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SLOVO

SLOVO VOLUME 15

NUMBER 1

SPRING 2003

Contents

3–4

ARTICLES

BOOK REVIEWS

An Inter-disciplinary Journal of Russian, East-Central European and Eurasian Affairs

5–21

23–31

beseda peЧ

33–47

– sanavards szó slova збор slovo

49–58

59–71 73–86

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The Quest for Purity: Linguistic Politics and the War in Croatia DAVID B. MACDONALD The Polish Science and Technology Sector under Free Market Economy Conditions ALEKSANDER BUCZAKI Soviet Language Reform: Practical Polemics Against Idealist Linguistics VLADISLAVA REZNIK Symbols, Myths, and Metaphors: The Discursive Battle over the ‘True’ Belarusian Narrative ANNA BRZOZOWSKA Polacy nie gesi? Balancing Between Anglo-Polish and the Government Ordained Purity: the Influence of the English Language on Contemporary Polish JOANNA DYBIEC The Burden of Ideology: Pasolini as Czech Poet in Bestia da Stile CHARLES SABATOS

ISSN 0954–6839

slovo

PAGE

EDITORIAL

SARA COHEN

Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2003

87–96

Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2003

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Maney Publishing for the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London

slovo1501cov

6/3/03

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Page 2

SLOVO EXECUTIVE EDITOR: MANAGING EDITOR: CHIEF ARTICLE EDITOR & LAYOUT:

Notes for Contributors Slovo welcomes original contributions that match the aims and scope of the journal (as described on the inside front cover) on the understanding that their contents have not previously been published or are currently submitted for publication elsewhere. All submissions will be sent to independent referees. It is a condition of publication that papers become the copyright of the School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London. All editorial correspondence should be sent to the Executive Editor, Slovo, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. Email: slovo@ssees.ac.uk

Sara Cohen Olga Potapova Anna Bartlett

For editorial addresses and submissions, see inside back cover.

EDITORIAL BOARD ARTICLE EDITORS:

Deadlines Deadlines are normally September for the spring issue and March for the autumn issue.

Alex Billington Jon Hoskins Kate Peevor

Laurence Heaney Darren Lake Edward Tyerman

Edward Henderson Clare Nuttall

BOOK REVIEW EDITORS:

Deborah Hodgkinson

Haaris Naqvi

Edward O’Brien

EDITORIAL ADVISOR:

Professor Robert B. Pynsent

ADMINISTRATIVE ADVISOR:

Andrew Gardner

EDITORIAL MANAGER (MANEY PUBLISHING): PRODUCTION EDITOR (MANEY PUBLISHING):

Liz Rosindale Anna Thrush

Slovo discusses and interprets Russian, Eastern and Central European, and Eurasian affairs from a number of different perspectives including, but not limited to, anthropology, art, economics, film, history, international studies, linguistics, literature, media, philosophy, politics, and sociology.

Slovo is a fully refereed journal, edited and managed by postgraduates of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Each year a new Editorial Board is selected from the postgraduate community to produce two volumes of academic depth and rigour, considering articles, book, and film review submissions from both established and emerging academics.

Slovo (ISSN 0954–6839) is published for the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, twice yearly, in the spring and autumn.

Subscriptions are entered by the volume and include postage (air-speeded outside the UK).

Subscriptions must be pre-paid at the rate appropriate to the location of the subscriber.

Volume 15, 2003 (2 issues) Institutional rate: £60.00; North America: US$96.00 Individual rate*: £25.00; North America: US$40.00 *Subscriptions are welcomed from individuals if prepaid by personal cheque or credit card and if the journal is to be sent to a private address.

All orders must be sent to Subscriptions Department, Maney Publishing, Hudson Road, Leeds LS9 7DL, UK (fax: +44 (0)113 248 6983; email subscriptions@maney.co.uk). Maney Publishing North America, 44 Brattle Street, 4th floor, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Tel (toll free): 866 297 5154; fax: 617 354 6875; email maney@maneyusa.com. All cheques must be payable to Maney Publishing.

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Presentation and Style Two complete copies should be submitted printed double-spaced with ample margins and not normally exceeding 6–8000 words. All pages should be numbered: the first page should state only the title of the paper, name(s) of the author(s) and, for each author, a short institutional affiliation, and an abbreviated title (for running headlines within the article). At the bottom of the page give the full name and address to which all correspondence, including proofs, should be sent. The second page should contain an abstract in English of not more than 200 words.

Contributions should follow the MHRA Style Guide (2002) and the house-style of the journal. Words should not be hyphenated at the end of a line. Use single inverted commas for short quotations (double for quotations within quotations), but quotations over fifty words should be indented and single-spaced without inverted commas. Translations are not generally needed for quotations from the Slavonic languages, although it is left to the author’s discretion if they wish to include the original. Where a passage presents particular difficulty, translation may be offered either in parentheses in the text, or in an endnote. Transliterations should follow the Library of Congress system without diacritics, which must be used except where conventions for alternative transliterations exist. Quotations in languages other than Slavonic will require translation. Non-English words in the text, apart from names, should be italicized.

Notes and References Contributors should adhere to MHRA and the journal’s house-style in the presentation of numbered footnotes and references. Any general note on the article (e.g. personal acknowledgements) should appear as a first un-numbered note. Within the text, references and notes should be indicated by a superscript Arabic numeral. Articles and publications cited in the text should then be listed in full in the footnotes: for books: Bernard Comrie and Gerald Stone, The Russian Language since the Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 2. for articles in books: George Schöpflin, ‘The Functions of Myth and a Taxonomy of Myth’, in Myths and Nationhood, ed. by Geoffrey Hosking and George Schöpflin (London: C. Hurst & Company, 1997), pp. 31–33. for periodical articles: Lubomir Dolezel, ‘Poststructuralism: A View from Charles Bridge’, Poetics Today, 21 (2000), 640–41.

For particular text(s) repeatedly cited, full bibliographical reference should be given in an initial footnote, with author/page references thereafter in parentheses in the text (Schöpflin, p. 31). Consistent abbreviations may be used in such references where appropriate. Authors are responsible for ensuring the accuracy of references.

Tables and Illustrations These should be submitted on separate sheets, repeating on the back the title of the paper, and numbered sequentially using Arabic numerals for Figures (illustrations, i.e. photographs, diagrams, and graphs) and Tables. Each must have a caption, source, and where appropriate, a key. The position in the text must be clearly shown (e.g. Figure 1, Table 1). Black and white prints of photographs should be supplied, or TIFF or EPS files on disk (with a print-out supplied for reference). Captions should be submitted on a separate sheet.

Submission on disk On notification by the Editors that a paper has been accepted, a final version of the article should be submitted on disk in Word. Submission on disk will improve typographical accuracy and accelerate publication. The filename and software must be indicated on the disk.

In preparing the disk version, there is no need to format articles: please include italics or bold type where necessary, but not style or footnote codes. Footnotes should be typed at the end of the file as part of the text, or supplied in a separate document. In the main text, numbering of notes should be indicated by superscript numbers. References and captions should be placed at the end of the file, or in separate files. Please use hard returns only at the end of paragraphs; switch auto-hyphenation off; do not justify text; and do not use automatic numbering routines. Consistency in spacing, punctuation, and spelling will be of help. Tables should be submitted as separate files and keyed horizontally from left to right using a tab between columns, not the space bar (or keyed in Table mode in Word).

Proofs Proofs will be sent to the author nominated for correspondence, by airmail if outside the UK. Proofs are supplied for checking and making essential typographical corrections, not for general revision, alteration, or changes to illustrations, which will not be allowed. Proofs must be returned to the editor within 5 days of receipt.

Complimentary copies Contributors will receive a free copy of the journal in which their article is featured.

Authors can also access a PDF of their article for distribution, obtainable from the Executive Editor at slovo@ssees.ac.uk.

SLOVO VOLUME 15

NUMBER 1

SPRING 2003

Contents PAGE EDITORIAL SARA

COHEN

3–4

ARTICLES

The Quest for Purity: Linguistic Politics and the War in Croatia DAVID B. MACDONALD

5–21

The Polish Science and Technology Sector under Free Market Economy Conditions ALEKSANDER BUCZAKI

23–31

Soviet Language Reform: Practical Polemics Against Idealist Linguistics VLADISLAVA REZNIK

33–47

Symbols, Myths, and Metaphors: The Discursive Battle over the ‘True’ Belarusian Narrative ANNA BRZOZOWSKA

49–58

Polacy nie gesi? Balancing Between Anglo-Polish and the Government Ordained Purity: the Influence of the English Language on Contemporary Polish JOANNA DYBIEC

59–71

The Burden of Ideology: Pasolini as Czech Poet in Bestia da Stile SABATOS

73–86

CHARLES

BOOK REVIEWS

Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz

(JAIME ASHWORTH)

87–88

Jasna Dragoviç-Soso, ‘Saviours of the Nation’: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (DAVID A. NORRIS)

88–89

Ivan Ïoloviç, The Politics of Symbol in Serbia: Essays in Political Anthropology (DAVID A. NORRIS)

89–91

Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd J. Fischer, eds, Albanian Identities, Myth and History (ERIC BECKETT WEAVER)

91–92

Henryk Kocój, Prussian Attitudes Towards the Kosciuszko Insurrection (Prusy wobec powstania kosciszkowskiego) (WOJCIECH JANIK)

93–95

Dervla Murphy, Through the Embers of Chaos: Balkan Journeys

95–96

(ZACHARY TAYLOR)

Slovo, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2003

Editorial

This year marks the first in a developing partnership between Slovo and Maney Publishing. It is hoped that this new phase in the publishing history of Slovo will serve to develop both the publication, and the experience of the editorial team.

Volume 15 of Slovo elicited submissions from a wide range of today’s emerging and experienced academics; the six articles published herein give a fair picture of the diversity of interests among researchers in the fields of Russian, Eurasian, Central, and Eastern European studies, while at the same time demonstrating that research undertaken in one part of the world often resonates with that of academics elsewhere. Taken together, Dr David B. MacDonald’s article The Quest for Purity: Linguistic Politics and the War in Croatia, Vladislava Reznik’s Soviet Language Reform: Practical Polemics Against Idealist Linguistics, and Joanna Dybiec’s Polacy nie gësi? Balancing Between Anglo-Polish and the Government Ordained Purity: the Influence of the English Language on Contemporary Polish demonstrate a keen interest in the ways in which language has been used in the different parts of this broad geographical region as a political tool and as a means by which to define and express one’s identity. At the same time, these three articles represent contributions from students of southeast Europe, Russia, and Central Europe, demonstrating the possibility for interdisciplinary and transnational dialogue and resonance.

Much like Dybiec’s piece, Aleksander Buczaki’s The Polish Science and Technology Sector under Free Market Economy Conditions addresses the issue of contemporary Poland, but this time from an economic perspective. Anna Brzozowska’s contribution, Symbols, Myths and Metaphors: The Discursive Battle over the ‘True’ Belarusian Narrative addresses the question of the search for a definition of post-Communist Belarusian identity, and the competing narratives employed by politicians to influence the population. Finally, Charles Sabatos’s The Burden of Ideology: Pasolini as Czech Poet in Bestia da Stile not only represents the field of Czech literary studies, but also places the study of Central Europe in a wider European context, demonstrating its relevance to the study of Italian literature, and helping to dispel the idea that Eastern European literature, history, and politics have occurred in a sort of vacuum, isolated and distinct from the rest of Europe.

Although this volume focuses largely on the questions of language, identity, history, and literature, Slovo is happy to receive submissions from any scholars interested in aspects of the region defined above. Our fundamental aim is to provide students and established academics with a forum for publication that is both respected and representative.

Serving as a member of the Slovo editorial team is both a challenge and a pleasure, and the final result provides postgraduate students, embroiled in the travails of

© School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London, 2003

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SLOVO, 15.1, SPRING 2003

dissertations and final exams, with a feeling of accomplishment and a grasp of the broader goals and experiences of a life in academia. We could not have come this far with Slovo without the help of professionals and academics who offered us their time and expertise in order to ensure that Slovo remains a quality publication.

The editorial board would like to thank, among others, Professors Roger Bartlett, George Kolankiewicz, Arnold Mcmillin, and Robert B. Pynsent; Drs Daniel Abondolo, Bhavna Dave, Alex Drace-Francis, Karin Friedrich, Tim Haughton, Alena Ledeneva, Slavo Radosevic, and Andrew Wilson; and Claudia Aradau, Tim Beasley-Murray, Nicholas Brown, Liz Hoskins, Liz Rosindale, Stephanie Schwander-Sievers, Anna Thrush and Maria Widdowson for their help and support.

Enjoy!

Sara Cohen Executive Editor, Slovo, 2002–03

Slovo, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2003

Symbols, Myths, and Metaphors: the Discursive Battle Over the ‘True’ Belarusian Narrative ANNA BRZOZOWSKA Central European University, Budapest This paper explores Belarusian identity struggles through the analysis of conflicting national narratives as proposed by two competing camps. The ‘pro-Lukashenka’ and ‘democratic’ versions of history and ‘Belarusianness’ are diametrically different. They start with different foundation myths, celebrate different moments of glory, despair over different events, and, ultimately, point to a need for different actions in the future. Both narratives derive their strength from the reference to powerful symbols, myths, and metaphors. None of the elite groups who stand behind these narratives is truly responsive to the needs of the population. The Lukashenka project seems to attract more attention as it uses the vocabulary and images that are more in line with the lived experience of Belarusian people. It feels familiar, and therefore, it is embraced more willingly. The ‘democratic’ project, on the other hand, is less appealing not because the values it proposes are rejected by the people; rather, it is distrusted as the notions used by ‘democrats’ are new, frequently ‘imported’, and not presented as embedded in the people’s own experiences.

‘Willingly, we forget who we are, what we are’.1 ‘The problem is (. . .) we do not know where we are heading (. . .) what we are building. What can be the situation if a person is called by a different name? The Belarusians want to know who they are, who we are, one wants to have one name.2

The struggle over what it means to be Belarusian, what defines Belarusianness and forms a truly Belarusian experience is currently taking place. Largely unnoticed by the external world, due to the undemocratic status of the country which too easily classifies Belarus as a ‘problem case’, the struggle is fought from unequal positions.

The inequality between Lukashenka and his opponents stems from the fact that the former possesses control of public institutions, mass media, and education, whereas the latter lack even a limited access to any of these spheres.

Both sides, further on referred to as the ‘pro-Lukashenka’ and ‘democratic’ or ‘national’ camps, fence fiercely with symbols. It is the competent symbolic communication that seems to contribute to Lukashenka’s success. He makes extensive use of ‘spiritual’ capital, and this allows him to establish a seemingly meaningful 1

I. P. Baradulin, poem in the literature handbook for the 4th form, edition of 1993.

Interview with T. I., a Belarusian speaker who learned the language as an adult in the late 1980s, and decided to ‘be Belarusian.’ At the time of the interview, working with an NGO in Minsk, December 2000.

2

© School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London, 2003

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contact with the population. Lukashenka resorts to a vocabulary that, no longer overtly labelled as Communist, sounds familiar and recognizable. This vocabulary has such a huge resonance primarily because in situations of uncertainty it promises at least a minimum of security.

There should be no illusions, however, the Lukashenka camp is NOT more responsive to the masses. Indeed, I would argue that both the groups — Lukashenka and his opponents — display highly elitist attitudes, and that there is an abyss between each group and the population. While under Communism there was an understanding that if the party and the masses disagreed it was because the latter had become ‘estranged,’ contemporary Belarusian democrats perpetuate this practice and defend their right to ‘represent’ and speak ‘of’ the people and not ‘to’ them. This creates the background for the success of the Lukashenka-sponsored project. This project was feasible due to his manipulation of discursive material that is recognized by the people.

Allegedly high levels of education and an impressive percentage of university graduates in Belarus constituted a reason of pride for many Belarusians during Soviet times, a point still frequently raised. One wonders if this high percentage of university graduates may have produced a better foundation for Lukashenka’s success due to the production of a more ideologized society in Belarus than elsewhere. This society, when transplanted into new Soviet conditions after 1917, completely internalized the ideological message and lost all capacity for critical judgement. Today they operate within the same universe of meaning as the Lukashenka circle.

Conversely, the fundamental difficulty of the anti-Lukashenka camp’s endeavours is linked to the fact that they lack a reverberating rhetoric that is recognizable to the people. Their utterances sound strange and opaque. Hence the main misunderstanding; what the sender of the message sees as the promise of a better life, of more dignity and justice, the recipient sees as something strange to his or her experience, something representing danger and instilling fear.

The lines of the poem quoted in the introduction illustrate the state of affairs in Belarus. This is the epitome of the conflict: what to remember, what to forget, and what to fear. Obviously, the ‘right’ memory is always based on the plethora of evidence, supported by the arguments of both reason and emotion. The problem lies in the fact that at least two distinct Belarusian identities, ‘naturally’ determining a vector of the future foreign orientation of the country, are present in different stories (narratives) about the past and present.

From an analytical point of view, a reading of the narrative may be a very rewarding experience. It allows for an insight that does not strive for an artificial division between actors and structures but appreciates the co-existence and co-creation of the two.3 Competing narratives are interesting to study as they brilliantly show the contingencies of historical developments; many things may come about as ‘unavoidable’ and ‘natural’ because one and not some 3

Hidemi Suganami discusses how individual agency is constituted by the story told about it. Similarly, an individual is also constructed through his/her biography. ‘Agents, structures, Narratives,’ European Journal of International Relations, 5 (1999), 365, 386, 369.

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other discourse happened to prevail at a given point in time. Narrative produces the world not only through the sifting of the factual material. Its ‘rigor’ over this material consists as well in the fact that, at least in the European tradition, it depends on logical reasoning, follows a structure that has a beginning, middle, and end, and uses causal patterns to demonstrate that certain things need to happen or must inevitably take place. In this process, the narrative remembers some events, forgets others, and becomes the unquestioned truth.

Narrative, using symbols, myths, and metaphors, and combining them into a logical string of events, generates power living in a word, sound, or image.4 Encompassing a set of beliefs that people hold about themselves, it makes mythology alive and reproduced.5 Supporting itself with the language of a myth, the narrative is striving to deny the relative historical quality of events. It presents them as essential, as if there could be no alternative interpretation.6 It mystifies and tries to ‘make contingency appear eternal’.7 In the narrative the material, what actually happened, is fused with the symbolic way in which it is interpreted.

If we acknowledge that narrative based on myths provides the blueprint of the ‘right,’ and only, worldview, and that it furnishes people with the pattern of ‘real’ morality, then we may appreciate why the two Belarusian positions may, indeed, be irreconcilable. This may be due to the fact that their explanations of the outside world are based on two completely different ontologies. What for the one group (the soviet-oriented elite) is a time of glory, is a period of decline and shame for the other. Thus, the Belarusian dilemma over the ‘true’ or ‘right’ narrative illustrates the extent of discursive power and recalls the claim by Foucault that discourse itself is much more than the link between the reality and langue, or ‘the interaction between the lexicon and experience’, that it, indeed, forms the objects of its utterances.8 Seeing through symbols as the building blocks of the myth Myths are built by many ‘blocks’ of various interlocked symbolic propositions.

Conversely, one simple symbol, frequently material in form, may metonymically stand for a complex myth. In Belarus the two interpretative grids are represented symbolically by different flags and different anthems. These territorial symbols most clearly demonstrate the divide, supported by the mutually exclusive myths of foundation and antiquity.

According to one story, the Belarusians are an ancient people whose sense of self was formed by years of living in the Great Duchy of Lithuania and then in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. They are, within this tradition, descendants of 4

Mark Smith, Social Science in Question (Sage: London, 1998), p. 240.

