Serguei Tchougounnikov
M. Bakhtin's Circle
and the "Stalinist Science"
In June 1950, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzugashvili, alias Generalissimus Stalin, for the first time shared with the nation his views on language. His long article
Marxism and Problems of General Linguistics, later published as a booklet, came out in
Pravda. This text by Stalin is a severe criticism of Nikolai Marr's "new theory of language". During the previous thirty years, starting from the end of the twenties, this theory had been the only officially approved linguistic doctrine in the Soviet Union.
Nikolai Iakovlevich Marr (1865-1934), archaeologist and linguist, a polyglot and an internationally recognised authority in the languages and civilisations of the Caucasus, was elected member of academy before the October
Revolution, in 1912. As distinct from many other academy members, Marr's career flourished under the Soviet regime, when he was awarded every possible academic distinction and became president of an academic institution created specially for him. In the post-stalinist Russia, however, his name is surrounded with an aura of scandal. His most notorious theoretical achievement lies in the field of the theory of language. To sum it up, Marr's linguistics constructs a genesis of language as parallel to the stages of development of human productive activity and connects language directly to social evolution. [1]
Within the Marrist framework of concepts, language appears as an undeniable part of the superstructure and as a product of social and historical class formations.[2] During its evolution, according to Marr, language makes "revolutionary
leaps"; such a leap is similar and parallel to a passage from one socio-economic formation to another, which passage, according to Marx, occurs under the pressure of productive forces outgrowing production relations.[3] Marrism also supports the idea of a trans-genetic community between languages:
the same classes speak the same languages, independent of the "genetic" frontiers allegedly creating the identities of national languages. The evolution of all languages of the world follows, therefore, the principle of universal determinism.[4] Marr, as one can see, was a monogeneticist. The latter reveals itself in Marr's thesis about the existence of four universal linguistic elements, common to all languages of the world and analysed as the material from which all languages were "made" in a universal glottogonic process (the notorious "jon", "sal", "ber", "rosh"). The inter-breeding and the inter-crossing of these four elements, in various combinations, is declared to lie in origin of every language of the world.[5]
According to Marr, three linguistic systems successively developed in the process of the evolution of the mind, originating in respective economic orders with corresponding social superstructures. These three systems are: 1) primitive communism, characterised by a synthetic structure of discourse and lexical polysemanticity, i.e., when meaning cannot be differentiated into substantial and functional signification; 2) a social structure based on the separation of different aspects of economy and on the social division of labour. This type of society is divided according to the professional principle, while its stratification into production groups is represented in primitive forms of guilds. At this stage, language, just like society, also achieves an internal structural differentiation gradually elaborating distinctions between different discursive elements, as for instance phrase elements like prepositions; 3) a class society with a state structure, a society determined by the technological division of labour and a language characterised by flexional morphology. [6] Another name for Marr's "new theory of language" was japhetidology; Marr (following the example of Baroque monogenetic linguists) used the name of the third son of Noah, Japheth, to designate the totality of languages spoken in the region of the Caucasus .[7]
In Stalin's text, an imaginary "group of younger comrades" asks questions about the nature of language, to which Stalin text gives three answers:
1) language is not a superstructure over the material or economical basis of society;
2) (Marrist) class languages do not exist, it is only the language of the whole people (obshchenarodnyj jazyk) that really exists. The existence of social dialects and class jargons does not contradict but confirms the existence of this general language of people: the former are all subordinated to the latter and are merely ramifications of the latter;
3) Marrism with its confusing notion of class languages and its definition of language as a superstructure is wrong. Thus the Marrist domination within language linguistic science must be terminated, which should be achieved in a free academic discussion .[8]
Among the consequences produced by Stalin's text, one can mention :
1) the rehabilitation of Russian linguistics as it existed before the Bolshevik revolution;
2) the rehabilitation of the historical-comparative method previously destroyed in the name of a Marxist language linguistic science. Stalin did not accept the idea of a "proto-language" but he shared the idea of a genetic relatedness among languages. This recognition relieved linguistic comparative studies of the earlier accusations of racism and imperialism.[9]
The reasons behind Stalin's new attitude towards Marr's ideological linguistics remain obscure and give rise to lively discussions. The fact is that after having entirely supported Marr's doctrine from the 1920s until the 1950s, after having given it the status of an official linguistic canon, Stalin
suddenly decided that its time was over - and exterminated it ruthlessly. Together with Marr's tyrannical academic politics, the controversial and challenging content of his theory was banished into oblivion.
