Introduction / Lara Ryazanova-Clarke and Petre Petrov -- Part I. Language Regimes of Stalinism -- Linguistic turn a la Soviétique : the power of grammar, and the grammar of power / Evgenii Dobrenko -- The Soviet gnomic : on the peculiarities of generic statements in Stalinist officialese / Petre Petrov -- Aesopian language : the politics and poetics of naming the unnamable / Irina Sandomirskaja -- Part II. Negotiating Codes of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe -- From subject of action to object of description : the classes in the Romanian official discourse during communism / Calin Morar-Vulcu -- Speaking Titoism : student opposition and the socialist language regime of Yugoslavia / James Robertson -- Deviant dialectics : intertextuality, voice, and emotion in Czechoslovak Socialist Kritika / Jonathan L. Larson -- "Birdwatchers of the world, unite!" : the language of Soviet ideology in translation / Samantha Sherry -- Part III. Soviet Vernaculars after Communism -- Linguistic mnemonics : the communist language variety in contemporary Russian public discourse / Lara Ryazanova-Clarke -- "The golden age of Soviet Antiquity" : sovietisms in the discourse of left-wing political movements in post-Soviet Russia, 1991-2013 / Ilya Kukulin.
Summary:
"The political revolutions which established state socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were accompanied by revolutions in the word, as the communist project implied not only remaking the world but also renaming it. As new institutions, social roles, rituals and behaviours emerged, so did language practices that designated, articulated and performed these phenomena. This book examines the use of communist language in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods. It goes beyond characterising this linguistic variety as crude 'newspeak,' showing how official language was much more complex--the medium through which important political-ideological messages were elaborated, transmitted and also contested, revealing contradictions, discursive cleavages and performative variations. The book examines the subject comparatively across a range of East European countries besides the Soviet Union, and draws on perspectives from a range of scholarly disciplines--sociolinguistics, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, historiography, and translation studies"-- Provided by publisher.
Series:
Routledge studies in the history of Russia and Eastern Europe ; 21
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.