Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Discourse of Argumentation in Totalitarian Language and Post-Soviet Communication Failures
- 2 Russian and Newspeak: Between Myth and Reality
- 3 ‘A Society that Speaks Concordantly’, or Mechanisms of Communication of Government and Society in Old and New Russia
- 4 Legal Literature ‘for the People’ and the Use of Language (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century)
- 5 ‘How to Write to the Newspaper’: Language and Power at the Birth of Soviet Public Language
- 6 Between the Street and the Kitchen: The Rhetoric of the Social(ist) Meeting in Literature and Cinema
- 7 Was Official Discourse Hegemonic?
- 8 Attempts to Overcome ‘Public Aphasia’: A Study of Public Discussions in Russia at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century
- 9 Allotment Associations in Search of a New Meaning
- 10 ‘Distances of Vast Dimensions …’: Official versus Public Language (Material from Meetings of the Organising Committees of Mass Events, January–February 2012)
- 11 Insides Made Public: Talking Publicly about the Personal in Post-Soviet Media Culture (The Case of The Fashion Verdict)
- 12 Distorted Speech and Aphasia in Satirical Counterdiscourse: Oleg Kozyrev's ‘Rulitiki’ Internet Videos
- 13 The Past and Future of Russian Public Language
- Notes on Contributors
- Subject Index
- Name Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Discourse of Argumentation in Totalitarian Language and Post-Soviet Communication Failures
- 2 Russian and Newspeak: Between Myth and Reality
- 3 ‘A Society that Speaks Concordantly’, or Mechanisms of Communication of Government and Society in Old and New Russia
- 4 Legal Literature ‘for the People’ and the Use of Language (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century)
- 5 ‘How to Write to the Newspaper’: Language and Power at the Birth of Soviet Public Language
- 6 Between the Street and the Kitchen: The Rhetoric of the Social(ist) Meeting in Literature and Cinema
- 7 Was Official Discourse Hegemonic?
- 8 Attempts to Overcome ‘Public Aphasia’: A Study of Public Discussions in Russia at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century
- 9 Allotment Associations in Search of a New Meaning
- 10 ‘Distances of Vast Dimensions …’: Official versus Public Language (Material from Meetings of the Organising Committees of Mass Events, January–February 2012)
- 11 Insides Made Public: Talking Publicly about the Personal in Post-Soviet Media Culture (The Case of The Fashion Verdict)
- 12 Distorted Speech and Aphasia in Satirical Counterdiscourse: Oleg Kozyrev's ‘Rulitiki’ Internet Videos
- 13 The Past and Future of Russian Public Language
- Notes on Contributors
- Subject Index
- Name Index
Summary
On 15–17 January 2013 an international conference on ‘Russian Society in Search of a Public Language: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow’ was held at the European University at St Petersburg (EUSP). The idea of the conference was (quoting the call for papers distributed in the spring of 2012) as follows:
Twenty years have passed since the last revolutionary transformation of Russia, but no effective mechanisms for the public discussion of vital problems have yet been developed in that country. The organisers of the conference start from the position that a ‘syndrome of public aphasia’ is not the least of the causes of this, and that it is the result of the underdevelopment of what might be called the ‘public register’ of the Russian language.
The ‘official register’ of modern Russian is well developed – the linguistic, stylistic and genre peculiarities of official speeches have been inherited in their entirety from the Soviet period, when strict regimentation and highly ritualised speech were combined with an extreme level of responsibility for anything spoken in public, and the result of any ‘discussion’ was known in advance. No less well developed – perhaps even better – is our ‘private register’: friendly, confidential conversations ‘in the kitchen’ are a distinctive characteristic of Russian late Soviet and post-Soviet culture. However, the register that would serve for the situation of speaking in public in front of an audience that is unknown and not necessarily friendly, which would help to convey one's point of view to one's opponents and successfully bring the two positions together, is almost totally lacking in modern Russian.
In these conditions either the official or the private register usurps the role of the public register in situations that ought to require it. The use of the official register in public discussions immediately evokes the sense of ‘being organised’, excessive formalisation and a pre-determined result, whereas the use of the private register is associated with the sense that there is no need to arrive at any result at all, and rather to defeat one's opponent than to try and find a compromise together.
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- Information
- Public Debate in RussiaMatters of (Dis)order, pp. 1 - 9Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016