Transforming Russia's image

One important function of French in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, besides those functions we have examined in preceding chapters, was to project a certain image of the expanding Russian Empire and the emergent Russian nation to other European peoples who, lacking knowledge of Russian, had access to little or no unmediated information about the country. This essentially propagandistic function of Russian francophonie had both a cultural and a political dimension. The French language was a medium through which to publicize abroad the achievements of Russia's new secular cultural elite. It also served as a vehicle through which sovereigns and patriots could defend Russia's polity and society against their detractors. However, French could just as well be used by opponents of the Russian regime as by supporters of it, in order to broadcast grievances, enhance solidarity among equally discontented compatriots, and more generally contribute to debate about Russia's relationship with Europe. Thus, from the age of Nicholas I, French eventually served as a tool for Russian writers at different points on the political spectrum, loyalists and opponents alike, as they tried to win over to their point of view both a European public and members of Russia's own political, social, and intellectual elites.

Russian attempts to influence European public opinion began as early as the first half of the eighteenth century, even before French had established itself as the most prestigious foreign language at the Russian court and among the aristocracy. As Russia emerged – in the conception of Enlightenment thinkers – from the ‘darkness’ of pre-Petrine Muscovy and came to occupy one of the foremost places among the European nations, its image became a crucial issue for Europeans concerned about the empire's growing power and, above all, for Russians themselves. Russians understood that their admittance to the concert of European nations depended not only on the actual state of Russia's society, economy, armed forces, sciences, belles-lettres, and arts but also – perhaps even more – on public perceptions of them in Europe.

Public opinion in the West, in the eighteenth century, was already being formed to a large extent by the press, especially the Francophone press.

Language debate and its place in discourse about national identity

Thus far, we have been concerned mainly with the social, political, and cultural history of Franco-Russian bilingualism. We have considered, for example, where and for what purposes French was spoken or written, how it served the interests of the nobility during the age when the nobility was aspiring to become a corporation of a European sort, and how the use of French by eighteenth-century monarchs and nobles helped to bring Russia into the sphere of European civilization. We have examined the use of French as a language of cultural propaganda and historiosophical or overtly political polemic as well as its incidence in various public and private literary genres. We have put Franco-Russian bilingualism in perspective by noting the use in Russia, at certain times and in certain domains, of foreign languages other than French. We have placed this examination of language use in the changing historical contexts of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and Russian worlds. We have also set our discussion within the frameworks provided by scholarship on the social history and cultural practice of the Russian nobility and by historico-sociolinguistic scholarship on such phenomena as plurilingualism, diglossia, language choice, and code-switching.

We turn now to the dimension of our subject that lies primarily in the fields of intellectual and literary history. That is to say, we shall explore Russian perceptions of the bilingualism of the elite, describing the way it is presented in the nation's mental landscape, whose contours were coming into view in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature and thought. The Russian views on linguistic matters that we shall discuss are bound up with the larger debates about national identity and destiny that Russians conducted over the long period with which we are concerned. What effect, for example, did the status of French as a prestige language at court and in the Russian nobility have on conceptions of nationhood among the intellectual and literary elite? The influence of French culture and the French language on the nation’s elite lent urgency, we contend, to the search for national character before, during, and after the Napoleonic Wars and helped to direct that search.

Conventional assumptions about Franco-Russian bilingualism

Until recently, the role of the French language in Russia had attracted rather little attention, save for passing remarks in works on Russian social or cultural history. No doubt this oversight is due partly to the fact that social and cultural historians and western students of the Russian nobility, on the whole, have not been specialists in linguistic matters and partly also to the fact that historical sociolinguistics is a relatively new academic discipline. In those works of scholarship (especially Anglophone scholarship) in which Franco-Russian bilingualism has been mentioned, moreover, we find a number of generalizations which have tended to reinforce the predominantly negative discourse on the subject in classical Russian thought and literature. Since we shall want to probe the accuracy of these generalizations in the course of our account of language use and language debate in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, we begin by briefly considering three of them. In the process, we shall introduce some of the key questions that our discussion of language use and language attitudes will need to explore and some of the larger narratives about Russian culture within which that discussion needs to be situated. We shall also rehearse some of the arguments against the commonplaces that are encountered.

