This article appeared in "The Modern Language Review", a quarterly magazine of the Modern Humanities Research Association, vol. 68, no. 4 (October 1973). Posted without permission, for fair academic use only. Ideas expressed by Unbegaun represent a radical formulation of the case originally taken up by N.S. Trubetskoi in his 1927 article written for volume "K probleme russkogo samopoznaniia". Unbegaun's speech delivered at a congress of slavists somewhere in late 60's or early 70's started an intense scientific war between factions of "slavonicists" who emphasized key role of Church Slavonic as a backbone in historical development and contemporary structure of Russian literary language, and "populists" who maintained that modern Russian literary language derives primarily from vernacular, with Church Slavonic having no significant impact on contemporary Russian. Over 20 years of research and heated argument culminated in development of comprehensive scheme presenting integration and fusion of two lingual subsystems (Church Slavonic and "native" Russian) into single language, and their co-existence and interaction within the framework of this synthetic ("two-dimentional", in Unbegaun's words) language. (See for ex. a number of books and articles by B.A. Uspenskii, such as his "Kratkii ocherk istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka", Moskva, 1994; or V.M. Zhivov, "Iazyk i kul'tura v Rossii XVIII veka", Moskva, 1996). In view of contemporary theory, some of Unbegaun's statements can be viewed as obsolete and imprecise. However, one can hardly overestimate the role his speech and article, presenting concept with such an extreme clarity, played as major pivotal points in development of modern theory of Russian literary language. *************************************************************************** The Russian Literary Language: A Comparative View B. O. UNBEGAUN The Presidential Address of the Modern Humanities Research Association read at University College, London, on 5 January 1973* ------------------ *) This is the text of the Address read on the President's behalf by Professor Robert Auty on 5 January 1973. To our great sorrow Professor Unbegaun died on 4 March 1973 and was unable to complete the fuller version of his Address which he had intended for publication. The title of my Address calls for an explanation. "Literary language" is, I am afraid, a Russianism or a Gallicism: "literaturnyj jazyk" or "langue literaire". The proper English term would have been "standard language", the German - "Hochsprache". If I have, none the less, chosen "literary language", it is for historical reasons, as you may very soon discover. The first written language the Russians learned was not their vernacular, but the so-called Old Church Slavonic, brought to them as a Church language when they were Christianized, at the very end of the tenth century. At the origin, this Old Church Slavonic was an obscure Macedonian dialect, of Bulgarian type, spoken by Slavonic peasants and shepherds on the outskirts of a great Greek city, Salonica. It had, however, the unexpected luck of being known and spoken by two Greeks, natives of Salonica, two brothers, one a learned theologian and a linguist, another a monk and a former high administrator of the Byzantine Empire. Later the two brothers were canonized and are now known as Saints Cyril and Methodius. With the help of their native Greek, they succeeded in elevating the Macedonian vernacular of Salonica to the dignity of the first Slavonic written language, even more than that - to the status of a fully-fledged liturgical language. The birth certificate of this language bears the date of 863. Phonetically and morphologically it was purely Slavonic, but in its syntax, principles of word-formation, and vocabulary, it was strongly influenced by Byzantine Greek. This Old Church Slavonic was imported to Kiev and Novgorod, as the language of the church, at the end of the tenth century. At that time the non-divided Common Slavonic language, which still existed in the middle of the first millennium A.D., had already been split into individual Slavonic languages, but the young scions were still so close one to another that Old Church Slavonic could be accepted and understood without any difficulty by the Eastern, as well as by the Southern and the Western Slavs. Everywhere it was welcomed as a form of the local vernacular, but of a higher, and sacred, nature. Nowhere was the need felt to translate it into the vernacular. It was but natural that in the Middle Ages the language of the Church should become the language of theology, of philosophy, of science, and of literature (almost exclusively religious), briefly a "literary language" in the broad sense of the word. And Old Church Slavonic became all that in ancient Russia, as well as in other Slavonic Orthodox countries. The analogy with Latin in countries of Western and Central Europe is obvious. There are, however, a few points of characteristic difference. Firstly, Old Church Slavonic was so close to the local vernacular, both in Kiev and Novgorod the two main cultural centres in the eleventh and twelth centuries, that it could be understood without difficulty, at least in its simpler usages, as, for example, in the Church services. Such affinity with the local idiom inevitably exposed Old Church Slavonic to a certain influence by the vernacular, a process which also occurred in other Orthodox Slavonic countries. This more recent and slightly contaminated type of Old Church Slavonic is conventionally called Church Slavonic. Old Church Slavonic ceased to be "Old". Compared with the familiarity this Church Slavonic enjoyed in Russia, Latin was utterly exotic to an English or German reader. Nor was it any more understandable to a Frenchman of the same period. Secondly, Latin became the language of the Church because it already had a long existence as a language of civilization in the Western World. In Russia, conversely, Old Church Slavonic became the language of civilization