A Cultural History of the Russian Language – a talk by Prof Simon Franklin

This event is dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the Cambridge Russian-Speaking Society’s founding.

This talk is about a book that is near to completion on a subject which rather surprisingly seems not to exist. There are lots of histories of Russian culture (culture in Russian) but there is no general history of the culture of Russian no cultural history of the language itself. This history follows the emergence of Russian as a language of culture and explores the changes in how it has been imagined debated disputed and manipulated in response to changing cultural fashions political circumstances and technological means. The story begins in the late 17th century before there was any formal notion of what Russian was (no printed grammars no dictionaries no courses of study) and it continues down to the present.

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Simon Franklin is a professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge UK and fellow of Clare College.

Most of Simon Franklin’s research has been concerned with the history and culture of early Rus and of Russia in the Early Modern period though he has also published occasional studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature. In particular he has focussed on aspects of the cultural significances of the written word across a broad spectrum of genres and forms and technologies: handwritten and printed graffiti inscribed objects ephemera. Most recently he has been developing a holistic approach to the study of the ‘graphosphere’ the spaces of visible words.

Apart from teaching and research he has served in numerous university and college roles including periods as Head of the School of Arts and Humanities as Senior Tutor of Clare College and as a Trustee of the European University in St Petersburg and of the Pushkin House Trust in London. In 2007 he was awarded the Lomonosov Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences and he is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Principal publications:

• [in press] (ed. with Rebecca Reich and Emma Widdis) The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature [Cambridge University Press 2024]
• The Russian Graphosphere 1450-1850 (Cambridge University Press 2019)
• (ed. with Katherine Bowers) Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Russia 1600-1850 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers 2017); free downloads at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/636%5d
• (ed. with Emma Widdis) National Identity in Russian Culture. An Introduction (Cambridge University Press 2004)
• Byzantium – Rus – Russia: Studies in the Translation of Christian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate 2002)
• Writing Society and Culture in Early Rus 950-1300 (Cambridge University Press 2002)
• (with Jonathan Shepard) The Emergence of Rus 750-1200 (London: Longman 1996)
• Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus’ (Cambridge Mass. Harvard University Press 1991)

Event Venue

Latimer Room, Clare College, Trinity Lane, CB2 1TL, Cambridge, United Kingdom