Friedberg_Nila-2021

at meetings mention ‘the masses,’ but have not yet learned how to talk to the masses. Workers at one presentation sent notes to the speaker: ‘Please do not use vague language. We have just learned to read…What is ‘periphery,’‘quintessential,’‘tendency’”? Almost forty years later, Selishchev’s sentiments were echoed by the Russian writer Kornei Chukovsky who, in his book Zhivoi kak zhizn’ (As Alive As Life Itself ) , coined the term канцелярит , or “bureaucratitis” (Chukovsky 1966: 114). According to Chukovsky, this word, with its disease-connoting suffix, is exemplified by phrases like учитывая вышеизложенное (“considering the abovementioned”), получив нижеследующее (“having received the below-following”), указанный период (“the period indicated”), or выдана данная справка (“the given certificate has been issued / given out”). Like Selishchev (1928), Chukovsky (1966) lamented the incursion of written bureaucratese into spoken Russian, famously declaring that he would sooner chop off his right hand than use bureaucratese. Chukovsky’s statement, of course, is dramatic and overly general: there are times and contexts when grammatical official written language is indeed called for; in fact, this is the only way to write a letter to an embassy if one wants to be taken seriously. This book thus includes writing exercises where students have to produce official letters. But Chukovsky’s intuitions, as well as Selishchev’s, are important. A similar antipathy to official language is shared by several writers in this volume; the use of an exaggerated, often ungrammatical bureaucratic discourse, for instance, is one of Bulgakov’s and Babel’s satirical devices 1 . The stylistic register shifts of the early Soviet period described by Selishchev (1928) occurred in different directions. It was not just formal phrases that were entering colloquial language “from above”; at the same time, “from below,” words that had previously been considered part of the uneducated or rural-dialectal register gained wider acceptance in everyday speech, and we still use them routinely today. Words that underwent such stylistic shift include парень (“guy”), ребята (“guys”), пока (“bye-bye”), похабный (“dirty, obscene”), жульничать (“to cheat,”e.g., in a game), ему/ей наплевать (“s/he does not care about,” lit., “s/he could spit on”), ничего (“not too bad,” lit. “nothing”), Питер (“St. Petersburg”), пьянка (a drinking party), ляпнуть (to“blurt”or say something stupid). Some of these words appear in the narrative of Bulgakov’s Sharik, showing that Sharik the dog shares many linguistic characteristics with an average Soviet everyman 1 Note that Soviet-era ideological clichés, like героический подвиг (“heroic deed”), are treated in this book as a separate category from formal discourse and are addressed in the chapter on Platonov (assignment 7) and Furmanov (assignment 12).