Myths and Nationhood, ed. by Geoffrey Hosking and George Schöpflin (London: Hurst and Company, 1997), p. 20.

6 Interpretation of Barthes, quoted by Brian D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse, The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p.18.

7 Bruce Lincoln, Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 5–6.

8 Michael Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972), pp. 47–49.

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Slavic tribes who intermarried with Balts, and later formed the principality of Polock. Thus, they represent themselves as a culturally developed entity in whose language the Lithuanian Statutes of 1529, 1566, and 1588 were written.10 This narrative claims that ancient ‘Belarus’ was institutionally highly advanced. It is assumed, for example, to have inspired the Great Duchy of Lithuania with the models for political organization.11 According to another story, Belarus was brought into full political existence by the Soviets who industrialized and civilized it. In this account, ‘real’ history starts in 1917 and the years before this date are treated as times of division and the exploitation of the local population, rather than as a time when the nation existed.

All that occurred before Soviet times is considered ‘pre-history’.12 In a contemporary context, this experience is enriched through new, seemingly incompatible elements.13 This latter version of Belarusian origins is probably more popular and considered ‘true’ due to its reinforcement through the oral histories reproduced by many people within a family circle. It is important to remember that the marked social promotion that accompanied the times of Soviet rule, during which modernization was apparently brought to this territory by the Soviets, formed a qualitatively new experience for thousands who left the villages and commenced a ‘better’ life in the towns.

The aforementioned symbolic ‘starting points’ of history are also the carriers of a clear ethical message. These ‘foundational moments’ are used to represent what constitutes the real Belarusian experience. Significantly, the highest points of one narrative are times of decline and ‘breaks’ with history according to the other. Some symbols, such as the ancient pahonia coat of arms and the white-red-white flag, so dear to the democratic narrative, are associated with evil in its purest form by the Soviet version of history. Both symbols, briefly revived during World War II while Germany sponsored Belarusian ambitions for independence, are now permanently stigmatized in the eyes of many who associate the war with the biggest national tragedy and the collaboration with Germans with an irredeemable act of vice.

Traditional symbols are, in this way, denigrated and completely compromised as any associations with German fascism are morally condemned.

These two competing foundation narratives are connected with the two possible interpretations of what constitutes Belarusian ‘statehood’. The first interpretation is epitomized by the political organism of the grand Duchy of Lithuania; the other is represented by the Belarusian Soviet Republic. Astrid Sahm proposes that different ideas govern these models: one gives priority to law and limited pluralism, the other to social justice, paternalism, autocracy, and the state-centred pro-Russian 9 Andrew Wilson, ‘Myths of National History in Belarus and Ukraine’, in Myths and Nationhood, ed. by Hosking and Schöpflin, pp. 182–97 (p. 186).

10 Ibid.

11 Ihar Lalkov, historian and researcher, interview in May 2000.

12 Interview with Irina, public servant. Although able to speak Russian only, she declares that her national tongue is Belarusian. Minsk, August 2001.

13 For example, the blessing of the Treaty on the Formation of a Community by Russian Orthodox Patriarch Aleksii II in April 1996. Ustina Markus, ‘Russia and Belarus: Elusive Integration’, Problems of Post-Communism, 44 (Sept/Oct 1997), 55–62.

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option. They are, furthermore, reflected in the concrete personalities of Lev Sapieha and Piotr Masherau.14 The material artefacts are similarly used in Belarus as symbols of a given proposition of a moral history. Clearly, the ominous and monumental architecture of Minsk is meant as proof of the Soviet civilizing mission. The sheer size of the buildings and the vast unoccupied space between them, space that is not, however, to be used by the inhabitants for their leisure, inspires the individual with a feeling of weakness and insignificance. The alternate story is told by the architecture of smaller towns in Belarus that are still constructed according to the Magdeburg law.

This special organization is a testament to the Western tradition in Belarus and is referred to, for example, in the texts of opposition rock groups, which emphasize the country’s natural adherence to the Western tradition.15 The materiality of the competing narratives is reflected as well in national holidays dates. Thus, 27 July was proclaimed the Independence Day because of the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Belarusian Socialist Republic. To counter this symbolism, the national-democratic camp attempted to move the holiday to 25 March, the anniversary of the creation of the Belarusian Popular Republic of 1918.

Moreover, there are certain highly problematic moments that are brought up in both narratives and represented in conflicting ways. Among these is the battle of Orsha of 1524, which is celebrated on 8 September and interpreted by national democrats as a Belarusian victory over the Russian element, and by communists and Lukashenka followers as a dark moment in the relationship between two brotherly nations. Consequently, the latter always tried to subvert the symbolism of 8 September with their own counter-events.16 Another symbol referred to in the competition between the identities is language.

Recently, the situation has become more complex as a growing segment of the nationally oriented elite has realized that referring to a basic opposition between the Russian and Belarusian speakers is not justified. Democratically minded Russian-speakers, after all, strongly demonstrate their lack of support for Lukashenka. Nevertheless, language remains a symbol of belonging, frequently creating barriers for communication between people supporting similar values.

Interestingly, language symbolism has become more ambiguous than it was in the early 1990s; it may now betray not so much pro- or anti Russian sentiments as inclinations to define the nation in linguistic–ethnic terms instead of civic and territorial ones.17 14 Astrid Sahm, ‘Political Culture and National Symbols: Their Impact on the Belarusian NationBuilding Process’, Nationalities Papers, 27 (1999), 649–61 (p. 650).

15 The example given to me referred to the group ‘Magistrat’: interview with Witold Martynienko, journalist, August 2001.

16 Sahm, ‘Political Culture’, p. 653.

17 As Irina (state administration) interviewed in Minsk in August 2001 says: ‘. . . it is not a criminal matter that I write in Russian. . still, they [people associated with a independent radio station] would not talk to me . . . and we are the same age, and we are, allegedly, for the same cause . . . and he [the editor-in-chief] tells me my private patriotism is of no interest to him’ (Irina registered during the all-Belarusian census as Belarusian, speaking Belarusian at home, though it was not the case, as a way of self-identification in opposition to the regime). ‘Who do they make this newspaper for? Not for people like me? And I am saying, and I said this to him, that he is doing exactly the same as those against whom he is fighting [. . .] I feel sorry it is this way . . . he never apologized,’ she added.

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It is necessary to state that the symbolic properties of language are not limited to its communicative aspect. Similarly, as my interviewees indicate, names and even whole parts of a narrative can be ‘taken away’ and used by the ‘others’. According to the national tradition, for example, the names that symbolize the Belarusian essence were appropriated by Lithuanians who are now known by the name that, according to some Belarusians, does not rightly belong to them, the use of which implies that the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania is solely theirs. The appropriation of the name is therefore partly responsible for current problems with identification.18 Even Russians are said to be guilty of similar linguistic ‘theft’, as they were originally called Muscovites and have now expanded the name to include elements that designate other groups, including contemporary Ukrainians as well as Belarusians. Similarly, strong emotions are evoked by the loss of Vilnius to Lithuania. The city was a cradle of Belarusian culture, and is still the home of many exiled Belarusian dissidents.

Linguistic symbols — metaphors An understanding of the world may be negotiated by the meaning attached to a symbol, but it may as well be based on the transfer of a certain familiar experience to another, unknown domain. Indeed, one may claim that it would be impossible to comprehend or use certain concepts at all, the nation in particular, if not for the metaphorical construct through which the experience is grasped.

Metaphors are indifferent to the falsity or truth of their propositions; consequently it is not possible to deny or criticize them in a rational way. Instead, they themselves, produce reality as they can successfully direct perceptions and sanction certain actions.19 They are not simply tools used to make comprehension easier. Like whole narratives, metaphors can also transmit moral evaluations. Thus, the successful deployment of a concrete metaphor may structure future choices thorough the imposition of the standards of morality.

As stated above, both Lukashenka’s and the pro-democratic elite display authoritarian traits and speak to the people from a position of superiority. Another similarity exists in the fact that people who are both pro- and anti-Lukashenka resort to the Nation–Family metaphor in its strict ‘Father’ Version, as defined by Lakoff. In both narratives, the references to the nation’s immaturity are frequent, especially when it is stated that people are not able to choose between what is right and what are construed as the abuses of democracy. Belarus is likened to a cauldron, the lid of which can be only slightly and gradually lifted. The people must be monitored as they could go to unhealthy extremes in enjoying liberties they are not accustomed to exercising.20 There are some obvious differences, however, in the two camps’ interpretations.

Lukashenka’s group presents itself as maintaining order, providing jobs, money, health, and education. It is a vision of a strict but ultimately good and just parent, leading a child by the hand. This image was formulated literally in Lukashenka’s 18 This is the opinion frequently voiced in the interviews e.g. V. Martynienko, Irina (August 2001), or M. Adniepadnistau and W. Areszka (May 2001, December 2001).

19 George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 158.

20 Interviews with three anonymous females, Russian speakers, August 2001, Minsk.

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2001 electoral speech, in which Belarus was compared to a little girl that Lukashenka is carrying in his manly arms. But the ‘Father’, in exchange for the provision of security, demands that the children follow his orders. They should work and study in peace, and should not doubt his good intentions. It is implied that the ‘child’ (the nation) may err, as it is simply not strong enough to make its own decisions and must be protected from insidious external influences.21 In the democratic narrative the Parent is also ominous, but the child itself is not good: it does not appreciate what is done for it and does not reciprocate appropriately. It does not want to learn; it is slow and lacks sufficient intelligence. It cannot be, therefore, treated seriously, and should be strictly controlled. Thus, if it does not perform, it should be forbidden from speaking. A salient example of this is the proposed restrictive voting system that could be helpful in local conditions because the majority of people from the moral and logical point of view have no right to do it [vote]. This would be the normal route travelled by Western countries[. . .] everywhere there was a restrictive census at the very beginning, possessions or education was decisive. . . And now a politician has to deal with cretinism. Dance kazachok in front of them.22

This approach is not new; Kastus Kalinowski, a national hero of the nineteenth century denigrated his people in a similar way for being stupid and ‘sheep-like’.

Interestingly, the democrats, referring to a structurally similar ‘Strict Father’ metaphor, promise only trouble if the nation does follow them. They speak of democracy, but they clearly do not appreciate the fact that what they understand by this term is not equivalent to the general public’s understanding. The latter may define democracy as unruliness, ‘chaos’, or ‘lack of security’. For many Belarusians democracy straightforwardly means unemployment and higher prices. A society that praises certainty and security, and reacts with panic to any remote possibility of conflict, will not be attracted by such visions.23 Finally, the position of Russia in both Family discourses is at once central and completely different in each case. It is probably enough to state that in the post-Soviet narrative Russia was always a giver, a protector, and a source of the positive, while in the democratic one she was a taker, a robber, both of natural resources and of the people. While the first narrative would claim that Russians were coming to Belarus to construct and bring expertise, the latter would hold that 21 On the basis of ‘Wmestie! Za silnuyu I procvetayuschuyu Belarus!’, Program of the President of the Republic of Belarus, A. G. Lukashenka, Sovetskaya Belorussia, internet version, http://sb.by/ cgi-bin/show.page.cgi?allnumber=21252&topic=first&file=sb255-1.b.txt, 5 September 2001.

22 Interview with a painter, Belarusian speaker, December 2000.

23 Belarusians value calm life due to their nature that is: calm, tolerant, patient, and mild, avoiding conflict and confrontations. Results of a questionnaire administered by the author in May 2001, in Minsk and Brest, as a part of interviews, to which there were 19 respondents. As well similar results are found in content analysis of the Belarusian press by Nadiezhda Efimova, ‘Sredstva massovoi informatsii I problema natsionalno-kulturalnogo wozrozhdenia Belarusov’, in D. E. Furman Belorusia I Rossija: Obschestva I gosudarstva (Moscow: Prava Tscheloveka, 1998), pp. 153–83. During the interviews conducted between December 1999 and September 2001, regularity appeared in the answers to the question ‘What do Belarusians fear most’, irrespective of their linguistic group or political orientation.

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they are invaders, likening Russia to a cause of ‘national haemorrhage’, to a big ‘vacuum cleaner draining the best blood of this country’.24 Belarusian as a liberated subject If the two Family metaphors are equally authoritarian, the Lukashenka camp makes use of some additional symbolic trumps. It employs yet another metaphor — that of a nation as a subject liberated by the Soviet ideology. This metaphor transfers the experiences of a class to that of an entire nation. According to the metaphor, Belarusians were historically treated as inferior members of a suppressed social strata and could never use their potential. They were kept in a lowly position, beaten, and robbed of the fruits of their toil. They were dirty, animal-like, and degraded.

This metaphor is again based on a Soviet myth of foundation that, in turn, exploits certain historical facts such as the modernization of Belarus in Soviet times, and the appearance of puppet Belarusian representation in international arenas including the United Nations. The introduction of Soviet policies of national flourishing in the inter-war period,25 and the construction of vertical contacts with Moscow at the expense of horizontal inter-republic bonds, led to the crystallization of this identity. Clearly, being Belarusian meant, within this construct, being Soviet as well.

While the moulding of national identities also took place under the Soviets in other countries, Belarusians received special treatment. They were granted war hero status, whereas Ukrainians were cast in the role of rascals. Soviet historiography portrayed Belarus as the primary arena of partisan fights and glorified the involvement of the local people. This view is reproduced by foreign sources as well.26 It is necessary to see and appreciate that Soviet rule, responsible for terror and purges, especially among the ranks of the intelligentsia, also produced a distinct and autonomous Belarusian subject, whose dignity was reinforced by steadily improving life conditions. For example, in the late 70s Belarusians working in the farming industry earned 157 roubles a month, one of the highest remuneration levels in the Soviet Union. In towns, communication, accommodation, and service prices were largely symbolic. In the early 1980s almost seventy per cent of Belarusians lived in towns and their sense of change, progress, satisfaction, and success was palpable.27 As one of the representatives of the first-generation of the Belarusian intelligentsia said: 24

Jaraslau Ramanczuk, deputy editor-in-chief of Bialoruskaja Gazieta, August 2001.

Soviets supported the twin policies of ‘rastsvet’ (stressing national cultural development) and ‘sblizhenie’ (drawing nations of the Soviet Union closer), David Riach, ‘Nation Building: Identity Politics in Belarus,’ Canadian Review in Studies in Nationalism, XXVII (2000), 49–63 (p. 49).

26 For example a new Polish publication quotes data according to which twenty per cent of Belarus was controlled by partisans in 1943; in more than half of the republic Germans managed to maintain their positions only in towns. Eugeniusz Mironowicz, Bialorus (Warszawa: Trio, 1999), p. 161. Referring to the masses who joined the partisans, the material mentions, however, the internal conflict with this part of the young population that joined the Belarusian Central Council (sponsored by Germans).

27 Mironowicz, p. 203.

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in the 60s and 70s it was an unbelievable social success, quite another life! One could drink a beer after work. Buy a kilim and hang it on the wall, turn on the TV. One could speak culturally, in Russian’. At the same time [. . .] anecdotes circulated that it was much better here than in Russia; in Russia they could not buy oil, for example, there was hunger. Belarusians have reasons to feel sentimental for the Soviet times.28

Consequently, Belarusians differed in the evaluation of their achievements of Communism from other nations, and it is much easier there to recall the Soviet claim that the defence of these achievements is a question of national security. For all these reasons, ‘(one) Belarusian ethnos can be rightly described as the amalgam of Pan-Slavism and Marxism’.29 The narrative built around the Soviet metaphor of Belarus as a subject is tainted, however, with internal tensions. Although the Marxist narrative ‘redeemed’ the Belarusian from the position of eternal inferior, and even presented him as a hero, this production of a Belarusian subject was not free from ambiguity and was burdened by negativity as well. Literature promulgated the portrayal of a preSoviet Belarusian as a poor, dirty, peasant, whom the new system literally washed and educated. This peasant icon is still very deeply ingrained and reproduced in contemporary practices. It surfaces even in a popular nickname for Belarusian — Bulbash — coming from the word ‘potato’. For such a ‘small’, and therefore insignificant person, the contact with the higher Russian culture was a privilege and the aspiration was to approximate it; such an ambition was most easily achieved through the use of ‘proper’ speech. This type of Belarusian identity is, therefore, characterized by Russian speech.

After World War II, when the newcomers from villages swarmed into towns purged of Jews, Poles, and the nationally minded intelligentsia, they saw all things Russian as their ideal. They interpreted them as perfect representations of culture and success. Any conceivable career was predicated upon speaking Russian and this ability was one of the most important forms of ‘capital’ one could posses. Thus, the acquisition of Russian launched these people into the labour market, and simultaneously cut them off from the ‘subaltern’ backgrounds they came from. The understanding of this symbolic value ascribed to the Russian language, and to Soviet times in the process of Belarusian emancipation and subjectification is a necessary component of any analysis of the Belarusian self.

Conclusions In this paper I represent Belarus as a locus for competition between two alternatives of the national narrative. One of them has been termed with an implicit acknowledgement of all possible tensions and inadequacies this name encompasses, a ‘pro-Lukashenka’ option; the other became the ‘democratic’ one.

This labelling is obviously a great simplification as some strongly anti-Lukashenka political elements displaying a rigid post-Soviet mentality might be assumed 28 29

Interview with S. Zaprudski, linguist, December 2000.

Riach, ‘Nation Building’, p. 53.

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to fall into a common category with extreme nationalists. In spite of all the limitations, this labelling was necessary and allowed for an analysis of mainstream representations of Belarusianness.

It has been shown that these two camps fight each other on a symbolic plane, fencing with flags, anthems, language, and architecture and the associations attached to these elements. They both try to denigrate their opponent through an attack on his symbols, as exemplified by the ‘nazification’ of nationalist symbolism. To translate the national reality into a familiar sphere, both groups resort to figurative expressions, such as ‘Family’ or ‘Strict Father’ metaphors.

Both Lukashenka and his opponents display a lack of meaningful communication with the population and this is visible in the authoritarian metaphors of the nation they have constructed. Not only is there no profound elite–people understanding, but the two elites are characterized, as well, by a marked degree of estrangement or even contempt for the masses. Nevertheless, Lukashenka has a very serious advantage over his political rivals as he has appropriated the powerful Soviet subjectification metaphor. This metaphor, having roots in the popular experience and having been transmitted through personal oral histories, transfers the class experience into a national one, and makes Belarusianness and Sovietness profoundly entangled with each other. Thus, Lukashenka’s camp possesses a discursive power and a vocabulary that reverberates, not because it is attractive to the population or in line with their wishes, but because it is simply better known and familiar. Conversely, the democrats, speaking about undisputable values, such as ‘democracy’, ‘sovereignty’, or ‘reform’, do not appreciate the fact that the society may entertain a completely different understanding of those notions and perceive them as ‘strange’ and existentially threatening.

The two stories are incompatible due to differing ontological claims they make about the nation. This problem, however, may be alleviated over time by one of two possible processes. Either a greater appreciation of the communist experience by the democrats will be achieved, or legitimate Belarusianness will be temporarily extended to that of Soviet ‘pre-history’ by the Soviet-oriented group; indeed, Lukashenka is already heading in this direction. In either case, the future will witness the hybridization of one of the narratives to incorporate elements of the other. The ‘winning’ version will be altered to such an extent that it will become more acceptable to the general public. Even then, and irrespective of who will celebrate victory, we will have to acknowledge that the significant actor in, and creator of, this single Belarusian national identity will be — unwillingly — Lukashenka himself.

