varieties Harpe du Nord (The Northern Harp; Russian francophone periodical), 87 haut monde see high society Heller, Monica, 4 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien (1715–71), 70

i n d e x   261 Herald of Europe see Vestnik Evropy heraldry see coats of arms Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (1759–1827), 25 Hernandez Philippe (editor of francophone periodical in eighteenth-century Russia), 88 Herzen, Alexander (Aleksandr Ivanovich Gertsen, 1812–70), 17, 237 high society, 13, 97–8, 158; see also French: as society language; Russian: in high society high varieties, of language, 230–1 higher education institutions, 12–13 historiography, 39–40 history, taught through French, 66 Hoffman, Ernst Theodor Amadeus (1776–1822), 112, 232 honnête homme, notion of, 3, 78 Hudson, Alan, 230 Hugo, Victor (1802–85), 95 Huguenots, 2, 50, 65 Hume, David (1711–76), 74 Hundred New Novelettes (fifteenth-century French collection), 53 Iakushkin, Ivan Dmitrievich (1793–1857), 143, 235 Iakushkina, Anastasiia Vasil’evna, née Sheremet’eva (1807–46), 143, 147, 235 Iazykov, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1803–47), 184 identity, language and, 4, 5, 17, 40–1, 64, 248 imagined communities, 62, 67, 78, 79, 247 Impartial Conservative see Conservateur impartial Imperial Library (in St Petersburg), 63, 70 Imperial Russian Academy see Russian Academy Instruction (Nakaz) see Catherine II intelligentsia, 248 intelligenty (i.e. members of intelligentsia), 129; see also intelligentsia interference between French and Russian, 73, 74, 111, 124 Ishimova, Aleksandra Osipovna (1805–81), 177 Italian in an album compiled by Karamzin, 162 architectural terms borrowed from, 210, 213, 216, 224 Russians’ knowledge or study of, 66, 75, 228 supposed qualities of, 34, 35 as vehicle for secular knowledge, 15 women’s knowledge or use of, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 116

Ivan III, the Great (1440–1505; Grand Prince of Muscovy 1462–1505), 14 Jacobin Club, 63 Jallabert, Jean (1712–68), 66 Journal de St.-Pétersbourg politique et littéraire (St Petersburg Political and Literary Journal; Russian francophone periodical), 86, 89, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97 Journal des Luxus und der Moden (Journal of Luxury and Fashions; German periodical), 195, 196, 198 Journal des sciences et des arts (The Journal of Sciences and Arts; Russian francophone periodical), 88, 95 Journal des voies de communication (The Journal of Roads and Communications; Russian francophone periodical), 87 Journal du Nord (The Northern Journal; Russian francophone periodical), 86, 88–9, 90, 92 Journal étranger (The Foreign Journal; French periodical), 85 Journal littéraire de St.-Pétersbourg (The St Petersburg Literary Journal; Russian francophone periodical), 88, 92, 95, 96 Journal of Luxury and Fashions see Journal des Luxus und der Moden Journal of Roads and Communications see Journal des voies de communication Journal of Sciences and Arts see Journal des sciences et des arts Journal of the New Fashions of France and England see Giornale delle nuove mode di Francia e d’Inghilterra journals see francophone press; periodicals; satirical journals July Revolution (1830), 75; see also French Revolution (from 1789) Jürgensburg, Karl Clodt von (1765–1822), 1 Kabinet van mode en smaak (Cabinet of Fashion and Taste), 195 Kamusella, Tomasz, 4 Kantemir, Antiokh Dmitrievich (1708–44), 28 Karamzin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich (1815–88), 233, 238 Karamzin, Andrei Nikolaevich (1814–54), 233, 238 Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1766–1826), 64, 75, 152–67, 233, 239, 243, 245 ‘A Few Thoughts on Love’, 153 album to Ekaterina Pavlovna, 161–4 album to Empress Elizaveta Alekseevna, 164–6

