Salon

When the first professional writers appeared in Russia, which only happened in the 19th century, most of them were very well-educated and expected the same from their readers. Thus, readers were not surprised when they encountered sentences written in a foreign language thrown into an otherwise Russian text. Some authors, however, took this tendency to extremes. Huge chunks of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" were written in French -- even the first sentence of the novel is a piece of French dialogue. Tolstoy rewrote these passages in Russian for a later edition, but still later he restored the earlier version. His distant cousin, Alexei K. Tolstoy, a brilliant poet and playwright, wrote several poems in a mix of Russian and German. The trend faded near the turn of the century as literature became accessible to a wider readership. It is interesting to note that truly bilingual or trilingual authors such as Vladimir Nabokov never indulged excessively in such language-mixing.

After the Revolution, things changed dramatically. Literature was now supposed to be written by the masses and for the masses, so any traces of "bourgeois" influence were subject to extermination. But foreign literature was a problem, since Western authors were never shy about sprinkling their texts with quotes from other languages. When this occurred, Russian translators and editors had to employ footnotes, translating even such set phrases as joie de vivre or veni, vidi, vici. This practice knew its silly extremes too. In a parody of Hemingway and his Russian translators from the 1990s, humorist Andrei Knyshev used the Spanish word escoceses ("the Scottish") a dozen times, each time giving it a different footnote.

Today the practice of foreign-language insertions seems to be returning. Arsen Revazov quotes songs and other texts in at least a dozen foreign languages, from Japanese to Portuguese, in his conspiracy-themed hit "Solitude-12" (Odinochestvo-12). Preserving the link with Soviet tradition, however, he provides a footnote for each quote. Linor Goralik and Stanislav Lvovsky used a more radical tactic in their novel "Half of the Sky" (Polovina Neba). The novel's characters are cosmopolitan and well-traveled, and some of the action takes place in the United States. And so, quite often, without any pressing need, the dialogue or narration slips into English. There are no explanations, no footnotes. The novel is clearly intended for people with a passable command of English who could read these pages without thinking twice.

Despite certain misgivings -- like the fact that this makes it more difficult to recommend the book to my grandmother, for instance -- I see this as a good sign. Russian literature is diversifying, and a new, better educated generation of readers is taking shape.