Pratique du multilinguisme dans une correspondance privée russe au xxe siècle : Formes et fonctions

Abstract

The 312 letters written between 1927 and 1933 by a cultured elderly lady of the Russian nobility contain many passages in foreign languages. The author, Olga Alexandrovna Voejkova, used to speak French, English, German and Italian. She corresponded from Leningrad with her son, daughter and three grand-daughters who had emigrated to Harbin, China.It seems quite obvious that her heavy reliance on English and French enables her to bypass the ever stricter censors. But it also represents an attempt to transcend the oppressive present and remind her addressees of happier days in the past. In quotations from famous English and French writers she re-asserts her own intellectual moorings in European culture. A subtle tone of irony in contrasting the present with the past is never too far.Thanks to her excellent English, French and German she draws upon idioms that would be difficult or impossible to translate into Russian. Rather than elaborating on people’s tremendous hardship at finding accommodation, she merely refers to a ‘wild goose chase’.