The French Language in Russia

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The French Language in Russia: A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History
-- With support from the Deutsches Historisches Institut Moskau --

Excerpt:

The French Language in Russia provides the fullest examination and discussion to date of the adoption of the French language by the elites of imperial Russia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is interdisciplimary, approaching its subject from the angles of various kinds of history and historical sociolinguistics. Beyond its bearing on some of the grand narratives of Russian thought and literature, this book may afford more general insight into the social, political, cultural, and literary implications and effects of bilingualism in a speech community over a long period. It should also enlarge understanding of francophonie as a pan-European phenomenon. On the broadest plane, it 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.

AUTHORS

Derek Offord
Emeritus Professor Derek Offord, Senior Research Fellow, University of Bristol. Specialist in Russian cultural and intellectual history and the author or editor of books on early Russian liberalism, Russian travel-writing, the history of Russian thought, and the modern Russian language.

Vladislav Rjéoutski
Dr Vladislav Rjéoutski is Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Moscow. He is a specialist in eighteenth-century Russian and French social and cultural history and the history of education, and author or editor of many works on these subjects.

Gesine Argent
Dr Gesine Argent is Centre Manager and Research Associate at the Princess Dashkova Russian Centre at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on Russian language culture, language ideology, and language purism. ...