First, the Russian nobility (which was numerically very small as a proportion of the population of the empire) is commonly treated as a clearly defined and undifferentiated class which uniformly adopted French in preference to Russian. The impression may even be given that all nobles, over a long period, spoke French all the time, and in all situations, to any compatriots who could understand that language. Thus it is claimed – to take an extreme example – that ‘for over two hundred years French (and, to a smaller extent, English) replaced Russian as the principal language spoken by the vast majority of Russian aristocracy, landed gentry, government officials, army officers, and wealthy merchants’. Even a leading sociolinguist, whose authoritative work we frequently cite, is drawn into a large generalization covering a vague time-span: ‘In some countries it is expected that educated persons will have knowledge of another language. This is probably true for most of the European countries, and was even more dramatically so earlier in countries like pre-Revolution Russia, where French was the language of polite, cultured individuals’.

Types of text and language choice in them

Cultural production in languages other than the writer's mother tongue, Peter Barta and Phil Powrie have pointed out, has become increasingly widespread in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as the ‘fall of the Iron Curtain and ever-greater mobility across borders during the postcolonial period have brought cultures into contact and languages into productive frictions’. The phenomenon of bicultural writing, though, is by no means new in western civilization, as Barta and Powrie emphasize, and in this and the following chapter we examine a major historical manifestation of it, namely Russians’ use of French as a written language in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The corpus of extant texts on which we may draw for this purpose is very extensive, so that we cannot do more in this book than classify the types of text found within the corpus and discuss some characteristic or particularly well-known examples. The corpus has many elements. It contains a mass of informal correspondence about personal and practical matters. It includes what might be called ‘literature’ in the broad sense of the term, that is to say elegant writing, or belles-lettres, and this capacious element itself consists of many different sorts of text: ego-writing, poems, drama, fiction, and discourse on moral, aesthetic, philosophical, and other matters. It also comprises texts in which the writer's purpose is persuasion, that is to say texts that are in some way propagandistic, polemical, or political, including texts that speculate on national destiny.

It will be useful, as we approach texts produced by Russians in French, or partly in French, to frame a question of the sort famously asked by Joshua Fishman about language use in a multilingual setting: who uses which language in what type of text, for what purpose, and at what stage in the historical period we examine? It will help us, moreover, to address this question and to understand the reasons why writers chose one language or another for particular texts, if we bear in mind the ways in which various kinds of ‘literature’ were conceived at one time or another. In particular, we may identify three types of literature in which the language choice made by bilingual Russians was determined by quite different considerations.

The aim of this book is to offer a multi-faceted history of the French language in pre-revolutionary Russia, where French was widely used for many purposes by the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century elites. (By ‘French language’ we mean the exclusive standardized variety used by the upper classes, which came in the eighteenth century to be seen as the only correct form of expression, a variety synonymous with the French language itself.) This is a subject that has been rather little explored, at least until very recently, but we believe it has considerable importance. Study of it may afford insight into the social, political, cultural, and literary implications and effects of bilingualism in a speech community over a long period. The subject also has a bearing on some of the grand narratives of Russian thought and literature, particularly the prolonged debate about Russia’s relationship with the world beyond its western borders during the ages of empire-building and nation-building. At the same time, we hope that a fuller description of Franco-Russian bilingualism than has yet been provided will enlarge understanding of francophonie as a pan-European phenomenon. On the broadest plane, the subject has significance in an age of unprecedented global connectivity, for it invites us to look beyond the experience of a single nation and the social groups and individuals within it in order to discover how languages and the cultures and narratives associated with them have been shared across national boundaries.

Two principal threads run through our book; each could be the subject of a discrete enquiry, difficult as it might be to separate them at certain points. The first thread concerns language practice, that is to say, the functions of French in Russia and the settings and media in which it was used over a long period from the early eighteenth century. We analyze, for example, the use of French as a spoken and written language in various social milieus (the court and sites of aristocratic sociability, such as the salon, the ball, and the Masonic lodge) and in some official domains, especially diplomacy. We also examine its use as a literary language, both for amateur and more professionalized forms of writing, and as a propagandistic or polemical language for the promotion of a positive image of Russia beyond the country’s borders and for international debate about politics and grand questions of historical destiny.

In the two preceding chapters, we have examined the use of French at the Russian court and in Russian high society, the principal domains in which francophonie served as a marker of social prestige and an expression of an outward-looking, pan-European identity. However, that same aristocracy which emulated the habits of the court, frequented the social venues we have identified, and circulated among European peers also occupied most of the high offices in the civilian administration of the Russian Empire and the high ranks in its armed forces. Nor was the boundary between the social life of the aristocracy and its life in imperial service rigid. Members of the same charmed circle met in different settings, social and professional, and they corresponded in different capacities, as both friends and colleagues. It was only to be expected, therefore, that they should to some extent function bilingually in the official or military realm as well as in the social realm – or rather, that male members of the elite should function in this way, for women, whose conspicuous introduction into the social sphere can be associated with the rise of francophonie in Russia, were entirely absent from the professional sphere. We therefore aim in this chapter to form an impression of the extent to which French was part of Russia's official life, as well as its social life, to discern the limits of its penetration in the official sphere, and to sense the pace of its progress there.

