Thomas Rosén. Russian in the 1740s. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2022. xiv + 198 pp. ISBN: 9781644694145 (hardback); 9781644694979 (paperback); 9781644694169 (ePub); 9781644698303 (Open Access).

Abstract

The Russian language in the eighteenth century can be compared to a sausage: we know pretty well what ingredients are used and we have an exact knowledge of what the final product is like, but what is less well understood is the bit in between. There is still much to discover about the processes by which the raw ingredients, in this case the various forms of Russian and Church Slavonic that co-existed in Muscovite Russia at the beginning of the eighteenth century are converted into this final product, the linguistic variety recognisable as something close to Modern Russian that emerges just over a century later. Dr Rosén seeks to expand our knowledge and understanding of some of these processes by concentrating, as the title indicates, on a specific decade, the 1740s.