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8 - French and Russian in Ego-Documents by Nikolai Karamzin
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- By Liubov Sapchenko, Professor of the Faculty of Literature at Ul'ianovsk State Pedagogical University
- Edited by Derek Offord, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, Vladislav Rjeoutski, Gesine Argent
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- Book:
- French and Russian in Imperial Russia
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 25 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 29 June 2015, pp 152-171
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Nikolai Karamzin is known in Russian culture as the author of sentimental tales and the multi-volume History of the Russian State (Istoriia Gosudarstva Rossiiskogo) and as the creator of a ‘new literary style’ (novyi slog) modelled on the norms of French. However, egodocuments were also an extremely important part of his legacy, and in these his moral and linguistic personality found its clearest expression. Like the ego-documents of most cultivated Russian noblemen of that time, these texts of Karamzin's were distinguished by their French and Russian bilingualism. We can pick out two basic types of text from Karamzin's French manuscripts: first, Karamzin's own letters and notes, and second, excerpts that he collected in his handwritten albums and notebooks from the works of French thinkers. I shall deal with the first of these types of text in the first and second sections of this chapter (the second section will be devoted entirely to Karamzin's letters to his second wife), and in the third and fourth sections I shall examine albums he addressed to two women in the imperial family. The aims of the chapter are to outline the range of Karamzin's French manuscripts, note the general patterns of Franco-Russian bilingualism reflected in them and bring out the traits of Karamzin's linguistic personality against the background of the bilingualism of the Russian nobility. The chapter should show how the writer proceeds from the laws of etiquette and genre to functionally differentiated authorial use of French and Russian.
KARAMZIN's BILINGUAL LETTERS
Letters make up the bulk of Karamzin's French texts and a significant proportion of them are bilingual. Philologists who have examined the question of bilingualism among the Russian nobility have noted the following patterns: Russian was used in official papers, documents addressed to the sovereign and letters to friends, while French was used in society correspondence, letters to women, especially one's fiancée, and so forth. At the same time ‘bilingualism was the norm for the educated Russian’ (Paperno 1975: 155), and many letters therefore contain codeswitching, that is to say interpolations in the other language.
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