262  in de x Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich (cont.) ‘Buffon and Rousseau’, 165 contribution to development of the Russian literary language, 39, 231 contributor to Spectateur du Nord, 96, 153 editor of Vestnik Evropy, 86 Entertainments at Znamenskoe, 153 History of the Russian State, 14, 39–40, 152, 158 ‘Julia’, 96 ‘Letter to the Spectator on Peter III’, 153 Letters of a Russian Traveller, 33, 35, 40, 106–7, 124, 215 letters to Alexander I and other members of royal family, 154–5, 244 letters to his wife, 156–60, 235 literary sources for letters in French, 156 Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, 163–4 neologisms, use of, 40 praising Russian, 35 ‘Thoughts about Love’, 164 ‘To Virtue’, 163 ‘Word about Russian Literature’, 153 Karamzina, Ekaterina Nikolaevna (1806–67), 234 Karzhavin, Fedor Vasil’evich (1745–1812), 213–14 Kazakov, Matvei Fedorovich (1738–1812), 222 Kern, Anna Petrovna (1800–79), 179, 187 Khemnitser, Ivan Ivanovich (1745–84), 97 Kheraskov, Mikhail Matveevich (1733–1807), 14, 35, 39 Rossiad, 76 Kiukhel’beker, Vil’gel’m Karlovich (1797–1846), 90, 177 ‘Glance at the Present State of Russian Literature’, 97 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb (1724–1803), 112–13 Knorrings, 1 Kolyvanova, Ekaterina Andreevna (after marriage Karamzina, 1780–1851), 156–60 Korfs, 1 Kozlov, Ivan Ivanovich (1779–1840), 97 Kriukovskii, Matvei Vasil’evich (1781–1811), Pozharskii, 76 Krylov, Ivan Andreevich (1769–1844), 10, 94, 97 Kukol’nik, Vasilii Grigor’evich (teacher at Noble Land Cadet Corps), 76 Kurakina, Natal’ia Ivanovna (1766–1831), 109 Kurganov, Nikolai Gavrilovich (1725 or

1726–1790 or 1796), Universal Russian Grammar, 37 Kutuzov, Aleksei Mikhailovich (friend of Radishchev in Leipzig; 1746 or 1747–97), 125 Kutuzov, Mikhail Illarionovich (1745–1813), 1 L see low varieties La Beaumelle, Laurent Angliviel de (1726–73), 95 La Messelière, Louis-Alexandre Frotier, Comte de (1710–77), 27 La Motte Fouqué, Friedrich de (1777–1843), Undine, 112 La Quintinie, Jean de (1626–88), 212 La Rochefoucauld, François de Marsillac, Duc de (1613–80), 55, 164 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos (1741–1803), Dangerous Liaisons, 178 Lally-Tollendal, Gérard de (1751–1830), 74 Lamarche Marrese, Michelle, 77, 103, 234, 237 Lamartine, Alphonse de (1790–1869), 95 Lamé, Gabriel (1795–1870), 223 Langeron, Alexandre-Louis Andrault Comte de (1763–1831), 1, 73 language attitudes, 8, 11, 61, 233, 238, 239, 243, 248 language choice, 5–6, 9, 61, 104, 116, 121–2, 156, 172–92, 235–8, 243, 244, 245; see also French: in correspondence language commentary see language attitudes language contact, 8 language ecology, 37 language mixing, 34, 103, 122, 124, 146, 186, 201, 203–5, 235–6; see also codeswitching language in nation-building, 5 Latest, Fullest and Most Detailed Guide to Letter-Writing, 123 Latin, 32, 34, 47, 75 alphabet or script, 111, 124, 139, 141, 146, 198 architectural terms borrowed from, 224 Russians’ ignorance or knowledge of, 15, 66, 75, 96, 228 supposed qualities of, 35 Launoy, Countess de (first name unknown; d. 1755), 2 Lavater, Johann Kaspar (1741–1801), 153 Le Blond, Jean-Baptiste Alexandre (1679–1719), 218 History of the Royal Abbey of St Denis, 218 Theory and Practice of Gardening, 218 Le Clerc, Sébastien (1637–1714), 212, 213, 216

i n d e x   263 Le Muet, Pierre (1591–1669), 210 Le Roux, Philippe Joseph, Comical Dictionary, 53 Le Sage, Alain-René (1668–1747), Le Théâtre de la Foire, ou l’opéra comique, 54 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas (1736–1806), 223 Lefort, François (1655–99), 218 Lefort, Jean (1685–1739), 218 Legislative Commission (set up by Catherine II, 1767–8), 13 Legrand, Nicolas (1741–91), 221–2 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716), 12 Leipzig University, 125 Lekarstvo ot skuki i zabot (A Cure for Boredom and Anxiety; Russian periodical), 195, 198 Leprince, Jean-Baptiste (1734–81), 69 Leroy, Alphonse-Louis (1742–1816), Researches on Women’s and Children’s Clothes, 195 letter-writing manuals, 123, 128–9, 135 Levesque, Pierre-Charles (1736–1812), 40 libraries, French books in, 32, 70, 174, 211, 217 Liefland, 1 Lievens, 2 life-writing see ego-writing Lilti, Antoine, 48 lingua franca see French: as lingua franca linguistic borrowing, 7, 8, 194; see also calques; loanwords; neologisms linguistic contamination, 34 linguistic Gallophobia, 34 linguistic patriotism, 34–5 linguistic purism, 8, 38 Literary Chameleon see Caméléon littéraire Literary Gazette see Literaturnaia gazeta Literaturnaia gazeta (The Literary Gazette; Russian periodical), 89 Lithuania see Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania Liubomirskaia, Princess Ekaterina Nikolaevna, née Countess Tolstaia (1789–1870), 109, 113–14 Livonia, 1, 14 loanwords, 10, 37, 193, 209–24, 245; see also calques; linguistic borrowing; neologisms Lomonosov, Mikhail Vasil’evich (1711–65), 33, 37, 90 eulogises Russian, 34–5 odes by, 14 Russian Grammar, 34, 37 theory of three styles, 37 Lotman, Iurii Mikhailovich (1922–93), 17,