Biographical Note Anna Brzozowska is a PhD candidate in the International Relations Department at the Central European University, Budapest. (MA in English Literature, Adam Mickiewicz University and in International Relations, CEU). Her research focuses on theories of international relations, foreign policy analysis, gender and identity studies, and elite/ population communication. She is interested in the application of new methodologies in international relations. She has worked for Polish self-government organizations and NGOs, was responsible for projects addressing citizen exchanges, and carried out research projects on authoritarianism and new technologies.

Slovo, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2003

The Polish Science and Technology Sector Under Free-Market Economy Conditions ALEKSANDER BUCZACKI Warsaw University of Technology The Science and Technology Sector has a significant impact on the development and competitiveness of the national economy through the development of new technologies and products, and their subsequent implementation in industry. In Poland, the institution that co-ordinates scientific research is the Committee for Scientific Research (KBN). Its tasks include, in particular, the drafting of National Science and Technology policy assumptions, the definition of priority research areas and the evaluation of research and development results, as well as the allocation of budgetary funds assigned to science. Research and development (R&D) activity is primarily carried out by the following four groups of institutions: Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), Polish Academy of Science Institutes, R&D Institutes and industrial enterprises. R&D Institutes obtain the majority of the R&D financing and they are the main institutions to conduct R&D in Poland. This group of institutions has the greatest impact on the competitiveness of the national economy.

An analysis of the R&D Institutes’ management systems has indicated the existence of the following areas of weakness that must be improved: translation of the Institute’s strategy into its operations; staffing difficulties; marketing systems; internal communication; and technological equipment.

Introduction Domestic industry’s competitiveness largely depends on the ability of enterprises to put new products on the market, that are better able to satisfy customers’ needs.

Once the Polish economy opened up to international competition, the only way for domestic enterprises to maintain their market position was to offer products of a quality at least equal to that of the products offered by foreign competitors and permanently strive to improve their performance and efficiency. Polish companies have also obtained an opportunity to enter new international markets, but this fact is not significant due to their insufficient competitive potential.

The introduction of new products on the market is impossible without progress in the development of new products and manufacturing processes, and improvement of existing products and processes. The Polish Science and Technology (S&T) sector is presently the main provider of research carried out to satisfy domestic industrial needs. Therefore, an effective S&T sector that offers high quality research and development (R&D) results is a chief determinant of the development of competitive industry, and as a result, also of economic growth. This is not a novel © School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London, 2003

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statement, since already in the late 18th and early 19th centuries economists (Adam Smith, David Ricardo Thomas Malthus, and John Stuart Mill) had observed that technological progress was the key factor in sustainable development.

In the course of the system transformations in the Polish economy, the S&T sector, which primarily satisfied domestic R&D demand, found itself in a situation worse than that of industry. The transformations were planned and carried out separately for industrial enterprises and research institutes, partly because the institutes did not — and do not — have any organizational ties with the industrial enterprises undergoing restructuring. It is also certain that adaptation and restructuring is more advanced in industry than in the S&T sector. This is caused, firstly, by the fact that the work involved in the restructuring of the Polish S&T sector is much more complicated due to its structure and ties with other areas of the socio-economic system (e.g. education). Moreover, changes in industry began much earlier.

The Polish Science and Technology sector The S&T sector has a significant impact on the development and competitiveness of the national economy through the development of new technologies and products, and their subsequent implementation in industry. S&T activity consists of basic research, applied research and development activities including the transfer of research results to industry. The effect of the S&T sector on the economy is the outcome of activities in all three areas.

The primary indicators of the S&T sector’s effectiveness are: – – – – –

the number of implementations in industry; the number of patents applied for and granted; the resources allocated to R&D, with a specification of their structure; expenditures for the purchase of domestic licenses; the number of publications in peer-reviewed journals.

Poland has traditionally had a better position in the area of basic research; this is reflected in its high position in the statistics on scientific publications.1 However, its position in the areas of applied research and transfer of results to industry is much worse, as evidenced by the drop in the number of patents applied for2 and by the low number of implementations. This situation is unfavourable to the economy since it is applied research and a successful transfer of results to industry that plays the most important role in increasing industrial competitiveness.

The institution that co-ordinates scientific research in Poland is the Committee for Scientific Research (KBN). Its tasks include in particular the drafting of the national Science and Technology policy assumptions, the definition of priority research areas, and the evaluation of research and development results.3 R&D activity is primarily carried out by the following four groups of institutions: 1. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). The primary task of HEIs is to educate students and prepare them for professional work. Since the higher education 1 Raport o stanie nauki i techniki w Polsce 1999 (Report on Science and Technology in Poland 1999), Central Statistical Office of Poland, Production and Services Statistic Division, Warsaw 2000, p. 152.

2 Ibid., p. 119.

3 Art. 2 of the Act on Committee for Scientific Research of 12 January 1991.

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system is part of the national science system, scientific research is also among the principal tasks of HEIs. A school may obtain funds from the State and from private sources for conducting research and diagnostic studies; it may also charge license fees; 2. Polish Academy of Science Institutes. The Polish Academy of Science was formed in order to promote scientific development through research, international scientific co-operation development and co-operation with HEIs and other scientific institutions in educating scientific professionals. The Polish Academy of Sciences carries out these and other tasks through its own scientific establishments. These may be institutes, plants, centres, research stations, and other units that conduct research or R&D activity;4 3. Research and Development Institutes. The law5 defines research and development institutes as state-owned organizational units, legally, organizationally, and financially discrete, set up in order to conduct scientific research and R&D work for their eventual implementation in specific areas of the economy or society. R&D Institutes may be research institutes, R&D centres or central laboratories. R&D Institutes’ tasks include R&D work, as well as promoting the implementation of results in industry. In addition they may produce apparatus and equipment and provide services to industry themselves; 4. Industrial enterprises. Enterprises conduct R&D to satisfy their own requirements.

Currently, only relatively few enterprises have their own R&D resources.

The traditional extremities of the system of R&D activity aimed at implementing innovations are the following models: – ‘research push’ — This model assumes that research results are used to design new products or technological processes and subsequently introduce them on the market. Activity based on this model ignores market requirements, instead of emphasizing the supply of research results; – ‘market pull’ — According to this model, new products or technological processes result from a careful analysis of market demand.

Western countries are beginning to use a model that combines the characteristics of both these models. A significant feature of this model is that it allows an institute to couple its technology potential with market requirements already at the earliest stage of R&D work. This type of innovation process is pictured in Figure 1.6 Before the system changes the Polish S&T sector was dominated by the ‘research push’ model. In addition, scientific institutes tended to concentrate on the development of new technological processes, paying less attention to developing new products. Today the ‘market pull’ model applies much more frequently. Certain institutes strive to generate demand for their results, constantly monitoring market requirements and adjusting their capabilities (i.e. operating according to the ‘combined’ model).

4

Art. 35 of the Act on Polish Academy of Science of 25 April 1997.

Art. 1 of the Act on Research and Development Units of 25 July 1985.

6 Based on: R. Rothwell and W. Zegveld, Reindustrialization and Technology (London: Longman, 1985).

5

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FIGURE 1. Combined innovation process

FIGURE 2. Comparison of financial allocations for R&D in the years 1994–98, by source of financing7

7

Raport o stanie nauki. p. 33.

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Figures 2–4 illustrate the situation in the S&T sector: – comparison of financial allocations for R&D in the years 1994–98, classified by the source of financing — Figure 2; – the number of researchers employed in the years 1995–98, classified by the categories of institutions — Figure 3; – comparison of participation in R&D financing during the period 1994–98 — Figure 4.

As Figure 2 shows, the State budget accounts on average for sixty per cent of the allocations to R&D. In more developed countries, this proportion is quite different, with the state providing only about one third of total R&D funding. According to the Central Statistical Office of Poland data, Poland allocates to R&D 0.7–0.8 per cent of its GDP. This is three times less than the average for the European Union.

Maintaining this low level of R&D financing by the State will have a very negative impact on Poland’s economic growth.

State intervention is especially significant in the effectiveness of the Polish S&T sector; such intervention should consist of ensuring:

FIGURE 3. The number of researchers employed in the years 1995–98, by the categories of institutions8

8 Stan nauki i techniki w Polsce (Condition of Science and Technology in Poland), Committee for Scientific Research, Warsaw, 1999, p. 26.

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FIGURE 4. Comparison of participation in R&D financing during the period 1994–989

– stable financial conditions for R&D activity initiated by industrial enterprises; – appropriate R&D infrastructure (technology parks, regional innovation, and technology transfer centres); – restructuring of research institutes in order to adapt them to operating under market conditions in Poland and abroad.

In addition, the State affects the S&T sector through the educational system, government programmes and legislation.

In 1993 the SCI-TECH project Reform Programme for the Science and Technology Development Sector, Poland was initiated. It was financed out of Phare funds and supervised by KBN. The purpose of SCI-TECH was to support the S&T sector reform process. The programme was continued under SCI-TECH II, completed in autumn 2000.

The Polish S&T sector currently employs approximately 90,000 workers (90,000 full-time positions). Scientists and researchers account for sixty-seven per cent of this total. One of the Polish S&T sector’s problems is the unfavourable age structure of its employees. This is partly caused by the fact that most institutions that conduct R&D activity are state-owned and are unable to offer attractive wages.

Figure 3 shows a steady decrease in the level of employment at R&D Institutes from 1995 to 1998. This decrease amounted to approximately twelve per cent during this period. At the same time, employment at HEIs rose, while employment at Polish Academy of Science Institutes has remained constant.

9

Ibid., p. 19.

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Figure 4 shows that R&D Institutes obtain the majority of R&D financing; they are also the main institutions that conduct R&D. The effectiveness of this category of institutions, which is largely dependent on close co-operation with industry, has a significant influence on increasing economic competitiveness. For this reason, in the remaining portion of the article I would like to focus more closely on these organizations.

Research and Development Institutes The system transformation has had the following consequences for R&D Institutes: 1) Changes in the R&D financing system, i.e. a decrease in the share of such financing provided by the government. This decrease was intended to provide a stimulus for increasing orders for R&D by the private sector and for the acquisition of the additional sources of financing by the institutes. The changes should also encourage the Institutes’ participation in international research programmes (such as the EU’s Framework Programmes); 2) Loosening of ties with industry. Polish industry currently shows little interest in using solutions developed by Polish R&D Institutes. The main reasons for this are: – the poor financial condition of Polish companies and the resulting difficulty in acquiring funds for investment; – a change in the conditions of co-operation with enterprises, particularly those whose ownership transformation has involved a buy-out by foreign investors whose strategies do not provide for the co-operation with Polish R&D providers.

The Act on Research and Development Units allows the Institutes to undergo a number of changes, including commercialization and privatization, transformation of certain Institutes that provide research crucial to the state into State10 Institutes and others.11 However, in order to survive on the market, all the Institutes should 10

The transformation of R&D Institutes into State Institutes is regulated by the Act on Research and Development Units. State Institute status will be available only to Institutes classified in the highest categories in the KBN classification system (categories 1–3). The criteria taken into account when awarding a State Institute its status will be the quality of research performed by the applicant and its usefulness to the state. The status will be awarded for a set period of time, dependent on the duration of the relevant national research programme. The Institute, in co-operation with the relevant ministry, will design a multi-year programme which will then be evaluated by the Minister of Science (KBN head) with respect to the quality of the research and the Institute’s potential. After the approval of the multiyear plan, funds for the project will be allocated from the state budget. State Institute status is awarded by a Council of Ministers’ decree. Comprehensive multi-year plans will be approved by the Parliament.

The awarding of State Institute status will carry with it close control over the Institute’s operations by the state authorities. State Institutes will be allowed to conduct commercial operations; these operations will be controlled according to principles different from those applied to operations carried out within the state research programme.

11 For example ‘spin-off’ business units with various degrees of capital and organizational independence. This process should be based on the following principles: spin-off the so-called accessory activities and functions that lie outside the Institute’s core operations; decreasing employment (the number of full-time positions) at the Institute; as a result of diversification, creating dependent units that conduct operations in new areas; the possibility to conduct commercial activity on more favourable conditions than a Research Institute (tax issues).

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introduce changes in their internal management systems in order to adapt to the new economic reality and improve their competitiveness. Of course, the condition of the Institutes is also influenced by external factors, such as the national innovation policy. Nevertheless, it is the Institutes — and in particular, the managers — that must realize the need for deep changes in the management of their operations.

An analysis of the Institute management systems has indicated problems in the following areas, common to all the Institutes: 1. Translation of Institute’s strategy into its operations; This is primarily due to the fact that the Institute strategies are defined only partially and do not precisely state the Institute’s objectives. What is more, the vision and mission frequently are not entirely compatible with the Institute’s resources and potential to achieve its objectives.

2. Staffing difficulties; The staffing problem involves above all the unfavourable employee age structure; on average, over fifty per cent of the Institute employees are over the age of fifty and have been working at the Institute for more than twenty years. Another important problem is the lack of interest among young educated people in pursuing a career in research Institutes.

3. Marketing systems; Marketing is conducted based on incomplete source materials. The Institutes’ spheres of activity are not sufficiently clearly defined by their commercial attractiveness and fit with research and production potential, or with the R&D Institute’s capabilities. The Institute staff are highly skilled in performing their research tasks, but have significant problems with marketing the research results. This situation is due partly to the system of co-operation between the Institutes and the enterprises in the past, when it was the enterprises that sought out R&D providers.

4. Internal communication; This relates mainly to the flow of information between the Institute’s top management and other levels of the organizational structure.

5. Technological equipment; Most of the Institutes’ machinery and equipment is obsolete. Since Institutes must maintain specialized equipment (frequently the only ones of their kind in Poland) required for experimental work, they usually carry higher levels of fixed assets than do commercial enterprises.12 Conclusions The State has a significant role to play in improving the effectiveness of the S&T sector. Currently, the state owns the majority of the Institutes that perform R&D, although the legal bases for Institute privatisation are currently being created.

Furthermore, the activity in the sector depends in large part on national policy 12

More in: A. Buczacki, ‘Problemy zarzådzania w jednostakch badawczo-rozwojowych’ (Problems in R&D Institute Management), Aktualne Problemy Organizacji i Zarzådzania Przedsiëbiorstwem w Warunkach Globalizacji (Current Enterprise Organisational and Management Problems in Conditions of Globalisation) (Warsaw, 2001), p. 9.

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and is regulated by specific laws. This is especially true for the Institute mergers, which, being bottom-up processes, require special legal arrangements. However, the parties that could have the largest impact on changes within the S&T sector are the organizations that operate in it.

The key to improving Polish industrial competitiveness lies in solving the problems related to the following three categories of issues:13 INCREASING R&D DEMAND

The role of the state in this area should focus on the development of the market for the Polish R&D providers by making enterprises aware of the need and potential for internal financing of R&D and providing mechanisms that would stimulate R&D implementations, such as: – – – –

tax breaks of over one hundred per cent of R&D expenditures; tax deductions for R&D result purchases (patents, licences); preferential loans guaranteed by the state budget; encouraging large enterprises to enter into long-term contracts with R&D Institutes from which they acquire new technologies; – promotion of R&D potential on international markets through financing, participation in fairs, exhibitions, and conferences.

IMPROVING R&D QUALITY AND INCREASING SUPPLY

Improvement of R&D quality and supply is to a large degree also determined by the quality of management at the R&D Institutes. All the more so since industry is interested in co-operation and is willing to spend money on R&D that will bring specific economic results. The R&D Institutes should therefore contribute to rising profits in industrial enterprises. It is also certain that an effective and efficient S&T sector is a necessary prerequisite for a competitive industry.

INCREASING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

The factor that is of the greatest significance to improving technology transfer effectiveness is improved communication between R&D providers and customers, and financial institutions. Technology transfer depends to a large extent on the transfer of researchers to industry.

Biographical Note Aleksander Buczacki is a PhD candidate at the institute for the organization of production systems at Warsaw University of Technology, in the Faculty of Production Engineering. He holds a Masters degree from Warsaw University of Technology, Faculty of Production Engineering (1993–98), as well as a Masters degree from Gdansk University’s Department of Law and Administration (1993–98). His current research interests include business process modelling, particularly in research and development units, as well as modern management system analysis and design.

13

R. Granger and T. Koÿmider, ‘Institute restructuring and training — overview and conclusions’, SCI-TECH II Conference materials (Warsaw, 2000), p. 25.

Slovo, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2003

Polacy nie gësi? Balancing Between Anglo-Polish and the Government Ordained Purity: the Influence of the English Language on Contemporary Polish JOANNA DYBIEC University of Paderborn The realignments of 1989–91 opened Poland, along with other the countries of so-called ‘Eastern Europe’ to outside influences, one of the most prominent being the globalized, mostly Anglo-American culture. Everyday life has changed and so has language, in which a growing number of anglicized vocabulary items have appeared. On the one hand, this reflects a changed reality of new services and products; it is also a social phenomenon.

On the other hand, peppering Polish with English expressions, often used in the case of advertising, is perceived to convey an air of prestige and modernity. This paper deals with the impact of the English language on Polish within the decade after the Round Table talks. The author seeks to explain if and why Polish has been such a heavy borrower and how the changed reality of liberal democracy and capitalism has led to the creation of new linguistic units. Furthermore, the author discusses how Polish as a Slavonic language, and thus highly inflected, deals with adapting English influences.

The paper ends with an analysis of the Polish Language Act of 1999 (Ustawa o jëzyku polskim), which can be seen as a manifestation of both public and government concern regarding linguistic changes, which are sometimes perceived as a threat to (national) identity.

Miko¢aj Rej (1505–1569), a 16th century Polish moralist, poet, publicist, and propagator of the vernacular, penned a poem of which one line was to become a common saying: ‘A niechaj narodowie w¯dy postronni znajå, i¯ Polacy nie gësi i¯ swój jëzyk majå’ (And let other peoples finally know that the Poles are not geese and have their own language). He thus encouraged the use of the vernacular, rather than Latin, by stressing that the Poles have their own appropriate and well-developed means of communication — the Polish language. Rej’s saying is often quoted whenever the Polish language is perceived by its speakers to be in decline. Is this the case with the Polish language at present?

This article investigates the growing influence of the English language on contemporary Polish, which manifests itself mainly in loan words. Furthermore, © School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London, 2003

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it seeks to answer the question as to whether the process of borrowing can be legitimately interpreted as a threat to the language. In this context, the Ustawa o jëzyku polskim (Polish Language Act of 1999) will be discussed, and whether it is an attempt to regulate the language and its purity by means of prescriptive legislative measures or a response to urgent economic, legal, and educational concerns.

Within the scope of this paper the language of media, everyday, and colloquial speech will be discussed, whereas economic and medical jargon — where English loan words are also numerous — are not considered. The paper focuses on changes introduced after 1989, which is regarded as the latest caesura in the development of contemporary Polish.1 However, from the perspective of language transformation this is a considerably short period of time, which makes it more difficult to observe the changes. The changes affect all sub-systems of the language, both grammatical and semantic. Whereas grammatical structures evolve slowly, semantic structures are prone to rapid change by means of word formation. In contemporary Polish this is based predominantly on neologisms and borrowings that come mainly from, or via English. Since Polish dictionaries do not provide information as to when a word appeared for the first time in this language, it is difficult to state precisely when a given loan word entered Polish. Therefore, the outline concentrates on the development of borrowing after 1989 and also places it in the historical context of tendencies originating before that date.