because it had already been the language of the Church. This should explain, to a certain extent, the eminently religious character of Old Russian literature. Thirdly, Latin covered all the needs of a language of civilization. To the functions which were assumed by Church Slavonic - as a language of the Church, of theology, philosophy, science, and literature - medieval Latin added also those of the language of law and of administration - a natural inheritance of the Roman Empire. Here lies a fundamental difference which separates the Russian practice from that of the Western World. From the very beginning, law and all that was related to it - commercial transactions, diplomatic relations, and, of course, all administration - princely, municipal, and private - was left outside the province of Church Slavonic. These matters were conducted exclusively in the vernacular. This paradox may be satisfactorily explained by a presumed existence, in the pagan period, of an oral customary law. When the Russians, as a consequence of baptism, received the Old Church Slavonic alphabet, and were able, for the first time, to record their law in writing, they did it in the only form in which this law was familiar to them - in the vernacular. Thus, from the beginning, Russians were handling two written languages. One, the imported Church Slavonic, was used for higher purposes - to express religious, ethical, philosophic, scientific, and aesthetic values. The other, the vernacular, was used for practical purposes, as the language of law and administration. Church Slavonic was the literary language in the broad sense of the word. It was not used in speech, but was intelligible when read or heard. In principle it was a dead language, but it was able to absorb some elements of spoken Russian. The other, the administrative medium, was a non-literary language. It was a living idiom based on the vernacular. Such a dichotomy was peculiar to Russia where it lasted until the eighteenth century and left its indelible stamp on modern Standard Russian. The coexistence of two different, though closely related languages, and I emphasize - LANGUAGES and not STYLES - with different functions, was something totally unknown in the whole Western World, including Poland and Bohemia. It seems that in the Western World the literary quality of a vernacular text, at the beginning, was determined by its having been written in verse. Only verse merited the honour of the precious parchment, a fact which is in perfect agreement with the Aristotelian principle of poetry’s primacy. The use of the vernacular both for literary prose and for administrative purposes came much later. Here the Russian practice is at variance with that of the Western World: medieval Russian literature is all in prose. Learned poetry appears in the seventeenth century under Western that is Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Polish stimulus, and it is still written in Church Slavonic by Ukrainian and Belorussian poets settled in Moscow. It was switched on to a Russian track in the thirties of the eighteenth century, at a time when Polish and, later, German influence was still palpable. No link with Russian oral folk-poetry can be detected. It has already been pointed out that the Russian linguistic dichotomy had no counterpart in any country of the Western World. It was shown that the relation of Church Slavonic to Russian was of a quite different nature from the relation of Latin to the various European vernaculars. And yet it is not so difficult to find some analogies in the subsequent development of both Latin and Church Slavonic. Both languages were dead languages. Their normal usage was the written one, although occasionally they could be spoken, but by the scholarly initiated only, and usually in relation to rather lofty subjects. In this respect Latin was used more often than Church Slavonic. As dead languages used by living men they inevitably deteriorated with time, Church Slavonic faster than Latin, because of its dangerous closeness to the spoken idiom. In both languages there were reactions against such a deterioration. There is only one way to salvage a deviating dead language, and that is to revert it to its primeval purity. In Russia an attempt in this direction was made in the fifteenth century, with the help of Serbian and Bulgarian scholars who fled to Moscow before the victorious Turkish army invading their countries. Not only was deterioration arrested, and correct Church Slavonic orthography and morphology were restored, but the syntax and phraseology became more flexible, and the vocabulary was more than doubled along the traditional lines of derivation. The price to pay for this face-lifting was high, but not excessive: the regenerated Church Slavonic moved away considerably from both the non-literary administrative language and the spoken idiom. Here again another analogy in the Western World comes to mind: the feeling of the Latin language's permanence, as opposed to that of the ever changing nature of the vernacular. How much of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century philosophical and scientific literature was written in Latin, because Latin was regarded as an eternal vehicle of learning? Curiously enough, even writers in the vernacular had doubts about its lasting quality. It is perhaps not surprising that Edmund Waller, flexible in character and verse, thought in the middle of the seventeenth Century that to express oneself in English was to write in sand. More unexpectedly, Montaigne regretted having compiled his "Essais" in French and not in the more permanent Latin. Such clear statements are not to be found in ancient Russia, probably simply because the very idea of writing in the vernacular would appear preposterous. But the Old Russian writer's fidelity to Church Slavonic certainly owes a good deal to the feeling of its permanence, so similar to the feeling of a Western writer for Latin. Another advantage of Latin was its uniformity as compared with the dialectal or