The Bakhtin Circle in the Soviet 1920s
The written production of the so called Bakhtin Circle [Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), Pavel Medvedev (1892-1937), Valentin Voloshinov (1895-1936)] is usually seen as a solitary island of resistance in the sea of the intellectual conformism of the early Stalin era. Several authors (B. Groïs,[10] M. Ryklin,[11] M. Keith Booker and D. Juraga [12]) underline, on the contrary and quite radically, certain links between the concepts of the Bakhtin circle and the ideological atmosphere of the Stalinist mainstream. I would like to propose a comparative reading of Marr, Stalin and the Bakhtin
Circle in an attempt to show what I believe can be identified as a "japhetic substratum" in the Circle's dialogical project. My special attention is given to its ideological content which I will show to have multiple, even though unexpected, links with Marr's new linguistics.
The notion of "ideological sign" is introduced by Voloshinov in his book
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Fundamental Problems in the Application of the
Sociological Method applied to the Sciences of Languages (1929). The ideological sign is defined by Voloshinov in accordance with its "refractive potential": the sign's capacity to refract or to transpose objective reality, proper to the human consciousness.[13] The ideological sign finds its natural manifestation in the intonation as an expression of value or of an ideological attitude. It realises what Voloshinov calls
my-pereživanie, a perception through a collective "us" as opposed to
ja-pereživanie, a perception through an individual self. The ideological sign is thus postulated as a trans-individual entity, it expresses a collective experience or collective real life, not an individual experience or personal real life.[14]
Pavel Medvedev in his critique of Russian formalism (The Formal Method in the
History of Literature. A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, 1928) introduces the notions of "ideologeme" and of "social evaluation". The ideologeme is defined as a zone where the distinction between the psychological and the social is abolished. It is ideological or social environment materialised in artistic forms, it is a junction or a meeting point between the ideological social environment and the artistic forms conditioned by it. Another important concept of Medvedev is that of an ideological bridge. This term designates a dialogical meeting between at least two consciousnesses through discourse. The ideological bridge is what the speaker projects between himself the addressee.[15]
There are three basic notions developed by the Bakhtin Circle: the "ideological", the "dialogical" and the "polyphonic"; all these terms are perceived as 1) the fundamental dimension of human language, 2) "bodiless" elements contained in every utterance, and 3) the very condition of a linguistic functioning and the constitution of the social. Because of their disregard of these elements, formal linguistics or poetics are declared incapable of grasping them. Formal theoretical thinking has no access to this fundamental inner reality of language. A sociological poetics or a dialogical study of language are the only possibilities of approaching and explaining these phenomena.
The theoretical writings of the Bakhtin
Circle have the following implications :
1) the individual is constantly invested by its social environment through linguistic signs;
2) the social environment is a sign-generating mechanism;
3) the place of the Other in individual discursive activity is constitutive for the speaker's own construction;
4) the production of the Other through linguistic means is simultaneously a production of one's own self;
5) the Other is a function of the real social environment ;
6) the ideological sign is a fundamentally a material phenomenon;
7) in a living organism there is always a spiritual centre, an instance of control and co-ordination of the totality of functions, called "architectonics";
8) the ideological sign is an ideal instrument in the transfer of a determined real life experience without being determined itself by any semiotic material; it is in a state of permanent becoming and does not ever coincide with the semiotic material.
Further, in the present study, I will attempt to elucidate a common substratum which these implications share with the official Stalinist science (1929-1950) : Marr's linguistics and Lyssenko's agrobiology.
The notions of class language in Marr and in the Bakhtin Circle
The discourse on "class language" is genetically founded on the perception of a social conflict as a collision of races. This view on political antagonism as a struggle between superior and inferior races originates from the 19th century grand narrative of evolution.
