Table Of ContentPolitics and the Theory of Language
in the USSR 1917-1938
Politics and the Theory of
Language in the USSR
1917-1938
The Birth of Sociological Linguistics
Edited by
Craig Brandist and Katya Chown
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2010
by ANTHEM PRESS
75-76 Blackfriars Road,London SE1 8HA,UK
or PO Box 9779,London SW19 7ZG,UK
and
244 Madison Ave.#116,New York,NY 10016,USA
© 2010 Craig Brandist and Katya Chown editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters © individual contributors
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
Cover image ‘St Petersburg in transition’© Craig Brandist
All rights reserved.Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced,stored or introduced
into a retrieval system,or transmitted,in any form or by any means
(electronic,mechanical,photocopying,recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested.
ISBN-13:978 1 84331 840 8 (Hbk)
ISBN-10:1 84331 840 7 (Hbk)
ISBN-13:978 0 85728 948 3 (eBook)
ISBN-10:0 85728 948 9 (eBook)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction 1
Craig Brandist
2. Soviet Linguistics of the 1920s and 1930s and
the Scholarly Heritage 17
Vladimir M.Alpatov
3. ‘Sociology’in Soviet Linguistics of the 1920–30s:
Shor,Polivanov and Voloshinov 35
Mika Lähteenmäki
4. Theoretical Insights and Ideological Pressures in Early Soviet
Linguistics:The Cases of Lev Iakubinskii and Boris Larin 53
Viktoria Gulida
5. Early Soviet Linguistics and Mikhail Bakhtin’s Essays
on the Novel of the 1930s 69
Craig Brandist and Mika Lähteenmäki
6. Language as a Battlefield – the Rhetoric of Class Struggle
in Linguistic Debates of the First Five-Year Plan Period:
The Case of E.D.Polivanov vs.G.K.Danilov 89
Kapitolina Fedorova
7. The Tenacity of Forms:Language,Nation,Stalin 105
Michael G.Smith
8. The Word as Culture:Grigorii Vinokur’s Applied
Language Science 123
Vladislava Reznik
9. Language Ideology and the Evolution of Kul´tura iazyka
(‘Speech Culture’) in Soviet Russia 137
Michael S.Gorham
vi POLITICS AND THE THEORY OF LANGUAGE IN THE USSR
10. Psychology,Linguistics and the Rise of Applied Social Science
in the USSR:Isaak Shpil´rein’s Language of the
Red Army Soldier 151
Craig Brandist
Appendix 1. Introduction to Japhetidology:
Theses,Ivan Meshchaninov 169
Translated and with an Introduction by Craig Brandist
Appendix 2.Glossary of Names 181
Appendix 3.List of Contributors 187
Notes 189
Index of Names 197
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
Craig Brandist
While there can be little doubt that the period between the October 1917
Russian Revolution and the outbreak of World War Two saw an extraordinary
upsurge in innovative approaches to language in Russia and then the USSR,
only isolated examples have reached an Anglophone audience beyond a
relatively narrow circle of Slavists.This is especially regrettable since many of
the questions that now occupy theorists of language and society were those
with which early Soviet linguists grappled, and one can still learn a
considerable amount,both positive and negative,from this experience.As the
work of what have become known as the Bakhtin and Vygotskii Circles began
to appear in translations in the late 1960s, structuralist and then post-
structuralist approaches to language became dominant in Western scholarship
in the humanities.This movement was led by scholars who often claimed to be
giving language due consideration for the first time, and who, polemically,
presented previous approaches in caricatured form, as outdated and naïve
theorizing that either unwittingly or willingly made common cause with
Stalinist totalitarianism. As a result of this, the newly translated Russian texts
appeared as exceptions that proved the rule, covertly subverting the official
Soviet position and so anticipating, in fragmentary form, the new French-led
paradigm. Just as these approaches arose in Europe, so in the United States
William Labov led a bold attempt to catalogue and theorise social variations
within American English by synthesizing dialect geography,attempts to define
language as a social rather than natural science,and US writings on language
contact and conflicts of the 1950s into a new discipline that was to be known
as sociolinguistics (Koerner 2002). Labov and his followers did not caricature
their predecessors in the same way as the post-structuralists, but the boldness
of their new formulations combined with the political context of the Civil
Rights movement still tended to exaggerate the novelty of these approaches
and certainly did not stimulate a search for precursors. By the mid 1980s a
2 POLITICS AND THE THEORY OF LANGUAGE IN THE USSR
veritable boom in Bakhtin studies had been launched, and Mikhail Bakhtin
himself,eclipsing the members of the so-called ‘Bakhtin Circle’,was being held
up as the hitherto unacknowledged initiator of a whole range of approaches.
