Miscellanea V. Harp in Tsarskoye Selo (Бряцанье в Царском Селе)

The title alludes to Pushkin’s juvenile breakthrough work, Recollections in Tsarskoye Selo (Воспоминания в Царском Селе). Pushkin can be regarded as the greatest contributor who arguably single-handedly elevated the Russian language to the halls of high culture. Therefore, I will discuss some trivia about the Russian language, centering on Pushkin.

Note: The Tsarskoye Selo Moment

In 1815, at just 15 years old, Pushkin recited this poem at the public examination of the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. A heavyweight figure was present—Gavrila Derzhavin (Гавриил Державин), the titan of Russian Classicist poetry at the time.

Legend has it that after hearing the recitation, the elderly Derzhavin was moved to tears. He wanted to embrace the young genius, exclaiming, "I have not died, for my heir has appeared!" This moment is viewed as a historic passing of the torch in Russian literature, marking the transition from the solemnity of Classicism to the vitality of Romanticism and Realism.

In Pushkin's era, Russian was still considered a language for the lower classes, a symbol of vulgarity. The upper class mostly spoke French; these devoted admirers of the French language were known as Галломания (Gallomania). In Eugene Onegin, Pushkin even remarked that "Ladies could not even use their own language / to write enthusiastic love letters."

Note: Tatyana's Letter

The context for this line is the famous "Tatyana's Letter to Onegin" in Eugene Onegin. Ironically, Tatyana, the heroine representing the gloomiest "Russian soul" of that era, actually conceived this love letter in French in her mind.

In the original text, Pushkin not only points out this awkwardness but also apologizes to the reader for having to "translate" the letter into Russian verse. The original reads:

So she wrote in French...

What is to be done! I repeat again:

Before now, a lady’s love

Did not express itself in Russian,

Before now, our proud language

Has not got used to postal prose.

This vividly demonstrates the poverty and lack of confidence Russian faced in expressing delicate emotions at the time.

This phenomenon is actually attributed to the reforms of Peter the Great. Since then, the Russian upper class began to revere French to an extreme degree, using it to demarcate class barriers. Linguistically, this phenomenon is known as Diglossia: French served as the H-variety (High variety), used for literature, science, and courtly interaction; while Russian served as the L-variety (Low variety), used only for conversations with servants and street life.

Note: Diglossia in Tolstoy's Works

This phenomenon reached its peak in the opening of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The very first paragraph of the book is not in Russian, but consists of the socialite Anna Pavlovna complaining about Napoleon in fluent French. In fact, approximately $2\%$ of the original text of War and Peace is pure French.

This Diglossia was not just a linguistic habit but a political identity. After Peter the Great forced complete Westernization, speaking French signified being a "civilized person," while speaking pure Russian risked being labeled as an archaic "Old Muscovite" or a savage serf. It was not until the outbreak of the Patriotic War of 1812, when Russia defeated Napoleon on the battlefield, that the aristocracy began—driven by a sense of patriotic self-awareness—to relearn how to speak proper Russian.

When I was learning Russian on Duolingo, I often felt that Russian and English words were extremely similar, such as объект — object, актёр — actor, софа — sofa. Later, I discovered that this was not only due to their cognate relationship within the Indo-European language family but also because both borrowed heavily from French vocabulary.

Note: Three Levels of Loanwords

The "similarity" we perceive in language is actually divided into different levels:

1. Proto-Indo-European (PIE) Cognates: Such as Russian мать (mat') and English mother. These are relatives separated by thousands of years; a blood relationship.
2. Internationalisms: Such as телефон (telefon). These words often originate from Greek or Latin roots and were adopted globally during the scientific and technological age.
3. Direct Loans: These are the French loanwords mentioned in the text. Especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, Russian absorbed a vast amount of vocabulary related to theater (актёр), furniture (софа, мебель), and clothing (пальто - overcoat), which became Russian words through phonetic transliteration.

