The Language of Russian Peasants in the Twentieth Century: A Linguistic Analysis and Oral History

The Language of Russian Peasants in the Twentieth Century: A Linguistic Analysis and Oral History analyzes the social dialect of Russian peasants in the twentieth century through letters and stories that trace their tragic history. In 1900, there were 100,000,000 peasants in Russia, but by mid-century their language was no longer passed from parents to children, resulting in no speakers of the dialect left today. In this study, Alexander D. Nakhimovsky argues that for all the variability of local dialects there was an underlying unity in them, which derived from their old shared traditions and oral nature. Their unity is best manifested in word formation, syntax, phraseology, and discourse. Different social groups followed somewhat different paths through the maze of Soviet history, and peasants' path was one of the most painful. The chronological organization of the book and the analysis of powerful, concise, and simple but expressive language of peasant letters and stories culminate into an oral history of their tragic Soviet experience.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1. The language of Russian peasants as a social dialect 1.1 Introduction: The language of peasants 1.2 Peasant language before 1917 1.3 Examples from Bogoraz, Tenishev 1.4 An initial generalization: the peasant language profile 1.5 A longer story from 1925 Conclusions Chapter 2. Peasants and Bolsheviks, 1917-1928 2.1 Introduction: The impact of the revolution 2.2 Letters to power: long history pre-1905 2.3 The revolution of 1905 and new kinds of letters 2.4 Linguistic background: Phraseology, Formulaic language 2.5 Revolution and civil war, 1917-21 2.6 Bolshevik innovations and peasant attitudes 2.7 Available peasant materials, 1917-1921-1928 2.8 Directions of change 2.9 Categories and examples Conclusions Chapter 3. Personal letters 1939-1940 3.1 Introduction: the source and the background 3.2 Letters to the army and peasant moods 3.3 Personal letters as a genre: tradition, structure and formal elements 3.4 The source and the historical background 3.5 Examples of letters 1: three generations 3.6. Examples of letters 2: Old people 3.7 Examples of letters 3: Recent peasants and some success stories 3.8 The defining features of peasant letters 3.9 On literacy and letters from schoolchildren 3.10 Discourse and pragmatic features 3.11 Overlap and interpenetration with other social groups 3.12 Vocabulary, syntax, phraseology Conclusions Chapter 4. Scholars and narratives from the 1950s to today 4.1 A longer timeframe, the endangered language 4.2 Biographic narratives as historical testimony 4.3 Examples, grouped by history 4.4 The linguistics of peasant narratives Conclusions: the unity of peasant language

About the Author :
Alexander D. Nakhimovsky is visiting scholar at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University.

Review :
This book is highly recommended and could be used in various courses on Russian history and culture of the twentieth century. Before 1917, almost all Russians were peasants. Alexander D. Nakhimovsky musters difficult-to-access sources to prove a thesis: despite geographical differences, peasants had nationwide speechways that survived into the first Soviet decades. But confronting collectivization, wars, large-scale migration into cities, mass education, and media, ex-peasants adopted standard language usage and Soviet jargon, first superficially and haltingly, later more thoroughly. Linguists and political scientists will also appreciate the explication of urban substandard usage (prostorecie), remarkably uniform throughout the Russian-speaking world. Until recently, most Russians were peasants, yet we still know sadly little about the world they lived in, and about their actual experience of the many catastrophes of the last century. Nakhimovsky writes clearly and with deep insight. Nothing I have read gives me such a vivid understanding of the world of the Soviet peasant, of the language they used, of how they thought and felt. This study also throws new light on the depiction of Russian peasants by such writers as Tolstoy and Chekhov. While Russian literature was endlessly adored by literati of many cultures, its most significant parts were seldom acknowledged or even mentioned. The language of the mass of Russian people, i.e. Russian peasants (in the 1940s still nice out of ten of them), its capacity to develop reflecting history was usually lost. Nakhimovsky is to be congratulated for the way he brought up the Russian language actually spoken by Russian people, its remarkable flexibility, the way it followed the daily life as much as the massive drama of what Russia’s life was. Even the curses typical of the way Russians have expressed themselves daily have often more vigor than the fine delicacy of others. This unique amalgamation of history, language, and textual analysis is based on little-known and hard-to-access data, yet is highly readable for non-specialists or even non-Russists. The author introduces a wealth of sources and a series of bold theses, bridging divisions between several disciplines, including ethnolinguistics, sociology, and dialectology. The letters themselves are a treasure for several disciplines and a potential resource for many dissertations; many are heartbreaking in their spare and stoic expression of human pain. They are all the more valuable given that peasants’ language has all but disappeared in Russia.