18, 29, 77, 122, 127, 173, 174–5, 183, 184, 228–9, 234, 235 Louis XIV (1638–1715; King of France 1643–1715, subject to regency 1643–61), 210 Louis XV of France (1710–74), 55 low varieties, of language, 230–1 Lucotte, Jacques-Raymond (c. 1733–1804), 213 Ludolf, Heinrich Wilhelm (1655–1712), Grammatica Russica, 33 Lukin, Semen Prokhorovich (teacher at Noble Land Cadet Corps), 76 Lumières see Enlightenment Luxembourg, Marie-Angélique de Neufville-Villeroy, Duchesse de (1707–87), 68 luxury, 34 Macartney, George, Earl Macartney (1737–1806), Account of Russia, 25 Magazin angliiskikh, nemetskikh i frantsuzskikh novykh mod (Magazine of New English, German and French Fashions; Russian periodical), 198–200 Magazine of New English, German and French Fashions see Magazin angliiskikh, nemetskikh i frantsuzskikh novykh mod  Maimin, Evgenii, 172–3, 177 Maimina, E. E., 122, 124 Maisonfort, Antoine-François-Philippe Du Bois Des Cours La Maisonfort, Marquis de la (1763–1827), 73 Malherbe, François de (1555–1628), 112 Mallet, Jacques-André (1740–90), 69 Manguin, abbé (French tutor in Russia), 91 Mansart, François (1598–1666), 224 Manual of Toilet and Fashion, 195, 203 Maria Theresa, Holy Roman Empress, Consort and Queen of Bohemia (1717–80), 51 Mariia Fedorovna, Grand Duchess (1759–1828), 113 Marmontel, Jean-François (1723–99), 45 Marot, Daniel (1661–1752), 212 Marrese see Lamarche Marrese Masclet, Hippolyte (translator), 97 masonic lodges, 9, 48, 68–9; see also freemasons; French: in masonic lodges Massillon, Jean-Baptiste (1663–1742), 78 Masson, Charles François Philibert (1762–1807), 25–6 mathematics, taught through French, 66, 71 Mauduit, Antoine-Francois (1778–1854), 223 May, Stephen, 4 medicine see French: for medical topics

264  in de x Meissonnier, Juste-Aurèle (1695–1750), 216 Melissino, Aleksei Petrovich (1759–1813), 1 Mémoires de la société des naturalistes de l’université Impériale de Moscou (Transactions of the Society of Naturalists in Moscow Imperial University; Russian francophone periodical), 87 Mercure de Russie (The Russian Mercury; Russian francophone periodical), 90, 91, 96 Merenburg, Natal’ia Aleksandrovna (Pushkin’s daughter, 1836–1913), 188 Mérimée, Prosper (1803–70), 95 metadiscourse, 11, 233, 237, 239 metalinguistic commentary, 61, 229 Miatlev, Ivan Petrovich (1796–1844), 115 Miatleva, Praskov’ia Ivanovna (1772–1859), 111, 115 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 92 Miroir (The Mirror; Russian francophone periodical), 87 Mirror see Miroir Mode (Fashion; French periodical), 95 modernisation, 11–13, 14 role of knowledge of foreign languages in, 15 Molé, Guillaume-François-Roger (1742–90?), History of French Fashions, or Revolution in Costume, 195 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 1622–73), 28, 50, 52, 54 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533–92), 161, 162, 163, 164 Essays, 162 Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de, 1689–1755), 28, 70, 74, 146, 164 On the Spirit of the Laws, 13, 50 Montferrand, Auguste de (1786–1858), 223 Monthly Works see Ezhemesiachnye sochineniia Morkov, Count Arkadii Ivanovich (1747–1827), 136 Moscow Gazette see Moskovskie vedomosti Moscow Telegraph see Moskovskii telegraf Moscow University, 12, 30, 35, 37 Moskovskie vedomosti (The Moscow Gazette; Russian periodical), 196–7 Moskovskii telegraf (The Moscow Telegraph; Russian periodical), 87, 89, 97 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756–91), 90 Müller, Gerhard Friedrich (1705–83), 47, 67 multilingualism in albums, 161–2, 164 at court, 2