The history of anglicisms in Polish begins in the 18th century, when words such as ‘cutter’ (ket(c)h) and ‘yacht’ appeared in the geographical work of Siarczynski.2 During the second half of the 19th century the number of borrowings was on the increase, reflecting a similar process taking place in other European languages at that time. The rise of the British Empire and the rapid growth of the United States as a global power largely contributed to this tendency. Although in 1921 it was still possible for Sapir to complain that, ‘It is a little disappointing to learn that the general cultural influence of English has so far been all but negligible’3, the situation was soon to change. Most English loan words were introduced to the Polish language after World War II, and predominantly after 1989.

The changes brought about by the Solidarnoÿç movement and the Round Table talks (1989) contributed to the downfall of Communist rule and Poland, along 1 Some authors, however, argue for the year 1980 as the boundary, since it was at the turn of 1980 and 1981 that significant reform efforts were initiated. They were stopped in their tracks by the introduction of martial law only to be continued after 1989. Cf. K. O¯óg, ‘Polszczyzna prze¢omu XX i XXI wieku’ (hereafter ‘Polszczyzna’) in Jëzyk — teoria — dydaktyka. Materia¢y 21. konferencji jëzykoznawczej w Trzcinicy k. Jas¢a w dniach 27– 29 maja 1998 roku, ed. by Greszczuk (Language — Theory — Didactics. Proceedings of the 21st Linguistic Conference in Trzcinica by Jas¢o) (Rzeszów, 1999), pp. 11–20.

2 See E. Maæczak-Wohlfeld, Angielskie elementy jëzykowe w jëzyku polskim (Elements of the English Language in Polish) (Kraków, 1994) (hereafter Elementy), p. 8.

3 In E. Maæczak-Wohlfeld, Tendencje rozwojowe wspó¢czesnych zapo¯yczeæ angielskich w jëzyku polskim (Developmental Tendencies of Contemporary English Borrowings in the Polish Language) (Kraków, 1995) (hereafter Tendencje), p. 39.

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with other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, became open to outside influence.4 First and foremost, the changes were of a political nature: a multitude of political parties were founded and censorship was abolished. Furthermore, the introduction of a free market economy reintroduced mechanisms and institutions such as the stock exchange, shares, and above all advertising. However, the end of the Communist system did not only entail a political and economic shift, but also a change of cultural paradigms. One of the most prominent factors has been the impact of global — mostly Anglo-American — culture, transmitted by means of rapidly developing media. New television channels and press publications have appeared, where a generation of young Poles has found a place to voice its opinions and concerns. As the everyday life of people has changed so has their language.

New products, services, and concepts have appeared, many of which are referred to using English terms.

Whereas at the beginning of the 19th century there were only about two hundred and fifty anglicisms, the number steadily grew and by 1961 Fisiak had recorded over seven hundred lexemes of English origin.5 In her study of anglicisms currently used in standard Polish, Angielskie elementy jëzykowe w jëzyku polskim (1994), Maæczak-Wohlfeld estimated their number at around 1600.6 Considering the rate of borrowing and the latest estimates we arrive at roughly 1900–2000 loan words.

Maæczak-Wohlfeld demonstrates that Polish borrowings from the English language are for the most part lexical and calculates that anglicisms are predominantly nouns (ninety-four per cent), followed by verbs (three per cent) and adjectives (one per cent). According to her calculations, of all the nouns recorded in 1994, eighty per cent are assigned the masculine gender in Polish, ten per cent the feminine, only six per cent become neuter, whereas about four per cent remain undetermined. The main criterion for allocating the appropriate category for a noun is the ending of the borrowed word. Should it end with a consonant, and the majority does, it will most probably become masculine in accordance with the structure of Polish.

Semantic criteria also influence gender determination, particularly when the loan word denotes a person. For example ‘stewardess’ becomes ‘stewardessa’, whereas ‘business woman’ and ‘lady’ remain ‘business woman’ and ‘lady’, but all three words are categorized as feminine. A semantic analogy can also be of importance, for instance, ‘whisky’ is feminine in Polish because of ‘wódka’ (vodka), which is also feminine. The language through which a given word entered Polish 4

The impact of transformation processes on the Polish language has frequently been the topic of academic scrutiny. See for example H. Satkiewicz, ‘Zmiany w zasobie leksykalnym najnowszej polszczyzny’ (Changes in Vocabulary of Contemporary Polish) in Uwarunkowania i przyczyny zmian jëzykowych. Zbiór studiów, ed. by E. Wroc¢awska (Conditions and Grounds for Linguistic Change.

Collection of Papers) (Warszawa, 1994)), pp. 143–47 or O¯óg, ‘Polszczyzna.’

5 J. Fisiak has dealt extensively with anglicisms in Polish, see ’Z¢o¯ony kontakt jëzykowy w procesie zapo¯yczania z jëzyka angielskiego’ (The Complex Linguistic Contact in the Process of Borrowing from English), Jëzyk polski, 42 (1962) and Zapo¯yczenia angielskie w jëzyku polskim. Analiza intereferencji leksykalnej (English Borrowings in the Polish Language. An Analysis of Lexical Interference) (·ód¶, 1965).

6 For a discussion of noun borrowings see Maæczak-Wohlfeld, Elementy, p. 8.

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can also influence gender determination. Thus both ‘farma’ (farm) and ‘d¯ungla’ (jungle) are feminine because of the mediation of German: ‘Farm’ and ‘Dschungel’ are both feminine. As far as nouns of unsettled gender are concerned, these include mainly pluralia tantum and take the Polish plural ending ‘–y’, such as ‘cornfleksy’ (cornflakes) and ‘d¯insy’ (jeans).

The tendency to borrow mainly nouns is not a phenomenon restricted to the Polish language. It might be explained by the predominance of nouns in language or our inclination to think in nominal structures. The most plausible explanation, however, is linked to semantics. Borrowing is primarily a response to the need to name new entities, processes and phenomena, which are most commonly expressed by nouns.7 This explanation would appear to account for the recent borrowing trend in Polish, at least as far as the so-called ‘necessary loan words’ are concerned, since they refer to an array of entirely new services and products which have inundated the Polish market. The semantic fields in which anglicisms are most evident include information technology, marketing and commerce, and entertainment.

The main area of recent borrowings is computing jargon and new technology.

Such verbs as ‘kliknåç’ (to click), ‘deletowaç’ (to delete), ‘skanowaç’ (to scan), ‘zasejwowaç’ (to save), or nouns like ‘touch pad’, ‘skaner / scanner’, ‘modem’, and ‘hacker’ require little or no translation whatsoever. This semantic field was most intensively supplemented with loan words in the 1980s, whereas the process has now slowed down and reflects only the most recent developments. These include nouns like ‘SMS’ for ‘Short Message Service’ or ‘czat’ (chat), with the related ‘czatownia’ (chatroom). As these examples demonstrate, when lexical items are borrowed they may preserve their original graphic form or they can acquire Polish affixes. When a loan word easily follows the pattern of Polish flection and related words subsequently appear, it is a sign that borrowing has already become a well-established feature of the Polish language. To take an older example, ‘hobby’ has become ‘truly Polish’ as there are such related words as ‘hobbista’ or ‘hobbistyczny’. Borrowings can also take the form of calques, also called loan translations, as in ‘drapacz chmur’ (sky scraper), where the components — usually of a compound or a phrase — are literally translated.

The second major area where English borrowings are particularly numerous is marketing and commerce. The very word for marketing in Polish is ‘marketing’.

‘Biznes’, ‘biznesmen’ and later also ‘business woman’8 have become buzz words.

The growing specialization within the job market as well as the appearance of professions, until recently unknown in Poland, have led to the introduction of such words as ‘developer/deweloper’, ‘broker’, ‘copywriter’, and ‘designer/dizajner’.

Polish job advertisements often give the name of the position in English, e.g. ‘sales manager’. Is this an indication of laziness, an attempt to ascribe prestige to the post or is it simply due to the fact that there is no Polish equivalent? Although 7

Maæczak-Wohlfeld, Tendencje, p. 55.

There is no consensus on how to write this word. Other variants are in use such as bizneswoman, businesswoman, and busineswoman.

8

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in this case there is the Polish equivalent — ‘kierownik dzia¢u sprzeda¯y’ or ‘dyrektor handlowy’, the title ‘Public Relations Officer’ has no Polish translation. It is important to add that some of the words in this category, for example ‘biznes’ or ‘mened¯er’, were used before 1989, but with less frequency and/or with different connotations or even meanings.9 There is a tendency to talk about ‘mened¯er’ and ‘zdolnoÿci mened¯erskie’ (managerial qualities) rather than using the older ‘kierownik’ and ‘zdolnoÿci kierownicze’. ‘Kierownik’ might awaken memories of the Polish People’s Republic, of state owned, inefficient, and often mismanaged colossi. ‘Mened¯er’, by contrast, seems to embody the entrepreneurial spirit of the free market economy, élan, and success.

This leads us to a vital aspect of the role of borrowings. On the one hand, they name new elements of reality (the naming function). On the other hand, they express emotions and value judgements towards objects, concepts, and physical phenomena (the expressive function). Loan words with naming functions dominate in such semantic fields as technology or economics, as the aforementioned names of occupations and computer terminology demonstrate. Many anglicisms of this type are also prominent in the field of media: ‘sitcom’, ‘soap opera’, ‘talk show’, ‘reality show’. The latest borrowings in this field are often related to the Internet, for example ‘surfowaç’ (surf), ‘e-mail’ (e-mail), ‘mailowaç’ (to write an e-mail), ‘bloger’ or ‘blogowicz’ (author of a blog), ‘blogowaç’ (to write a weblog), ‘homepage’ (homepage), ‘link’ (link), or ‘debugowaç’ (debug). Some of these terms are used interchangeably with their calque forms, for instance ‘soap opera’ or ‘opera mydlana’, ‘homepage’ or ‘strona domowa’. This raises the question for users of Polish of whether to literally translate compound borrowings and of whether it is always possible to.

The second group of words — anglicisms of expressive function — polarizes public opinion more so than the former category: while language purists deplore the decline of the Polish language, others enthusiastically pepper their speech with English words. Anglicisms are often preferred as they are perceived to convey an aura of prestige and status. In Plus Minus, the weekly supplement of Rzeczpospolita, the columnist Maciej Rosalak voices his concern and irritation, noting that a prospective Polish yuppie applying for a job does not call his résumé by its Polish name ‘¯yciorys’ but instead uses ‘cv’.10 Ironically, this is the abbreviation of the Latin curriculum vitae, but it is pronounced as an English speaker would say it.11 Once a successful ‘mened¯er’, a Pole does not eat ‘drugie 9 Cf. T. Mroczkowski, R. G. Linowes, and A. Nowak, ‘Differing Interpretations of Key Management Terms: Old versus New Poland’, published as a research working paper of the Copenhagen Business School in 1999. The article summarizes the outcome of a research project, which analysed differences of attitudes among workforce entrants in reference to employment, economic participation and so on between 1989 and 1997.

10 M. Rosalak, ‘CV naszych czasów’ (A CV of our Times), Rzeczpospolita, 28–29 July 2001, p. 6.

11 Other acronyms are also pronounced according to the English rules. Thus in Polish a DVD is read [di: vi: di:] and not [de fau de]. By contrast, the acronym CD has also been borrowed from English, but it functions in the form of a loan translation p¢yta kompaktowa, colloquially called kompakt.

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ÿniadanie’ (literally ‘second breakfast’) or ‘obiad’ but ‘lancz’ (lunch)12 and does not read ‘gazety’ (newspapers) but ‘media’.

The popular association of English-sounding words with success and glamour is widely used in advertising.13 A chain of Polish hotels calls itself ‘Prestige Hotels’ in an advertisement published in a Polish weekly for Polish readers. A few years ago, the Pepsi Cola Company ran a campaign promoting a new size of bottles with the slogan ‘big ¢yk’ (big swallow/gulp). Interestingly, by suggesting that the two words rhyme, it also promoted incorrect English pronunciation. Another example of the use of puns in advertising is a bicycle shop slogan: ‘rower power’, meaning ‘bike power’, but in this case the phrase has a more playful character as it poses the question of how to actually pronounce the words. The point of this slogan seems to be to surprise the addressee by the fact that, although having almost an identical graphic form, the Polish ‘rower’ does not rhyme with the English ‘power’. Moreover, for marketing purposes firms, banks, and insurance companies choose or even invent English-sounding names for the products they offer. Thus a Multibank advertisement states modestly that ‘mamy dla Ciebie najlepsze konto na rynku — MutliKonto Business Class’, which translated into English means ‘[we] have for you the best account on the market — MultiKonto Business Class’. A German bank operating in Poland calls its new service Volkswagen Bank direct and the addresses of successful Polish recruitment web sites avoid using the word ‘praca’ (work, job) and instead use the English word: www.jobpilot.pl and www.jobaid.pl.

Finally, for expressive purposes English words are dropped into colloquial conversations, a practice which is particularly popular with teenagers.14 Instead of saying ‘Popatrz!’ (Look!) you will hear ‘Looknij!’ and instead of ‘Zadzwoæ do mnie!’ (Give me a call!), ‘Callnij do mnie!’ has become more common. The Polish ‘przepraszam’ tends to be replaced by ‘sorry’ in informal contexts. In a recent e-mail from a friend I was astonished to see ‘sorry’ used as a diminutive, which is a very Polish/Slavonic phenomenon. It was only the context that enabled me to guess what ‘sorki’ meant. A similar phenomenon and certainly not a new one is observed in intellectual circles, who prefer to use English or Latin sounding words instead of their Polish equivalents, such as ‘relewantny’ (relevant) and ‘redundantny’ (redundant) instead of ‘wa¯ny’ and ‘zbëdny’.

The question arises as to whether the high social standing of English loan words as well as their growing number can be considered as an exclusively Polish phenomenon. On the one hand, the historical and political reasons that contributed 12 The difference between the words lancz and obiad is not merely that of associations. It is right to state that while the former conveys occupational success, the latter is more like a homely meal. However, it also a case of meaning differentiation. Lancz is a light meal eaten during a short break from work, thus is linked with the professional life. It is consumed in a snack bar or bistro rather than at home. By contrast, obiad is a proper meal, often prepared and eaten at home and can be more ceremonial and festive than a simple lancz. While there is a collocation of ÿwiåteczny obiad (lit. ’holiday dinner/lunch’), ÿwiåteczny lancz sounds like a contradiction of terms. This demonstrates, that the introduction of lancz reflects the reality of the business world.

13 For a discussion on anglicisms in Polish advertising see W. Ch¢opicki and J. ¸wiåtek, Angielski w polskiej reklamie (English in the Polish Adveritsing) (Warszawa, 2000).

14 Anglicisms are also frequently used by ‘subcultures’, for example: graffiti artists (graficiarze), break dancers (break dance’owcy), rappers (rappersi). Many anglicisms are also used in hip-hop culture.

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to or enabled the rapid increase of anglicisms and the spread of Anglo-American culture in Poland on an unprecedented scale may indeed be unique to Poland and other former socialist states. On the other hand, it is the progressing globalization and the growing role of the USA as the world’s only super power that enhance the already strong position of English as the world’s lingua franca. Therefore, although Poland is not an exception, it seems that the psychological factor has played an important role: the rapid influx of American culture after 1989 has been difficult to accommodate over such a short period of time, hence the growing uneasiness and apprehension on the part of some Poles, who may feel that they cannot control the process and who perceive their language as losing its purity.

For a comparison, let us consider the situation of Poland’s largest neighbour, Germany. As in Polish, English borrowings dominate in such fields as economics, computers, communication technology, media, and music. They are particularly popular in the language of the entertainment industry and advertisements. In the shop windows of D-2, a telecommunication firm, large posters announce ‘Hier gibt’s cash’ (There is cash here). The German language has gone further than borrowing and there is now a tendency to invent English-sounding words, mainly for marketing purposes. The best-known example is a German ‘Handy’, meaning not handy or useful but a mobile phone. The German railway, Deutsche Bahn, has recently carried out a peculiar grass roots language reform, which introduced a number of English words into the company’s official language. ‘Fahrschein’ has become ‘ticket’, ‘Informationspunkt’ — ‘service point’ and ‘Toiletten’ — ‘WC’ or ‘MacClean’. Similarly, German Telecom uses English words to name some of its services and tariffs, for example ‘sunshine-Tarif’ and ‘moonshine-Tarif’, ‘City-Calls’, and ‘German-Calls’.

The growing number of anglicisms and particularly their introduction into the official, ‘corporate vocabulary’ of companies, on whose functioning millions of citizens depend, has caused various responses, from support to harsh criticism.

Increasing concern about language issues has found its reflection in the creation of the Verein Deutsche Sprache (German Language Association, GLA). It was founded in 1997 in order to preserve a high standard of German by defending it against excessive borrowings from English.15 It is therefore an attempt to work against the popularity of what is negatively termed Denglish or Gernglish, a combination of German and English. Annually, the Association grants the title of ‘Sprachpanscher des Jahres’ (Language Dilutor of the Year), which is usually awarded to a company for encouraging the usage of anglicisms rather than of their German equivalents. Both Deutsche Bahn and German Telecom have already received the title, in 1999 and 1998 respectively. Last year the award went to Wolfgang H. Zocher, the CEO of the Bundesverband der Deutschen Bestatter (National Association of German Funeral Companies). The expressions which captured the attention of the GLA included ‘peace box’ instead of the German ‘Sarg’ (coffin).

15 It was originally called Verein zur Wahrung der deutschen Sprache, that is the Association for the Protection of the German language, but the term ‘protection’ has been recently dropped in order to avoid charges of being too defensive and nationalistic.

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The flood of English loan words has attracted the attention of many linguists, politicians, journalists as well as of members of the general public and it has caused considerable concern particularly among the elderly.16 Excessive borrowing, however, is not an isolated process and should be viewed in the context of changes taking place in the Polish language over the last decade. In 1998, in the programmatic guidelines of the Polish language policy, Stanis¢aw Gajda noted the recent linguistic trends. He points towards the process of democratization, which manifests itself through ‘a tendency towards informal ways of expression and a tolerance towards varieties other than literary languages (local dialects, jargons), which are combined with the decline in authority of the literary language and codification.’ Moreover, he mentions the process of commercialization, by which he means that ‘popular culture is being promoted at the cost of high culture, (and that) linguistic primitivism (. . .) and vulgarization have become conspicuous.’17 The fervently debated Ustawa o jëzyku polskim of 1999 (Polish Language Act) could be perceived as an attempt to legally control matters relating to language and to deal with the aforementioned trends. Indeed, the first chapter ‘General regulations’ specifies what the protection of language should consist of and it clearly states that this involves acting against the vulgarization of Polish (Art. 3.1.2).

The fourth chapter regulates the competence of Rada Jëzyka Polskiego (Polish Language Council), which is to serve as a national advisory body for language issues: governmental and educational institutions can consult the Council about the usage of Polish and producers, importers, and dealers can request an opinion about naming their goods which currently have no Polish equivalents (Art. 14.2).

The most important aspect of the act, however, concerns the regulation of the use of Polish in law and commerce, that is, in the public sphere. It declares the Polish language to be the official language of the Republic of Poland (Art. 4). All legal persons carrying out public activities in Poland have to use Polish in legal transactions (Art. 5.1). International contracts or agreements of which Poland is a party should have a Polish version, which serves as a basis for interpretation unless otherwise specified (Art. 6). It obliges all companies introducing imported products into the market in Poland to provide Polish product descriptions, manuals, etc.