Walter Benjamin in his essay on Baudelaire, written at the end of the 1930s and published at the end of 1950s, comments in detail on the discursive articulation between social and racial. In particular, Benjamin refers to the book by Granier de Cassagnac
Histoire des classes ouvrières et des classes bourgeoises (The history of working and bourgeois classes) (1838). This study reveals the origin of proletarians as a class of sub-humans,
in effect the result of cross-breeding between bandits and prostitutes. Benjamin observes that Marx himself could not avoid this "racial" vision of class conflict. In the first volume of
Capital there appears an idea of the "singular race of partner-swappers" (quoted by W. Benjamin) which for Marx means a proletarian. Benjamin reads Baudelaire's famous litany "Cain and Abel" within this socio-biological context. This poem tells about the ever-irreconcilable fight between the "race of Abel" and the "race of Cain."[16] Cain, the ancestor of disinherited people, appears in the poem as the forefather of the race of proletarians. This is the race of human beings whose only fortune is their workforce.[17]
Benjamin connects this romantic vision of surplus value to the particular literary genre developed in France from the beginning of 1840, that of "literary physiology". It would seems to be relevant to recall here Balzac's overture to
La comédie humaine (The human comedy) which ties this physiological genre in literature to the biological discussions of the period. Balzac underlines the idea of the "unity of composition" resulting from comparison between "Humanity and Animality". He also refers to the debates between Cuvier, the partisan of "fixism", and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the partisan of the "transformism", as well as to others naturalists (like Buffon and Bonnet) in order to support the "basic law of the unity of composition," i.e., the unity of human and animal nature. The Creator used only one pattern in the making of all organised beings. The animal takes its form from its natural milieu. Thus zoological species result from external differences of the natural environment. In this sense the reality of social species is not in principle different to the reality of zoological species. The task of
The Human Comedy consists in creating an encyclopaedia of social species after the example of Buffon's description of the animal kingdom.[18]
One can probably identify an even more archaic layer in the genesis of the notion "class language", a layer connected to the etymology of the term of "proletarian". Indeed, this term is borrowed from the Latin word
proletarius which designates a citizen belonging to the lowest class of the Roman society. This word signifies literally "those who are considered as useful only through children they produce". Saint Augustine thus comments on this term: "proletarians were those who were occupied to beget children". The word
proletarius comes from proles, a collective name of a group of children, of a race or a line of descent. This ancient semantic nucleus could have influenced the new definition of the term since the middle of the 18th century until 1848, when Marx's and Engel's
Communist Manifesto introduced the term in its modern meaning.[19]
Nikolai Marr first formulated the idea of the class nature of language long before the October
Revolution, in 1892. This thesis was based on his personal experience during his trip to Armenia. During this voyage, Marr, whose Armenian was very poor, still managed somehow to understand Armenian peasants thanks to his knowledge of Georgian, and especially of the Georgian spoken by simple uneducated people.
By contrast, the Armenian peasants were unable to understand the extremely educated Armenian language spoken by the monks who accompanied Marr on his journey. This resemblance thus discovered between the Armenian and Georgian lower class dialects gave Marr the idea of a relationship between the Armenian and Georgian languages. Indeed, Marr found common features between these two languages but only in Armenian dialects and not in written documents (according to other linguists he was misled by borrowings). Marr postulated two Armenian languages: the Armenian of the princes and the Armenian of the people. Popular Armenian was declared to be much closer to popular Georgian. This is how Marr's notorious thesis on the non-genetic proximity of class languages first appeared, thus giving origin to non-genetic and anti-formalist linguistics which deny the historical-comparative doctrine of language families.[20]
One can say that the Bakhtin Circle was also fascinated by the idea of class languages. According to Voloshinov, a word is neutral as a linguistic sign but it is never neutral as an ideological sign. A linguistic sign (a word) obtains the status of ideological sign through interaction with the social environment and under its influence. The ideological sign becomes an "engaged" unity through the replacement of accent of which it is a bearer. In a socially homogeneous environment for the successful exchange of signs one must possess the same semiotic resources. This homogeneous nature of semiotic exchange and consequently the success of communication is guaranteed by the identity of accents and social values which determine abstract linguistic signs. The determination of abstract linguistic sign is accomplished on the level of inner speech.
Indeed, in his critical study of Freudianism (Freudianism, 1927) Voloshinov proposes to replace the Freudian dichotomy between the conscious and the unconscious by a new opposition:, that of inner and outer speech. Nothing in objective reality corresponds to Freud's Unconscious. According to Voloshinov, the unconscious is merely the conscious in disguise, the psychoanalytical practice dealing in actual reality with a conflict between an official and non-official consciousness.
