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p 1. The writer’s duty is to fight indifference to bad work. The most effective weapon in this battle is the writer’s sense of responsibility towards his own work. It isn’t enough to say that such and such a writer is sloppy in his use of language. The writer must practise what he preaches and set an example of the correct way of handling words. Write a book without misusing a single word. This will be an effective contribution to the struggle for the cultivation of language as an art. It is worth remembering those remarkable words of Goethe, who is respected far too highly and read far too little: "Bilde, Kunstler, rede nicht."  [271•** 

p The only way to the creation of literature lies in the unceasing effort to create it. Speeches, however smooth and clever they may be (which, 272 by the way, they usually aren’t), do little to help matters. And yet the writer under our conditions often has to talk, to make statements and speeches. He carries a substantial share of other people’s obligations, particularly those of the literary critic and the propagandist. How many times have writers spoken in public on various problems of Soviet literature? And in order to realise how feebly criticism is coping with its extensive tasks, it is sufficient to mention that the problem of the literary language has only been posed by the writers themselves (and partly by political publicists), while evoking practically no response whatever from the critics.

p And so we have come to Leningrad for a debate on language with a minimum of baggage, without even a general conception of the problem, and even without having collected the appropriate literature published in our periodicals.

p We must first note the rigid interdependence of creative writing and journalism. The remoteness of the literary publishing world from the newspaper editorial offices creates an apparent gulf between the two forms of writing. But they are directly connected. What is the difference between a journalist’s sketches and a book of sketches by a fiction writer? The short story, which they are at present intending to make an item of literary expenditure, thrives in the newspapers no less than in books. There cannot be two approaches to writing, one for books and the other for newspapers. What the woman of letters does with words is not missed by the journalist. There can be no doubt of the influence of so-called "serious literature" on the untold ranks of feuilletonists, sketchwriters, critics, and reporters. Conversely, a mistake of language repeated a thousand times in the papers is often picked up by the young writer, and a vivid expression happily hit on by the newspaper writer becomes current in "serious literature”. One must not, therefore, underestimate the importance of newspapers in trie struggle for the proper use of language, when there isn’t a townlet 273 or big factory in the Soviet Union without its own newspaper. "That’s a newspaper blunder. What else can you expect?"—this kind of dismissal testifies to the unpopularity in literary circles of the problem of cultivating language.

p How is the question of language in fiction to be formulated? To establish a correct approach to the language question means to establish a correct approach to the question of form.

p Language is one of the chief components of form, which means that language, as a part of form, is a means to an end. This should be the basis of our approach to the question of language in creative writing. It is this, too, that distinguishes us from the literary morphologists, for whom words are independent material and for whom philological problems can be an end in themselves.

p The language controversy, as I have already mentioned, is being fought out here almost entirely without the participation of the theoreticians and the critics. A disgraceful state of affairs.

p The debate should be illustrated with actual examples from Soviet literary works, and these should be juxtaposed with examples from the newspapers, and also from the living speech. This would make it possible to get an idea of the various views and theories of the writers. We must undertake something of this kind, unless we want simply to mark time. Even if we initially draw on a limited amount of material, we are bound to see how the forces of the "traditionalists and the innovators" are deployed.

p An accumulation of material would help us to reach agreement on the basic positive signs of innovation, and on the identification and birth marks of the “ traditionalists”. This is essential, because at present the writer who tries to discuss the precision and clarity necessary in the use of words is irrevocably relegated to the ranks of the “conservatives”, whereas almost any incoherence of language has a chance of being granted official recognition for meritorious service to linguistic “innovation”. On the other hand, without sufficient research material we run the risk of elevating the haphazard to the representative 274 and, in the end, operating with non-existent and invented categories.

p When discussing innovation, we often measure it by degree of incomprehensibility. This criterion has been in force for a long time now, and its roots went deepest during the times of futurism and “nonsense-writing”. If it’s incomprehensible, it’s new, and if it’s new, it’s good. Sometimes this is actually so. Gogol was an innovator in the use of language. His contemporaries considered him an innovator. But his literary enemies attacked him for the “incomprehensible” Ukrainianisms which he liberally introduced into his books. The fruitfulness of Gogol’s innovations has been proved by the subsequent development of 19th-century Russian literature. At the beginning of the second decade of the 20th century, futurism announced its preferential rights to innovation, soon converting them into a monopoly. Collected works of Velimir Khlebnikov in five volumes have just been published here. The literary world is much indebted to those who helped to bring this edition out. The collected Khlebnikov admits us to the whole laboratory of futurism, especially the work done by this movement in terms of language. We can, and must, use material from Khlebnikov’s writings in order to make a thorough study of futurism and arrive at the first scientific evaluation of it. Such an evaluation must inevitably admit that, despite the productive expenditure of energy in terms of rhythm, metre, rhyme and so forth, futurist poetry worked hard to no purpose and, for sterility, in certain respects, even out-does the impoverished nineties. Anyone who knows that big poem of Khlebnikov’s in Volume One, which can be read from left to right or from right to left, like the word kazak, is bound to realise that many futurist works are of interest to the psychopathologist but not to the woman of letters. It can be objected that this poem is an experiment, a poet’s virtuoso exercise in technique. Agreed. But the trouble is that these exercises consumed a substantial part of Khlebnikov’s powers as a writer. Play on words becomes a cult, and word becomes fetish— anything but a vehicle for the expression of thought or image. And so we have here before us a vivid example 275 of sterile innovation. Clearly, Khlebnikov’s outgoings of cerebral energy have not been recouped, his talents have long been spinning uselessly in the void.