This involves Loanword Adaptation in language contact. Three languages belonging to different language families (Germanic, Romance, and Slavic) share many similar components. This is difficult to explain solely from the perspective of language genesis, especially since Russian is a typical Inflectional Language with an extremely complex system of cases, differing fundamentally from an analytic language like English. A sociolinguistic perspective must be introduced.

Note: The Aggressive Assimilation of Russian Grammar

Russian's ability to "assimilate" is quite domineering. As an inflectional language, it cannot tolerate a noun without a Gender or the ability to decline (change cases).

When a French word enters Russian, it must submit to Russian morphological rules. For example, the French word pomate (tomato) entered Russian as помидор (pomidor). Although it is a foreign loanword, because it ends in a consonant, Russian classifies it as a Masculine Noun.

Once it has a gender, it must begin to decline:

• I see the tomato: я вижу помидор (Accusative / Fourth Case)
• No tomato: нет помидора (Genitive / Second Case)
• About the tomato: о помидоре (Prepositional / Sixth Case)

This mechanism ensured that while foreign words flooded in, the core grammatical structure (the skeleton) of Russian did not collapse but instead grew stronger with more "flesh and blood."

Under the ideology of "worshipping foreign things" at the time, Russian underwent drastic Relexification. Even for everyday vocabulary, aristocrats tended to use French roots with Russian suffixes directly. For example, the French chance became шанс in Russian, and basic words like пляж (plage, beach) and этаж (étage, floor) were completely Frenchified. Russians at that time were not just admiring a foreign language; they were on the verge of completely "losing the word-formation ability of their own language."

Note: Karamzin's Reform

Before Pushkin, the famous historian and writer Nikolay Karamzin had already begun the work of standardizing Russian loanwords. This sparked a famous debate.

• The Innovators (Karamzin): They argued that to express modern concepts (especially emotions and abstract ideas), French loanwords must be introduced or imitated (Calque). For instance, before this, Russian did not even have an accurate word for the concept of "touching/moving" (трогательный — a calque of the French touchant).
• The Archaists (Shishkov): They staunchly opposed polluting Russian and believed that new words should be excavated from ancient Church Slavonic roots. For example, they mocked Karamzin for using the French word галоши (galoshes), arguing they should be called мокроступы (literally: wet-steppers).

Although Pushkin leaned more towards Karamzin, he did not Westernize completely. Instead, like a genius, he found a balance between these two factions.

It was at this juncture that Pushkin took on the role of the "Savior of National Culture."

In reality, Pushkin himself was a fervent Gallomaniac (Galloman / Галломан). After all, he was born an aristocrat, and his proficiency in French was a symbol of his talent; Eugene Onegin contains significant passages of French. However, the most concentrated embodiment of Pushkin's genius undoubtedly lies in how he "revitalized" Russian poetry.

Prior to this, written Russian consisted mainly of two parts: the rigid and sacred Church Slavonic, and the vivid but unregulated Folk Vernacular. The famous Lomonosov proposed the "Theory of Three Styles" to reconcile the two, but the results remained stiff.

Note: Lomonosov's Three Styles

In the mid-18th century, Mikhail Lomonosov proposed a strict stylistic division to standardize Russian:

1. High Style: Uses mainly Church Slavonic vocabulary; used for Odes, Epics, and Tragedies. Extremely solemn and grand.
2. Middle Style: A mix of Church Slavonic and general Russian; used for Drama, Satire, letters, and elegant prose.
3. Low Style: Uses mainly spoken Russian; used for Comedies, folk songs, and private daily records.

While this theory established norms, it acted like a straitjacket, restricting writers. Pushkin’s greatness lies in tearing this straitjacket to shreds—he dared to use "Low Style" slang in "High Style" poetry and vice versa, creating a new style where it felt equally natural to discuss God or potatoes.