Inner speech which precedes manifestation, i.e., outer speech, is always conscious. Freud works on language in search of the repressed. But the totality of language is by definition perfectly and entirely conscious. Since language is a social instance there is no real distinction between what is inner and outer, the difference is always a question of strategy or politics.[21]
Thus, Voloshinov (or Bakhtin under the name of Voloshinov) believes that the social determination of the sign occurs in inner speech. Thinking and language being one and the same process, inner speech initially contains every possible realisation of every speech act. A collective or a social group is determined from the inside by the mechanism of the inner sign.[22]
In this context the problem of language as a semiotic medium is no longer relevant. A non-official consciousness that realises itself in inner speech becomes an effective means of self-control for the official consciousness, or of every instance of exteriorised, manifest speech. A fundamental task is consequently to produce an ideological transmutation of the individual inside the consciousness, on the level of inner speech. This can be achieved through a choice of the only possible form of universe refraction.[23]
In Europe in the 1960s and 1970s these formulations were discovered as a revelation and a source of revolutionary conceptual inspiration,[24] which neglected their consubstantiality with the Soviet atmosphere of the second half of the 20s in which they were produced. Even the Soviet secondary school curriculum published by the Marrists in 1932 contains the same definition of the utterance: "An utterance is a communicative unity which reflects the reality refracted by the class consciousness of a speaker."[25]
In his 1950 article, Stalin, taking aiming against the idea of the class nature of national languages, denies revolutions in language in order to restore a continuity of linguistic evolution. According to Stalin, language as a means of communication serves equally all classes of the society and is in this respect indifferent to class divisions. But social groups are far from being indifferent to language and seek to use it for their interests. For instance, dominant classes create class dialects and salon jargons. It is this way the exploiting classes manifest their distance from the people.
Dialogical grafting
Commenting on Voloshinov's idea of "reported discourse" J. Peytard observes that the concept is needed to identify those points where the Other emerges in the discourse. It deals with the "operation of grafting between two tissues in interaction."[26] This commentary is a faithful translation of the idea of Voloshinov - Bakhtin: the metaphor of grafting, or transplanting, stemming from the method in biology that was extremely fashionable in the USSR of the 1920-1930s. The organic image of the interaction of two grafted tissues provides a key to dialogism of the Bakhtin
Circle. The receiving organism (the author's discourse) and the graft (reported discourse, the discourse of the other) are united in the totality of the grafted organism .
This gardening metaphor comes from Soviet agrobiology and further develops in language theory. In order to theorise discourse in the novel Bakhtin uses the term hybridisation. The latter is defined like "the mixing of two social languages within one utterance."[28] Bakhtin's dialogism in its capacity of a fundamental property of the novel is founded on a particular quality of speech or mixed discourse.[29] Heterogeneity expresses itself through different strategies of incorporation. This "transplanted" instance is an "image of the language of the other". In his
Discourse in the Novel Bakhtin distinguishes between "three basic categories: hybridisation; dialogic interrelation of languages; and pure dialogues."[30]
Hybridisation, as well as "bivocal word" and free indirect style, is polyphonic, dialogic and related to the novel. These forms result from the prolific interaction of exterior and interior discourses: this "otherness", this heterogeneous instance (visibly based on the organic metaphor where hybridisation is synonymous
with fertility) is positively defined as a condition and an "anti-incestuous" guarantee of the verbal exchange.[31] Discourse in the novel and its polyphonic potential are conceptualised by Bakhtin through a device I would like to define as "a dialogical grafting". Indeed, the presence of the other is marked through grafting, an operation equivalent to the transplant of an organic tissue to another organic body, a bearer of its own vital autonomy. In the Soviet epistemological context of the
1920s and 30s this conceptual metaphor is far from being an original invention (see the theoretical and practical works
of the biologists Michurin and Timiriazev, as well as Lysenko's agrobiology). The technique of grafting was introduced by the horticulturist Michurin and further developed by Lysenko. The idea is to obtain hybrids which possess the hereditary characters of , participating biological species.[32]
For Lysenko "grafted" or "vegetative hybrids" were perfectly identical to the hybrids obtained through sexual cross-breeding. "Lysenkoism" considers that it is possible to transmit the heredity through the technique of grafting, thus bypassing genetic mechanisms.[33] Hereditary properties are transmitted
