This volume explores the impact of French on Russian language attitudes, especially among the literary community. It examines the ways in which perceptions of Russian francophonie helped to shape social, political and cultural identity as Russia began to seek space of its own in the European cultural landscape.

-- With support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK and the Deutsches Historisches Institut Moskau --The French Language in Russia provides the fullest examination and discussion to date of the adoption of the French language by the elites of imperial Russia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is interdisciplinary, approaching its subject from the angles of various kinds of history and historical sociolinguistics. Beyond its bearing on some of the grand narratives of Russian thought and literature, this book may afford more general insight into the social, political, cultural, and literary implications and effects of bilingualism in a speech community over a long period. It should also enlarge understanding of francophonie as a pan-European phenomenon. On the broadest plane, it has significance in an age of unprecedented global connectivity, for it invites us to look beyond the experience of a single nation and the social groups and individuals within it in order to discover how languages and the cultures and narratives associated with them have been shared across national boundaries.

This is the first of two companion volumes which examine language use and language attitudes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, focusing on the transitional period from the Enlightenment to the age of Pushkin.

This volume explores the impact of French on Russian language attitudes, especially among the literary community. It examines the ways in which perceptions of Russian francophonie helped to shape social, political and cultural identity as Russia began to seek space of its own in the European cultural landscape.

The French Language in Russia' provides the fullest examination and discussion to date of the adoption of the French language by the elites of imperial Russia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is interdisciplinary, approaching its subject from the angles of various kinds of history and historical sociolinguistics. Beyond its bearing on some of the grand narratives of Russian thought and literature, this book may afford more general insight into the social, political, cultural, and literary implications and effects of bilingualism in a speech community over a long period. It should also enlarge understanding of francophonie as a pan-European phenomenon. On the broadest plane, it has significance in an age of unprecedented global connectivity, for it invites us to look beyond the experience of a single nation and the social groups and individuals within it in order to discover how languages and the cultures and narratives associated with them have been shared across national boundaries.

While it is generally acknowledged that Russia’s culture has been influenced by France, the present study goes beyond the Francophile preferences of the noble elite and examines Russian society more broadly, exploring those elements of French cultural influence that are still relevant today. This is done through an historical analysis of French loanwords in the Russian language from the time of Peter the Great to the present. The result of this lexical analysis and subsequent study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archival, periodical, and memoir material is to empirically link Russia’s present culture to two major Franco-Russian events: the wave of immigration to Russia following the French Revolution and Russia’s war with Napoleon. This is primarily a book for those interested in European history, particularly imperial Russia, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars. The study of Russian officer memoirs includes original campaign maps, which may be of interest to military historians. The analysis of periodical literature will likewise be a resource for those studying the history of printing, publishing, and journalism in Russia. The book’s interdisciplinary nature, however, broadens its relevance to linguists, cultural historians, and those in the emerging field of Immigration Studies.