Regarding poetic form: Since Polotsky established syllabic verse for Russian poetry, and Lomonosov created the Syllabo-tonic verse—specifically the famous Iambic tradition—which better suited the stress patterns of Russian, the formal norms of Russian poetry were basically complete. However, because Russian words are generally long (many polysyllabic words) and word order is free, early poets still struggled to master it. They often faced the dilemma of a "surplus of syllables" or used empty Church Slavonic adjectives to force a rhyme, leading to "words outweighing thoughts."

Note: The Nightmare and Liberation of Russian Stress

The average length of Russian words far exceeds that of English, and polysyllabic words have only one stress. This posed a huge challenge for poets following strict Meter.

• Principle of Syllabo-tonic verse: It relies on the regular repetition of stress (e.g., weak-STRONG, weak-STRONG).
• The Dilemma: Fitting three four-syllable Russian words into a four-foot iambic line (four stresses per line) is theoretically almost impossible.

Pushkin utilized a technique known as the Pyrrhic foot (Пиррихий) to modulate the rhythm. This involves cleverly placing an unstressed word (like a preposition or conjunction) where a stress should theoretically be, creating a "gap" or "leap" in the rhythm. This prevents the verse from feeling heavy like a pile driver, allowing it to flow like a waltz. For example, the famous first line of Onegin: Мой дядя самых честных правил (My uncle [is] of the most honest principles) This rhythmic treatment allows long words to breathe freely within the poem.

Pushkin's genius lies in his execution of linguistic Code-mixing and stylistic reshaping:

First, the precision of syntax: He cut away the verbose modifiers of Church Slavonic and absorbed the concise syntactic structures of French, giving Russian verbs more power. Second, the democratization of vocabulary: He boldly introduced folk colloquialisms (Prostorechie), which were considered "vulgar," into poetry, breaking the restriction that "high genres can only use high vocabulary."

Note: "Burn Hearts with the Verb"

Pushkin's preference for verbs was revolutionary. In old Russian poetry, adjectives were rampant (e.g., "the glorious and sacredly majestic..."). deeply influenced by French prose (especially Voltaire), Pushkin pursued "naked precision."

He wrote in the poem The Prophet: Глаголом жги сердца людей (Burn the hearts of people with the word/verb). Here, Глагол in Church Slavonic means "word/speech," but in grammar, it means "verb." Pushkin was discussing not only a mission but an aesthetic: conveying maximum energy with minimal decoration. He often used a sequence of verbs in a stanza to create a montage-like sense of rapid propulsion.

He not only solved the problem of expression but also excelled at conveying rich emotions within the limited space of Iambic Tetrameter, using Russian vocabulary that was considered barren at the time. He made Russian sound as elegant and airy as French while retaining the deep phonetic beauty native to the Slavic language.

Note: The Onegin Stanza

Pushkin was not just a master but a creator. In Eugene Onegin, he invented a unique sonnet-like form known as the "Onegin Stanza."

• Structure: $14$ lines of Iambic Tetrameter.
• Rhyme Scheme: AbAb CCdd EffE gg.
  • AbAb (Cross rhyme): Used to state the theme.
  • CCdd (Pair rhyme): Used to develop the description.
  • EffE (Enclosing rhyme): Used for discussion or a turning point.
  • gg (Couplet): Used for a humorous, satirical, or aphoristic conclusion. This structure is incredibly complex, yet Pushkin wrote over 5,000 lines using it. Vladimir Nabokov, when later attempting to translate it into English, painfully discovered that English could not replicate this form that combined "colloquial naturalness" with "mathematical precision." He eventually abandoned the rhyme scheme in favor of a hyper-literal translation with exhaustive commentary.

Pushkin's role in Russian literature mirrors the literal meaning of his hometown: He absorbed the essence of European civilization with "Imperial" (Царское) talent and height, while rooting himself in the national soil with "Village" (Село) simplicity and vitality. He finally used the bard's harp to teach Russians to no longer be ashamed, but to sing proudly in their own language.