of Russian elite, 2, 16, 25, 26–7, 98, 141, 228 of Russian women, 103–17, 236 of Stroganovs, 79 Münnich, Count Burkhard Christoph von (1683–1767), 212, 219 Murav’ev, Nikolai Erofeevich (teacher at Noble Land Cadet Corps, future general and senator, 1724–70), 76 Murav’eva, Sof’ia Aleksandrovna (1825–51), 108, 109, 110, 113 Muscovy, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 33 music, taught through French, 32, 66 Musset, Alfred de (1801–57), 95 Nakaz (Instruction) see Catherine II Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), 1, 86, 92 invasion of Russia by (1812), 3, 157, 222, 228 Napoleonic Wars, 64, 79, 222 narod see peasantry Naryshkins, 1, 79 Natal’ia Alekseevna, Grand Duchess (1755–76), 55 National Assembly see French National Assembly national backwardness (of eighteenthcentury Russia), 247 national identity see identity, language and navy, created by Peter I, 12 Necker, Louis (1730–1804), 66 Necker, Madame (Suzanne Curchod, 1737–94), 68 Nemetskaia sloboda (foreign quarter in seventeenth-century Moscow), 2 neologisms, 40, 222; see also calques; linguistic borrowing; loanwords Nesselrode, Count Karl Vasil’evich (1780–1862), 92–3 Neufforge, Jean-François (1714–91), 216 new literary style (novyi slog, associated with Karamzin), 152 News see Vedomosti News Gazette see Vesti-Kuranty newspapers see periodicals Nicholas I (Nikolai Pavlovich, 1796–1855; Emperor of Russia 1825–55), 1, 93, 94, 95, 98, 173, 184, 185, 238 Nine Sisters Lodge, 68–9 nobility provincial nobles, 27 as social corporation, 28 social range covered by the term, 27 see also aristocracy; emancipation (of nobility in 1762); French: as language of nobility

i n d e x   265 Noble Land Cadet Corps, 3, 12–13, 30–2, 35–7, 76, 78 Nodier, Jean Charles Emmanuel (1780–1844), 95 Northern Bee see Severnaia pchela Northern Bulletin see Bulletin du Nord Northern Harp see Harpe du Nord Northern Journal see Journal du Nord Northern Troubadour see Troubadour du Nord Novikov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1744–1818), 33, 39, 40, 57, 201, 202 October Revolution see Russian revolution(s) of 1917 odes, 13, 14 Oldenburg see George, Duke of Orléans, Louis Philippe I (1725–85), Duke of, 69 Orlov, Count Grigorii Vladimirovich (1777–1826), 94 Orlov, Count Ivan Grigor’evich (1733–91), 138 Orlov, Mikhail Fedorovich (1788–1842), 175 Orme, Philibert de l’ (1510–70), 216 Orneval, Jacques-Philippe d’ (d. 1766), Le Théâtre de la Foire, ou l’opéra comique, 54 Orthodox Church, 105, 125 Orthodoxy, 16, 76, 77, 112, 139, 141–2, 145 Osipova, Praskov’ia Aleksandrovna, previously Vul’f, née Vyndomskaia (1781–1859), 178, 179 Ospovat, Kirill, 125 Ostermann, Heinrich Johann Friedrich (1686–1747), 212 otechestvo see fatherland Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso (43 bc–ad 17 or 18)), 128, 129 Tristia, 128 Oxenstierna af Croneborg, Johan Turesson (1666–1733), 31 Pages Corps, 65 Pahlens, 1 Painter see Zhivopisets Palladio, Andrea (1508–80), 216, 217 Pallas, Peter Simon (1741–1811), Comparative Vocabulary of the Languages of the Whole World, 38 Paperno, Irina, 123, 126, 184, 233 Parisian Review see Revue de Paris Parkinson, John (1754–1840), 127 parrot (as topos in cultural discourse), 33 partitions (of Poland in eighteenth century), 14 Pascal, Blaise (1623–62), 161, 164

pastoral, 13 patriotism, 70, 71, 72, 76–7, 78, 79; see also fatherland; linguistic patriotism patronymics see Russian: in patronymics Paul I (Pavel Petrovich, 1754–1801; Emperor of Russia 1796–1801), 88, 95, 120 Pavlishcheva, Ol’ga Sergeevna, née Pushkina (1797–1868), 174, 175, 176, 186 peasantry monolingualism of, 17 Romantic image of, 77 Pekarskii, Petr Petrovich (1827–72), 212 periodicals, 13, 33, 39, 57, 243 on fashion, 194–200 in German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Yiddish, 87 readership of, 87–91, 198 see also francophone press; Russian press; satirical journals Perrault, Claude (1613–88), 210, 213, 216 Abridgement of the Architecture of Vitruvius, 213 Pestel’, Pavel Ivanovich (1793–1826), 175 Peter I, the Great (Petr Alekseevich, 1672–1725; Tsar of Russia from 1682, sole ruler from 1696, Emperor 1721–5), 11–14, 70, 72, 85, 98 edicts on dress, 193 empire-building under, 14 French books in library of, 211, 212 German, knowledge of, 2 recruitment of French architects by, 218 as viewed by Westernisers and Slavophiles, 16 see also modernisation; Petrine reforms; Westernisation Peter III (Karl Peter Ulrich, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, 1728–61 (–1762 NS); Emperor of Russia 1761 (–1762 NS)), 2, 13, 28, 106, 133 Petina, Larisa, 162 petits-maîtres see fops Petrine reforms, 11–13, 128 philosophes, 48, 120 Physiocrats, 51 Pictet, Jean-Louis (1739–81), 69 Pius VII, Pope (1742–1823), 109 Pletnev, Petr Aleksandrovich (1791–1865 (OS)), 177 Pogorel’skii, Antonii (nom de plume of Aleksei Alekseevich Perovskii, 1787–1836), 184, 232, 233 Poland see Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania

266  in de x polemical writing, 11 Polevoi, Nikolai Alekseevich (1796–1846), 97 police state, conception of, 220–1 polis, Greek notion of, 221 politics of language, 4, 6, 11 Poltava, Battle of (1709), 14 Pompignan, Jean-Jacques Lefranc, Marquis de (1709–84), 163 Poniatowski, Stanisław-August (1732–98), 45 Pope, Alexander (1688–1744), Epistle to the Right Honourable Richard Earl of Burlington, 115 Porter, Roy, 4 Post from Hell see Adskaia pochta Potemkin, Prince Grigorii Aleksandrovich (1739–91), 52, 57 Potier, Charles (1786–1855), 223 Potocki, Count Jan (1761–1815), Manuscript Found in Saragossa, 90 press see francophone press; periodicals; Russian press; satirical journals Prévost, abbé Antoine François d’Exiles (1697–1763), 85 primary sources for study of Russian francophonie, 8–11 print culture, 37 Prokopovich, Feofan (1681–1736), 96 pronominal usage (in second-person forms), 156, 176, 187 prose fiction, 10, 13 proverbs see Russian: in proverbs public opinion, 13 publishing houses, 39 purism see linguistic purism Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1799–1837), 6, 10, 90, 97, 122, 124, 127, 161, 172–88, 229, 238, 243 bilingual wordplay, 236 Boris Godunov, 176 correspondence with family members, 173–6, 180, 182, 244 correspondence with fiancée and future wife, 180–3, 235 correspondence with friends, 176–9, 233, 245 correspondence with future mother-inlaw, 181–2 Eugene Onegin, 77, 180 ‘I Recall a Wondrous Moment’, 179 letters to Alexander I, 183–4 literary sources for letters in French, 180–1 ‘My Pedigree’, 185 ‘Queen of Spades’, 63 ‘To My Inkwell’, 172

Pushkin, Lev Sergeevich (1805–52), 174, 175–6, 180, 186 Pushkin, Vasilii L’vovich (1766–1830), 175 Pushkina, Ol’ga see Pavlishcheva Pushkina, Sof’ia Fedorovna (1806–62), 181 Quarenghi, Giacomo (1744–1817), Buildings Erected in St Petersburg, 223 Racine, Jean (1639–99), 28, 50, 78 The Litigants, 110 Racine, Louis (Racine fils, 1692–1763), 74 Radishchev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich (1749–1802), 120–9, 140, 146, 243, 244 Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, 120, 128 ‘Letter to a Friend in Tobol’sk’, 127 Radishchev, Moisei Nikolaevich (1756–1804), 125 Radishchev, Nikolai Afanas’evich (1728–1806), 125 Radishchev, Pavel Aleksandrovich (1783–1866), 125 Raeff, Marc, 28 Raevskii, Nikolai Nikolaevich (1801–43), 1, 176 Raevskii, Vladimir Fedoseevich (1795–1872), 175 Raevskiis, 175 Ransel, David, 128 Razumovskaia, Countess Varvara Petrovna, née Sheremeteva (1759–1824), 194 Razumovskii, Count Kirill Grigor’evich (1728–1803), 92 Razumovskiis, Counts, 68 Renaissance, 210 Republic of Letters, 62; see also French: in the Republic of Letters Résimont, Alphonse (1811–not before 1838), 223 Revocation of Edict of Nantes (1685), 86 revolution(s) see French Revolution (from 1789); July Revolution (1830); Russian revolution(s) of 1917 Revue de Paris (The Parisian Review; French periodical), 95 Revue étrangère (The Foreign Review; Russian francophone periodical), 95, 96 Rey, Marc-Michel (1720–80), 88 Richardson, William (1743–1814), 25 Richelieu, Armand Emmanuel de Vignerot du Plessis, 5th Duke of (1766–1822), 73 Rivarol, Antoine de (1753–1801), On the Universality of the French Language, 28 Robert, Hubert (1733–1808), 69 Rochfort, Sophie (English governess in early nineteenth-century Russia), 77