(Art. 7). In particular, this regulation directly and positively affects the ordinary man or woman in the street, as it offers customer protection. It puts an end to the common practice of selling imported goods without providing labels with product information in Polish. Breach of this regulation, which means applying solely English terms in legal transfer, is subject to a fine, which is set at the maximum of 100 000 zloty (about £16,600) (Art. 15). Moreover, the act stipulates that contracts to be implemented within the territory of Poland, of which one party 16 The issue of acceptance of loan words in Polish was examined by a public opinion poll carried out by Instytut Badaæ Opinii i Rynku Pentor on 9 August 1999. The older the respondents, the greater their opposition against using loan words. While in the age group 15–29 almost twenty-six per cent of respondents are for ‘puryifying’ Polish of borrowings, it is almost forty-three per cent among people over fifty. Greater liberalism in relation to borrowings is observed among inhabitants of border regions.

Moreover, it increases with education. See A. Lubecka, ‘Ustawa o jëzyku polskim a poprawna polszczyzna’ (The Polish Language Act and the Correct Polish), Biuletyn Glottodydaktyczny (Kraków, 2000), p. 130.

17 In J. Bralczyk ‘Ja pobruszë a ty poczywaj’, Polityka (21 August 1999), p. 21.

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is Polish, have to be drafted in Polish or they are invalidated (Art. 8). Thus the act has predominantly legal and economic consequences. The heated debate in the press, most of which occurred in the summer of 1999, largely overlooked these significant factors and concentrated on the absurd and sensational aspects and the act was presented as if its objective was to forbid the use of vulgar words and borrowings.

Indeed, the act raises the issue of protecting the language, as far as linguistic correctness and awareness are concerned, by defining the competencies of the Council. But it was the series of amendments and the parliamentary debates that were to a large extent responsible for the critical press. One of them stipulated that proper names do not have to be translated into Polish if they do not have equivalents. This started an even more heated discussion on the definition of an equivalent and resulted in the mass media ridiculing any attempts to amend the legislation by suggesting absurd examples. Perhaps the most outlandish example was the question of whether Margaret Astor’s cosmetics should in Poland become Ma¢gorzata Astor, which clearly overlooked the fact that proper names are hardly ever translated. The general public was led to believe that their speech habits would be regulated from now on by the law and thus, that their individual freedom would be restricted. ‘Nie paæstwo bëdzie mi mówiç, jak mi mówiç’ (The state is not going to tell me how to talk) is how Prof. Bralczyk, a specialist on the Polish language, subtitles his article in which he discusses the act and the accompanying debate. The tug of war between linguistic purists and liberals is an old phenomenon. As he states, ‘indignation over those trying to introduce linguistic regulations goes hand in hand with the indignation over the inactivity when the language is in decline. Linguists are ridiculed for excessive purism and condemned for exaggerated liberalism.’18 Supporters of the act stress that it regulates important aspects of language and that it voices concern about the recent changes in Polish, such as excessive liberalism and vulgarization. Critics of the Polish Language Act are certainly correct in believing that legal protection will not save a truly ‘endangered language’, which Polish certainly is not, and that interfering with the language structure and aesthetics is doomed to fail.

Apart from its legal and linguistic significance, the act is also relevant to the issue of national identity. The preamble in its first sentence states that ‘the Polish language constitutes the basic element of national identity, is part of national heritage and that there is a need to protect it from the process of globalization’. Moreover, the preamble reflects how the Poles perceive their own national history and the role of language in it. The experience of partition and war is referred to, when, as it proclaims, ‘the fight of partitioning and occupying powers against the Poles was a measure of national uprooting.’ This statement draws attention to traumatic events in Polish history and by referring to this past experience the act evokes the impression of looming endangerment. However, these historical events are hardly comparable with the present day situation and it is clear that the effects of transformation processes and globalization provide a very different background and context to the 18

Bralczyk, ‘Ja pobruszë’, p. 21.

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times when Poland was partitioned. When the act is regarded in the context of transformation processes and the re-making of Polish national myths, the question arises as to whether it reflects a crisis of identity or whether it is merely an ersatz activity in the face of economic hardships and social tensions.

The act was announced in Dziennik Ustaw on 8 November 1999 to become a binding law six months later, which again triggered off a lively media debate. An interesting initiative was undertaken by the weekly journal Polityka, which in summer 2000 ran a competition called ‘Spolszcz to sam’ or ‘Polonize it yourself’.

The task was to find Polish versions of recent anglicisms. There was a strong response to the competition as 2000 answers were sent in, including over 21,000 proposals altogether, which were then analysed and discussed in a series of articles.

The task of evaluation was in the hands of renowned experts on matters of the Polish language such as Walery Pisarek, the honorary president of the Polish Language Council, Jerzy Bralczyk, Professor of Polish philology, Miroslaw Banka, Director of the Polish dictionaries section at the PWN publishing house, and Jerzy Podracki, the Director of the Institute of the Polish Language at the University of Warsaw. The analysis of the proposals showed that the competition proved to be a challenge to the users of Polish. Many anglicisms were rendered into Polish using English syntax or morphemes, as in ‘peeling’ — ‘z¢uszczing’, ‘czat’ — ‘intertok’, whereas others were so long and complex that the jurors doubted that they could be incorporated into the Polish language. The twenty-five winning words included: banner — has¢onosz, boy band — ch¢opela, caravanning — drzyma¢ka, energy drink — orze¶wiacz, hamburger — butlet, sitcom — pó¢seriol, and wiza¯ysta — twarzysta (‘visagiste’). Polityka invites its readers to make at least a few of these proposals part of their vocabulary, but only time will tell if any of these words will indeed become part of the Polish language.

Despite widespread interest in the issue and serious concern about the condition and the purity of the Polish language, the statistics show that the quantitative influence of English is not as staggering as it might be expected. Praktyczny s¢ownik wyrazów obcych u¯ywanych w prasie, radiu i telewizji (The Practical Dictionary of Loan Words Used in the Press, Radio, and Television) by Markowski, (1995), in which the author stresses his efforts to include all new anglicisms, contains only about 130 such items which make up little over 10 per cent of all loan words of this dictionary.19 By comparison, Aleksander Brückner, a distinguished Polish linguist and a specialist on Old Polish, calculated that from the 13th to the 15th century Polish borrowed over 5000 words from German. With the number of anglicisms at about 2000, they are outnumbered by borrowings from Latin, German, and French.

Loan words come and go as the political, economic, and socio-cultural situation changes. Some of them become so well-established that they cease to be perceived as borrowings, while others become obsolete and then forgotten. It is difficult to foresee which of them will become an integral part of the language and which are of ephemeral nature. In many cases this might be as unpredictable as life itself: the events of the 11 September have drawn the world’s attention to 19

Maæczak-Wohlfeld, Tendencje, p. 89.

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New York, US foreign policy, the war against terrorism, and questions of safety.

This concern has immediately been reflected in the language of the media. In Polityka (20 October 2001) while reading about American special forces we come across such words, proper names and acronyms as ‘marines’, ‘rangersi’, ‘US Air Force’, ‘Special Boat Squadron’, ‘SEALs’ etc. In the same issue an entire article deals with the concept of ‘rogue states’ taken from American political discourse, which is translated as ‘paæstwa zbójeckie’. Terms such as ‘pariah states’ (paæstwa pariasy), ‘outlaw states’ (paæstwa wyjëte spod prawa), ‘renegade states’ (paæstwa renegackie), and ‘states of concern’ (paæstwa troski, paæstwa stwarzajåce zatroskanie) appear as quotations.20 So far this paper has concentrated on loan words, i.e. lexical items, as this is the main result of the influence of English on the Polish language. Of these, nouns are in the majority, followed by verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Changes other than lexical happen over a longer period of time and can therefore only be observed and analysed after a suitable time lapse. Grammatical structure is referred to as ‘closed’ since it is most immune to transformation processes. Unlike loan words, grammatical or morphological changes are not as conspicuous and therefore are often overlooked by the average Polish speaker. However, as Maæczak-Wohlfeld states, changes other than lexical are now being observed in the Polish language as the result of the influence of English.21 Major changes of this type are discussed below.

In English compound nouns where the modifying element is also a noun are common: table napkin, art gallery, paper money. Often they are hyphenated or become one word: tablecloth, paperclip, moneylender. There is a tendency in Polish to build compound nouns according to the same principle, particularly in the language of advertising and journalism and above all when naming small businesses, for example ‘infolinia’ (info line), ‘bizneslinia’ (business line), ‘fliz shop’ (tile shop), ‘auto lakiernia’ (a place where cars are painted), ‘auto szko¢a’ (driving school), and ‘hurt-land’ (warehouse). There is no agreement as yet on whether to write such compounds as one word or two, or when to apply the hyphen.

Foreign prefixes and suffixes are becoming more common. Some of them can be easily identified as English, whereas others have a broadly international character.

The latter can enter or re-enter Polish via English. Moreover, the existing affixes of Latin or Greek origin are becoming more widespread since they are associated with English in which they commonly appear. The most popular prefix is ‘super-‘ which combines with both nouns and adjectives as in ‘supertani’ (very cheap) or ‘superokazja’ (super offer/bargain). Trendy prefixes of a valuative nature, which intensify features expressed in the stem include ‘mega-’, ‘hyper-’, and ‘extra-‘. Also the English ‘-ing’ is applied to form new words, as for example ‘hangaring’ (a room in which there are many people), which is an analogy to the established anglicism ‘rooming’ (a room in which a mother with a new born baby stays).22 20

W. ·uczak, ‘Rambo idzie na front’ (Rambo Goes to the Frontline), Polityka (20 October 2001), pp. 23–24; M. Meller ‘Piëtna na mapie’ (Brands on the Map), pp. 25–26.

21 Maæczak-Wohlfeld, Tendencje, p. 84.

22 The example comes from Maæczak-Wohlfeld, Tendencje, p. 85.

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An interesting phenomenon is the formation of a very common suffix ‘–ers’ in singular and ‘-ersi’ in plural, meaning a person or a social group performing a specified action or engaged in a particular profession. The origin of this pair of suffixes lies in the process of ‘depluralization’ of anglicisms in Polish with the result that English plural nouns become established in Polish as singular: ‘Eskimos’ (singular) from ‘Eskimoes’, ‘Torys’ (singular) from ‘Tories’. The plural is respectively ‘Eskimosi’ and ‘Torysi’. The same process takes place when English nouns end in ‘–er’, for example ‘rangersi’ (plural) from ‘rangers’. Maæczak-Wohlfeld provides an example of the word ‘tamersi’, which appeared in 1991 to refer to a group of protesters against the building of a local dam (Polish ‘tama’). It seems, however, that presently the word has gone out of use. One of the current buzzwords is ‘blokers’ from ‘blok’ (high-rise). It originates from the hip-hop culture in which it functions as a pejorative name for a person living in a high-rise. The term has entered mainstream usage via Sylwester Latkowski’s film Blokersi, a story of young people who attempt to escape the oppressive atmosphere of urban high-rise areas by finding refuge in the world of hip-hop music. The use of the term in the title was an act of provocation on the part of the director, who was attempting to bring to the fore one of the main problems within Polish society at the moment: the changing status of ‘bloki’ and their inhabitants. The majority of Poles live in high-rise buildings, from university professors to domestic helps and blue-collar workers. By contrast to Western Europe, until recently such housing estates were free of negative connotations as they were considered to be standard way of living.

However, the appearance of new, modern, and more attractive high-rises and housing estates has lead to the degradation of the older ones and the term ‘blokers’ has been coined to refer to the (implied) moral degradation of the residents of these ‘bloki’. The meaning of the term is undergoing a process of social negotiation, as demonstrated by an article in the popular woman’s magazine Twój Styl.23 In that article directors of such films as bloki.pl, Inferno, and Czeÿç Tereska (Hello Tereska), which address current social problems, are interviewed. Interestingly, each of the artists explains and interprets the term ‘blokersi’ at length, which demonstrates the controversy and emotions connected with this word.

In conclusion, the changes within the reality of Polish life in the post-1989 era are reflected in language. One of the most conspicuous developments is an intensive process of borrowing from English. Borrowing has a predominantly lexical nature and most of the loan words are nouns. Recently, however, borrowings have also affected the morphological structure of language. In the years 1999 and 2000 there were heated media debates on the condition of the Polish language, which were linked with the passing of the Act on the Polish Language. The act mainly regulates the use of Polish in the public sphere and endorses customer rights. However, the formulation of the preamble might evoke a misleading impression of Polish being endangered and in need of protection. Moreover, legal initiatives appear to have been ineffective and redundant in regulating linguistic change. Borrowing is a natural process of language change and in such areas as computers, economy, and 23

M. Adaszewska, ’W blokach z betonu nie ma mi¢oÿci’ (In High-Rise of Concrete There is No Love ), Twój Styl (2 February 2001), pp. 33ff.

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technology there was a specific need to introduce terms for developments which were unknown or neglected in Poland before. Many of these words are already established as part of the Polish language. However, borrowings of expressive character, characteristic of colloquial language, are of an essentially ephemeral nature since trend-words tend to disappear as quickly as they appear. The Polish Language Act and the accompanying debate have contributed to the growth of social sensitivity and awareness on matters of language. Both this debate and the Polityka competition show that the borrowings issue has the potential to generate fascination and interest among the general public and as such can be a motivation for social and linguistic activity and creativity. Borrowings can therefore be seen to have contributed to the development of the Polish language.

Finally, the tendencies noted by Gajda, that is democratization and commercialization of discourse, are worth remembering. They might be seen to represent an infatuation with the colloquial or even the vulgar but could also be seen as inevitable consequences of freedom of speech, liberalism, and a free market economy.24 Biographical Note Joanna Dybiec has been a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Cultural Anthropology and Travel Literature at the University of Paderborn, Germany, since 2000. She holds an MA in English Philology from Jagiellonian University in Cracow (1997) and has also studied at the universities of Bochum and Hamburg. She has held positions as Lecturer at Jagiellonian University (1997–99), and Lecturer of Polish as a foreign language at the Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder) (1999/2000). Her current research addresses the depiction of Poland in American and German travel guides published between 1945 and 2002. Other reserach interests include travel literature, stereotype research, cognitive linguistics, foreign language teaching, and translation studies.

24 The latest publication dealing extensively with the issue of anglicisms in Polish and Russian is K. Luciæski Anglicyzmy w jëzyku polskim i rosyjskim (Anglicisms in Polish and Russian) (Kielce, 2000).

The study, however, traces the influence of English on these two languages from the first contacts until the times of transition. The author intends to discuss recent anglicims in a separate publication.

Slovo, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2003

The Quest for Purity: Linguistic Politics and the War in Croatia DAVID B. MACDONALD Otago University Since the nineteenth century, the ties between language and nationalism have been strong.

In Croatia, the re-creation of a national language in the 1990s performed several useful functions. First, it conferred a sense of uniqueness and superiority to co-nationals, while allowing Croatia to distance itself from its Serbian neighbours, and attempting a spiritual rapprochement with Western Europe. Second, linguistic revisionism allowed Croatia to claim both Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Bosnian Moslems as an integral part of the Croatian state and nation. Third, Croatia’s wartime president, Franjo Tudjman, was able to capitalize on the re-creation of language to claim a species of ‘national revolution’, masking many of his less than salubrious acts of national state-craft. However, Tudjman’s project was not entirely new, and linguistic re-creation was very much a continuation of a much older struggle that stretched from after World War I, through to the ‘Maspok’ movement in the late 1960s.

[I]f one assumes that language is the instrument by which it is possible to bond groups with a theoretically unlimited number of individuals, control over language and its use provides the most far-reaching possibilities of moulding and manipulating large groups of humans.1 A language is a dialect which possesses an army and a navy.2

Most if not all nations endeavour at some stage in their development to promote a national language as a key moniker of uniqueness and pride. Theorists of nationalism often cite language as an ‘irreplaceable’ factor in the ‘existence and security of a nation’,3 as well as a ‘crucial function in many nationalist movements’.4 James Kellas has argued that language forms one of several ‘objective’ characteristics of a nation, while for John Rourke, language is an ‘easily identifiable common attribute’ of the 1 Tomasz Kamusella, ‘Language as an Instrument of Nationalism in Central Europe’, Nations and Nationalism, 7 (2001), 236.

2 Branko Franoliç, ‘The Croatian Language Today’, Address to the Croatian Society Cambridge University (May 2001) <http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/cro/crolang.htm> [Accessed 20 November 2001].

3 Ray Taras, ‘Nations and Language-Building: Old Theories, Contemporary Cases’, Nationalism & Ethnic Politics, 4 (1998), 79.

4 Jan Blommaert, ‘Language and Nationalism: comparing Flanders and Tanzania’, Nations and Nationalism, 2 (1996), 237.

© School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London, 2003

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nation, alongside race and religion. If language acts as a cement to bind co-nationals together, it also allows them to distinguish their nation from other, potentially hostile nations. In the case of Croatia, linguistic nationalism has been intimately tied to efforts to differentiate Croatia from its seemingly more ‘Balkan’ neighbours: Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and indeed the entire Balkan region.

This article will review the emergence of the Croatian language, arguing that while Croatian nationalists have had every right to create their own language in the service of nationalism, many of the ‘facts’ that underlay linguistic revisionism are highly suspect, as were their political motivations. As Croatian author Predrag Matvejeviç once remarked, in Yugoslavia ‘linguistic tolerance depended on the nature of our mutual relations, e.g. before and after the unification: whenever they were comparatively good, differences were underplayed’. As history clearly bears out, during bad times, the obverse was also patently true.6 Since Croatia’s territorial borders on the eve of independence were highly contested, with a Serbian minority of 11 per cent, Croatian historians endeavoured to prove that their national distinctiveness and superiority legitimated their efforts to forge an autonomous state. George Schöpflin has described how nations struggling to reinvent themselves often have recourse to ‘myths of election’ — a belief that the nation has been specially chosen by God or history to perform some special mission, because of its unique or noble virtues. While sometimes reflecting Christian elements, national superiority is often said to reside in a nation’s capacity for ‘civility’, ‘literacy’, or ‘Europeanness’, ranking it above rival neighbouring groups.7 For Croatia, proving the existence of a separate language allowed nationalists to liberate their nation from a century and a half of spiritual and political association with the supposedly ‘eastern’ and ‘backward’ Serbs. This article begins by charting the past and present of the Croatian language, then considers the political strategies behind linguistic revisionism, as a means of reducing rights for both Croatian Serbs and Bosnian Moslems, while making a break from the Balkan world.

The early basis of the Croatian language The origins of modern Croatian, like modern Serbian, German, or Italian, are not found in antiquity, but rather in the work of nineteenth-century Romantic nationalists, who used a standardized language to unite their people into coherent nations.

Johann Gottlieb Herder is commonly credited with elevating nations and/or ethnic groups as manifestations of the Divine, with mother tongues as the key to preserving the spirit of the nation. Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his Addresses to the German Nation (1807) would later praise the mother tongue as the most important possession fathers could pass on to their descendants.8 Tomasz Kamusella credits the 1848 Völkerfruhling (Spring of the Nations) with the introduction of a linguistic form of 5

Taras, pp. 85–86.

Bozidar Jaksiç, ‘Nationalism and Language’ (Belgrade University, 1997) <http://www.zaslon.si/ romag/pub/Nationalism-and-Language.html> [Accessed 18 November 2001].

7 George Schöpflin, ‘The Functions of Myth and a Taxonomy of Myth’, in Myths and Nationhood, ed. by Geoffrey Hosking and George Schöpflin (London: C. Hurst & Company, 1997), p. 31.

8 Of course, Herder was strongly influenced by the ideas of his mentor Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the earlier thought of Giambattista Vico. See Kamusella, p. 238.

