Introduction

5.1.1 One linguistic concept, although fundamental and constantly referred to, is often taken for granted: the concept of ‘word’. The word is the domain of many phonological statements; it is the implicit ordering principle in morphology; and the word is a central, though again implicit concept of syntax in so far as the latter describes the patterns or rules according to which words are combined into larger linguistic structures. It is therefore necessary to be somewhat more explicit about this linguistic category, not only because words – more precisely, the aggregate of words making up the vocabulary (= dictionary = lexicon) of a language – are the topic of this chapter, but also because the term is familiar from non-technical, everyday language, where it is often employed in a variety of senses, while as a technical term it ought to be unambiguous. Thus, when talking about inflectional paradigms, the term ‘word’ might be used to refer both to each individual member of the paradigm, and to the global entity each member of the paradigm is a form of, as well as to the entity that is bounded by spaces to its left and right in a text. This, then, might lead to a seemingly contradictory statement such as

(1) The word heah steap is written as two words.

In actual fact, there is a sequence heah steap reced ‘very high house’ (lit. ‘high lofty house’) in Gen. 2840 (Sauer 1985:270), where heah steap is normally interpreted as an adjectival compound, which, however, is written in the manuscript as two separate words.

Introduction

Whatever their other achievements, the Anglo-Saxons could not lay claim to being outstanding grammarians. Indeed, to judge by the paucity of grammatical writing during the Old English period, where Ælfric's Latin Grammar (ca 1000) stands out because it is the exception that proves the rule, the Anglo-Saxons would not have wished to make such a claim, their intellectual interests lying in entirely different areas.

This, of course, makes the task of reconstructing the nature of the Old English language that much more difficult. Thus, in the areas which are the concern of this chapter, we have no equivalent of the Icelandic First Grammarian, who, writing in the thirteenth century, gives a wealth of detail about the sound system of Old Icelandic (see Benediktsson 1972, Haugen 1950). At much the same time as the First Grammarian was writing, an East Midlands monk of Scandinavian origin, Orm, composed a lengthy verse work entitled Orrmulum, in which he employed a writing system of his own devising from which we can glean a considerable amount of information about his pronunciation (see Burchfield 1956, Sisam 1953b: 188–95 and vol. II, ch. 2 of this History). However, Orm's spelling system, valuable as it is, is not only ambiguous in its aims and effects, but also relates to a period when the English language had considerably altered in structure and system. For Old English itself we have no direct testamentary evidence from any contemporary or near-contemporary source.

General principles

The special status of names

Naming, although semantically a specialised function, in other respects forms part of the everyday language. Phonemic material has to be the same, and to follow dialectal and chronological paths that are related, albeit not invariably identical. The morpho-syntactic features of names must fit with general ones. Lexical material and modes of word-formation too must reflect those of the language at large. Indeed, place-names normally start as plain descriptions of the sites concerned: e.g. Kingston < cyninges tūn ‘the king's estate’, Pyrford < (æt) pyrigan forda ‘(the settlement at) the ford by the pear-tree’ (PN Surrey: 59, 132; illustrative examples will usually be given in normalised rather than documentary form). Personal names, although less transparently motivated, likewise ultimately derive from elements of common language.

Before becoming truly a ‘name’, a descriptive formation must, however, be divorced from its etymological meaning in such a way that the sound-sequence, no matter how complex its structure or plain its surface-meaning, becomes a simple pointer; ‘one might claim that unintelligible names fulfil their role more directly’ (Gardiner 1940; Nicolaisen, in Gelling et al. 1970:14). Bath, as a place-name, coincides in form with the common noun, and awareness survives of the Roman baths that it commemorates; but, for all that, the name's everyday ‘meaning’ is independent of etymology. Such independence is clearer still with names which, like London, have, since records began, apparently been opaque to their users (Rivet and Smith 1979:396–8).

Language change and historical linguistics

Greek philosophers were aware of the fact that human language is subject to change in the course of time. But only from the nineteenth century onwards did scholars develop a truly scientific approach to language change and its description. During the Middle Ages various suggestions had been put forward with regard to language development, but religious prejudices frequently stood in the way of a correct understanding of historical processes; thus one widespread view was that all languages somehow descended from Hebrew. Then in his justly famous Anniversary Discourse of 2 February 1786 (published in Asiatick Researches 1.415–431 (1788)) Sir William Jones brought basic features of Sanskrit to the attention of western scholars. He contended that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin stem from a ‘common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists’ and surmised that Germanic and Celtic derive from the same source ‘though blended with a very different idiom’. The first quarter of the nineteenth century then saw the development of a reliable methodology in genetic linquistics. The main point concerning language relationship can be phrased as follows: two or more languages are genetically related if they stem from a common ancestor; the fact and the degree of the relationship are established on the basis of deep-cutting structural agreements which cannot be due to chance. Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Germanic, Celtic and a few other languages stem from a common proto-language, which is usually termed ‘Indo-European’ (in German indogermanisch).