We shall go about this task mainly by studying language practice in the field of diplomacy, using a small part of the enormous extant archival holdings of documents that relate to the conduct of Russian foreign affairs. By focusing on this field, through which Russia's formal relations with the European world expanded and developed and were maintained in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we thus complement our investigation of the role of foreign languages in the Europeanization of the Russian elite in the social and cultural spheres. After some introductory remarks on the ascendancy of French as Europe's principal diplomatic language in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, we consider foreign-language use in Russia before the age of Peter the Great and the development of language instruction, during Peter's reign, for men serving in offices dealing with foreign affairs.

Cultural and linguistic practice at the Russian court set an example which men and women in the higher ranks of the nobility, as it turned out, followed with zest and without being compelled to do so. They embraced a European cultural identity, cultivating politesse and refinement. They adopted other European languages of their own accord and ensured – insofar as their financial resources permitted – that their children had the access to foreign tutors, governesses, books, and opportunities for foreign travel which would enable them to acquire a high level of competence in those languages, and in French in particular. In showing this independent interest in the field of education, and in insisting that language learning should be central in their children's curriculum, the great aristocratic families were acting in parallel with the court. (It was the lower-ranking nobility on whom the monarchy needed to exert pressure, if it was to ensure that they too would adopt the western cultural model.) Nobles’ adult reading habits then deepened the knowledge of western culture that their upbringing had instilled in them and kept them abreast of European developments in everything from philosophy, belles-lettres, politics, economics, and agriculture to social life, fashion, and coiffure. To be sure, their education and reading equipped noblemen for various types of service – especially in diplomacy, the upper ranks of the civil administration, and the officer corps – and, in a more general sense, prepared them to be worthy representatives of their empire. At the same time, this upbringing disposed them (both men and women) to a certain kind of sociability that was emblematic of their social class and exclusive to it.

It is the function of French in nobles’ performance of their social role to which this chapter is devoted. For the most part, we are dealing here with linguistic usage, rather than language attitudes, insofar as usage can be accurately established at this remove. We therefore rely as far as possible on sources – especially memoirs and materials from family archives – which yield what seems to be factual information. When we come to consider the use of French as a marker of the social identity of the nobility, on the other hand, we stray into the more subjective domain of perceptions and need to take account of the conscious or possibly sub-conscious biases that our sources may contain.

The rise of the novel and the expression of nationhood in it

By the age of Alexander II, Russian prose writers – inspired by the example that Pushkin and others had set in the 1830s – had fully developed their own idiom. They, no less than Pushkin and other early nineteenth-century poets of the so-called Pushkin Pleiad, were responsible for the creation of a literature written in the vernacular which became the outstanding manifestation of Russia's cultural maturity and the clearest expression of the new Russian nationhood. It was important to prose writers, as they strove for cultural autonomy, to free themselves from subservience to foreign literary models. It also helped them, as they tried to define their own nation and its mission, to look critically at another sign of Russians’ apparent subservience to foreign cultural mentors, namely the persistence of the phenomenon of French-speaking in nineteenth-century noble society. It is the continuation of debate about the semiotic significance and the effects of noble francophonie in the writings of Ivan Turgenev, Tolstoi, and Dostoevskii that we examine in this final chapter.

To point out the shortcomings of prose fiction as a source of information on actual linguistic practice, as we did in our introduction to this volume, is not to deny that fiction may corroborate the evidence provided by nonliterary types of written source. The classical Russian novel is firmly rooted in byt (daily life), of which language practice was of course one element. This practice included bilingualism, code-switching, and choice of French rather than Russian to tackle certain subjects, to negotiate certain relationships and situations, or to indicate social identity. At the same time, the social or civic colouring of a work of fiction, which – as the literary historian D.S. Mirsky remarked – was ‘a general characteristic of the European novel of the mid nineteenth century, but [was] nowhere more apparent than in Russia’, made for a high degree of subjectivity in treatment of Franco-Russian bilingualism, as in other matters. For example, authors might have their literary characters make linguistic choices or use language in particular ways in order to highlight personal traits or moral qualities which they wished their readers to find appealing or rebarbative and thus to underline some broader social or cultural point.