i n d e x   267 Rollin, Charles (1661–1741), 74 Romanticism, 64, 84, 234, 248 Romme, Gilbert (1750–95), 63, 69, 71, 72 Rostopchin, Fedor (1763–1826), 64, 75 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78), 28, 36, 63, 112, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166 Confessions, 106 First Discourse, 128 Julie, or the New Heloise, 137, 156, 181 Of the Social Contract, 163 Royal Academy of Architecture (in Paris), 219, 223 Royal Berlin Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts, 28 Rozens, 1 Rusca, Luigi (1762–1822), 223 Russian alleged ignorance of among nobility, 74 codification of, 37–9 for culture-specific material in correspondence in French, 139–43, 145 in education, 35–7, 72 development of literature in, 13, 39–40, 98, 229, 235 dictionaries of, 37–8 in diminutives, 135, 136, 137, 145, 147 functions of, 105 grammars of, 37, 196 in high society, 229 in identity formation, 3 in Karamzin’s correspondence, 154–60 as language of intimacy, 126, 183, 187, 188, 235–6 in letters to ruler, 154–5, 183–6 in Moscow University, 35 at the Noble Land Cadet Corps in St Petersburg, 36 in official correspondence or as official language, 122, 127 in patronymics, 135, 137, 145, 147 perceived weaknesses of, 32–3, 57 in personal correspondence, 67, 72, 122–9, 132–43, 154–60, 172–88, 233 promotion of, 3, 32–40, 71 in proverbs, 111, 144, 147, 164, 166 in Pushkin’s correspondence, 175, 176 in Radishchev’s correspondence, 122–9 rise in value of, 4, 35 at the Russian court, 27 as secret language, 109 standardisation of, 3, 4, 37–9, 196 supposed qualities of, 34–5 for toponyms (place names), 111, 123, 145, 147, 232 as vehicle for literature, 3 women’s use of during travels abroad, 109

women’s use of in travel diaries, 115, 116, 245 see also Catherine II: use of Russian by; Church Slavonic; code-switching; Dictionary of the Russian Academy; loanwords; Russian linguistic consciousness Russian Academy (also Imperial Russian Academy, founded 1783), 38, 71; see also Dictionary of the Russian Academy Russian Invalid see Russkii invalid Russian linguistic consciousness, 3, 13, 26, 33–40 Russian Mercury see Mercure de Russie Russian press, 85–6; see also francophone press; periodicals; satirical journals Russian revolution(s) of 1917, 105 Russkii invalid (The Russian Invalid; Russian periodical), 86 Russo-Persian War (1826–8), 97 Russo-Turkish wars (1768–74 and 1787–92), 14 St Petersburg, founding of, 12 St Petersburg Gazette see Gazette de St. Pétersbourg St Petersburg Literary Journal see Journal littéraire de St.-Pétersbourg St Petersburg Political and Literary Journal see Journal de St.-Pétersbourg politique et littéraire St Petersburg University, 95 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin (1804–69), 95 Saint-Julien, Charles de (1803 or 1804–69), 95 salons, 13, 45, 47–8, 68 Sancé, Count Edouard de (1797–1875), 91 Sand, George (nom de plume of Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, Baronne Dudevant, 1804–76), 95 Sass, Andreas Burchard Friedrich von (1753–1816), 1 satire, 13 Satirical Herald see Satiricheskii vestnik satirical journals, 34, 193 Satiricheskii vestnik (The Satirical Herald; Russian periodical), 203 Scamozzi, Vincenzo (1548–1616), 216 Scarron, Paul (1610–60), 52 Virgil Travesty, 53 Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832), 112 secret police see Third Section Sénac de Meilhan, Gabriel (1736–1803), 74 Seneca, the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca, c. 4 bc–ad 65), 74

268  in de x Sénépart, Denis (eighteenth-century French actor), 69 Seniavina, Ekaterina Alekseevna (after marriage Vorontsova, 1761–84), 138 Sénovert, Etienne-François de (1753–1831), 223 Sentimentalism, 64, 106 Serglio, Sebastiano (1475–1554), 217 Sérigny troupe (headed by Charles de Sérigny, dates unknown), 54 service (as obligation of noblemen), 28–9 Seton-Watson, Hugh, 4 Seven Years War (1756–63), 28, 91 Severnaia pchela (Northern Bee; Russian periodical), 93 Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de (1626–96), 50, 55, 74 Shafirov, Mikhail Pavlovich (1681–after 1733), 212 Shapir, Maksim, 231 Shcherbatov, Prince Dmitrii Mikhailovich (1760–1839), 30, 146 Shcherbatov, Prince Mikhail Mikhailovich (1733–90), 29–30, 32, 146 History of Russia from the Earliest Times, 39 On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, 29 Shcherbatovs, Princes, 1 Shishkov, Admiral Aleksandr Semenovich (1754–1841), 64, 75 Shuvalov, Ivan Ivanovich (1727–97), 27, 66, 91, 216 Shuvalovs, 1, 68, 79 Sievers, Baron Karl von (1710–74), 66 SIHFLES (Société internationale pour l’histoire du français langue étrangère ou seconde), 7 Slavonicisms, 33 Slavophiles, 16–17 Smolensk, 25 Smol’nyi Institute, 30, 35, 54 Sobolevskii, Sergei Aleksandrovich (1803–70), 177, 233 sociability, 17, 32, 48 society see high society soirées, 13 Sokolov, Petr Ivanovich (1764–1835), Basic Principles of Russian Grammar, 37 Sokolov, Petr Stepanovich (teacher at Noble Land Cadet Corps), 76 Son of the Fatherland see Syn otechestva Sorbière, Samuel (1615–70), Account of a Journey to England, 55 Soufflot, Jacques-Germain (1713–80), 219, 224 Spanish, 34