from the subject to the graft without exchanging chromosomes of cellular nuclei. The "plastic substance" of the graft (transplanted organ) possesses species-specific properties, a "hereditary potential.". Heredity is not an exclusive property of a distinct special substance localised in an organ. Every element of the body possesses a hereditary property, i.e., it demands relatively determined conditions in order to live, grow up, and develop.[34]
Lysenko's idea of vegetative hybridisation is based on his belief in the possibility of heredity transmission through any living substance and on the rejection of any specific material substratum.[35] He advances this idea against the "idealist" concepts of contemporary genetics (Mendel, Morgan) according to which "hereditary factors maintain their independence inside the cell and stay distinct - without being melted - one in another." [36]. Lysenko suggests a "materialist dialectic" scheme, with a dialectic contradiction
as the basis. Vegetative hybridisation and sexual hybridisation must have a common foundation. This common foundation lies in the fact that the cross-breeding elements are mutually assimilated and give birth to a hybridised product.[37]
Thus Lysenko's agrobiology is focused on the interaction between organic and inorganic elements, on the exchange between organisms and their environment, and their mutual assimilation. The graft (the transplanted organ) of a young organism is transferred onto the stem of an adult plant. The new graft is forced to assimilate as much as possible of the nutritive substances developed by the varieties whose properties one seeks to transmit. The process amounts to an organic "re-education", Lysenko's "pedagogic" concern in biology.[38] His "natural pedagogy" is organised in accordance with the model of vegetative nutrition. The graft (transplanted organ) is isolated from the "raw" nutritive elements, it receives only food already elaborated by the supporting organism. The transmission of desirable hereditary characteristics occurs through intrinsic assimilation.
One finds similar ideas in Goethe's metamorphoses of plants. In his commentaries to Goethe's botanical writings Rudolf Steiner underlines the difference between a bud and a plant, both of them containing total potentiality of their realisation. If a seed has the soil as its immediate developmental ground, a bud is a plant formed on a plant, a "reported plant", so to speak. A bud marks a point of interruption in the process of growth, it is a point of concentration of seminal forces, a starting point of regeneration or new development. A bud is thus a visible manifestation of a new stage of vegetative life.[39] A seed and a bud are situated in different moments of the vegetative circle; these moments correspond respectively to diastole and systole.
While a seed is in immediate contact with its environment and receives nutrition directly from its milieu, a bud is nourished in a mediated way. Its mode of nutrition implies the whole process of vegetative growth. There occurs an intensification, or "progression on the spiritual scale" (Steigerung). The organs in direct contact with the soil (like seeds) are immediately dependent from on their exterior inorganic environment. The organs distant from this milieu (like buds) draw their nourishment from already organised organic elements. Steiner adds that distant organs receive nourishment already prepared for them by other organs.[40] In Goethe's own explanation, a superior "knot" is born from the preceding "knot" and through the latter it receives nutrition. This "reported" nutrition is consequently more refined and more filtered. The superior knot benefits from it and develops itself with greater refinement.[41]
This morphologic image of Steigerung borrowed from Goethe is easily discernible in Lysenko's "new proletarian biology". Grafting is marked with the organic tradition of
Bildung, a spiritual heir of Bildung.[42] One finds a similar image of morphologic filiation in the core of Bakhtinian dialogism, in the theory of the novel and "translinguisitcs". They all seem to originate in the metaphor of productive hybridisation.
The ontology of the novel in Bakhtin [43] and the general ontology of the bi-vocal or dialogic word by Bakhtin and his circle are anchored in the German morphological tradition with its idea of organic formation (Bildung) and the inner form. Bakhtin's speech genres as well as his "translinguistics" seem to explore different branches within the same Romantic project of the "literary absolute."[44] His inspiration seems to come from the Romantic idea of the organic growth of "natural forms."
Dialogism in the context of cross-breeding of languages.
This figure of a crossbred linguistic species is rather frequent in linguistic debates in 19th and in the early 20th centuries. Thus, Marr postulates that all languages of the world are produced through the mutual crossbreeding
of a limited number of archaic elements (sal, ber, jon, roch), as the Armenian language which Marr says is a product of crossbreeding between the Japhetic (or Caucasian) languages and the Indo-European ones. Marr connects the crossbreeding of languages to the crossbreeding of ethnic groups: according to him, the Armenian (working) people are of a Japhetic origin while the dominants classes descend from Indo-European conquerors.[45] The idea of crossbreeding allows him to connect every language to the Caucasian Japhetic group.
