As students of a foreign language, college students benefit greatly from a basic understanding of the influences and factors from which the modern prestige dialect, the form of language taught in the classroom, was adopted. These influences may change the way a student pronounces and conceptualizes vocabulary, inflection, and grammar. In order to examine foreign borrowings in the Russian language, I will examine works of literature in which the Russian language is affected by contact with other language groups. The primary focus of this article is the literature of the 19th century (specifically the works of Lev Tolstoy), and the prominent role of French language contact in the printed works of this time.
This century came to be known as ‘The Golden Era’ of Russian literature. This age of unparalleled linguistic innovations in the field of Russian prose affected the way the Russian language is spoken today. The works of Lev Tolstoy, who lived from 1828 to 1910, were among the most prominent Russian of the era, and, perhaps, of all time. His magnum opus, War and Peace, takes place during the French Revolution, and thus directly questions the adherence of the Russian aristocracy to the French language. In the late 17th century, long before the rise of Napoleon, Peter I enacted sweeping cultural reforms in Russia as a means of ‘Westernizing’ the nation. In his reforms to bring Russia culturally closer to Western Europe, Peter I highly
encouraged the acquisition of the French language among the Russian nobility. By the time of War and Peace, a fair portion of the Russian nobility spoke French as a first language, with Russian as a close second. Tolstoy illustrates this in his work immediately, with a line of dialogue in French as the opening lines.Today, many borrowings still exist, though spoken French is not as common in Russia as it once was. As a second-year Russian student, I am already aware of several direct borrowings from French (Диван, багаж, etc.), though my knowledge encompasses only a small fraction of the vast French-influenced Russian lexicon.[1] In War and Peace, the frequency of spoken French became an issue of nationalism, due primarily to the fact that the nation was at war with France. The language spoken by the characters of the book often corresponded to their behavior as well, denoting which characters acted in a ‘Russian’ manner, and which behaved in a ‘European’ manner.
In a similar manner, other languages have been incorporated into Russian by contact with other language groups, though none is quite as pronounced as the French influence. Other 19th century works depict situations in which Russians come into contact with other language groups, primarily through warfare. War and Peace also includes scenes of interaction with German and Polish speakers through interactions by military alliance. Later on, pidgin dialects, blends between two languages, arose in Soviet-era writings as an effect of the Russian language mandate. Even English came to affect the Russian lexicon though the acquiescence of sport terminology in the early 1900’s.
Though language can be changed in many ways, be it through war, political doctrine, or adaptation of new concepts, the best way to observe the effects of these changes is in the everyday interactions of speakers of that language. In a related sense, the best way to examine the spoken habits of previous centuries is by the written examples of literature.
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