Friedberg_Nila-2021

or разг.-сниж. ) to signify an intermediate stage between colloquial and rude. These stylistic labels are retained in this textbook’s footnotes and assignments; the book also employs the stylistic labels диалектное (which gramota.ru refers to as нареч .) and просторечие (“uneducated discourse”), which gramota.ru does not use. The nuanced differentiation between stylistic registers described here may seem excessive for a language textbook, but it has several advantages. First, it accustoms students to seeing the labels that they will encounter in Russian-to-Russian dictionaries, and that are especially important for heritage speakers who may not differentiate between formal and informal discourse. Second, attention to registers can help us interpret characters. For example, Ostap Bender, the con-artist from The Twelve Chairs , easilyswitchesbetweenformalandcolloquialregisters,andthislinguisticunpredictability is one of the ways in which Bender manipulates or confuses his interlocutors. Finally, attention to register is crucial in understanding the language of the early Soviet period studied in this textbook. Stylistic register shifts represented a particularly prominent change in that period. As documented by linguist Afanasii Selishchev in his book The Language of the Revolutionary Epoch (1928), the revolutionary and post-revolutionary era was accompanied by an excessive use of ambiguous language, bureaucratese, and ideological clichés, like социал-предатели (“social-traitors”) or хищникиимпериализма (“imperialist predators”); we will encounter the latter phrase in the speech of Shvonder, one of the characters in Bulgakov’s Heart of aDog . Selishchev quotes an extreme, comical example of vague bureaucratic language: Мы молодежь, принимая во внимание, все эти серьезные тенденции и проекты, хотьминимум,нонаправленыстремитьсясерьезнообдумываяксемуинтенсивно преодолевая старые, закоренелые виды, должны идти принципиально вперед, пробуждаясь от вечной спячки и апатичности. (Selishchev 1928) We, the young people, taking into account all these serious tendencies and projects, are directed at the very minimum to strive toward this seriously pondering and intensively overcoming old, ingrained patterns, [and] must go fundamentally forward, awakening from age-old dormancy and apathy. Bureaucratic phrases, observed Selishchev, were not a feature of written texts only: they were striking precisely because they entered spoken language. Responding to such speech, one newspaper of the period, quoted by Selishchev, noted that“presenters