p Khlebnikov must inevitably come up in any controversy about language. His books tell us much that is significant about inventiveness in the literary use of language. Moreover, they give the clue to certain claims by Soviet writers to "innovation at any price”.

p The urge to legitimise everything that in some way or other changes the form of language exists here too, and even the painless and peaceful demise of militant “ nonsense-writing” never taught a thing to certain adepts of the compulsive neologism.

p What is the danger of this attitude to language innovation? Simply that the opponents of "innovation at any price" are immediately joined by battalions of parasites who do not know anything at all about language, or who can’t be bothered to pull any effort into it. The researcher who is going to study the problem of language in fiction must borrow examples from the work of the Soviet writer who concocts his books to a set formula which degrades vulgarity and bad taste. Too often under the guise of "mastering the heritage of the classics”, we master the cliches of the Breshko-Breshkovskys. Such adherents of the “classics” should be given no quarter.

p And yet the first duty of the Soviet writer is to study the literature of the past.

p It won’t do any harm to take a closer look at what has been happening over the last few years in the graphic arts—in painting, for instance. What is the position in painting with the much celebrated problem of academicism? The rejection of academicism in painting was once carried as far as the rejection of the study of nature. It was decided that it was enough to depict woman diagrammatically, and that the problem was, to put it bluntly, whether it was possible to draw a woman in two lines or even one instead of three. The study of nature was abolished as harmful academicism. The result of this sage experiment was that young artists were now unable to draw, and when the Academy of Arts was recently reorganised and painting classes were restored to the 276 curriculum, the senior students went to the first-year students to learn drawing. "How do you draw? Show us!" At the Kiev School of Arts, the anti-academic movement was so deep-rooted and flourishing that the affair ended in a court trial of the original "persecutors of the human form”.

p I don’t believe in trials. I believe that writers who seriously and critically study the literature of the past, especially from the point of view of verbal mastery, should not be written off as “traditionalists”. That the concept of literary “conservatism” should not be identified with an interest in the Dahl group of writers or with Dahl himself. That the battle against false word-forms should not be branded with the dubious stigma of “purism”. It is convenient to mask a simple inability to draw with an obligatory injunction to depict the human form by means of schematic signs. What, then, lies behind the claims of men of letters who stigmatise “purism” and encourage "innovation at any price”?

p One must be able to draw. Many genuine innovators in painting were fine “academics”. If they had not been “academics”, could they have been innovators?

p One must be able to express a thought precisely and clearly. The inability to do this is sometimes camouflaged by deliberately complicated and confused language. The proponents of clarity of thought and language encourage innovation in the region of the comprehensible and reject innovation in the region of confusion. That is the essence of it.

p But at present this standpoint is also known as “purism”. What is purism, exactly?

p In his time, Gogol introduced many neologisms into literature, and his achievement as an innovator in language was no less important than his complete renewal of subject matter. But read his Declaration on the Publication of a Russian Dictionary and see how many complaints, typical of the woman of letters, he makes about the pollution of the language, about the "corruption of the plain, true meaning of genuine Russian words"! Does it follow from this document that Gogol was a purist? The struggle for purity of language does not of itself imply 277 a struggle against verbal innovations, against new words.

p In our own times, words formed on the analogy of technical terms and built up from different parts of several words—for example, Komsomol—have become an organic part of the spoken and the literary language, have come to stay, are inflected in accordance with all the traditional forms, and do not require special legal sanction from the guardians of linguistic purity.

p The cultivation of good speech demands not only a good ear, but sound knowledge as well. Expressions such as "a pair of minutes”, "a pair of words”, and so forth, have been condemned as immigrants from the West. But that refined connoisseur of language, N. Leskov, wrote: "A pair of words instead of an epilogue" to his novel The Disinherited, and in a letter to Mikulich he talks about a "pair of days”. It would obviously be purism to insist on banning from circulation this far from attractive “pair” (with this proviso: it should not be assumed that the presence or absence of an expression in some literary authority should decide the fate of that expression).