General background

The study of syntax is the study of the patterns by which morphemes and grammatical categories such as Noun, Adjective, Verb, Preposition and conjunctions are organised into sentences.

To understand the syntax of a language fully, one needs to have access to grammaticality judgements. For example, to understand how the perfect works in English one needs to know not only that She has arrived is possible, that is, that it is part of the system of English, but also that ** She has arrived yesterday is not (** signals that the pattern is not part of the structure of the language, or at least of the variety in question; as is traditional in historical grammars, * is reserved for reconstructed, hypothetical forms). To understand the interaction of indefinite Noun Phrases and subject, one must know that ** A man is over there is not part of the system, whereas There is a man over there is. We obviously have only partial access to the syntax of an earlier stage of a language. This is in part because we have only indirect access to any grammaticality judgements, usually through the negative evidence of absence of a pattern, sometimes through inferences that can be drawn from crosslinguistic generalisations about constraints on possible syntactic patterns given certain word orders, etc. In part, it is because we have access only to written, not to spoken language. Furthermore, in the case of Old English (OE), much of the prose is dependent on Latin (this is particularly true of the interlinear glosses).

The period from 1953 to 1980 saw Russian literature develop in many different directions both inside and outside the Soviet Union. With Stalin’s death the intense cultural pressures which the guardians of literature had exerted after the Second World War diminished, and with some hesitation literature sought to strike out in unfamiliar channels during the period of the so-called thaw, a name adopted from Erenburg’s timely novel of the day. The thaw continued through the eventual accession of Nikita Khrushchev to power, but there were clearly strict limits to it, as the controversy over Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and the award of the Nobel Prize to him in 1958 showed: Pasternak finally rejected the award, and his novel was not published in the Soviet Union for nearly thirty years.

And yet the process of cultural liberalization after Stalin has never been totally reversed. The early 1960s saw the rise to prominence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, following the publication of his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962. Solzhenitsyn remained a central figure of the 1960s thanks to the existence of samizdat, since many of his further writings could not be published within the country. It is indicative that he is supremely a writer of prose, and that two mentor-poets of the older generation – Pasternak and Akhmatova – had ceased to exert very direct influence on the younger generation of writers by the early 1960s. The attitude of the authorities toward the energies of the new literature passed through certain phases.

After the powerful impetus given Russian literature by the flowering of realism from 1855 to 1880, the period from 1880 – the year when Dostocvsky completed publication of his last novel, and Tolstoy underwent his spiritual conversion – to 1895 was perhaps inevitably a time of lesser cultural energies, although any epoch which contained writers of the stature of a Chekhov is still a remarkable one. In 1894 Alexander III had died after reigning for almost this entire period and taking very little interest in literary matters, unlike most of his predecessors. In literary terms 1895 is the year which saw the creation of Chekhov’s The Seagull – the first of his four outstanding plays which followed upon a period dedicated for the most part to the short story – a major work which incorporated modernist and even symbolist elements, foreshadowing the cultural revival to come.

This transitional period was dominated ideologically by the late Tolstoy, who after his spiritual crisis of 1879–80 turned to moral didacticism in literature, developed a viewpoint which came to be known as Tolstoyanism (advocating primarily non-violent resistance to evil), and gathered disciples about him. In his short story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” he argued that the most ordinary life is the most terrible life; and in “The Kreutzer Sonata” he suggested that since sexual passion was the root of all evil, human beings might abstain from sexual relations even if this meant the end of the human race.

From 1790 to 1820 the Russian Empire underwent tumultuous years beginning with the immediate aftermath of the French revolution, continuing through the rise of Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars which saw the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and the allied occupation of Paris, and ending with the intellectual ferment of the movement which would culminate in the abortive Decembrist uprising of 1825. No great fraction of the nation’s energies at this time could be directed toward literature.

In literary terms this period begins with a work which faithfully reflects the political tensions of the time of the French revolution – Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow – and ends with a narrative poem, Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, which expresses well the romantic sensibility then on the verge of a short-lived cultural triumph. In the intervening thirty years, a culturally chaotic period, a major alteration occurred in literature’s approach to the world. As Arthur Lovejoy has so aptly put it, during the years of neoclassicism and the Enlightenment intellectuals looked to a single standard, “conceived as universal, uncomplicated, immutable, uniform for every rational being.” But then a “momentous” shift in outlook occurred, and was completed by the time of the romantic period, “when it came to be believed not only that in many, or in all, phases of human life there are diverse excellences, but that diversity itself is of the essence of excellence.” In short, the change in emphasis was from a unitary human standard to a belief in diversity for its own sake.