By contrast, Stalin's linguistic thinking is radically "anti-hybridian" and argues against the idea of a crossbred origin of languages. He affirms the original purity of a national language (in this case, Russian).[46]
The text by Voloshinov, alias Bakhtin, Marxism and the Philosophy of
Language also makes a statement on this problem. Bakhtinian thought inserts the metaphor of crossbreeding of languages into the context of a class war. For Voloshinov, the refraction of Being in the ideological sign is determined by the "crossing" of different social interests within the same sign community. A class doesn't coincide with a sign community, nor with a collective usage of the same signs for ideological communication. Different classes use the same language, but different accents "cross" every ideological sign. The sign is consequently transformed into a scene of class war between accents .[47]
This crossing of different accents within the same sign is postulated by Voloshinov as a condition of the sign's "life," as if it were an organic being. Because of that inner crossing of accents the sign is mobile and living. On the other hand, a sign extracted from a class war withers (zakhireet) and degenerates into an allegory, becoming an object for philological and not sociological interpretation. A dominating class seeks to attribute an eternal, classless status to the ideological sign, to repress a war of social accents and to bind a sign into "monoaccentuality."
[48] Voloshinov quotes Marr's idea of the crossbreeding of languages as a decisive factor of linguistic evolution, referring to it as the "ideological or dialogical element". Mutually crossing accents of an ideological or dialogical type inside a sign are a fundamental condition of linguistic sign's life and death.[49] This ideological (or dialogical) instance animates a word. Terms like "ideological", and "social" become synonymous to "living" or "organic,", while terms like "linguistic," "abstract" and "formal" are used to designate dead linguistic matter. According to Voloshinov, a dissociation between a language and its "ideological content" is a profound error of "abstract objectivism". A traditional linguistics is a formal representation of dead foreign languages conserved in written texts. The European linguistic consciousness is based on "bodies of written languages" and all its essential categories and approaches are produced by the reanimation of these linguistic corpses.[50]
In this context Voloshinov again quotes Marr, for whom Indo-European linguistics has developed from the "fossilised" forms of written languages and from dead monological utterances. This tradition of working with dead foreign languages and with written monuments led to a passive comprehension of language. Also
according to Voloshinov, a language as it is theorized by comparative linguistics is "dead, written, and foreign", and a linguistic approach is associated with a "dead comprehension".[51] Given Marr's scandalous reputation in the contemporary academy after Stalin's intervention in language theory, scholars prefer to ignore these references to Marr in the writings of the Bakhtin
Circle. Nevertheless, this reference seems to reveal something important in the genesis of Bakhtin's fundamental concepts of "dialogism", "polyphonism" and "translingusitics".
An anti-philological "accent" is also an important conceptual coincidence between Voloshinov and Marr. Indeed both postulate a necessity to study what they call "living languages" instead of the traditional philological object of "formal linguistics". The fact that philology never studied "living" (oral) languages is considered by Marr to be a factor of the class approach in the choice of material, the "so-called national language" being merely a fiction produced by the ruling classes.[52]
Further, Marr accuses Indo-European linguistics of harbouring a "racist" and "thoroughgoing
fascist" idea of the inferiority of non-flexional languages. In his opinion, associating language with
racially specific Indo-European linguistics divided mankind into inferior and superior races. Opposing "dead written languages" to "living spoken language" Marr and his disciples called upon scholars to replace a study of linguistic norms by a study of "the living speech of the masses". This
required a major intervention in the form of language (jazykovoie stroitel'stvo), to create alphabets for languages without writing systems. A "living spoken language", a new language of a new society should reflect radical changes in the mind. A proletarian language should replace a language of intellectuals and aristocrats.
The political conceptualisation of "living languages" was presented by Marrism as a revolution in language and part of the Soviet cultural revolution. Instead of reforms of orthography or grammar Marr claimed a "radical reconstruction of the whole universe of superstructure,", "a change of norms of language," and a transfer of language "onto the rails of the language of the masses". He was in fact advocating the formation of a new language.[54] Of special interest is that the anti-colonial and anti-eurocentric connotations are quite visible in Marr's theories.
