“North Slavic” Deconstructivism As Invented Tradition Of Russian Historical Slavistics

Academic "compromise" canon

A compromise concept inherited from the Soviet period dominates in modern Russian historiography and philology. Its main provisions are following: firstly, the territory of Kievan Rus (Raffensperger, 2016) was inhabited by a single ancient Russian nationality; secondly, the East Slavic tribes populated territories of Kievan Rus (Dimnik, 2016) and became its ancestors; thirdly, Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages, defined as East Slavic ones (Sedov, 1995) became the descendants and historical heirs of the Old Russian language. This point of view, which continues to dominate and prevail in historiography, is not formally dominant in the modern intellectual situation, and therefore some scholars declare importance and necessity for its revision.

Heterogenization of history or academic attempts to revise the canon. What are the main provisions of the revisionist paradigm in the East Slavic linguistics? Which intellectuals made the greatest contribution to the rise and progress of alternative viewpoints in their attempts to deconstruct the official canon? Several authors, including philologists A.A. Zaliznjak A.V. Zhuravleva, V.L. Vasiliev, V.B. Krys’ko, G.A. Haburgaev, as well as historians (I.N. Danilevskij and V.L. Janin for example) preferred to express the revisionist point of view, which denies the existence of an East Slavic group of languages in their works. Summing up the ideas and assumptions of these scholars it is logical to formulate several ideas that form the hardcore of the revisionist paradigm in history writing of East Slavic languages. In recent years, revisionism (Post, 2017; Riggenbach, 2016) has become an influential factor in the development of history (Kolmas, 2018). Revisionism as a method and approach to writing history does not depend on political boundaries and this factor allows it to claim universality among other methodological paradigms. Revisionist points of view in the study of the history of East Slavic languages arose as a logical continuation of the attempt to propose an alternative approach to the study of the history of the Old Russian nationality in particular and, as a result, a history of the Eastern Slavs in general.

Russian historian Igor’ Danilevskij (1998) presumes that in ethnic terms - today it is already quite clear - the population of Kievan Rus cannot be represented as a single ancient Russian nationality… its inhabitants were quite clearly divided into several ethnic groups with different appearance, language, material and spiritual culture (p. 248).

Historians in the contemporary Russian academic situation were the first intellectuals who were bold enough to express doubts about the inviolability and infallibility of the Old Russian nationality concept they inherited from the Soviet historiography (Cohen, 2017; Mardilovich, 2019; Thomas, 2019). Therefore, historians actualized the problems and possibilities of historical revisionism in studies of the East Slavic languages, assuming and realizing that, on the one hand, the population of the region was heterogeneous, and its historical and geographical ancestral homelands, on the other hand, could be different also (Jemialjančyk, 1998).

Revision of the historical concept of "East Slavic" languages

Supporters of the revisionist perception and deconstruction of the official historiographical canon believe that theories of East Slavic languages and Old Russian nationality arose and developed as an imagined and invented intellectual traditions in the historiography of the Soviet period. Proponents of the revisionist point of view on the history of East Slavic languages believe that it is important and necessary to abandon the geographical principle in its typology proposing other criteria for classification that would actualize not the geographical location of their speakers, but the structural grammatical features of the languages themselves. Supporters of the revision of the canonical version of the history of East Slavic languages insist that Slavic dialects of the Kievan Rus had significant features. Therefore, some intellectuals presumed that the language defined in historiography as “Old Russian” never existed, but in fact, several scripts used in the texts of the annals.