Spectateur du Nord (Spectator of the North; German francophone periodical), 96, 153 Spectator (Russian periodical) see Zritel’ Spectator, The (English periodical), 85 Spectator of the North see Spectateur du Nord Staden, Evstafii Evstaf’evich (1774–1845), 1 Staël, Germaine de (1766–1817), 112 standardisation see Russian: standardisation of Steele, Sir Richard (1672–1729), 85 Stendhal (Henri Beyle, 1783–1842), 112 Stepanov, Nikolai, 172 Sterne, Laurence (1713–68), Sentimental Journey, 120 Stoicism, 34 Strakhov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1768–after 1811), 203 Stroganov, Baron Aleksandr Grigor’evich (1699–1754), 65 Stroganov, Count Aleksandr Pavlovich (1794–1814), 63–4, 74, 75–6 Stroganov, Count Aleksandr Sergeevich (1736–1811), 62–71, 72, 74, 76, 78 ‘Letter to a Friend about Travels’, 68 Stroganov, Count Pavel Aleksandrovich (1772–1817), 63, 71–5 Stroganov, Sergei Grigor’evich, Baron (1707–56), 62, 64–5, 67 Stroganov Palace, 63 Stroganova, Countess Adelaida Pavlovna (1799–1882), 64 Stroganova, Countess Ekaterina Petrovna, née Princess Trubetskaia (1744–1815), 62 Stroganova, Countess Elizaveta Pavlovna (1802–63), 64, 75, 78 Stroganova, Countess Natal’ia Pavlovna (1796–1872), 64 Stroganova, Countess Ol’ga Pavlovna (1808–37), 64 Stroganova, Countess Sof’ia Vladimirovna, née Golitsyna (1775–1845), 63, 73, 74–5 Stroganovs, 1, 8, 27, 61–83, 243 Sturm, Leonhard Christoph (1669–1719), 217 Suard, Jean Baptiste Antoine (1732–1817), 85 Sudienko, Mikhail Osipovich (1802–74), 187 Sue, Eugène (1804–57), 95 Sumarokov, Aleksandr Petrovich (1717–77), 28, 39, 57 epistle on the Russian language, 34 superfluous men (Russian literary type), 28 Suvorov, Vasilii Ivanovich (1705–75), 211

i n d e x   269 Svetov, Vasilii Prokof’evich (1744–83), Brief Rules for the Study of Russian, 37 symbolic capital, 239; see also Bourdieu; cultural capital Syn otechestva (Son of the Fatherland; Russian periodical), 86 Table of Ranks (introduced by Peter I in 1722), 12 Tatars, 2 Tatishchev, Vasilii Nikitich (1686–1750), 39 technological progress, 12 Teillard, Mme (eighteenth-century French dressmaker), 199 Teplov, Grigorii Nikolaevich (1717–79), 90 Tessin, Carl Gustaf (1695–1770), 50 Thief see Voleur Third Section (of personal chancery of Nicholas I, i.e. secret police), 2, 93 Thomon, Jean-François Thomas de (1760–1813), 219, 223 Collection of Monuments, 223 Treatise on Painting, 219, 223 Time of Troubles (1598–1613), 76 Tolstoi, Count Aleksei Konstantinovich (1817–75) ‘The Portrait’, 215 Tolstoi, Count Lev Nikolaevich (1828–1910), 18 War and Peace 10 toponyms see Russian: for toponyms town-planning see urbanistics tragedy, 13 Transactions of the Society of Naturalists in Moscow Imperial University see Mémoires de la société des naturalistes de l’université Impériale de Moscou translation from European languages into French, 32, 50, 71, 74, 75, 89, 90, 95–7, 112, 199, 248 from European languages into German, 71, 95 from French into Russian, 7, 9, 31, 65, 75, 97, 138, 145, 157, 193, 195, 196, 197, 199, 209, 211–16, 221, 224, 245 translators, 15, 196–8, 211–14, 245 travel writing, 9–10, 103–17; see also egowriting Trediakovskii, Vasilii Kirillovich (1703–69), 28 Troubadour du Nord (The Northern Troubadour; Russian francophone periodical), 87, 92 Truten’ (The Drone; Russian periodical), 202 Tschudy, Baron Henri de (1724–69), 64, 91, 92, 96

