Friedberg_Nila-2021

long before he is transformed into Sharikov, the New Soviet Man. Selishchev’s study lists other characteristics of the period highly relevant for this book. He mentions the mass borrowings of foreign words, such as альянс, гарант, дискредитация, лимит, ориентироваться, стабилизация, стандaртизация . Borrowings were not limited to individual words, but extended to prefixes or phrases; among the ones listed by Selishchev are сверх - (uber- or ober-), as in Lenin’s сверхлевый коммунист (“super-left communist”), целиком полностью (a rendering, pleonastic in Russian, of theGerman ganz und voll ), and вобщемицелом (fromtheGerman imgrossen und ganzen); the latter phrase appears in the speech of Bulgakov’s Shvonder. Lists of foreign words and their meanings were attached to calendars and distributed among peasants (Selishchev 1928); thus, Bulgakov’s Sharikov’s adoption of the name Poligraf from a calendar represents a realistic rather than absurd element of Heart of a Dog . This period also saw an enormous influx of abbreviations, such as ВЧК (Всероссийская Чрезвычайная комиссия – the All-Russian Emergency Commission, or Cheka), ЦИК (Центральный исполнительный комитет – the Central Executive Committee), Нарком (народныйкомиссар–people’s commissar), andЛикбез (ликвидация безграмотности – the Soviet literacy campaign); many such abbreviations appear in the text of The Twelve Chairs . Selishchev (1928) quotes a newspaper report describing peasants’ reaction to such abbreviations: “Peasants coming to the city are bewildered amid these awkward and strange names.” But as Zhivov (2005) points out, Bolshevik revolutionary speakers felt quite at home with these acronyms: they gave them a sense of power and control, while foreign borrowings signaled symbolically that the revolution was supposed to spread across nations, being international both ideologically and linguistically 2 . Selishchev’s study presents the most extensive account of early Soviet linguistic changes, but as Zhivov (2005) convincingly observes, it is problematic to attempt to explain, as does Selishchev, early Soviet language change with reference to the linguistic, ethnic, or educational background of revolutionaries themselves; such an approach opens the possibility of “blaming” the other for the Russian Revolution. For readers of 1920s literature, the main value of Selishchev’s book is not its explanation of the causes of linguistic change, but in the striking overlap between his lists of 2 Some foreign borrowings entered the Russian language before the revolution as well, such as баррикады, бойкот, демонстрация, пропаганда, партия, провокатор, петиция, фракция, митинг ; the difference, as Zhivov (2005) observes, was in the strikingly increased proportions of such words in the postrevolutionary language.