The linguistic situation and linguistic consciousness in Muscovite Russia: perception of Church Slavonic and Russian

 

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If in a bookish Church Slavonic text demonic speech can be endowed with signs of a Russian spoken language, then in a proper Russian (non-bookish) text, demons can express themselves in an abstruse, "gibberish" language, which can apparently be considered as a kind of generalization of foreign speech in the linguistic consciousness20. In both cases, of course, what we have before us is nothing but anti-behavior, i.e., Russian speech and glossolalic speech appear as functionally correlated phenomena.

No less characteristic is the current idea that the devil loves being called devil in Russian, but cannot stand the Church Slavonic name demon (Zelenin, II, p. 89); here, a specific attitude to both Church Slavonic and Russian is clearly pronounced, when Church Slavonic speech is associated with the power of the cross, and Russian speech is associated with an unclean, diabolical beginning (cf. the opinion of John Vishensky that with the help of the Church Slavonic language one can fight the devil). In the same way, in a certain contingent of native speakers of the Russian language, such a Russian word as thank you (truncation from save, God) can be perceived precisely as an appeal to the Antichrist21. This is directly connected, of course, with the distortion of the word God as an etymological component of this word (cf. § 5), but the very possibility of such a perception characterizes the general attitude towards the Russian language as a distorted Church Slavonic (cf. § 2).

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In all these cases, the opposition of the Church Slavonic and Russian languages ​​is seen as the opposition of the Divine and Satanic, although in some cases this is manifested at the level of phonetics, in others at the level of morphology. We saw above that this or that deviation from the canonical form of a sacred word, insofar as it is perceived as a distortion of this form, is naturally associated with the opposite content (see § 5); in the examples cited, this kind of distortion is simultaneously associated with the Russian linguistic element - the Russian language, in accordance with the direct statements of the ancient Russian scribes, appears in such cases as a sinful distortion of the sacred Church Slavonic language, which is attributed to diabolical intent.

Boris Uspensky
Published in "Byzantium and Rus" (M., 1989) p. 206-226