Therefore, some authors insist that the drevnenovgorodskii dialekt or Old Novgorod dialect significantly differed from other dialects, because it separated genetically from other Slavic languages in the pre-Slavic era that preceded the pre-East-Slavic period (Zaliznjak, 2004). Proponents of the revisionist viewpoint believe that dialects of the Old Novgorod language historically formed and developed independently from the East Slavic language areal (Haburgaev, 2005). Thus, the Novgorod dialect developed differently from the southern dialects, and this fact allows supporters of the revisionist approach to state and presume that the theory of East Slavic languages became a political and ideological construct only. The presence of the Old Novgorod dialect among the East Slavic languages can be determined as a political-historiographical misunderstanding and the result of the forced integration of historiography in political canon, but not the result of the development of the language itself. Therefore, supporters of the revisionist viewpoint insist that the peculiarities of the Old Novgorod dialect became, on the one hand, a consequence of its historical and chorological, archaicness (Šuster-Ševc, 1998) in comparison with the dialects that emerges later.

On the other hand, supporters of the exclusion of the Old Novgorod dialect from the East Slavic contexts insist that it had much in common with the Western Pre-Lechite, Pre-Sorbian (Mańczak, 1992) and the Balkan South Slavic dialects. Therefore, the proponents of this alternative approach used “northwestern Slavic languages” (Šahmatov, 1916) as an alternative definition in their attempts to denote the Old Novgorod, Old Pskov and Krivich languages. This idea destroyed artificial and political division of Slavic languages into Western, Eastern and Southern ones, but this idea dominated in Soviet historiography and continues to prevail in Russian. Supporters of radical revisionist epistemology believe that the Old Novgorod language belonged to the West Slavic languages (Krys’ko, 1998). Developing this assumption and revising the viewpoints and stereotypes that dominated on the Soviet historiography, supporters of revisionist concepts exclude Ilmen Slovenes (ancestors of the medieval population of Novgorod and Pskov) and Krivich tribes (ancestors of modern Belarusians) (Nikolaev, 2011) from the Eastern Slavs. Soviet and Russian scholar V.V. Toporov tried to localize and map the genesis of the Krivich tribes in the zone of the settlement of the Western Slavs (Toporov, 1990) also. A.A. Zaliznjak another outstanding figure in linguistics believed that the Old Novgorod language had much in common with the West Slavic (North Lechitic) and South Slavic (Slovenian) languages and dialects (Janin & Zaliznjak, 1986).

Historical Slavic studies, revisionism, and the “language” / “dialect” problem

Analyzing the revisionist approaches to history writing of East Slavic languages, the problem of the relationship between the categories “language” and “dialect” (Bassiouney, 2017; Reaser, 2017) arise inevitably. In historiography, the idea that the Old Russian language was just the language, while Novgorod and Pskov were its regional dialects is still the prevailing opinion. Modern Russian linguistics and historiography inherited this viewpoint from Soviet science, but the political and intellectual history of the 20th century provides historians with several examples of status changes when idioms, previously defined as dialects, became languages (Clampitt-Dunlap, 2018; McMahon, 2019; Suny, 2017). The change of status from “dialect” to “language” had political and ideological significance in the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, and changes of borders and the emergence of new nations (Lowry, 2019; Tamir, 2019), that were ambitious enough in their attempts to establish a new independent, but nationalizing in fact (Brown, 2018; Stojanov, 2008; Wright, 2016), states inspired these transformations (Bergmann, 2020; Bieber, 2020; Hazony, 2018). A high degree of formal academic discussions and historiographic debates about the status of the Old Novgorod and Old Pskov dialects and the prospects for their recognition as separate extinct Slavic languages became inevitable. The hypothetical recognition of the Old Novgorod idiom as an independent language with a possible revision of its belonging to the East Slavic languages will not entail either territorial claims or the intensification of linguistic nationalism because its active users are absent. Despite these consequences of medieval Russian history, which did not lead to the emergence of strong regional identities, attempts to reconsider the status and affiliation of the Old Novgorod dialect in modern Russian linguistics and historiography are among marginal intellectual practices. Nevertheless, attempts to revise status and debates about the typology of Slavic languages are periodically renewed in academic literature.

