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3 - Language Use Among the Russian Aristocracy: The Case of the Counts Stroganov
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- By Vladislav Rjéoutski, Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Moscow, Vladimir Somov, Research Fellow in the Manuscript Department of the Rimskii-Korsakov State Conservatory in St Petersburg
- 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 61-83
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- Chapter
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Summary
Many Russian aristocrats had a command of several foreign languages. Knowledge of languages – above all French, in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries – played an enormous part in their lives: in their studies, in their social life within the family and beyond it, in the composition of ego-documents and so forth. Examination of the ‘linguistic behaviour’ of the upper stratum of the Russian nobility in the period when French was an international language in Europe and when the aristocracy presented itself as in many respects a cosmopolitan group will help us to see in what ways linguistic processes in Russia were similar to those that we may observe in other parts of Europe and in what ways they were different. We do not yet have many accurate studies of this subject that are based on large volumes of sources, but a recent survey shows that although pan- European processes were at work the situation does differ considerably from one country to another (Rjéoutski et al. 2014).
Choice of languages for study and for social intercourse in the families of the aristocracy might be regarded as a type of adherence to pan- European fashion. Indeed, adherence to models of linguistic behaviour that had become firmly established may explain the relative infrequency of metalinguistic commentary among the Russian aristocracy. However, while ‘the fashion for languages’ undoubtedly played an important role, adherence to models of upbringing among the higher nobility was, as a rule, a conscious process – it is no accident that the families of high society have left us many an ‘education plan’ (plan d’éducation). We should therefore probably assume a certain degree of reflection about the benefits that command of one language or another might confer or, to put it in Pierre Bourdieu's terms, the ‘cultural capital’ which this or that language possessed in the imagination of Russian aristocrats. Mastery of one language or another, we believe, may be part of the process of creating ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991).
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