The decades between 1820 and 1840 witnessed simultaneously the zenith of Russian romanticism and the first stages of Russian literature’s greatest period, which extended from approximately 1820 to the time of the First World War. In terms of genres, Russian romanticism began with a strong emphasis on poetry (it is appropriate that Ruslan and Lyudmila of 1820 should be a narrative poem), but in the course of its development shifted toward prose. Thus Pushkin, though he never abandoned poetry by any means, turned definitely toward prose in 1830 with the composition of his Tales of Belkin, a cycle of works which laid the foundations of the Russian short story yet to come; Gogol began his literary career with a poetic failure but soon found his place as a writer of elaborate prose; and Lermontov, in numerous ways the most characteristic figure of the romantic period, remained not only a fine poet – many think him second only to Pushkin among nineteenth-century poets – but became an excellent prose-writer as well, and it is proper that his novel, or cycle of short stories, A Hero of Our Time (1840), should mark the end of Russian romanticism, and rather decisively at that. The transition from Ruslan and Lyudmila to A Hero of Our Time marks not only a shift from an early romanticism based upon national folklore to a romanticism oriented toward the extraordinary individual, the “superfluous man,” in a social context, but also a shift from poetry to prose. And yet both works are plainly romantic in their thrust.

Although those who came first chronologically in the history of eighteenth-century Russian literature – Antiokh Kantemir and Vasily Trediakovsky – initially wished to effect a radical break with their medieval tradition, much as Peter the Great had done in the political sphere, they could not manage it immediately. They initiated the transition to a modern literature, but it would take some time to accomplish, for the greatest literary figure of mid-century, Mikhail Lomonosov, was not so anxious as they to jettison native ways, and indeed eventually Trediakovsky too reverted to a greater sense of his roots than he had displayed in his youth, when under strong western European influence.

Although the church ceased to nurture literature directly in those years, it still continued to do so indirectly – through its schools, for example, which Lomonosov attended – and took an active hand in developing culture generally. Although literature was evidently much more secular in the eighteenth century than it had been earlier, there was still a serious religious component to it, one which emerged, for example, in Lomonosov’s “Morning meditation” and “Evening Meditation,” in Trediakovsky’s Feoptiya, and in Derzhavin’s ode “God,” promptly translated into many languages. Nor did it prove a simple matter to implant an understanding of literature as fiction: Kantemir had to explain carefully to the readers of his satires that his characters were but literary creations.

The period from 1895 to 1925, arguably the most complex in the entire history of Russian literature, may be characterized as the era of modernism in its various manifestations: decadence, symbolism, avant-gardism, futurism, acmeism, formalism, and a number of other doctrines, all of which were formulated by writers acutely conscious of culture as an entity created by human minds. The beginnings of Russian modernism are generally traced to an important critical piece of 1893 by Dmitry Merezhkovsky entitled On the reasons for the decline and on the new currents in contemporary Russian literature, an article which defined the new mood of the Russian intelligentsia, now prepared for a quite different sort of literature than it had welcomed theretofore. When modernism in its various forms did prevail, it held the stage for some time, even past the political cataclysms of the First World War and the October revolution: the literature of the early 1920s which dealt with these events still remained modernist in its approach until about 1925.

The year 1925 functions as a dividing point in literary terms for several reasons, of which two may be noted here. First, in that year the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union passed a resolution enunciating a comprehensive position on questions of literature and art. Although it did not actually exert its control at that stage over such matters, it asserted its right to do so in the future, and eventually did so.

The story of Russian literature begins with a date of great significance for Russian political and cultural history: the year 988, when the ruler of Kievan Rus officially accepted Christianity as the new faith of the principality. At that point there was no written literature in Rus, but by his action Prince Vladimir laid the foundations of what we now call medieval Russian literature, even though it would not come into real being – so far as we know from what has reached us after the destruction wrought by the Mongol invasion – for some years thereafter. But the eastern Slavs received an alphabet designed by SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, and also fell heir to the rich Byzantine cultural heritage which had been and would be translated from the Greek.

When we speak of “literature” in the old Russian period, however, we must understand it as something quite different from our notions of “literature” in the twentieth century.

In the first place, most old Russian literature was not what we would consider fictional, or at least it presented itself as dealing with fact and reality. In the earliest period one of the leading literary genres was the chronicle (exemplified by the Primary Chronicle) which built upon the achievements of the Byzantine historians. This genre by its very nature claimed to be factual even though it contained some clearly fictional (or at least non-factual) elements. Another leading genre was hagiography, which dealt with biographical accounts of the lives of Russia’s holy men and women: if a saint’s life contained fantastic elements, they were meant to be taken seriously, and not regarded as fiction.