Twenty years after the publication of the book by Voloshinov, Stalin expressesd a very different attitude on the idea of crossbreeding of language. He accepts Marr's term of crossbreeding but rejects its content and returns to more traditional Neogrammarian formulations. In Stalin's opinion, neither revolutionary explosion nor
the formation of a third new language results from a crossbreeding of (at least) two different languages. The winning language remains identical to itself but assimilates some elements of the defeated language.[55]
According to Stalin, crossbreeding of languages is a long process that evolves
over centuries. It is wrong to think that a third qualitatively different language results from the crossing of two languages. In reality one of the competing ("fighting") languages always comes out victorious. It preserves its grammatical order, its essential lexical corpus and continues to develop itself according to its own internal laws. As for a defeated language, it loses its quality and gradually dies. Consequently, a crossbreeding does not create a new language but preserves one of the languages and gives it a possibility to evolve further.[56]
At the same time Stalin accepts the "mutual fertility" of languages. The dominant language absorbs the "best features" of the other (defeated) languages. For example, national languages of the Soviet Union constantly enrich themselves through their contacts with Russian. The latter in its turn enriches itself through its contacts with the national languages. There are consequently two kinds of coexistence of languages, organic and inorganic. Western borrowings, neologisms, barbarisms, "salon jargon" etc. are neither harmonious nor organic; these are to be eliminated. The second type of coexistence of linguistic systems, an organic one, presupposes on the contrary a mutually fertilizing relationship: these are languages which can coexist harmonically. A factor assuring an organic coexistence is a united space, a spatial continuity. Any language is able to progress and to develop itself according to its internal law through the fact that it conserves "its grammatical and essential lexical stock,", i.e., its inner pure nucleus. Stalin's conclusion is that the theory of crossbreeding of languages is unable to study the internal laws of language development.[57]
Conclusion
Thus, the essential "stock" of a national language [58] is invariable: the political implications of this thesis revealed themselves in Stalin's "campaign against cosmopolitanism." Its task was to return to the "authentic popular origins" (of the language) through the elimination of dialects and class jargons. Soviet linguistic politics was proclaimed to be a therapy of language, assisting in purging the Russian language of borrowings, "inorganic elements" and, with respect to its theory, of "sterile formalism".
Stalin asserted a continuity between thinking and language, and between nation and class as a necessary condition of historical process. A revolutionary break is no longer seen as a constitutive element of this world picture. These breaks are "dialectically assimilated" into the organic totality of a universal process. During the twenties, in the expectation of Trotsky's International Revolution, Soviet linguists were transliterating Cyrillic scripts into Latin characters. Stalin's conception of socialist construction in one isolated country launched a Russification of the peoples of the Soviet Union, and now Cyrillic alphabets were now being imposed on the Soviet Muslim cultures.[59]
Such radical changes in language policy were dictated by the necessity of defining the USSR as a "new historical community" without antagonistic classes. In accordance with Stalin's definition of
a nation, one of its fundamental properties was a community of language. In this context a thesis of historical continuity and of absence of revolutionary leaps in the process of evolution inside a community without antagonistic classes could be useful in order to perpetuate
the political monopoly of a governing party. Stalin's language theory defines a national language as a consensus valid for the whole of the society, for the whole of the nation. A language conceived as a means of communication without class distinctions reinforces the Soviet constitution of 1936. It proclaimed the USSR as a society of non-antagonistic classes. Such a society did not need any linguistics that would be, like Marr's or Voloshinov's, based on the premise of a class war. A proclamation of
the classless nature of a national language (which by definition is Russian) prepared a conception of a "new historical reality" called the "Soviet people." Confirmed by the new Constitution of 1977,[60] Russian becomes a "language of inter-ethnic communication." Stalin's postulate of the national language as an immutable and classless one corresponded to the communist utopia of an immutable, classless (Soviet) society. Free of antagonist tensions and class refractions, language develops its perfectly organic structures, its content perfectly coinciding with its form. The limits of the sayable
coincide with the limits of the thinkable.
Thus, in June 1950, a linguistic imagination based on the figures of polemics, hostility, class war and a permanent break between form and content was no longer of
any use in any longer in Soviet society. Now it was time for a perfect conformity between individual content and linguistic forms. Such a language excludes the possibility of thinking something outside its own forms. Ironically, such a conception of language represents the triumph of Voloshinov's (Bakhtin's) ideologeme, a notion for the radical abolition of differences between the social (discursive) and the psychological (conscious).
Notes
Literature:
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© S. Tchougounnikov
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TSQ 34
Toronto Slavic Annual 2003
Arkadii Shteinvberg. The second way
Roman Timenchik. Anna Akhmatova in 60s
Le Studio Franco-Russe
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