In 1924 Otto Jespersen pointed out the difficulty of finding an adequate term for a type of indirect speech which is not dependent on an immediately preceding verb like ‘he said’ or ‘he thought.’ He suggested that previous terms such as ‘erlebte Rede’ be replaced by the term ‘represented speech,’ because the writer “does not experience or ‘live’ these thoughts or speeches, but represents them to us….” Since then the terminology problem has by no means become smaller. Jespersen’s term is almost forgotten today, having been replaced by completely new terms, or by terms previously in use, among them ‘erlebte Rede.’ Some of the more common terms presently in use are: ‘style indirect libre,’ ‘monologue intérieur indirect,’ ‘indirect interior monologue,’ ‘narrated speech,’ ‘nesobstvenno-prjamaja reč’, and ‘quasi-direct discourse.’ The last two are direct translations of the German term ‘uneigentliche direkte Rede.’ One of them, viz. quasi-direct discourse, will be used in the present paper only tentatively, since it will be shown later that there is actually no need for having a special term in the grammar of Russian.