The Russian and Slavonic Languages in Sixteenth-Century Muscovy

Abstract

THE SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW Volume 85, Number I - January 2007 The Russian and Slavonic Languages in Sixteenth-Century Muscovy* CHARLESJ. HALPERIN In memory of BenjaminUroff IN sixteenth-centuryMuscovy authors wrote in one of two languages, first, Slavonic or Church Slavonic, the Russian recension of Church Slavonic, or second, chancery (prikaz) Russian or simply Russian. The relationshipbetween them has been the subjectof considerablediscussion by linguistsand literaryscholarsas a fundamental feature of the evolution of the modern Russian literarylanguage, but historianshave also addressedthe issue in termsof Muscovite culturalhistory.There is no questionbut that texts in Slavonic and chancery language look and feel differentenough to permit assigning them to differentlanguages. A reader of a sermon by Metropolitan Makarii and the Sudebnik (law code) of I550 would have no difficultyassigning the texts to different languages. Scholarsdo not agree on how the languageswere treatedby Muscovites. The linguist Boris 0. Unbegaum, for example, described the coexistence of two written languages, Church Slavonic and chancery language, utilized for differentfunctions, in which chancery Charles J. Halperin is a Visiting Scholar at the Russian and East European Institute of Indiana University. * I wish to express my sincerest appreciation to the four conscientious referees of 7he Slavonicand East European Reviewfor their numerous useful stylistic, substantive and bibliographic suggestions. I have tried to incorporate as many of them as possible. I am solely responsible for any remaining errors. 2 RUSSIAN & SLAVONIC IN I6TH-CENTURY MUSCOVY language,employedin jurisprudence and correspondence, was pure Russianand virtuallyfree of Slavonicinfluence.'Bothlanguages,he observed,couldbe influencedby colloquialexpressions.2 Kuznetsov, on the otherhand,wrotethattherewas no cleardistinction between Slavonicand Russian.3The 'linguisticquestion',therefore,possesses interdisciplinarysignificance. The distinguishedlinguist, philologist and semiotician Boris Uspenskii haspresented themostsystematic theory.4 He viewsSlavonic and Russian(russkii)5 as a diglossia,a specificlinguisticsituationin whichtwolanguagesfunctionas one, the firstas a privileged, literary languageand the secondas a spoken,non-written language.Because nativespeakers learnthebookishlanguagefromthe non-bookish,6 the two languagesareperceivedas one language.To a foreignerthe two languages appearto bejustthat,twolanguages.7 AmongtheEastSlavs fromtheeleventhto theseventeenth century,Slavonic wasthebookish, literary, indeedsacred,writtenlanguage,whichcouldnotbe employed 1 Boris 0. Unbegaum, 'Russe et slavon dans la terminologie juridique', RevuedesEtudes Slaves,34, 1957, pp. I29-35, as reprinted in id., Selected PapersonRussianandSlavonic Philology, Oxford, I969 (hereafter, Unbegaum, Selected Papers),pp. 176-84; id., 'Le russe literaire est-il d'origine russe?', Revuedes EtudesSlaves,44, I965, pp. I9-28, as reprinted in Unbegaum, Selected Papers,pp. 299-311; id., 'lazyk russkogo prava', in Na temyrusskiei obshchie. Sbornik stateiv chest'prof.N S. Timasheva, New York, I965, pp. 178-84, as reprinted in Unbegaum, Selected Papers, pp. 312-I8. 2 Boris 0. Unbegaum, 'The Language of Muscovite Russia in Oxford Vocabularies', OxfordSlavonicPapers, io, I962, pp. 237-54 (hereafter, Unbegaum, 'The Language of Muscovite Russia'), as reprinted in Unbegaum, Selected Papers,pp. 237-54 (p. 237). 3 P. S. Kuznetsov, U istokovrusskoigrammaticheskoi mysli, Moscow, 1958 (hereafter, Kuznetsov, U istokov), pp. II, 27. 4 Boris A. Uspenskii, Istoriiarusskogo literaturnogo iazyka(XI-XVII), Munich, I987 (hereafter, Uspenskii, Istoriia(I987)), pp. 14-21 (esp. I4-I6), 66-72, 244-58 (on Muscovy); id., 'The Language Situation and Linguistic Consciousness in Muscovite Rus': The Perception of Church Slavic and Russian', Michael Flier trans. (hereafter, Uspenskii, 'The Language Situation'), in Henryk Birnbaum and Michael Flier (eds), MedievalRussianCulture,Cal4fomia SlavicStudies,12, I984 (hereafter, AMedieval RussianCulture), pp. 365-85; Boris A. Uspenskii, Istoriiarusskogo literaturnogo iazyka(XI-XVII), 3rd edition, Moscow, 2002 (hereafter, Uspenskii, Istoriia(2002)), pp. 24-29, IOI-II, 365-95 respectively. I wish to express my sincerest appreciation to both Boris Uspenskii and Hugh Olmsted for answering some questions about diglossia; neither is in any way responsible for my conclusions. 5For the Kievan period, it would be preferable to speak of the East Slavic vernacular or Rus' language, which would be cumbersome and violate the linguistic continuity between Kiev and Moscow which Uspenskii implies. In general in this article occurrences of the word russkii,in sources or secondary works, will uniformly be translated as 'Russian'. 6Uspenskii, Istoriia(I987), p. I5; Uspenskii, Istoriia(2002), p. 25. On the other hand, literacy (like religion) was acquired by reading religious texts such as the Psalter. Ivan IV ordered a Circassian who was going to convert to Orthodox Christianity to be taught gramota(Polnoesobranierusskikh...