INTRODUCTION

In any society discursive practice has its own dynamics. As Pierre Bourdieu suggests, the genesis of an official dominant discourse within a society takes place in the process of a discursive struggle for symbolic power, for the formatting and reformatting of the mental structures expressed in language (Bourdieu 1991: 48).

Satire has at all times been one of the most highly marked forms of counter-discourse, of those forms which enter into dialogue with the dominant language and resist it (Terdiman 1985), though its counterdiscursive features and temper depend to a large extent on the discourse which it is intended to oppose and which creates and fills with dominant meaning the signs which satire is called upon to deconstruct.

This chapter notes the appearance of a syndrome of distorted speech and aphasia as a feature belonging to the satirical counter-discourse of the time of Dmitrii Medvedev's official presidency. These properties will be further explored as mechanisms of satirical semiosis in the series of internet clips called ‘Rulitiki’. The question to be answered in this chapter is what the distortion of speech and aphasia in oppositional discourse mean in the context, on the one hand, of the pseudo-liberal Medvedev period, and, on the other, of the extended influence of the semiotics of the Internet.

The material for the research on which this work is based consists of thirty-seven video clips made by Oleg Kozyrev over two years of the ‘Rulitiki’ project (2008–10) and posted on the web site of the electronic publication Ezhednevnyi Zhurnal [Daily Journal].

SATIRE: A CHANGE OF GENERATIONS

Although there is no doubt that when Medvedev formally came to power in 2008 the régime remained basically the same as it had been, it is important when discussing the discursive practices of the time of his presidency to take account of the fact that the Medvedev period coincided with the beginnings of widespread computer use in Russia. This was the time when the use of the Internet became a daily mass means of receiving information, social intercourse and unification. According to Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) data for the spring of 2011, Internet users made up 46 per cent of the population of Russia, or 59.2 million people (FOM 2011).

In the Military Gallery of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg there hang portraits of over 300 high-ranking officers who fought in the Russian army in the campaign of 1812, after the invasion of Russia by Napoleon's Grande Armée, and in the European campaigns of 1813–14, which ended with Napoleon's defeat. The portraits were painted by the English artist George Dawe, who was engaged on this task, with help from two Russian artists, from 1822 until shortly before his death in 1829. Many of the great Russian noble families (the Golitsyns, Naryshkins, Shcherbatovs, Shuvalovs, Stroganovs, Volkonskiis and Vorontsovs, for example) are represented in this collection, as well as some of the most notable heroes of the war, such as the commander-in-chief, Mikhail Kutuzov, Denis Davydov, Aleksei Ermolov and Nikolai Raevskii. However, many of the officers painted by Dawe were of non-Russian origin, as their surnames suggest. A few of these had recently come over to the Russian side, such as de Langeron, a French royalist who entered Russian service after the French Revolution, von Bennigsen and von Wintzingerode, natives of Brunswick and Hesse respectively, and the Dutch nobleman van Serooskerken. Others belonged to families who had only recently settled in Russia or found themselves in territory conquered or annexed by Russia in the eighteenth century. There was a Melissino, who had Greek forebears, and a de Witt, the son of a Polish-Lithuanian general. Above all, there were members of noble families from the Baltic regions of Courland, Estland and Liefland (or Livonia). These Baltic noblemen included members of the Berg family, a Bistrom, a von Jürgensburg, von Knorrings, von der Pahlens, Rozens, a von Sass and a von Staden. Not that the families of foreign origin who are represented in the gallery of the Winter Palace supplied the Russian emperor only with military personnel. Members of some of those families, such as the Korfs and von Lievens, also occupied high office in the civilian administration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. General Alexander von Benckendorff, after a distinguished military career, would become the first head of the Third Section, the secret police established by Nicholas I in 1826. In the Alexandrine age, then, towards the end of the period encompassed by the two volumes we are introducing here, Russia was an empire with a multi-ethnic European elite.

The two volumes we introduce here concern an aspect of the social, cultural and political history of language in Imperial Russia. They deal with the profound impact which the French language and the culture that it bore had on Russian high society and on the consciousness of the social and literary elite in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, when French was an international language among such elites in the European world. The volumes explore the coexistence, competition and commingling of the two languages and the possible benefits and allegedly detrimental effects of Franco-Russian bilingualism.

The two volumes are closely tied together in approach as well as subject-matter. They are conceived as original contributions to the multidisciplinary study of language. They address, from a historical viewpoint, subjects of interest to sociolinguists (especially language use and language choice, bilingualism and multilingualism, code-switching and language attitudes). At the same time, much of their subject-matter (social and national identity, nationalism, linguistic and cultural borrowing) falls within the purview of social, political and cultural historians, or of Slavists (who have an interest in the relationship between Russian and Western culture and debate about it) or of students of the European Enlightenment, Neo-Classicism and Romanticism.

The volumes share a main title, French and Russian in Imperial Russia, and are conceived as complementary to one another, but their focus is different and each is intended to be capable of standing on its own. This volume, sub-titled Language Use among the Russian Elite, examines the functions of French in Russia in various spheres, domains and genres in the period in question and the interplay and intermixing of French and Russian. It also provides some examples of French lexical influence on Russian. It is concerned primarily with linguistic practice. The second volume, sub-titled Language Attitudes and Identity, investigates the effects of the use of French and analyses Russian perceptions of the phenomenon of elite bilingualism.

In the first of our two volumes we examined the use of French in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russia and considered factors which governed language choice. In broad surveys and case studies, the contributors to that volume explored such matters as the way Catherine II used French, linguistic practice among the nobility (or at least, among certain sections of it and in certain families), the Russian francophone press, nobles’ personal correspondence, and types of writing and literary forms in which French was used in Russia, such as albums and travel diaries. They studied the phenomenon of codeswitching, analysing factors which might trigger it, and the effect of French on certain areas of Russian lexis, such as architectural terminology and fashion. They also discussed the extent to which Russian elite society was not merely bilingual or even multilingual but, in certain respects, diglossic.

The volume we introduce here focuses more sharply on language attitudes and the relationship between language and identity. In other words, we are now concerned not so much with actual usage as with perceptions of usage and its effects, as these were expressed in language debate, much of which was conducted in journalism or even on the stage. In examining language attitudes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, contributors to this volume refer more frequently to certain types of subjective writing, especially imaginative literature and polemical articles or treatises, which were discussed in the section on primary sources in our introduction to Volume 1. Their findings should accordingly be of interest to literary and intellectual historians, who routinely draw on this sort of material, as well as to historical sociolinguists and social historians.

In order to prepare the ground for this investigation into language attitudes and identity marking, we shall use this introduction to contextualise the shift in attitudes towards the use of both French and Russian which we believe can be traced in Russia over the period encompassed by our volumes, from around the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. This was a period in European cultural and intellectual history when the Enlightenment was giving way to Romanticism and when empires were being challenged by the rise of nationalism.