local variety of the written vernacular. This is particularly palpable in England and Germany, less in France, because of the early adoption of "francien" the dialect of Ile-de-France, as the national language. Particularly in Germany the splitting of the country into territories after the death of Henry VI (1197) resulted in a number of "Literaturdialekte". In Russia, too, it would have been over-optimistic to speak of a Russian language without a local qualification. Various local traditions, indeed, may be found in the chancery non-literary language: the Central tradition, that of Moscow, the Northern, that of Novgorod and its vast dependencies; the Western, that of Pskov small, but culturally important; the South-Eastern, that of Rjazan', short lived and culturally of lesser importance. In the sixteenth century they all began to be absorbed by the rising Central tradition, the Muscovite usage, but not even in the seventeenth century was the process entirely completed. Opposed to this dialectal variety of the chancery language stood the monolith of literary Church Slavonic unchanging in space and time, and yet easily accessible even to the non-initiated. No wonder ancient Russian writers clung so tenaciously to this monolith as long as it was possible. The monopoly of Church Slavonic as the sole literary language had, however also its negative side. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century the chancery language acquired considerable breadth and flexibility. But it lacked the refinement that only literary usage can give to the written vernacular. Such a refinement was the privilege of Church Slavonic, not of Russian. To put it briefly: Russia lacked both its William Tyndale and its Martin Luther. Having had no Tyndale, it had no King James Version of the Bible, one third of which is worded exactly as Tyndale left it. Both in England and Germany the translation of the Bible into the vernacular was decisive for the creation of an all-purpose prose language. Not only did nothing of the sort happen in Russia but the very principle of Luther's translation "ich rede nach der sachsischen Kanzlei" - would have horrified the pious Muscovites as utterly heretical. The Church Slavonic Bible (both the New and the Old Testament) was translated into Standard Russian only at the beginning of the nineteenth century and, curiously enough under the aegis of the British and Foreign Bible Society. This translation passed unnoticed and had no influence whatsoever on the Russian literary language, already embodied in Pushkin's masterpieces. The Russian Orthodox Church refused to accept this translation and has kept to the Holy Writ in its Church Slavonic version to this very day. The strength of Church Slavonic as the literary language of Russia was rooted in its being the language of the Orthodox Church, and the Orthodox Church penetrated the whole spiritual and intellectual life of medieval and Muscovite Russia. It was but natural that the language of the Church should continue to serve as vehicle for this religiously orientated, and somehow totalitarian, civilization. One appeared made for another. At the end of the seventeenth century this Muscovite type of civilization was shaken to its foundations by an ever increasing pressure of the Western way of life and thought. It finally collapsed in the eighteenth century. A Westernized Russia was born. There was every reason to expect a parallel collapse of the Muscovite cultural medium - the Church Slavonic literary language. The opportunity seemed at hand when, following the great example of the rest of Europe, Russia would at last firmly establish her all-purpose language on the vernacular. Surprisingly enough, nothing of the kind did happen. In the general cultural shake-up the structure of literary Church Slavonic held astonishingly firm. Of course, it adapted itself to the new situation by removing some dead wood in morphology. Three archaic past tense verbal paradigms were dropped. They had already been badly confused in the seventeenth century. A few obsolete declensional endings, which Church Slavonic shared with Old Russian, were replaced by their more modern Russian equivalents. Two new endings of the nominative plural were incorporated. On the whole, the changes in declension affected less than a half dozen endings. The greatest, and the most fateful, concession to the vernacular was, however, the absorption of non-literary administrative Russian and of the spoken idiom into literary Church Slavonic. This process of integration took approximately a hundred years, after which the two separate written languages of Muscovite Russia emerged, in the middle of the eighteenth century, as a single all-purpose Standard language of Imperial Russia. It has remained unchanged. Church Slavonic was, of course, pronounced from the beginning in the Russian way, very much as Latin has been pronounced, and still is, in half a dozen varieties across the continent of Europe. When, twenty years ago, with my Russian, that is German, habits of Latin, I had, at my first Encaenia in Oxford, the opportunity of enjoying Lord Halifax's (the then University's Chancellor's) Latin, I knew it was Latin, because I suddenly ceased to understand his speech in English. Such must have been the case with Church Slavonic in Russia, and it was inevitable and natural. Church Slavonic morphology, so similar to that of Russian, was finally adjusted to it at the end of the seventeenth century. A few islands, however, have remained Church Slavonic, as, for example, the whole participial system, and some declensional endings, mainly in the genitive, in singular and plural. All the rest - the syntax, the acquired vocabulary and the means for its extension - the wide set of suffixes remained Church Slavonic, a living mechanism which is still productive of new Church Slavonic words and expressions. What is important is that the continuity remained unbroken, the old and well-tried Church Slavonic structure held firm. There was no linguistic revolution. But