It took some time before the problems with the new perspectives became
widely acknowledged and sober historical scholarship eroded the inflated
claims to individual innovation, leading to a reassessment of the heritage of
sociological approaches to language, even after the end of the Cold War had
cleared the way for sustained archival research in the ex-USSR.
The current volume presents new materials that were first raised at the
conference Sociological Theories of Language in the USSR 1917–1938, which took
place at the University of Sheffield, UK, in September 2006. The conference
was itself a part of a four-year project,The Rise of Sociological Linguistics in the Soviet
Union, 1917–1938: Institutions, Ideas and Agendas, in the Bakhtin Centre at the
same university.1 The project facilitated extensive archival research in the ex-
USSR and collaboration with Russian scholars working in the area, some of
whom contributed to the current volume, and has contributed to a changing
perspective that was already underway before the project began. One of the
main findings of the project has been the multi-dimensional character of the
linguistic innovations in the USSR between the two World Wars, which was
conditioned by political changes,the rise of new paradigms in linguistics proper,
the dynamics of the institutional locus of research,patterns of appropriation of
philosophical ideas from abroad and the diverse character of the ethnic
composition of the USSR. Not only were these factors always present, but
relations within and between each of them were constantly shifting according
to the huge socio-political changes that characterized that period.Furthermore,
disciplinary boundaries themselves were still in the process of formation and so
scholarship about language took place in a wide variety of disciplinary contexts,
including what would now be covered by psychology, ethnology, sociology,
literary studies and even disability studies and archaeology.Needless to say this
volume can do no more than highlight a few aspects of this complexity,but it is
hoped that presenting the materials in this way will stimulate further interest in
an extraordinarily rich field outside of the narrow confines of Slavic studies,
which in many respects maintains some of the conservatism of the Cold War
climate in which it developed.
Vladimir Alpatov presents us with a discussion of the way in which Soviet
linguists related to the scholarship of the pre-Revolutionary period both within
and outside Russia. He shows how the Revolution coincided with the
importation of Saussure’s new paradigm into Russia, and the way the two
factors interacted in the work of different groups of linguists. Four trends are
identified:those who rejected the new paradigm and the tasks the Revolution
INTRODUCTION 3
posed for linguists; those who rejected both the old and new paradigms and
sought to construct a new Marxist linguistics ab nihilo; those who selected one
among particular trends as a source for the construction of a new Marxist
linguistics; and those who sought to construct a new Marxist linguistics by
assimilating and combining aspects from a variety of pre-existing trends.This
expands upon Alpatov’s earlier work (2000) in which the many claims to having
constructed a specifically Marxist linguistics was subjected to scrutiny and
found to be seriously lacking in coherence.Linguistic constructions were found
to have originated elsewhere and this or that linguist’s commitment to
Marxism was shown to have only influenced the direction of research and the
conception of society of which language was seen as part.Alpatov now shows
that linguists related to positivist,idealist and Saussurean linguistics in complex
ways, with Marxism influencing the objects of research and the criteria for
appropriation of methodology and wider conceptions of language.
