Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Discourse of Argumentation in Totalitarian Language and Post-Soviet Communication Failures
- 2 Russian and Newspeak: Between Myth and Reality
- 3 ‘A Society that Speaks Concordantly’, or Mechanisms of Communication of Government and Society in Old and New Russia
- 4 Legal Literature ‘for the People’ and the Use of Language (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century)
- 5 ‘How to Write to the Newspaper’: Language and Power at the Birth of Soviet Public Language
- 6 Between the Street and the Kitchen: The Rhetoric of the Social(ist) Meeting in Literature and Cinema
- 7 Was Official Discourse Hegemonic?
- 8 Attempts to Overcome ‘Public Aphasia’: A Study of Public Discussions in Russia at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century
- 9 Allotment Associations in Search of a New Meaning
- 10 ‘Distances of Vast Dimensions …’: Official versus Public Language (Material from Meetings of the Organising Committees of Mass Events, January–February 2012)
- 11 Insides Made Public: Talking Publicly about the Personal in Post-Soviet Media Culture (The Case of The Fashion Verdict)
- 12 Distorted Speech and Aphasia in Satirical Counterdiscourse: Oleg Kozyrev's ‘Rulitiki’ Internet Videos
- 13 The Past and Future of Russian Public Language
- Notes on Contributors
- Subject Index
- Name Index
5 - ‘How to Write to the Newspaper’: Language and Power at the Birth of Soviet Public Language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Discourse of Argumentation in Totalitarian Language and Post-Soviet Communication Failures
- 2 Russian and Newspeak: Between Myth and Reality
- 3 ‘A Society that Speaks Concordantly’, or Mechanisms of Communication of Government and Society in Old and New Russia
- 4 Legal Literature ‘for the People’ and the Use of Language (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century)
- 5 ‘How to Write to the Newspaper’: Language and Power at the Birth of Soviet Public Language
- 6 Between the Street and the Kitchen: The Rhetoric of the Social(ist) Meeting in Literature and Cinema
- 7 Was Official Discourse Hegemonic?
- 8 Attempts to Overcome ‘Public Aphasia’: A Study of Public Discussions in Russia at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century
- 9 Allotment Associations in Search of a New Meaning
- 10 ‘Distances of Vast Dimensions …’: Official versus Public Language (Material from Meetings of the Organising Committees of Mass Events, January–February 2012)
- 11 Insides Made Public: Talking Publicly about the Personal in Post-Soviet Media Culture (The Case of The Fashion Verdict)
- 12 Distorted Speech and Aphasia in Satirical Counterdiscourse: Oleg Kozyrev's ‘Rulitiki’ Internet Videos
- 13 The Past and Future of Russian Public Language
- Notes on Contributors
- Subject Index
- Name Index
Summary
In his famous article ‘Politics and the English language’ (1946), Orwell drew together questions of liberty and questions of style. Obscure and cloudy writing, he thought, was a means of hiding the true nature of things from the reader, and was thus a form of political manipulation, or ‘brainwashing’:
When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. (Orwell 1946, cited from Orwell 2010; italics in the original)
Orwell concluded that ‘if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought’. Such problems, in his opinion, were not confined to English:
I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship. (Orwell 1946, cited from Orwell 2010)
Orwell's attitude to the ‘mechanisation’ of language under authoritarian régimes, which was shortly afterwards to be the inspiration for ‘Newspeak’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four (and if a great deal in the dystopian world of the novel is derived from the symbolism of Evgenii Zamiatin's We, the characterisation of this world of ‘absolute aesthetic submission’ (Zamiatin 2011: 141) from a linguistic point of view must be regarded as Orwell's own achievement), had in turn a great influence on the perception of ‘totalitarian society’ by political scientists in the USA and Western Europe and in Soviet dissident circles in the 1970s and 1980s, and also in the post-Soviet period. It became a commonplace that Soviet language was an extremely specific expression of the régime's ‘power game’. As a correlative, the opinion emerged that it would be enough to reform public language in order to create a new public (what in Soviet times would have been called a new social milieu (obshchestvennost).
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- Information
- Public Debate in RussiaMatters of (Dis)order, pp. 101 - 126Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016