p But here is an excerpt from a note in The Literary Gazette: ".. .percentage remuneration inevitably encourages the kioskers to sell the more expensive serious literature. ...”

p This pearl of creation was produced by a special team of the late FOSP  [277•* . There are five names at the foot of the note; that is to say, five people working in the chief literary organ of the Writers’ Federation agreed that it was legitimate to use the word kiosker, and the editorial staff of this respected organ did not see fit to raise any objection to the neologism. Would it be purism to ridicule, in front of all decent people, the five team members and, above all, The Literary Gazette?

p I think I’ve made my meaning clear, and there’s no point in giving further examples.  [277•** 

p The label of “purism” is used simply to discredit a 278 responsible attitude to the language, a refusal to permit sloppiness in literary work, and a desire to teach the writer to apply conscious effort in the choice of words. To sum up:

p 1. The battle for the language is one aspect of the struggle for form in the work of art as a means to the correct solution of the ideological task.

p 2. The battle for the language should be fought by literature aided by journalism.

p 3. The scientific illumination of the problem of language in literature should be carried out by researchers using examples from Soviet literature in juxtaposition with examples from the newspapers and from the living speech.

p 4. In the controversy about conservatism, purism and innovation, material should be used from the works of contemporary men of letters who, while pretending to study the classics, are resuscitating the cliches of trivial pre-revolutionary belles-lettres. Material should also be used from the works of Khlebnikov, and from Soviet writers who perpetuate the Khlebnikov tradition by reviving his type of innovation.

p It is not a matter of caprice, of inventing aesthetic problems. Not at all.

p It is inherent in a word to express a concept. But it is not invariably inherent in it to express that concept in the best possible way. The decisive factor must always be quality. And the writer must remember that given two works on the same ideological level, the one in which the quality of language is highest is the one which is of the greatest value artistically. The writer must aim for higher quality. This is demanded of him by literature, by the reader, by the times.

p 1933

p 2. In his note Scapa Flow, Alexei Nikolayevich Krylov recalls a historical parallel to the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow—Admiral Nelson’s order for the destruction at Naples of twelve Neapolitan (belonging 279 to Ferdinand I, King of both Sicilies) ships ".. .for any ship not under the English flag could be against England”.

p The note includes the following sentence:

p “Nelson received aboard his flagship King Ferdinand, Queen Caroline, the famous Lady Hamilton and her husband Lord Hamilton, put the Neapolitan nobility and Ferdinand’s ministers aboard the other vessels, hung Admiral Caracciolo  [279•*  as a farewell gesture, on the foretopsail yard-arm of one of the ships, [evidently earmarked for destruction, i.e., left for that purpose in the Bay of Naples.—K. F.) and departed for Palermo.”

p The stylistic marriage of calm narrative prose with the marked abundance of technical terms—"on the foretopsail yard-arm" instead of the usual "hung on the yardarm"—is, to my mind, absolutely brilliant!

p There’s such irony in it, such humour, and at the same time such matter-of-fact seriousness and precision that, I think, it would be hard to find anything anywhere near as brilliantly effective. It’s remarkable that the emphasis is not on the Admiral of the Fleet’s treatment of another admiral: the executioner and the victim could both, no doubt, appreciate the serious and matter-of-fact humour of so opposite a technical detail: "on the fore-topsail yardarm”. It is quite likely that the English admiral used these very words in giving the order for the Italian to be hanged.

p If I didn’t know Krylov’s wit and amazing feeling for words, I would say that the expression about hanging the Republican Caracciolo "as a farewell gesture" was an Englishwoman’s, for it epitomises all the characteristics of English phrasing: matter-of-factness, verbal economy, concealed amusement.

p But Krylov was richly endowed with all these attributes, and many more into the bargain.

p His language is a model of Russian style at its finest. Krylov writes briefly, with the precision of a scientist and with Pushkin-like clarity of thought. He is exemplary and irreproachable in his use of metaphor. He can use 280 a scientific and technical term in such a way that I, without knowing that term, will unfailingly understand it and—most important of all—will be able to visualise what is being described. One example of this is his notes On Wrecks and Disasters at Sea. Take, for instance, his story of how the Cruiser Kuban sank in dock at Libava. It is a classic study of marine engineering language, a language of equal appeal to anyone familiar with the technicalities of the trade and to the uninitiated reader; that is to say, it is a model of a popular style of writing as yet beyond the scope of our popularisers.

p Krylov must be included among those non- professional writers from whom the woman of letters should learn Russian and the art of style (Ilya Repin is another example of the non-professional writer).

p I first read Krylov some time ago—it was N. E. Felten who showed me his notes and articles in Torgovy flat as far back as the twenties. But it’s only recently that I’ve come to appreciate Krylov properly as an expert in the Russian language and as a stylist.