From the "East Slavic" to the "North Slavic" languages

In the late 1980s, A.A. Zaliznjak modified the arguments of supporters of the revisionist approach, suggesting that the Krivich (Polish, North Lechite and Sorbian languages) was a dialect from a separate North-Western group of Slavic languages. The Slovenian Ilmen dialect (together with Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian), as A. Zaliznjak, presumed belonged to another group of Slavic languages, defined by him as South-Eastern. Proponents of this viewpoint underline the parallels of Novgorod's toponymy with the West Slavic languages, perceiving the Novgorod dialect, defined by them as an independent language, as one of the Western Slavic languages, denying its Eastern Slavic status. These ideas inspire and stimulate the deconstruction of the theory of the Old Russian nationality and the Old Russian language. The very definition of "Eastern Slavic languages" in this intellectual situation becomes an archaic, politically motivated and ideologically biased theory that is doomed to lose its academic role and significance. Therefore, supporters of the revisionist viewpoint propose to modify the traditional concept of the three groups of Slavic languages, offering to supplement it with a fourth one, North Slavic, group. Supporters of this revisionist theory insist that the fourth group of Slavic languages included idioms determined as Western or Eastern Slavic languages. For example, Lechite (Western Slavic) and extinct Old Novgorod and Old Pskov dialects (Eastern Slavic) are imagined as potential members of the North Slavic group. The hypothetical exclusion of the Old Novgorod and Old Pskov dialects from the East Slavic ones allows us to abandon their perception as dialects, inspiring the revision of their status and their recognition as separate languages (Zaliznjak, 1988).

The prospects of revisionism as a form of radical epistemology in modern Russian linguistics

An analysis of some concepts in the history of East Slavic philology allows us to state the significant fragmentation of the Russian academic community and the heterogeneity of viewpoints proposed by its representatives. Analysing this situation of methodological and conceptual heterogeneity in history writing of the Slavic languages, it is necessary to take into account factors that actualize the main trends in the development of the academic community. The author believes that the metaphor proposed by British historian Eley (1991) applies to our attempts to describe the modern scientific Russian community of linguists. Eley (1991) believes that any science is comparable to a moving train: if supporters of the traditional positivistic methodology ride in most wagons, then adherents of radical epistemology travel in other wagons of this imagined academic train – conservative scientists form the majority and they would be happy to get rid of radical revisionists as authors who encroach on historically arising and politically sanctioned norms of academic orthodoxy.

The fact that the train continues to ride remains positive because the movement of the science train provides for a hypothetical possibility of change. Commenting on the British historian’s assumption in the Russian linguistic perspective, the author is forced to admit that proponents of conservative approaches form the majority. The formal institutions of the academic community (periodicals, scientific institutions, structural units of research institutes and universities) are under control of scholars who represent the older generation, tend to adhere to traditional paradigms and avoid radical epistemology. Therefore, it is impossible to exclude the use of informal practices of control of the scientific community, including ideological restrictions, the opacity of the peer review institution and politically motivated censorship (Antonova, 2017) in formal academic periodicals, which inspires the marginalization of those authors who prefer to use the methods of radical epistemology, including its special or private cases such as modernism and constructivism. The author believes that a compromise in modern Russian linguistics is virtually unattainable.

The author presumes that the scientific community will continue to function as fragmented and heterogeneous from a theoretical and methodological viewpoint. This factor will strengthen the differentiation of research institutes and universities, specialized periodicals, which can be divided informally into traditional and radical epistemological. The first ones (faculties and departments in regional classical universities, some units of research institutes, as well as periodicals of state institutions) will reproduce the canon of ideologically and politically motivated knowledge inherited from previous generations of researchers. They will inspire the conservation of the community, the rise of methodological discrepancies and, as a result, they will create conditions for stagnation. The second ones, as proponents of radical epistemology, will be marginal in the shadow of the conservative majority, but their diverse activities, including publications that will not coincide with the dominant discourse problematically and thematically, will become an actual alternative to the official canon, inspiring the heterogenization of studies in the history of Eastern Slavic languages.