the Church Slavonic framework was now allowed to absorb as much Russian material as it could hold - Russian of both types: the spoken idiom and the written non-literary administrative language. When later, in the eighteenth century, the new literary Russian was flooded with German and French "calques" they normally were rendered into Church Slavonic, not into native Russian. Such a Russian word as "ravnovesie" is a Church Slavonic calque of German "Gleichgewicht" (itself a calque of Latin "aequilibrium"), and the Russian expression "vlachit’ zhalkoe sushchestvovanie" is a word-for-word Church Slavonic translation of the French "trainer une miserable existence". The integration of the vernacular into the Church Slavonic framework resulted in a two-dimensional construction. A Russian writer was now free to give his work the bias of his choice - either a Church Slavonic bent or a Russian one. The choice concerned, mainly, the vocabulary, but some option was possible even in syntax and morphology. The vast mass of neutral words and forms, that is those common to Church Slavonic and Russian, then gravitated naturally to one or the other side - the way of the author's choice. It was a delicate and often a subconscious operation. The originality of the Russian solution can be fully appreciated only when compared with languages which originally were in the same linguistic conditions as Russian, but opted out of the Church Slavonic frame and built their all-purpose standard on the vernacular. Such languages exist, they are the two other East Slavonic languages: Standard Ukrainian and Standard Belorussian. Compared with Standard Russian, they are, so to say, one-dimensional languages. If one disregards the numerous loanwords, one can see that the Russian abstract, learned, and figurative vocabulary (precisely that which stamps an idiom as a language of civilization) continues to develop mainly along the traditional lines of Church Slavonic derivation. Quite naturally, it has annexed also the administrative area, which, in ancient Russia, was the exclusive privilege of the vernacular. In general the more abstract, or learned, or metaphoric, or ceremonious, the context, the more probable its expression in Church Slavonic elements. For example, the newspaper "Pravda" usually describes the landing of Soviet astronauts in a flawless modernized Church Slavonic. The most obvious conquest of the vernacular within the Church Slavonic fortress was its use in fiction, in what Russians call "belletristika", "belles-lettres". Old Russian literature had no problem in using Church Slavonic chiefly in moralizing or narrative prose. A modern Russian writer, especially in a dialogue, tries to get away from the obviously Church Slavonic stock, more frequently than not by using a vocabulary common to both Church Slavonic and Russian. The delicate question of dosage is left to his skill. It is not impossible, although rather difficult, to write a half page exempt of any Church Slavonic word, and such half pages exist, for example, as simple dialogues between simple people. A few Russian writers went further either by coining new words on a purely Russian pattern, or even by borrowing words from dialects, usually through dialectal dictionaries. More often than not it was a linguistic success but an artistic failure. The most recent example is Solzhenitsyn. The undeviating development of Modern Standard Russian from Church Slavonic has conferred on it a few privileges which are unknown to Western languages. Its literary, non-vernacular origin preserved Standard Russian from local varieties, the "Literaturdialekte", which plagued the German area for a long time. The German "Hochsprache" finally got rid of them, but not before the eighteenth century, when first the Imperial Chancery of Vienna, and then the Swiss Calvinist Church adopted Luther's slightly reshaped East Central German. But even so, a short walk in the streets of Frankfurt, Vienna and Zurich may sow some seeds of doubts about the consummation of Luther's work. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the all-purpose written Russian was also adopted as the spoken standard by educated society, a process common to the whole of Europe. In England, by the way, it took place almost simultaneously with its occurrence in Russia. This was another conquest of Church Slavonic which saved spoken Russian from the local colouring so characteristic of spoken educated German or Italian, and even French. Of course, the vernacular which fleshed out the Church Slavonic frame had its own dialectal basis: it was, as one might expect, the Central one - the dialect of Moscow - the capital, as the dialectal basis of French was the dialect of Paris, and that of English, the dialect of London. The dialectal provenance of Standard Russian is, however, secondary to its Church Slavonic genealogy, which has been primordial. Here again the Russian development has been strikingly different from that of the Western World. Modern Standard English, based on the East Midland tradition, has a number of words whose pronunciation betrays their non-Midland origin: for example, "left" (as opposite to right) and "bury" are Kentish, "one" and "vixen" are Southern, and "raid" is Northern. The pronunciation of Standard Russian is Muscovite throughout, but not necessarily unchanging, simply because there has been no literary tradition in the written vernacular. Perhaps only two words may point to a Northern origin because of their initial "ts"; instead of the expected "ch": "caplja" (heron), and "cep'" (chain). Not a single vocalic deviation from the Muscovite pattern can be detected in the speech of the educated. And here Modern Standard Russian stands, a naturalized alien with an uninterrupted tradition of nine hundred years, first as a Church language, then as a literary language, and, finally, as an all-purpose standard, and the spoken idiom of the educated. Such a development is unique in the Slavonic world. It is unparalleled among the languages of Europe.