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national association into Central Europe, with the equation ‘language = nation = state’ trumping the Western European and American understanding of national identity: ‘state = nation’. By the 1860s, German philologist Richard Böckh would argue that language was the only adequate proof of a nation’s existence.9 National languages in Europe were most often derived from different regional dialects, each with its own vocabulary, grammatical structure, and pronunciation.

However, native speakers of proposed national languages were few and far between. In France, on the eve of its Revolution, 50 per cent of the population did not speak French at all, and only 12–13 per cent spoke the Parisian variant that eventually became the standard form. When Italy began its unification process in 1861, scarcely 2.5 per cent of the population used Italian for everyday communication.10 The levels in Germany in 1871 were certainly higher, but those who could read and write Hochsdeutsch, let alone speak it, were a rarity.11 Unlike these examples, Croatia stood on a much sturdier footing.

Linguist Ljudevit Gaj is commonly credited with standardizing the Croatian language in 1830, with his Kratka osnova horvatzko-slavenskoga Pravopisanja (A Brief Outline of Croatian–Slavic Orthography, published in Budapest), using a form of Czech orthography with its ‘one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds’.12 In Croatia, three main dialects are commonly identified. The kajkavski dialect, similar to Slovenian, was spoken in northern Croatia including Zagreb. In Istria, northern Dalmatia, and Croatia’s islands in the Adriatic, the ïakavski dialect was spoken, while štokavski/ijekavski was commonly used in Dubrovnik (or Ragusa), southern Dalmatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Of these three options, Gaj chose štokavski/ijekavski/jekavski, the language most commonly used by the Croatian population, and also associated with the Renaissance writers of Dubrovnik: Marin Dr¥iç, Ivan Gunduliç, Junije Palmotiç, and others.13 Gaj’s choice of štokavski/ijekavski was also related to the rise of Serbian linguistic nationalism, where Vuk Stefanoviç Karad¥iç had earlier adopted the same dialect for his standardized Serbian. This was the language of the majority of Serbs in the Sand¥ak, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and much of Western Serbia, and soon replaced the more literary Serbian dialect slavenoserbski. Allying his language to that of Karad¥iç, Gaj hoped that a common language would unify South Slavs against the encroaching power of the Hungarian empire, a correlate to Karad¥iç’s project of unifying South Slavs against the Ottomans. However, the adoption of štokavski/ijekavski in both countries implied a rejection of the city 9

Kamusella, pp. 239–40.

Umut Ozkirimli, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (London: MacMillan, 2000), p. 220.

11 Kamusella, p. 239.

12 Franoliç, ‘The Croatian Language Today’.

13 Marcus Tanner, A Nation Forged in War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 73–75. For discussion of Dubrovnik’s literary traditions, see Karlo Mirth, ‘Croatian Language from the Eleventh Century to the Computer Age’, Journal of Croatian Studies, 25–26 (1984–85) <http://www.croatianacademy.org/croatian-language-vol25-26.htmCROATIAN LANGUAGE> [Accessed 20 November 2000]. A detailed description of the differences between these dialects can be found at the University of California Los Angeles Language Website; ‘Serbo-Croatian Language Profile’, CLA Language Materials <http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/profiles/profs01.htm> [Accessed 20 November 2001].

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dialects, kajkavski in Zagreb, and štokavski/ekavski for Belgrade and Novi Sad, leading inevitably to future conflicts between rival dialects.14 What differentiated these language-building projects from those of other European countries was the ease with which they could be accomplished. While Italy was often presented as a model for linguistic standardization, dialectical differences, such as those between Milan and Sicily, were enormous. This was not the case in Croatia and Serbia, where speakers of different dialects could understand each other without much difficulty, making a coherent South Slavic language relatively more natural and easy to achieve.15 By 1850, Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian writers and linguists had met in Vienna, and signed the ‘Vienna Literary Convention’, agreeing to a five point programme creating a unified literary language or Knji¥evni jezik. The formation of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts (Jugoslovenska Akademija Znanosti i Umjetnosti) in 1866 in Zagreb further strengthened cultural and linguistic affinity between Croats and Serbs, paving the way for Illyrianism and Yugoslavism — two programmes which advocated South Slavic political rapprochement.16 Men like Ljudevit Gaj and Bishop Juraj Strossmayer, who together with others founded the Yugoslav Academy (and Illyrianism), believed that cultural and spiritual union with the Serbs was the best way to secure a strong South Slavic state — wherein some measure of freedom and equality could come about. Similarly, Ivan Meštroviç, the world famous Croatian sculptor, pushed for Yugoslav unity, even creating a ‘Kosovo Temple’ which he controversially exhibited at the Serbian, and not the Austro-Hungarian exhibit at the Rome International Exhibition in 1912.

For many decades, Croatian intellectuals and writers were at the forefront of Illyrianism, even more eager for union than their Serbian counterparts.17 Serbo-Croatian and the culmination of Illyrianism The end of World War I would see the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman Empires. It would also mark the rise of many new states throughout Central Europe and the Balkans. In the midst of state formation in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Albania, Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes came together to form their first 14 Some Serbs were often wary of Illyrianism, seeing it as an attempt to dilute their own conception of linguistic purity, and continued using ekavski. As for Croats, a form of literary Croatian would be formed from štokavski, but which was also enriched with elements of kajkavski and ïakavski. For a detailed discussion of language politics in the nineteenth century, see Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 76–88, 209–10. See also Robert Greenberg, ‘Language, Nationalism and Serbian Politics’ (Washington, DC: East European Studies Website, 1999) <http://wwics.si.edu/ees/reports/1999/182gre.htm> [Accessed 20 November 2001].

15 Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 24–25.

16 The name ‘Illyrian’ has its origins in the very early pre-Slavic inhabitants of the western Balkans, and would later be revived during the Renaissance, and again during the Napoleonic era as part of a general enthusiasm for recapturing the classical spirit of the past. See Mirth, ‘Croatian Language from the Eleventh Century to the Computer Age’.

17 Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth And The Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 57–58.

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common state in history. Reflecting several decades of Illyrianism, a form of standardized Serbo-Croatian (derived from štokavski) was agreed in 1918, and linguists throughout the country began to speak for the first time of ‘the unity of Yugoslav culture’ and ‘complete national unity’.18 Sadly for Croatian idealists however, the new state would remain dominated by Serbian interests: a Serbian monarchy, bureaucracy, and military. Soon, there was also conflict between the Croatian ijekavski and the Serbian ekavski variants of the language, with Serbian linguists attempting to impose their dialect as a narodno jedinstvo.19 Contemporary Croatian writers would portray this as a time of misery, a time when, ‘the lives of non-Serbian people had no value’.20 In time Croats, resentful of Serbian dominance in the first Yugoslavia, would make a devil’s bargain with the Nazis in 1941, hoping to end what was seen to be a destructive relationship with their Serbian neighbours. During their brief flirtation with Fascism in the Independent State of Croatia or NDH (1941–45), Croatian nationalists attempted to dismantle the cultural and linguistic commonalities that accompanied Yugoslavia’s creation. The standard Serbo-Croatian phonetic alphabet was replaced by an etymological construction, in which the stem of a word was retained through all its forms — an entirely new and invented orthography. The government also purged large numbers of supposedly Serbian words, in an effort to create a ‘purer’ form of Croatian.21 This early effort at linguistic cleansing was designed to reinforce a decisive split between Croatian language, culture, and history and its hated Serbian adversary.

During the tenure of the NDH, Education Minister Mile Budak would claim that Croatian culture had been polluted by ‘barbarisms’ and ‘Turkisms’. These, he posited, had ‘destroyed everything Croatian’, giving the language a ‘Serbian character’.22 A process of purification was thus required, to undo decades of cultural and linguistic co-operation between Croatian and Serbian intellectuals. In practice, however, Budak’s campaign achieved little more than linguistic confusion, with many nationalists proud to speak their new language, but with little idea of what it was or would end up becoming.

‘Serbo-Croatian’ in Tito’s Yugoslavia With the victory of the Communist Partisans in World War II came the dismantling of the NDH and the end of Croatian as a separate national language. In 1943, the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) instated four official languages for the new country: Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, and 18

See Niko Bartuloviç’s speech in Wachtel, Making a Nation Breaking a Nation, pp. 90–91.

Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia, pp. 212–13.

20 Dragutin Pavliïeviç, ‘Persecution And Liquidation Of Croats On Croatian Territory From 1903 To 1941’, in Southeastern Europe 1918–1995, ed. by Aleksander Ravliç (Zagreb: Croatian Heritage Foundation/Croatian Information Centre, 1998) <http://www.hic.hr/books/seeurope/index-e.htm#top> [Accessed 5 February 2000].

21 Daria Sito Suïiç, ‘The Fragmentation of Serbo-Croatian Into Three New Languages’, Transition, 2 (29 November 1996) <http://www.omri.cz/Publications/Transition/Features/Feature.V02N24.html> [Accessed 23 July 2000].

22 Wachtel, Making a Nation Breaking a Nation, p. 139.

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Macedonian. The Yugoslav Constitution of 1946 would be published simultaneously in these four languages, and other trappings of the state, such as the dinar, also carried all four languages when it was released in 1947.23 Equally, foreign treaties, constitutions and all legal documents were published in all four languages, as well as Hungarian and Albanian in some cases.24 The status of Croatian as equal, however, changed in 1954, when communist leader Josip Broz Tito assembled twenty-five Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin writers and linguists at Novi Sad. The outcome of this process, the Novi Sad Agreement on linguistic unity, formally unified Croatian and Serbian into Serbo-Croatian, with Occidental (Croatian or štokavski/ijekavski-jekavski) and Oriental (Serbian or štokavski/ekavski) variants. A joint language was seen as an important aspect of Tito’s ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ — an attempt to achieve cultural and political unity under a socialist banner. By denying the existence of a separate Croatian language, Tito hoped the problem of nationalism would simply disappear, and the bitter scars left by half a decade of fighting would somehow heal themselves.25 However, this strategy did little more than anger the Croats, who felt that their national rights were again being trampled upon and suppressed by a Serb-dominated federation.

Croatian linguists would also reject the many Russian neologisms introduced as a result of Soviet influence. Such words Branko Franoliç termed ‘newspeak’ or ‘novogovor’, after George Orwell’s 1984, characterized largely by ‘verbal inflation and devaluation of the semantic content of the lexical meaning of words used in political discourse and journalistic jargon’. Among the many words listed by Franoliç are included: kominterna, kolektivizacija, udarnik (front ranker), petoljetka (five-year plan), crveni kutiç (red corner or local communist office), ïistka (political purge), kult liïnosti (personality cult), samokritika (self-criticism) and so on. The word blending that so typified Soviet era lingo was also present in Yugoslavia: kolhoz, sovhoz, agitprop, fiskultura, ditto the plethora of acronyms much loved by communists throughout the world: ‘NOB, OZNA, UDBA, SKPJ, SKOJ, ZUR (Zakon o udru¥enom radu), OOUR/OUR (Organizacija udru¥enog rada), SIZ (Samoupravna interesna zajednica)’.26 Franoliç argues that the inclusion of Russian words made the language plodding and heavy, difficult both to understand and to translate. Language was also used to artificially include and exclude certain groups of people. The common phrase radnici, seljaci i poštena inteligencija or ‘workers, peasants and honest intelligentsia’, implied that the majority of intellectuals were dishonest, save for those who could prove their loyalty to the regime. Additionally, in keeping with a view of the world as black and white, those loyal to the regime were deemed to be radnici (workers): prosvjetni radnik for teacher, socijalni radnik for social worker, or zdravstveni radnik for 23

Karlo Mirth, ‘Croatian Language from the Eleventh Century to the Computer Age’.

Sabrina Petra Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia: 1962–1991 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992) p. 56.

25 Suïiç, ‘The Fragmentation of Serbo-Croatian Into Three New Languages’. See also Mirth, ‘Croatian Language from the Eleventh Century to the Computer Age’.

26 Franoliç, ‘The Croatian Language Today’.

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doctor, while those criticizing the regime were labelled as reakcija or neprijatelj (enemies) engaging in some sort of konspiracija to undermine or overthrow the system.27 This feeling of cultural and linguistic dominance as a result of Communism, as well as Russian and Serbian influences, would lead to a backlash in 1967, when the Serbian cultural organization Matica Srpska unveiled the first two volumes of a proposed unified standard dictionary and orthography for Serbs, Croats, and Montenegrins. Common Croatian vocabulary was often excluded, and when it did appear it was cited as a deviation, with Serbian presented as the standard.28 Reacting against this perceived threat to Croatian culture and language, famed Croatian novelist Miroslav Krle¥a led a group of 140 leading academics and eighteen cultural institutions on a campaign to designate Croatian as a separate language for education and literature, initiating what became known as ‘Maspok’.29 The March 1967 Declaration Concerning the Name and Position of the Croatian Literary Language would directly repudiate the Novi Sad Agreement, calling on the federal government to reinstate a separate Croatian language and acknowledge this fact through amendments to Article 131 of the constitution.30 What followed was ostensibly a linguistic sparring match between the Matica Srpska and the Matica Hrvatska. A spate of accusatory publications traded insults back and forth, as each side consolidated their position. The Matica Hrvatska’s position during this time was clear: ‘Matica Srpska says that we have a single uniform language, and we say this is not the case . . . we have a single language but it is not uniform’.31 Linguistic revision during this time went into high gear. In 1971 a manual of Croatian orthography (Hrvatski Pravopis) was published, ‘stuffed with archaisms and exotic neologisms designed to eliminate anything that might be construed as a Serbianism’, as Sabrina Ramet describes. Visiting academics to Croatia were likely to find themselves criticized by ‘militant Croatophiles’ for using the ‘wrong’ vocabulary.32 By June, the Matica held an open meeting to discuss the Zadar Review’s continued use of ‘impure language’, and their new organ, Hrvatski Tjednik, soon began publishing regular columns updating the Croatian language and ferreting out Serbianisms.33 A backlash against all of this was not inevitable, but the Matica pushed its agenda too far when it announced its intention of establishing branch offices in Bosnia and Vojvodina to serve disenfranchised Croats in these areas. Croatian leaders now began making untenable demands, at least within the context of Yugoslavia: a separate Croatian currency, a separate Croatian headquarters for the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army, a Croatian national bank with the ability to negotiate foreign loans 27

Ibid.

Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, pp. 101–02.

29 Nouvel Observateur et Raporteurs sans Frontières, Le Livre Noir de L’Ex-Yougoslavie: Purification Ethnique et Crimes de Guerre (Paris: Publications Arlea, 1993), p. 125.

30 Wachtel, Making a Nation Breaking a Nation, p. 185. Also Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, p. 102.

31 Ibid., pp. 103–04.

32 Ibid., pp. 107–08.

33 Ibid., p. 111.

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independently, the Sabor as the highest political institution in Croatia, a separate Croatian legal code, even a seat on the United Nations. Croatia’s leader Vladimir Bakariç now began to talk of the Matica as a ‘shadow government’, while Tito asked publicly, ‘Are we going to have 1941 all over again?’34 The backlash against ‘Maspok’ came in December 1971. During the so-called ‘Croat Spring’, Tito decapitated the Croatian leadership, stripped some 741 officials, writers, film-makers, and university professors of their posts, and expelled hundreds more from the Party. The Matica Hrvatska was closed down, and many pro-nationalism publications were banned.35 Theatrically, Hrvatski Pravopis was seized and destroyed by the government. Of forty thousand copies, only one survived, and was smuggled out of the country and reprinted in London the next year.36 Krle¥a and his supporters were imprisoned — among them a fiery young general and historian named Franjo Tudjman. Krle¥a, Tudjman, and others became martyrs for the nation, defending Croatia’s national language against a seeming onslaught of Serbian cultural domination.

However, while the Croatian Spring has commonly been presented as an era of martyrdom for Croatia’s intellectuals, most of the reforms they sought were quietly granted. After 1971, Croats, Serbs, and Montenegrins were guaranteed their own national languages in their respective constitutions. Only Bosnia-Herzegovina with its multi-confessional, multi-national character retained Serbo-Croatian.37 The Federal Ministry of Education soon dismantled its Yugoslav-oriented curriculum, allowing individual republics to focus on their own national histories. Yugoslav history and ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ were gradually replaced by an emphasis on Croatian language, history, and tradition.

Linguistic rediscovery after the collapse of Yugoslavia While the official doctrine of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ persisted throughout Tito’s tenure, in practice few Serbs and Croats internalized its principles. In a survey conducted in 1966 and repeated in 1990, the majority of respondents in both national groups refused to countenance marrying a member of the other nation (65 per cent of Serbs rejected the idea of marrying a Croat; for Croats, the figure was 90 per cent).38 Tito’s death in 1980 would release much of the pent-up hostilities within national communities, with the encouragement of opportunistic leaders.

Kosovar Albanians were the first to demand increased autonomy in Yugoslavia, followed soon after by Serbian leaders. Slovenian and Croatian nationalist demands followed slowly but surely in their wake.39 34

Ibid., pp. 122–23, 127.

Ibid., pp. 129, 131.

36 Franoliç, ‘The Croatian Language Today’. Also discussed in Mirth, ‘Croatian Language from the Eleventh Century to the Computer Age’.

37 Suïiç, ‘The Fragmentation of Serbo-Croatian Into Three New Languages’.

38 Mattei Dogan, ‘Nationalism in Europe: Decline in the West, Revival in the East’, Nationalism & Ethnic Politics, 3 (Autumn 1997), 82–83.

39 For a discussion of the rise of Kosovar and Serbian nationalism, see Aleksander Pavkoviç, The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism in a Multi-Ethnic State (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1996), p. 78; also see Jim Seroka and Vukasin Pavloviç, The Tragedy of Yugoslavia (London: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), p. 77; and Mark Thompson, Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina (London: Article 19/International Center Against Censorship, 1994), p. 128.

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Franjo Tudjman’s rise to power in the late 1980s was premised on his status as a martyr for Croatian history — and the Croatian language. One of his first tasks when the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) government was popularly elected in 1991, was to ‘re-purify’ the language — to create a separate Croatian which would be unrecognizable from Serbian, thus fulfilling the goals of the Matica Hrvatska some thirty years before. For Croats, the Serbo-Croatian language was little more than a ‘political tool’, which had been used throughout the history of Yugoslavia to homogenize different peoples into a single nation. As one pro-Croatian historian asserted, ‘The only reason that “Serbo-Croatian” existed and the only reason it has been forced upon unwilling populations were the politics of an artificial Yugoslavia united by force against the will of the majority of its population’.40 For many Croats, there had once been a linguistic Golden Age that needed to be rediscovered. At some stage, there was a pure, authentic, and unadulterated Croatian language, waiting to be dusted off, polished, and shined, after decades of being covered with Serbian and Communist dirt and tarnish. Well-known Croatian writer Slobodan Novak commented on the new ‘purity’ of Croatia by proclaiming triumphantly: Croatia is cleansing itself of Yugo-unitarist and Great-Serb rubbish which had been spread all over it for a whole century. Croatia is simply restored to its original form and returning to its true self. If today it has to make painful incisions in its language, history, scholarship and even the names of its towns and streets, that only shows the extent to which it was contaminated and how polluted were all facets of its life and all segments of its corpus.41

For Novak, as for many others, one of the most painful legacies of Communism was the loss of the national language. The renewal of Croatian would restore national uniqueness and prestige. It would forever confirm the divide between Serbs and Croats, and allow Croatia to take its rightful place as part of Central, rather than Eastern, Europe. A concerted attempt was made to ‘de-Yugoslavize’ educational curriculums, as ‘Yugoslavism’ and ‘Illyrianism’ lost their historical significance, and were now tainted with the dubious epithet ‘illusionism’. Tito was denounced, while Tudjman became ‘the fulfilment of Croatian history’.42 In the quest to reduce Serbian influence and recapture the essence of a linguistic Golden Age, the 1990 Croatian Constitution established literary Croatian as the language of administration, and dismissed the Serbian Cyrillic script — a rather senseless and provocative move which resulted in Croatian Serbs desperately trying to master Cyrillic, which barely 5 per cent of local Serbs could use.43 This accompanied a rigorous purge of Serbs from the government, the police, the educational system, 40 C. Michael McAdams, ‘The Demise of ‘Serbo-Croatian” (Zagreb: Croatian Information Centre Web Page, 1998), <http://www.algonet.se/~bevanda/mceng.htm> [Accessed 18 June, 1998].