Marxism inevitably influenced the conception of society with which linguists
worked, and thus of the type of sociology he or she developed. However, it is
not always clear that linguists had a sophisticated understanding of Marxism,
and quite often general conceptions from positivism or Durkheimian sociology
were adopted with Marxist terminology often amounting to little more than a
gloss. The dominant form of sociology that developed in postrevolutionary
Russia, under the leadership of Nikolai Bukharin, could only be regarded as
fully Marxist with considerable reservations.Bukharin’s Historical Materialism:A
Popular Manual of Marxist Sociology(1926 [1921]) presented a brand of positivist
Marxism in which technology exerted a determining influence on social
development and language was, for the first time in ‘Marxist’ theory, assigned
to the ideological superstructure that arises on the economic base (1926 [1921],
pp. 203–6). Despite the fact that Lenin had shown considerable scepticism
towards sociology as a discipline and towards Bukharin’s understanding of both
Marxism and culture (Biggart 1987), and that some of the most talented
Marxist theoreticians abroad (Lukács 1925; Gramsci 1971 [1929–35]) heavily
criticized Bukharin’s work, this formulation was widely accepted by Soviet
linguists as the model of Marxism to which their work needed to correspond.
Moreover, while Bukharin was quite liberal in his approach to sources from
‘bourgeois’thinkers,his conception of culture and science,which derived from
the work of Aleksandr Bogdanov,encouraged culture and science to be viewed
as class phenomena,with the creation of specifically proletarian versions to be
a desideratum of Soviet scholarship. This gave a theoretical basis for the
scholarly nihilism that developed among certain Soviet linguists and elsewhere,
and for the harassment of scholars who remained open to a wide range of
influences, especially at the beginning of the 1930s. As Alpatov shows with
4 POLITICS AND THE THEORY OF LANGUAGE IN THE USSR
reference to linguistics, however, most scholars remained open to pre-
Revolutionary and western influences even if they sought to recast those
influences in the mould of ‘Marxist sociology’,and this was particularly true of
the former students of the Polish-Russian linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay,
such as Evgenii Polivanov,Boris Larin,Lev Iakubinskii and Lev Shcherba.
Mika Lähteenmäki examines the notions of sociology found in the work of
three prominent Soviet linguists, Rozaliia Shor, Polivanov and Valentin
Voloshinov.Of these only the last is well known among Anglophone scholars
for his 1929 book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (translated 1973),
though a collection of Polivanov’s articles has been available in English
translation since 1974.Lähteenmäki shows that in her 1926 book Language and
Societyand subsequently,Shor was not only heavily influenced by Saussure (as
Alpatov discusses) but also by Durkheimian sociology as adopted by the
French sociological school led by Antoine Meillet.Meanwhile,Polivanov and
Voloshinov appeared to have a direct relationship to Bukharin’s Historical
Materialism, though neither adopted his perspective in its entirety but sought
to cleanse the conception of its mechanistic features and incorporate
teleological features into their respective conceptions of language.
Furthermore, Lähteenmäki shows that none of the linguists actually made it
clear exactly what they understood by ‘Marxist sociology’, and that this
allowed them to emphasise different features at different points in their
respective intellectual developments.
A wide range of approaches to the development of a new linguistics was
evident during the 1920s when,with certain exceptions,scientific still generally
prevailed over statutory authority in determining careers within academic
institutions. One certainly needed to pose one’s chosen research in terms of
relevance to the new social and political environment and, from 1924, this
increasingly pertained to the ‘building of socialism in one country’,but this was
a capacious field within which there was little agreement on many fundamental
questions.The relationship between social structure and linguistic variation was
posed particularly sharply in the 1920s when the conscious construction of
standard forms of the languages of the peoples of the former Russian Empire
was embarked upon. All national groups had been given the right to be
educated in their native language and to communicate with central government
in that language, but this often required the selection, systematization and
codification of standard forms from a plethora of local dialects,along with the
creation of written forms.2 Even in Russia itself, the rapid process of
urbanisation along with the destruction of the old state institutions meant that
cities became multi-lingual and multi-dialectal environments. The drive to
spread literacy and to form a new public discourse that was not remote from
that spoken by the urban population inevitably required attention be given to
