Since the turn of the century the public debates on language have increasingly focused on the need to ‘protect’ the language. This tendency has been accompanied by greater state involvement in the domain of language regulation and legislation. The much-debated Law on the Russian Language of 2005 is a key text in this regard, while recent prohibitive laws, such as the ban on profanity in art (2014), the fourth successive renewal for 2016–20 of the Federal targeted programme ‘Russian language’ and the emphasis on ‘the role of the Russian language’ in various governmental policy documents, indicate both that language cultivation is of concern to the authorities and that there is a belief, or ideological conviction, that language can be regulated through political initiatives.

In Chapter 6 we looked at reactions to state involvement in linguistic questions of writers and intellectuals, including protest actions such as Abanamat. In the present section we turn again to the writers’ primary domain, their artistic and linguistic practice. Questions concerning language legislation, linguistic ideologies and, more broadly, language and power, are central to a number of recent Russian novels. We shall take a closer look at two novels from 2012, Valerii Votrin's Logoped (The Speech Therapist) and Mikhail Gigolashvili's Zakhvat Moskovii: natsional-lingvisticheskii roman (The Occupation of Muscovy: A National-Linguistic Novel), and see how these topics are treated.

VALERII VOTRIN's THE SPEECH THERAPIST

Valerii Votrin was born in Tashkent and studied Romance languages at Tashkent university. In 2000 he moved to Brussels, where he went on to study ecology. He now lives in Bath in the UK and works both in the field of ecology, and as a translator and writer of fiction, having published, since his debut in 1995, a number of stories and three novels: Zhalitvoslov (The Book of Prayers and Complaints, 2007), Poslednii magog (The Last Magog, 2009) and Logoped (The Speech Therapist, 2012). Several of his books have been nominated for Russian book prizes.

The Speech Therapist portrays a society governed by strict orthoepic laws: a set of rules for pronunciation meant to preserve the standard language. Although this language is called ‘bookish’ in the novel, the focus is, and this is quite original, on the spoken language.