41 Quoted in Dubravka Ugrešiç, The Culture of Lies (London: Phoenix House, 1998), pp. 64–65.

42 Wolfgang Hopken, ‘History Education and Yugoslav (Dis)-Integration’, in State-Society Relations in Yugoslavia: 1945–1992, ed. by Melissa Bokorov, Jill Irvine, and Carol Lilly (London: MacMillan, 1997), pp. 95–96.

43 Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 12.

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and the media, which only confirmed the alarming and paranoid rhetoric emanating from Belgrade.44 As part of Croatia’s linguistic renewal, a large number of new words were introduced, many with no historical origin. Strange and new problems developed along with this process of revisionism. For example, the word for one thousand in SerboCroat (tisuça) had been outlawed by the Communist government and substituted with hiljada, paradoxically an archaic Croatian word. The more authentic hiljada was then rejected by nationalists who now insisted on tisuça, because it was banned by the Communists. Franjo Tudjman also took part in this linguistic revisionism, and invented new tennis terms (many of them unwieldy) such as pripetavanje for tie-breaker.45 In order to catalogue many of the changes, new dictionaries began to appear on the scene. Vladimir Brodnjak’s Razlikovni Rjeçnik (Dictionary of Differences) featured thirty-five thousand entries, composed mainly of technical term and archaisms. Hrvoje Šošiç’s Croatian Political Dictionary (1993) also advanced a distinctly national view of history, and its twelve hundred pages carefully omitted any controversial periods in Croatia’s history, such as its horrific legacy from World War II.46 The government controlled media introduced linguistic columns in their newspapers, highlighting certain ‘non-Croatian’ words — not to be used by the public.

Similarly, the zeal to ‘de-Serbianize’ the language led to revisions of distinctly ‘Croatian’ texts. Jasna Barešiç’s 1994 Croatian language reader Dobro Došli had to be cleansed of the ‘Serbianisms’ by other Croatian linguists on a daily basis, since new ‘impurities’ were constantly being identified.47 Even Krle¥a, Croatia’s linguistic martyr, had his works translated from ‘Serbo-Croatian’ for new school textbooks.

Linguists and historians also argued that while this process of linguistic pollution had occurred, there was still much left that was Croatian. C. Michael McAdams, a pro-Croatian American historian, highlighted the thousands of supposedly different words between the two languages. His examples included odojïe, which means a nursing baby in Serbian, and a pig in Croatian, and voz, which means railroad car in Serbian, and a hay cart in Croatian. Another example was deva, which means the Virgin Mary in Serbian, and a camel in Croatian. For these reasons, McAdams would conclude that Serbian and Croatian were less similar than Norwegian and Danish, or Flemish and Dutch.48 However, McAdams’s efforts were deliberately misleading, since English words such as ‘runt’ and ‘wagon’ also share such dual meanings, denoting respectively both baby and pig, and railroad car and hay cart.

For impartial linguists studying the rise of Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian, it was clear that this was one and the same language, even if there were 44

See Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 44–45.

45 Chris Hedges, ‘Words Replacing Bullets in Latest Balkan Battle’, The Globe and Mail (16 May 1996).

46 ‘A Review of: Hrvoje Sosiç, Croatian Political Dictionary (Rijeka: Tiskara Rijeka, 1993)’, Feral Tribune (29 December, 1997) <http://www.cdsp.neu.edu/info/students/marko/feral/feral53.html> [Accessed 12 March 1998].

47 During language courses at Zagreb University in 1994, the author was unwittingly made a party to this process.

48 C. Michael McAdams, ‘Croatia: Myth And Reality’, <http://www.dalmatia.net/croatia/mcadams/ myth/midi01.htm> [Accessed 23 July, 2000].

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some different words.49 One can talk accurately of a common language, because differences in vocabulary, grammar, and structure in the spoken language make up less than seven per cent of the total lexicon.50 For this reason alone, returning Croatian ‘to its true self’, as Novak described, would not be an easy matter. It would have been a long, self-conscious process of invention.

During this time, language was being used as a means of distinguishing friend from foe, even within the Croatian ranks. Croats from Serbia and BosniaHerzegovina were forced to pass linguistic proficiency exams in order to qualify for Croatian citizenship. For many newcomers, adapting to the new linguistic exigencies of the government proved extremely difficult. By August 1995, members of the HDZ were trying to push more draconian changes to the language. One deputy proposed reintroducing the World War II-era etymological alphabet, while identifying some thirty thousand words that needed to be purged from the language.

Another bill was aimed at creating an Office for the Croatian Language, which would have had the ability to enforce fines or imprisonment for those speaking in the ‘wrong’ way. While such laws were never passed, and were openly condemned in the opposition media, language fever persisted.51 The type of havoc such legislation would have created is unimaginable.

At the more extreme end of the spectrum, ultra right-wing publications such as the NDH magazine proposed creating a completely different national language.

Advocating the Croatian korienski orthography, journalist Marijan Krmpotiç advanced that the adoption of a new dialect was the only way to create an authentic Croatian language. That this language would be neither historically ‘pure’ nor accurate was apparently unimportant. As the author explained: ‘Only the renewal and rebirth of the unique character of the Croatian language and “korienski” orthography can destroy Serb appetite for Croatian lands and free us from fear of violent “unification” of parts of Croatia with Serbia’.52 Creating their own linguistic babel would allow Croats to be safe from Serbian attacks, as she explained: the loss of mutual intelligibility of Croatian and Serb languages is the best guarantee that Croatia will never again join some Yugo-associations which could lead to the renewal of the common state with the Serbs, because our languages, cultures, and religions would be different. Since [Serbs and Croats belong to] two different civilizations there can be no co-existence for us. Let us work hard, with love, and learn the Croatian language cleansed of all non-Croatian traces which had been imposed by force on it, and renew its Croatian character.53

That the ‘Croatian character’ to which the author referred would also be unintelligible to the vast majority of Croats themselves seemed to matter little. To be successful, Croatian did not have to be historically accurate — it had to be radically 49 This issue is discussed in Neven Anjeliç, ‘Arret sur langage en Bosnie-Herzégovine’, Raisons Politiques (May 2001), p. 149.

50 Joseph Slowinski, ‘The Politics of Language and Education: Past and Present in Yugoslavia’, International Education, 2 (December 1998) <http://services.canberra.edu.au/uc/educ/crie/1998-1999/ieej8/ ie8-joseph.html> [Accessed 18 November 2001].

51 Suïiç, ‘The Fragmentation of Serbo-Croatian Into Three New Languages’.

52 Marijan Krmpotiç, ‘Why is Croatian Language Still Suppressed in Croatia?’, NDH (December, 1997) <http://www.cdsp.neu.edu/info/students/marko/ndh/ndh2.html> [Accessed 18 June, 1998].

53 Ibid.

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different from Serbian, prompting another Croatian journalist to lament: ‘It is not inconceivable that language planners will eventually teach new generations how not to understand each other’. The Croatian Heritage Foundation, an affiliate of the Croatian government, made it clear that the differences between languages could be political as well as actual. They argued that ‘just as democratic Spain after the fall of fascism recognized Galitian as a language different from Spanish and Portuguese, thus Croatian and Serbian can be considered two different languages due to their separate cultural histories and functional differences’.54 The Bosnian dimension Revising or re-purifying a Croatian language also had political ramifications in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where both Serbs and Croats were fighting against the Bosnian Moslems and each other, to carve up this once lauded example of tolerant multiculturalism. Part and parcel of legitimating Croatian military forays into Bosnia was a full-scale propaganda campaign, promoting the claim that Bosnian Moslems were ethnically Croatian. Such views were nothing new — they had made their appearance during the nineteenth century and again during World War II, when Moslems and Catholics were touted as Croatians of two faiths.

During the conflict, both Serbs and Croats considered themselves to be ‘natural’ nations, based on ‘unambiguous and common ethnic origin’. By contrast, Moslem identity was based on ‘psychological identification’, and subject to self-observation.

Moslems were therefore seen as an ‘invented nation’ — not to be considered relevant in the more important dispute between ‘natural’ Serbs and Croats.55 Both sides claimed that Moslems had converted from either an ‘authentic’ Orthodox or Catholic faith and had abandoned their true ancestry. However, the other dimension to these claims was linguistic, with both sides arguing that Moslems spoke their national language and were therefore part of their nation.56 Historians such as Abdulaf Dizdareviç would mix a variety of racial and linguistic criteria to dismiss Moslem nationalism, writing: ‘The uniformity of the physical features of our Croatian nation which, along with its language is one of the dominant characteristics of the same racial group [. . .] They preserved [the Croatian] language in its purest form and as a dialect of clear and undeniable 54 Matica Hrvatska Iseljenika, ‘Croatian Language and Literature’ <http://www.dalmatia.net/croatia/ language/index.htm> [Accessed 1 December, 2000].

55 Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 31. Bringa makes reference to the 1990 debate in the Sarajevo daily Oslobodenje (Liberation).

56 Aleksa Djilas, ‘A House Divided’, in The Black Book of Bosnia: The Consequences of Appeasement, ed. by Nader Mousavizadeh (New York: New Republic Books, 1996), p. 20; see also Vera Vratusa-Zunjiç, ‘The Intrinsic Connection Between Endogenous and Exogenous Factors of Social (Dis)integration: A Sketch of the Yugoslav Case’, Dialogue, 22–23 (June/September 1997) <http://www.bglink.com/business/ dialogue/vratusa.html> [Accessed 18 June 1998], 3; Djordje Jankoviç, ‘The Serbs in the Balkans in the Light of Archaeological Findings’, in The Serbian Question in the Balkans: Geographical and Historical Aspects, ed. by Dušanka Had¥i-Jovanïiç (Belgrade: University of Belgrade Faculty of Geography, 1995), pp. 125–46 (p. 137); Jovan Iliç, ‘The Balkan Geopolitical Knot and the Serbian Question’, in The Serbian Question in the Balkans, ed. by Had¥i-Jovanïiç, p. 16; Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ (Texas: A & M University Press, 1995), p. 81; Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 226–27.

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Croatian origin’.57 Linguistic claims allowed nationalists to argue that BosniaHerzegovina was itself part of historic Croatia, due to the linguistic and ethnic identity of the Bosnian Moslems. In his 1991 affirmation of Croatian sovereignty, Tudjman intimated that ‘territorial adjustments’ would be required since ‘Croatia and Bosnia constitute a geographical and political unity and have always formed a joint state in history’.58 Croatian Defence Minister Gojko Šušak was similarly lucid on the status of this now independent state in one 1996 interview: ‘For me Bosnia-Herzegovina is also the state of Croatian people and for me it is Croatia. For a Bosniak it can be Bosnia, and for a Serb whatever, but according to its constitution it is also the state of Croatian people and as such I consider it to be my homeland’.59 Ante Beljo, Director of the Croatian Information Center, would similarly describe Bosnia as an integral part of ‘Croatian ethnic territory’, with both republics comprising ‘an entity historically, culturally, linguistically, and economically’.60 Other academics contributed spurious statistics to buttress these irridentist claims. Šime Ðodan’s unambiguously titled Bosnia and Herzegovina: a Croatian Land, claimed that ninety-five per cent of Moslems and thirty per cent of Serbs were ethnically Croatian. This argument was based on the contentious theory that all surnames ending in ‘an’ were of Iranian origin, and therefore Croatian. Presumably, the author had names such as Ðodan and Tudjman in mind.61 Supplementing such claims were glossy travel books, such as Ante Ïuvalo’s Croatia and the Croatians, which described Croatia’s eastern borders as Serbia, Kosovo, and Montenegro (i.e.

Bosnia-Herzegovina’s current borders). As Ïuvalo clearly stated in his introduction: ‘further reference to the Croatians and Croatia in this book encompasses the territory of today’s Republic of Croatia and the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina’.62 Unsurprisingly, the territory of this ‘joint’ state, together with its population, was efficiently combined together into a Croatian super-state, imaginatively packaged for prospective western tourists, presumably since ‘today’s’ republics would not be tomorrow’s.

A simple logic pervaded such propaganda. To slightly alter Kamusella: ‘National language = membership of the nation = integral part of the national state’. Since Bosnian Moslems supposedly spoke the Croatian language, then they were ipso facto ethnic Croatians and lapsed Catholics.63 Additionally, since Moslems were former 57

Quoted in War Pictures 1991–1993, ed. by Ante Beljo (Zagreb: Croatian Information Center/Matica Hrvatska Iseljenika, 1993), p. 115.

58 Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: Yugoslavia’s Disintegration and Balkan Politics in Transition (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), p. 97.

59 Dubravko Horvatiç and Stjepan Šešelj, ‘Croatian Culture and Croatian Army: Interview with Croatian Defense Minister Gojko Šušak’, Hrvatsko Slovo, (27 December 1996) <http://www. cdsp. neu.edu/info/students/marko/hrslovo/hrslovo7.html> [Accessed 18 June, 1998].

60 Ante Beljo, Genocide in Yugoslavia (Subdury, ON: Northern Tribune Publishing, 1985), p. 12.

61 ‘Review of: Sime Dodan, Bosnia and Hercegovina, a Croatian Land (Zagreb: Meditor, 1994)’, Feral Tribune (29 December, 1997).

62 Croatia and the Croatians, ed. by Ante Ïuvalo (Zagreb: Northern Tribune Publishing, 1991), pp. 19–20.

63 This issue is discussed in Warren Zimmermann, Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and its Destroyers — America’s Last Ambasador Tells What Happened and Why (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 181–82; see also Dubravko Horvatiæ, ‘Our Existence is a Crime’, Hrvatsko Slovo, (22 March, 1996) <http:// www.cdsp.neu.edu/info/students/marko/hrslovo/hrslovo5.html> [Accessed 18 June 1998].

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Croats, their land was also Croatian land, and the ‘liberation’ of Moslem territory would bring the Moslems back into the fold after centuries of following their ‘psychological identification’. Thus would Tudjman claim with pride after his troops took control of Herzegovina in September 1995: ‘Croatia accepts the task of Europeanisation of Bosnian Moslems at the behest of the Western European powers’.64 The inherent ugliness of this civilizing mission had been demonstrated all too clearly two years before by Tudjman’s public admission that Croatian ‘collection centres’ had been established within Croatian-held Herzeg-Bosna, housing an estimated twenty thousand inmates. That ‘others had them too’ was enough of an excuse for Tudjman, who did not seem to deny, nor regret, that such camps existed.65 The Croats of course were not alone, as the Serbs were equally bound to their own nonsensical linguistic strategies. On the advice of Serbian linguist Pavle Iviç, Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia began using the Belgrade štokavski/ekavski dialect and the Cyrillic script, even though few if any of them had more than a nodding acquaintance with either. As a result, both politicians and academics appeared bumbling and semi-literate when addressing their national constituencies on television or radio.66 Linguist Ranko Bugarski described this as a form of ‘linguistic schizophrenia’, where people spoke one dialect and listened to another.67 Bosnian Moslems soon picked up on this trend, and began introducing Turkish and Arabic loan words into their new language, along with the letter ‘h’ in selected words.68 Moslem linguist Senahid Haliloviç’s logic was impeccable on this point: if both Serbs and Croats had rejected ‘Serbo–Croat’ then why should Moslems continue to adhere to a language which did not even contain their name? Writer Alija Isakoviç claimed without a trace of irony that Moslems had every right to their own language, since ‘Bosnian differs from Serbian and Croatian as much as the latter two languages differ from each other’.69 In 1993, three distinct Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian languages were recognized with the passage of a language bill.70 The political nature behind this move became obvious during the 1995 Dayton Accord negotiations, when participants had the choice of simultaneous translation into ‘Serbian’, ‘Croatian’, and ‘Bosnian’.

64

Michael Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide In Bosnia (London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 95.

65 Gordan Maliç, ‘Herceg Camp’, Feral Tribune (29 April, 1996) <http://www.cdsp.neu.edu/info/ students/marko/feral/feral31.html> [Accessed 18 June 1998]. By ‘others’, Tudjman referred to Serbian camps, of which they controlled thirteen major camps to the Croats’ four. These, however, were only the largest. The International Red Cross would eventually document a total of fifty-one, many small and impromptu — located in camp grounds, schools, even movie theatres. Serbian camps were exposed during 1992, and figured prominently in the famous ITN–Channel 4 series on Bosnia. See Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide (New York: MacMillan, 1993), p. 23.

66 Joseph Slowinski, ‘The Politics of Language and Education: Past and Present in Yugoslavia’.

67 Jaksiç, ‘Nationalism and Language’.

68 Greenberg, ‘Language, Nationalism and Serbian Politics’.

69 Slowinski, ‘The Politics of Language and Education’.

70 Ibid.

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Amusingly, however, while there were officially three separate channels from which to select, there was only one translator for all three ‘languages’. As American negotiator Richard Holbrooke discovered, no one seemed particularly disturbed by this reality. Language was a matter of national pride, not expediency, and all of the participants spoke English as well as each others’ ‘languages’ fluently.71 In all three cases, linguistic politics served as an important role in defining national groups and differentiating one from the other. Peter Alter has argued that ‘social groups also tend to define their national identity and national consciousness in negative terms . . . Encounters with ‘alien’, other forms of language, religion, customs, political systems make people aware of close ties, shared values and common ground’.72 Ernest B. Haas’s definition of the nation includes the proposition that national consciousness is derived primarily from ‘some set of characteristics which differentiate them (in their own minds) from outsiders’. Sentiments of ‘difference, or even uniqueness’ are for Haas at the root of national collective consciousness.73 Is Croatia alone?

Croats elevated themselves through myths of election, and demonized the Serbs as eastern, backwards, barbaric, and cruel. In fairness to the Croats, however, the Serbs were following exactly the same procedure, and had also been practising a form of exclusivist nationalism. The Serbs also saw themselves as a unique, chosen nation, and used their own myths of election throughout the conflict to justify their right to intervene in Kosovo, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. For some, the Serbs were ‘purely spiritual’ . . . ‘turned towards Christ and the “Empire of Heaven”’, to quote one historian.74 Serbia as the ‘new Byzantium’, and the Serbs as a ‘heavenly people’ were to become increasingly popular motifs. Equally prevalent was the view that the Serbs had much in common with the Jews, as fellow victims of horrendous suffering.75 Like the Croats, although to a lesser extent, Serbs were also debating the future of the Serbian language and what it should look like. While retaining the ekavski dialect seemed to be popular amongst the majority of the population, some proposed continuing the split between eastern and western variants, since western Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia continued to use the ijekavski dialect, even if some were trying hard not to. With the influx of ijekavski-speaking refugees from Bosnia and Croatia after 1995, such a split seemed a good idea. Nevertheless, the debate continues.76 While less virulent in their pursuit of an exclusivist language, other postCommunist countries also participated in a form of linguistic nationalism. In the Baltic region, Estonia’s 1989 ‘State Language Law’ privileged Estonian language speakers in civil service positions, in a manner similar to Latvia’s 1994 ‘Latvia First’ 71

Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 232.

