This talk is about a book that is near to completion, on a subject which, rather surprisingly, seems not to exist. There are lots of histories of Russian culture (culture in Russian), but there is no general history of the culture of Russian, no cultural history of the language itself. This history follows the emergence of Russian as a language of culture, and explores the changes in how it has been imagined, debated, disputed and manipulated in response to changing cultural fashions, political circumstances and technological means. The story begins in the late 17^th century, before there was any formal notion of what Russian was (no printed grammars, no dictionaries, no courses of study), and it continues down to the present.

When: Thursday, 14 November 2024 at 18:00 (doors at 18:00)
Where: Latimer room, Old Court Clare College, Trinity Lane, Cambridge CB2 1TL
Language: English
Format: in person and online
Tickets: £8 standard / £5 CamRuSS members & concessions;
access via Zoom and video recording: £5 standard, free for CamRuSS members & students.

Please book via AllEvents

Followed by a wine reception.

Simon Franklin

Simon Franklin is a professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a fellow of Clare College.

Most of Simon Franklin’s research has been concerned with the history and culture of early Rus, and of Russia in the Early Modern period, though he has also published occasional studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature. In particular, he has focussed on aspects of the cultural significances of the written word across a broad spectrum of genres and forms and technologies: handwritten and printed, graffiti, inscribed objects, ephemera. Most recently he has been developing a holistic approach to the study of the ‘graphosphere’, the spaces of visible words.

Apart from teaching and research, he has served in numerous university and college roles, including periods as Head of the School of Arts and Humanities, as Senior Tutor of Clare College, and as a Trustee of the European University in St Petersburg, and of the Pushkin House Trust in London. In 2007 he was awarded the Lomonosov Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and he is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Principal publications:

• [in press] (ed., with Rebecca Reich and Emma Widdis) The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature [Cambridge University Press, 2024]
• The Russian Graphosphere, 1450-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
• (ed., with Katherine Bowers) Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600-1850 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017); free downloads at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/636%5d
• (ed., with Emma Widdis) National Identity in Russian Culture. An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
• Byzantium – Rus – Russia: Studies in the Translation of Christian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)
• Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, 950-1300 (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
• (with Jonathan Shepard) The Emergence of Rus, 750-1200 (London: Longman, 1996)
• Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus’ (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1991)