COML6460 - Linguistic Culture and Literary Development

The opening pages of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” (1869), set in July 1805, feature a conversation between two nobles who are speaking in a combination of Russian and “that elegant French in which our forefathers not only spoke, but also thought.” Tolstoy’s remark points to a shift in the relative status — both practical and symbolic — of each of these languages in Russian high society that was occurring as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth. Shifts in the functions and values of language(s) comprise the subject of this graduate-level seminar, which traces the emergence of the modern Russian literary tradition as it took place in dialogue with evolving attitudes and ideologies surrounding language, translation, nation, and empire. We will adopt a diverse array of theoretical approaches as we examine the influence of linguistic culture on literary development as well as how ideas about literature can exert their own influence on realities and discourses of language.