Had It Not Been for the Tower of Babel, or Why All of Russia Would Not Speak French

Abstract

This review analyses The French Language in Russia: A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History, a book by an international research group (D. Offord, V. Rjéoutski, G. Argent). It deals with the peculiarities of French language use and attitudes towards it in the Russian Empire from Peter I to Alexander II. The book's authors consider the history of French language teaching and determine the functions of French at court, high society, diplomacy, administration, fiction, journalism, private correspondence, diaries, and memoirs. They also examine attacks on gallomania in Russian comedies and novels between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. D. Offord, V. Rjéoutski, and G. Argent argue that Russian society, despite the widespread use of the French language, was never monolingual. They claim that the Russian language developed due to active contacts with French and other languages in the political, social, cultural, and literary spheres. Thus, francophonie became one of the crucial factors of Russia's westernisation. Without questioning the relevance and importance of the conclusions, the reviewer points out the underestimation of historical inertia which let the French language shape the cultural image of Russian society until the Revolution of 1917. © 2020 Ural Federal University. All rights reserved.