p Also important is the question of the excessive use of technical terms in literary work, something of which the woman of letters is not infrequently accused by the critics. But what really matters is not whether too many or too few technical terms have been used in a novel (if its theme deals with engineering, science, and so forth). The point is in what way these terms have been used—whether or not they interfere with the reader’s appreciation, whether they need additional explanation, or whether the work has been written so that all the terms are easily understood and only add to the instructional value of the novel.

p Krylov teaches us a great deal in this respect, although he is not a novelist.

p In the summer, I decided to “attack” the use of the verb dovlet’  [280•* . In the autumn, a letter was published by 281 Gladkov, in which he suggested that the word dovlet’ should be "abolished from Russian literature and the living speech as not suitable for the Russian language”. At first, I wanted to support Gladkov, but thought better of it, chilled by his tone: “exclude”, “abolish”, "not to be tolerated any further...”. This is the language of the censor, it is not a language for a discussion of language. Then there appeared on the llth of December, 1951, in the same paper, an article by Academician Vinogradov in answer to Gladkov in which, incidentally, Gladkov’s demand for the abolition of the word dovlet’ in our language was indirectly invalidated.

p Vinogradov’s approach is basically correct: of course, to define the correctness or incorrectness of this or that use of a word is the task of stylistics. But to say which science should concern itself with such a definition, or to say that it is a task of stylistics to decide whether one "should or should not paralyse and delay...” the historical development of the Russian language is, in effect, to say nothing whatever.

p In practical terms, the question, as before, can only be settled by deciding whether or not to use this unhappy verb with the meaning which many attribute to it.

p If Vinogradov personally, and I, and Gladkov, and others, find it unacceptable (as Vinogradov admits he does) to use the expression "dovlet’ over someone”, then what is the point of referring to the fact that "leading experts in the contemporary Russian language do not despise this word" as Vinogradov does, quoting examples from M. I. Kalinin and N. S. Tikhonov? Who is more correct, Vinogradov and Gladkov, or Kalinin and Tikhonov? The whole historical analysis adduced by Vinogradov goes to show that he and Gladkov are more correct, but the final conclusion is in favour of the "leading experts”. And so it transpires that the Academician personally refuses to consider himself a more leading expert: than those who use what he regards as an “unacceptable” form. ... But why does he find it unacceptable? Is it really only a matter of subjective taste? And this in a scientist who writes that "style must weed out moribund and obsolescent phenomena in the system of the contemporary 282 language"! Well, weed them out, then! Only not " according to taste”, but by demonstration, as is expected of a science, so that it will be quite clear whether you desire to “paralyse” or to encourage the use of an expression which is historically incorrect, but which is not moribund and is current even among the "leading experts”. One or the other. But Vinogradov sits on both sides of the fence.

p This is the point: in what circumstances should we legitimise and regularise a change in the meaning of a word as a result of that word’s "historical development”, and in what circumstances should we “paralyse” (!!) its development, “delay” it, claiming that the change of the word’s meaning is illegitimate?

p Why has the metamorphosis in the meaning of the verb dovlet’ become law?

p What are we to do about the change, or rather substitution, that has happened before our very eyes in the living speech to the adverb obratno which means “back” but has for some reason come to mean “again”?

p Is this a result of "historical development" or simply an incorrect word-usage which has spread like an epidemic, infectious, like every fad?

p At what point will the philologist accept this mistake as “law”? Suppose the "leading experts" of the contemporary language start using obratno in that sense? . . . Will this use of the word become correct and historically legitimate?. ..

p I have often asked myself, how is one to “paralyse” or stop an incorrect word-usage which has become widespread in general practice? Is it in the power of the independent scientist, writer, or newspaperwoman to do this, if a hundred million people are all speaking incorrectly?

p But: 1) all our population is literate.

p 2) Shoolteachers, editors, and the proofreaders in hundreds of thousands of editorial offices have access to the Ushakov dictionary.

p 3) The four volumes of the Ushakov dictionary are an academy, a university, a science!

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p So why should it not be possible to influence the masses under the circumstances? What excuse is there for not mastering speech practice, for not making it more rational and more organised than it was in the old days?

p But our own editors devote far too little time to the study of their own language. We are too casual about our Ushakovs. The academic world itself is guilty of much vacillation, referring to language “experts” who have never regarded themselves as experts.

p And the millions go on creating their own speech, as they created it in olden times, making their mistakes “legitimate”, and ignoring the scientists and the world of science.

p Grammar is created on the basis of word-usages, on the basis of the language which is alive at the moment of its creation.

p But time passes, and grammar becomes canon. Wordusages change, the language renews itself.

p The contradiction between established grammatical standards and the new living speech intensifies.

p Someone (or something) has got to give way to someone (or something). Living growth cannot give way to canon.

What matters is that in our time we consciously ( organisedly and on a scientific basis—that is to say, on the basis of considered experience) take part or, to be more exact, want or would like to take part in building up the language, in its development.