tu and vous forms see pronominal usage Turgenev, Aleksandr Ivanovich (1784–1846), 172, 238 Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich (1818–83), 188 Turkestanova, Elizaveta (b. 1778), 110 Turkestanova, Varvara Il’inichna (1775–1819), 109–10, 113 tutors see French-speaking tutors Ukhtomskii, Prince Dmitrii Vasil’evich (1719–74), 216–17 Ulybyshev, Aleksandr Dmitrievich (1794–1858), 90, 97 universalité see French: universality of Unofficial Committee (of Alexander I), 63 urbanistics, language of, 209, 219–22 Ushakov, Fedor Vasil’evich (1747?–70, friend of Radishchev), 125 Uspenskii, Boris, 231, 235 Usslar, Mme la Baronne (teacher of French in Russia), 31 Uvarov, Count Sergei Semenovich (1786–1855), 91, 92 Vallin de la Mothe, Jean-Baptiste (1729–1800), 219 Van Serooskerken, Diederik Jacob van Tuyll (1772–1826), 1 Van Suchtelen, General Jan Pieter (1751–1836), 73 Vasil’eva, Elizaveta (author of nineteenthcentury travel diary), 111 Vatsuro, Vadim, 161 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de (1633–1707), 211, 224 Vedomosti (News; Russian newspaper), 85 Vernet, Professor Jacob (1698–1789), 66 Vesti-Kuranty (The News Gazette; Russian periodical), 85 Vestnik Evropy (Herald of Europe; Russian periodical), 86, 165 Viazemskaia, Princess Vera Fedorovna, née Gagarina (1790–1886), 177, 187, 234–5, 237 Viazemskii, Prince Petr Andreevich (1792–1878), 172, 177, 187, 233, 234, 235, 236 Vignola, Giacomo Barozzi da (1507–73), 212, 216, 217 Canon of the Five Orders of Architecture, 211 Vigny, Alfred Victor (1797–1863), 95 Vinogradov, Viktor, 233 Viollet, Catherine, 103 Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, d. 15 ad), 211, 213

270  in de x Voeikova, Aleksandra Andreevna, née Protasova (1795–1829), 234 Voleur (The Thief; French periodical), 95 Volkonskiis, 1, 73 Volkov, Boris (translator of time of Peter I), 212 Vol’pert, Larisa, 179 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778), 28, 45, 50, 67, 69, 70, 78 history of Peter the Great, 96 Nanine, 46 ‘On the Embellishments of Paris’, 221 ‘On the Embellishments of the Town of Kashmir’, 221 Voronikhin, Andrei Nikiforovich (1759–1814), 70, 72 Vorontsov, Count Aleksandr Romanovich (1741–1805), 120–9, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143–5, 146, 244 Vorontsov, Count Mikhail Illarionovich (1714–67), 27, 133, 136, 138, 142 Vorontsov, Count Mikhail Semenovich (1782–1856), 133, 141, 142 Vorontsov, Count Semen Romanovich (1744–1832), 133, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141–5 Vorontsova, Countess Anna Karlovna (1722–75), 138 Vorontsova, Countess Ekaterina Semenovna (1784–1856), 133 Vorontsova, Countess Elizaveta Romanovna (1739–92), 133, 141 Vorontsovs, Counts, 1, 27, 73, 79, 132–47, 243, 245 vous forms see pronominal usage Vul’f, Aleksei Nikolaevich (1805–81), 178 Vul’f, Anna Nikolaevna (1799–1857), 178

Wagner, Pastor (tutor of future Catherine II), 50, 57 Wailly, Charles de (1730–98), 214 War of the Fourth Coalition (1806–7), 92 Weber, Friedrich Christian (d. 1739), 212 Westerners see Westernisers Westernisation, 4, 11–13, 14, 16–17, 26, 33, 228, 247; see also modernisation; Petrine reforms Westernisers, 16–17 Wintzingerode, Ferdinand von (1770–1818), 1 Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling, 27 Witt, Ivan Osipovich de (1781–1840), 1 Wolzogen, Baron Wilhelm von (1762–1809), 153 women social position of, 13, 17 supposed difficulty of Latin for, 75 see also English: women’s knowledge or use of; French: differences between men’s and women’s use of; French: women’s use of; German: women’s knowledge or use of; Italian: women’s knowledge or use of; multilingualism: of Russian women; Russian: women’s use of in travel diaries wordplay see Catherine II: use of French by Year in Literature see Année littéraire Zhivopisets (The Painter; Russian periodical), 201, 202, 206 Zhukovskii, Vasilii Andreevich (1783–1852), 97, 172, 177, 186, 234 Zotov, Ivan Nikitich (168?–by 1723), 212 Zritel’ (The Spectator; Russian periodical), 199 Zubkov, Vasilii Petrovich (1799–1862), 181, 182