Vernaculars of Communism

Petre Petrov is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin.Lara Ryazanova-Clarke is Head of Russian and Academic Director of the Princess Dashkova Russia Centre in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh.

• Introduction Part 1: Language Regimes of Stalinism 1. Linguistic Turn a la Soviétique: The Power of Grammar, and the Grammar of Power 2. The Soviet Gnomic: on the peculiarities of generic statements in Stalinist officialese 3. Aesopian language: the politics and poetics of naming the unnamablePart 2: Negotiating Codes of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe 4. From subject of action to object of description: the classes in the Romanian official discourse during communism 5. Speaking Titoism: student opposition and the socialist language regime of Yugoslavia 6. Deviant dialectics: intertextuality, voice, and emotion in Czechoslovak Socialist 7. Birdwatchers of the world, unite!’ The language of Soviet ideology in translation Part 3: Soviet Vernaculars after Communism 8. Linguistic mnemonics: the communist language variety in contemporary Russian public discourseLara 9. ‘The golden age of Soviet Antiquity’: sovietisms in the discourse of left-wing political movements in post-Soviet Russia, 1991-2013

"...this is a book that should be read not only by students of linguistics but also by anyone interested in the problems of the ‘captive mind’, so eloquently revealed at the time of Stalin’s death by Czesłw Miłsz."Martin Dewhirst, University of Glasgow, Slavonic and East European Review