What is public language? What elements, semantic or stylistic, are necessary to it? If we take the opposition between the two predominant registers of language in Russian social reality, the official and the private, what relation can public language have to either of them? On the one hand it may be understood that it is important to ask these questions in the search for effective communication in the social discussions of modern Russia. On the other, it is no less important to consider how the opposition between the official and the private has itself come into being, and when the question of whether it is possible to establish something like a public language first arose in Russian history.

From this point of view it is interesting to study the pre-revolutionary period of Russian history – the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century – when the legitimacy of the autocracy was becoming less and less evident. This was a time of rapid changes and of growing criticism of the existing hierarchy in social and cultural relationships, using ideas of democracy, and of the need for a final emancipation of ‘the people’ (narod), that is, as contemporaries saw it, the peasants. Still, our present understanding of ‘the public’ (and therefore of so-called public debates) can hardly coincide with the ideas and with the life and cultural level of the people that predominated at that time. Paradoxical though it may be, the very notion of ‘society’ (obshchestvo) was still closely connected with those same strict hierarchies that were being so severely criticised among the educated part of the population, which considered itself to be ‘society’. A certain level of education seemed to be a necessary condition for being allowed to take part in ‘social’ discussions. Therefore the opposition between the official and private registers could hardly have been the most important distinction in connection with the evolution and conduct of such debates. It was more important to have access to a certain level of education – even in the opinion of those who saw the ordinary people as the basis for their desired transformation of the political and social order.