The zenith of Russian realistic prose is treated here as beginning in 1855, a date of political significance, the year in which Nicholas I passed from the scene, but also of literary importance, as the year which saw the publication of Chernyshevsky’s Esthetic Relations of Art to Reality. That essay formulated the principles upon which literary critics, by then quite numerous, would judge and interpret the literary masterpieces shortly to be produced. Chernyshevsky’s was a straight-forwardly materialist esthetic, based on the central propositions that “the beautiful is life” and that art is in every meaningful sense inferior to a reality subject to rational comprehension. His critical followers elaborated upon his ideas with such enthusiasm that by 1865 his doctrine had become the dominant critical view. Even those numerous critics and even more numerous writers who rejected Chernyshevsky’s approach had to take it into serious account, and in this sense his ideas defined the course of the literary discussion in large measure until about 1870.

The years from 1855 to 1880 were the time when the Russian realists flourished. A mere listing of names is sufficient to make the point: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Pisemsky, Ostrovsky, Leskov – the literary careers of all these reached their peak during this quarter-century. It was also a stimulating period for criticism, with critics of sufficient stature at least to compare with the writers they interpreted: Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Pisarev among the radicals, Grigorev among their opponents.

The decade of the 1980s divides neatly into two equal halves. Over the first half hung the shadow of the gloomy “period of stagnation” which is rightly associated with the name of Leonid Brezhnev, one of the most dull-witted and predatory political figures of this century.

Brezhnev wanted to be a writer. In 1978–79 he published his auto-biographical sketches Malaya zemlya (the name given to a portion of the Kerch Peninsula, scene of fierce fighting during World War II, where Brezhnev was a political commissar), Rebirth (Vozrozhdenie), and Virgin Lands (Tselina). Although they were nothing more than brochures written in bureaucratese by ghostwriters, Brezhnev was immediately honored with a Lenin Prize, the highest Soviet literary award. Moreover, the literary journals and papers in Russia outdid one another in extolling the author of this “trilogy,” holding up his talent as an example for all, exclaiming over his brilliant metaphors, his vivid epithets and similes, and his lively dialogue. Moscow and Leningrad writers would gather for solemn discussions of the Brezhnev “trilogy” in obedience to party command.

Is it any wonder that so-called “secretarial literature” flourished luxuriantly at precisely this time? If everybody agreed that the country’s leading writer was the incredibly mediocre and perhaps even only semi-literate General Secretary of the party Central Committee, then what was to prevent the various Secretaries of the Union of Soviet Writers from publishing their writings in multi-volume editions? To be sure, Brezhnev exercised such unlimited power that he could award himself a Lenin prize, while the secretaries of the Writers Union could not do as much – but still they controlled such publishing houses as “Soviet Writer,” “Artistic Literature,” and “Young Guard.”

The 1840s – that “marvellous decade,” in Paul Annenkov’s phrase – occupy a special place in the historical memory of the Russian intelligentsia. For most of its length the decade was a time of great philosophical, cultural, and literary beginnings, which then came to an abrupt ending in the so-called “epoch of censorship terror” commencing with the European revolutions of 1848 and continuing through Russia’s losing involvement in the Crimean war of 1853–6. The second portion of the years from 1840 to 1855 transformed the entire period from a beginning to something more like a transition, from the great years of romanticism to the time of the Russian realists who would win for Russian literature a worldwide reputation. It was also a period of continuing transition from an age of poetry to an epoch when prose writing dominated the literary arena.

Philosophically, the early 1840s were a time when young Russians eagerly followed and endlessly discussed all the latest theories, emanating especially from Germany. Young people formally enrolled in universities found it much more interesting to spend their hours participating in small “circles” and all-night debates about the good, the true and the beautiful, than attending classes. That frame of mind is epitomized in Turgenev’s vignette of an instance when he and Belinsky were summoned to dinner by Belinsky’s wife and the critic objected to being interrupted for a meal when the two of them had not yet settled the question of God’s existence.

If the year which begins this period – 1925 – has both literary and political significance, as the year when the newly established communist regime asserted its authority over literature and culture, the ending date is primarily of political significance: it is the year of Joseph Stalin’s death. A political date is quite appropriate to close this era of Russian literature, during which literature and politics were more intimately interconnected than at any other time during the entire span of Russian literary history.

The political pressures of the early Soviet era brought about the division of Russian literature into two major if unequal parts: the principal one of Russian literature within the Soviet Union, and the lesser one of the “first wave” of the emigration which began to assume definite form around 1925. When the first wave later subsided – as some writers returned to the Soviet Union during the 1930s or after the Second World War, others died natural deaths or perished during that conflict, and the major centers of émigré culture between the wars were disrupted by that historical cataclysm – it was suddenly reinforced by the so-called “second wave” of the emigration resulting from the dislocations of that very conflict. The “second wave” contained few established writers, but it did provide a much larger audience than before for émigré literature, and boasted a number of talented people who managed to establish themselves as writers later on. The second wave of the emigration was more or less at its height at the time of Stalin’s death.