Peter Alter, Nationalism (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), p. 19.

73 Gordana Uzelac, ‘Perception of the Nation: The Example of Croatian Students in 1993’, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, 26 (1999), 123.

74 The Uprooting: A Dossier of the Croatian Genocide Policy Against the Serbs, ed. by Bozidar Zeïeviç (Belgrade: Velauto International, 1992), p. 10.

75 Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia, p. 73.

76 Greenberg, ‘Language, Nationalism and Serbian Politics’.

72

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legislation, where Latvian language and history exams were required as a condition of citizenship. Ukraine introduced its own ‘Ukrainian Language Laws’ in 1989, designed to reduce the historic impact of Russian language and culture. Moldova also promulgated its own nationalistic language laws in the same year, prioritizing Moldovan over Russian and Romanian — the languages spoken by a significant minority of the population. Despite these cases, Croatia was one of the few countries to relentlessly pursue such policies throughout the 1990s. In other cases, countries eventually amended their legislation to make it more inclusive and less intolerant, for example Estonia in 1995, Latvia in 1998 and Moldova in 1994.77 Conclusions In December 1999, Tudjman’s long battle with stomach cancer ended with his death at the age of seventy-seven. In the national elections soon after, Ivica Raïan and the Social Democrats decisively ended HDZ control, assuming power in early 2000 with Stipe Mesiç as President. Since that time, Croatia has drawn closer to the European Union and a decade of intolerance has drawn to a close. The end of Tudjman’s regime has heralded a new era in Croatia, one which is paradoxically much more ‘western’ and ‘European’ than during his disreputable administration.

However, this change in government marked a time when most of the objectives of Croatian language policy had already been met. Kamusella has isolated four key objectives of linguistic nationalism, all of which were accomplished by Croatian nationalists during Tudjman’s time in office. These include language as ‘the main binding factor for the nation, especially in cases where no common state existed’, as ‘the instrument for excluding [. . .] persons with no or insufficient knowledge of the national/state/official language’, as ‘justification/the instrument of enlarging the territory of the nation state’, and as ‘justification/the instrument of enlarging the numerical membership of the nation’.78 The re-emergence of the Croatian language, both during and after federal Yugoslavia, served as a means of rallying co-nationals together in defence of the nation. Language tests and laws served the purpose of excluding Croatia’s Serb minority from the evolving spirit of a newly independent Croatia, as did the rejection of Cyrillic. Further, a re-appraisal of the language allowed for the inclusion of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Bosnian people themselves within an imagined Croatian super-state.

Serbo-Croatian as it existed during Tito’s time is defunct, and the debates over the issue are consigned to history. As early as 1996, the language had changed sufficiently to allow Mladen Klemenïiç to happily proclaim that ‘as the Croats and the Serbs have their own separate states, the language issue is no more. Each side will develop its own variant language freely and independently, and they will be able to name it in accordance with national sentiment or any other heart’s content’.79 In 2001 Croatia celebrated its ten-year anniversary as an independent country, a country now free of Serbian violence and HDZ authoritarianism. Nevertheless, 77

Taras, ‘Nations and Language-Building’, pp. 91–94.

Kamusella, ‘Language as an Instrument of Nationalism’, pp. 244–45.

79 Mladen Klemenciç, ‘Croatia rediviva’, in The Changing Shape of the Balkans, ed. by F. W. Carter and H. T. Norris (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996) p. 107.

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some continue to tilt against windmills. Sporadic books have been published on the separateness of the Croatian language, as if the war in Yugoslavia continued unabated. Miro Kaïiç’s Croatian and Serb — Delusions and Forgeries, was translated into French in 2000, with a special new chapter on ‘Why Croatian cannot possibly be Serbo-Croatian’.80 New language books, such as the Hrvatski jeziïni savjetnik (Croatian Language Counsellor), and the Rjeïnik hrvatskog jezika (Croatian dictionary) were published in 1999 and 2001 respectively. They compliment a growing number of journals devoted to language which have emerged since 1990. The two newest additions, Fluminensia and Jezikoslovlje, bring the total number of Croatian language journals to ten for a readership of just over four million people.81 Certainly many nations have produced their own standardized languages based on one specific dialect, and there is nothing morally wrong with such an exercise.

Nor is Croatia’s right to self-determination in question — this was but one of twenty post-Communist countries to chose independence after the Cold War.82 Rather, what needs to be addressed in the Croatian case were the often violent motivations behind linguistic re-creation and the quest for independence. Linguistic re-creation was used to differentiate Croats from Serbs, to demonstrate that Croatia’s troublesome 11 per cent did not belong. It was also designed to excuse Croatia’s contribution to the brutal division of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the denial of the legitimate rights of Bosnian Moslems to their own language, religion, and territorial autonomy. Like all examples of linguistic standardization, the reformulation of Croatian was by necessity exclusivist, a process designed to suppress regional variations and deny people the right to communicate on their own terms with one another.

Biographical Note Dr David B. Macdonald has been a Lecturer in Political Studies at Otago University, New Zealand, since July 2002. Previously, he held the position of Assistant Visiting Professor in the Social, Legal, and Economic Sciences Department of the École Supérierure de Commerce de Paris (ESCP-EAP) from 1999–2002. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

80

‘Book ‘Croatian, Serb — Delusions And Forgeries’ Published In French Paris’, Hina (3 May, 2000) <http://www.dalmatia.net/croatia/language/miro_kacic.htm> [Accessed 23 July, 2000].

81 Franoliç, ‘The Croatian Language Today’.

82 Benyamin Neuberger, ‘National Self-Determination: A Theoretical Discussion’, Nationalities Papers, 29 (2001), 391.

Slovo, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2003

Soviet Language Reform: Practical Polemics Against Idealist Linguistics VLADISLAVA REZNIK University of Strathclyde Soviet language construction in the 1920s–30s has often been examined in broad terms of the relationship between language and power or, more specifically, from the standpoint of its contribution to the sociology of language. This article, however, concentrates on the analysis of language reform in its relation to the evolution of Soviet linguistic theory. It is argued that in the course of language construction Soviet linguists elaborated an original materialist method, based on Saussure’s sociological conception of language as a social fact and a Marxist interpretation of the relationship between language and society. This synthesized method allowed Soviet language planners to overcome Saussure’s abstraction and treat language as a tangible material phenomenon, susceptible to a conscious language change on the part of society in general and its language specialists in particular. It is further demonstrated that the elaboration of a materialist method ensured the practical success of language reform. Therefore Soviet linguists’ contribution is regarded as one of the earliest examples of a sociolinguistic approach to language, on the one hand, and as a more productive implementation of Marxism in linguistics, on the other.

The Soviet 1920s and early 1930s are well known as a period of the most intensive, ambitious, and pioneering multinational language development. Soon after the Revolution, the Bolshevik leadership declared a new policy that guaranteed ‘the most complete equality of nationalities and their languages’.1 It emphasized that the new multinational Soviet state, in contrast to the Russian Empire, was to have no official language. Russian was to cease to be the language of state, culture, and education; every citizen was granted the right to his or her own national identity, and the right to use their mother tongue in private and in public affairs. It was also envisaged that educational and cultural materials would be made available in all of the country’s non-Russian languages.

In March 1921 the new language policy was formulated in a resolution of the 10th Communist Party Congress. It was aimed, above all, at the immediate and complete national self-determination of non-Russian peoples, who were encouraged to form and consolidate judicial, administrative, governmental, and economic bodies, and to develop education, press, clubs, and other professional and cultural institutions 1

V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 25 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1958–65), p. 146.

© School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London, 2003

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in all the languages of the non-Russian population. In practical terms, the intention was to make as complete and functional as possible more than one hundred national languages of non-Russian peoples, of which only twenty had their own written forms, and only thirteen an established literary norm. In response to the Party’s edict, Soviet linguists and educators embarked on a programme of language reform unprecedented in its scale. Whilst acknowledging the immense utopianism of this undertaking, as well as a number of potentially problematic political implications, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that we are also dealing here with a programme of language planning of daring ambition and novelty, both in terms of its aims and, to the often unacknowledged credit of the linguists involved, of its achievements.

Soviet language reform has previously been examined in broad terms of the sociology of language or, more specifically, in terms of the relationship between language and power. The present article, however, looks at language reform from the standpoint of its significance for the development of a new theoretical paradigm — a materialist linguistics.

It was clear that the tasks of such a challenging language policy could be fulfilled only if a thoroughly new linguistic method was worked out and adopted as the theoretical basis of language planning. Thus, the search for this new — and specifically materialist — approach to language was carried out through a number of pioneering linguistic experiments, including the creation of new alphabets for national languages without a tradition of writing, considerable transformation of old writing systems, elaboration of orthographies, vocabularies, terminologies, and even in certain instances the creation of entirely new languages. These practical experiments, in turn, contributed to the evolution and crystallization of the theoretical basis of a materialist linguistics, whose main principle — in fact, its only clearly formulated principle — was a creative, active approach to language, facilitating a process of conscious language construction and change.

According to Einar Haugen’s definition, ‘language planning is the establishment of goals, policies and procedures for a language community’.3 For the specifically Soviet context, however, we will adopt the more precise definition of Viktor Grigor’ev, who characterizes language policy as ‘the theory and practice of a conscious influence on the course of language development on the part of society; in short, goal-oriented and scientifically grounded guidance of the function of existing languages and the creation and improvement of new linguistic means of communication’.4 This definition is consistent with the fact that, in the Soviet 1920s, the term language policy [iazykovaia politika] was used interchangeably with language construction [iazykovoe stroitel’stvo], which referred to ‘the purposeful intervention of society (represented by specialist scientists) into the spontaneous process of language development, together with the organized management of this process’.5 The fact 2 Iu. D. Desheriev, ‘Razvitie mladopis’mennykh iazykov narodov SSSR v sovetskuiu epokhu’, Voprosy iazykoznaniia, 5 (1957), 18–30 (p. 18).

3 Bernard Comrie and Gerald Stone, The Russian Language since the Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 2.

4 M. I. Isaev, National Languages in the USSR: Problems and Solutions (Moscow: Progress, 1977), p. 13.

5 Isaev, National Languages in the USSR, p. 12.

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that Soviet language planning was understood as a conscious and scientificallyguided intervention and attempt to influence language on the part of society is the key concept of the present discussion. Further, I will argue, it is also the fundamental ideological principle that distinguishes the materialist linguistic method from Saussure’s idealist conception of language as an abstract system of signs, existing independently from the speaking collective, and not susceptible to any intentional influence on the part of that collective.

The development of a materialist linguistic method: Saussure An analysis of the linguistic method elaborated by the theorists and practitioners of Soviet language planning in the 1920s and early 1930s shows that a certain ideological conformity of scientific positions was achieved in the course of language construction work. Many scholars saw a materialist method as the only suitable instrument for resolving the immense practical tasks of language reform. This is not to say, however, that any unanimously agreed definition of the materialist method existed. The general presupposition was that a materialist approach rested on Marxist principles, regarding language as a social phenomenon (and, almost without doubt, a superstructural category) that should be studied in its immediate interdependence with the social, political, and economic life of society. Moreover, and most importantly, Soviet language planners disputed and sought to overcome the traditional belief in the intangible existence of language, with which people cannot and should not tamper.

I have already stated elsewhere that the conventional belief in the independent and intangible life of language, which had been well established and professed in nineteenth-century linguistics, was characteristic of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic theory as well. However, it is of primary importance to emphasize that Saussure, who had carried out his earlier linguistic research along the lines of the comparative–historical method, upheld this traditional attitude to language in his otherwise revolutionary sociological theory that brought about the decisive shift in the twentieth-century linguistic paradigm. Saussure’s concept of language became known in 1916 in the form of one of the most influential books of the century, Cours de linguistique générale [Course in General Linguistics], which had a profound and lasting effect on Russian linguists.

Saussure’s concept was essentially sociological and established the nature of language as that of social fact. In the search for a real object of linguistic inquiry, Saussure made a sharp distinction between langage, langue, and parole. He understood parole as actual speech production, influenced by the individual will of the speaker, whereas langue constituted an abstract social system of signs, shared by all the individuals of the speaking community and beyond the reach of the individual will. Saussure made it clear that langue is the proper object of linguistic analysis, since only langue is immune to the influence of volitional factors and can be studied scientifically. In separating langue from parole, Saussure at the same time separated what is social from what is individual, and what is essential from what is accessory and accidental.6 He relied upon the metaphor of a dictionary, of which every individual member of the given speaking community holds an identical copy.

6

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London: Peter Owen, 1964), p. 14.

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Whilst presenting language as an abstract system of signs, Saussure also insisted that the only essential thing in this system is a union of concepts and soundpatterns, deposited in the mind of the speaker. Their sum, stored in the minds of all individuals, could be identified as the social bond that constitutes language; it is only within a collectivity that signs become firmly associated with concepts and ‘the social crystallization of language comes about’.7 Language is then defined as ‘a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty’.8 Thus, Saussure’s contribution was to elucidate language as an essentially social phenomenon and formulate linguistics as a sociological science, delivering it from both historical and psychological perspectives, which had dominated the study of language for more than thirty years.

It was Saussure’s insistence on the social nature of language and his sociological perspective that made his theory immediately popular amongst Russian scholars, who would also search for a new approach to language on sociological grounds.

The most significant among them was Ivan Baudouin de Courtenay, whose observations on the social nature of language were of primary importance for presenting linguistics as a sociological science. Similarly, members of the Moscow Linguistic Circle recognized the affinity between Saussure and their own linguistic research.

Most importantly, however, the reasons for Saussure’s favourable reception by the Russian linguistic community go beyond the limits of mere theoretical and/or methodological correspondence of scientific ideas. The intellectual atmosphere of the 1920s was dominated by Marxist sociology and the prevailing ‘climate of opinion’ favoured a sociological approach in the arts and science. Moreover, ideological adherence to the philosophy of dialectical materialism, as well as the practical tasks of language reform, called for a materialist method of linguistic research. Simply understanding language as a social fact was the best rudimentary approximation to the prevailing materialist philosophy. Therefore, Saussure’s sociological conception met an eager response on the part of Soviet linguists involved in language reform, and laid the foundations for their particular materialist method.

Of no less importance for Soviet language planners were the other two key aspects of Saussure’s concept of language. The need to establish autonomous linguistic inquiry was the driving force behind the strong distinction that Saussure made between the study of language as a static system and the study of language change in historical perspective, or, in other words, the distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics. Saussure maintained that synchronic linguistics constitutes the autonomous field of linguistic inquiry, devoted to the study of the language system in and of itself, and independent of historical, psychological, or individual factors. Synchronic linguistics was based on the primacy of living, spoken languages, and supplied the linguist with universal laws that allowed for a systematic study of any individual language with the help of a uniform structural methodology. Thus, Saussure established the autonomy of linguistic inquiry and emphasized that synchronic linguistics should remain rigorously distinct from 7 8

Ibid., p. 9.

Ibid.

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diachronic (historical) linguistics. This allowed him to ascertain the primacy of spoken language and make the language system the real object of scientific inquiry, in contrast to the nineteenth-century focus on either the empirical study of disparate individual acts of speaking or an abstractly conceived historical linguistic analysis.

This central aspect of Saussure’s theory came to be particularly useful for the activists of Soviet language construction, who, equipped with the methodology of synchronic linguistic inquiry, set out to codify disparate vernaculars, compile descriptive grammars, and modify and standardize existing alphabets. In their understanding, any language was an individual variant of the universal system, to which uniform laws of function and structure could be applied.

Last but not least, Saussure’s semiological conception of language as a collection of signs profoundly affected the evolution of phonology in Soviet, as well as European, linguistics. The linguistic sign, according to Saussure, comprises the signifier, a sound pattern, and the signified, a concept, both of which are deposited in the mind. Saussure made it clear that the sound pattern is as distinct from the actual sound as the concept is distinct from the actual object. Saussure’s view of the signifier as an abstract sound pattern received almost universal acceptance, no less so in the Soviet Union of the 1920s, where it contributed to the evolution of the concept of the phoneme. Phonology was based not upon physical differences of sound, but on the ability to distinguish between concepts. The distinction between a physical phonetic level and an abstract phonemic level enabled Soviet linguists, whose primary concern was to codify various languages without a tradition of writing, to deal with abstract sound patterns, as opposed to simply ‘sound phenomena’. Therefore, with Saussure’s concept of the sound pattern as its cornerstone, the phonological approach formed the theoretical basis of the alphabet reforms and was immediately applied practically in various codification procedures.

Thus, we arrive at the conclusion that the ascent of Saussure’s framework in the Soviet 1920s can be explained by its sociological orientation, in the first place, as well as by its primary interest in spoken language and its methodological adequacy to the problems of language reform. It is not surprising, then, that Saussure’s theory laid the foundation for a new sociological approach to language and, ultimately, for a new materialist linguistic method in Soviet linguistics.

However, a number of crucial and even definitive differences exist between Saussure’s original framework and its variant, elaborated and adopted as the leading method of Soviet language reform. More specifically, Soviet linguists opposed Saussure’s abstraction and, while accepting the view of language as a system of socially shared signs, they also rejected the idea that it is an abstract system.9 In the search for a true materialist approach to language, Soviet scholars opposed the notion that the stability of the language system is only violated by contingent acts of 9 This split, intrinsic for Saussure’s theory and immediately recognized by Soviet linguists, has not been reconciled in post-Saussurean linguistics. Sociolinguistics pursued Saussure’s view of the social nature of language (the tradition in which Soviet language planners of the 1920s hold pride of place for their pioneering research in the field), whereas structuralist currents and Chomskyan generative linguistics pursued Saussure’s view of the abstract nature of language. Many scholars believe that an eventual reconciliation of this split would constitute a major breakthrough in the understanding of language.

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speaking. Furthermore, they disputed Saussure’s belief in historical transmission, which effectively prevents language from undergoing any fundamental change.

Finally, and most importantly, they rejected the central Saussurean postulate that the individual can neither create nor modify language, and is confined to its passive assimilation.10 Soviet language planners conducted a practical polemic against these idealist aspects of Saussure’s framework. In the course of language construction they adopted a creative, dialectical approach that enabled them to overcome the conservative belief in the independent intangible existence of an abstract language system, and to prove its susceptibility to individual and social influence and change. Without such an approach, the implementation of Soviet language policy would have been impossible.11 Iakubinskii The most explicit declaration of the materialist basis of Soviet language planning — its de facto ideological manifesto — was made by a scholar who did not take an active part in practical language construction work, but contributed to its theoretical foundation. Lev Iakubinskii’s ‘Ferdinand de Saussure o nevozmozhnosti iazykovoi politiki’, written in 1929 and published in 1931, while certainly polemical in character, nonetheless demonstrates the fundamental distinctiveness of the materialist position taken by Soviet linguists in their approach to language.

Iakubinskii begins by confronting Saussure’s paradoxical idea of the simultaneous immutability and mutability of the sign. Indeed, for Saussure, society passively accepts language from preceding generations, and it is the historical factor of transmission that prohibits any sudden widespread change. Thus, the sign is immutable. On the other hand, language undergoes inevitable change through time, which means that the sign is mutable.12 Saussure, however, fails to name the forces of change; he merely speaks of a certain abstract effect of time that makes mutability inescapable.13 Saussure’s students and editors, Bally and Sechehaye, have attempted to explain this apparent paradox by arguing that language changes despite the inability of speakers to change it — it is intangible but not unchanging.14 Saussure himself, while emphasizing the essentially arbitrary nature of the sign, believed nonetheless that for the linguistic community, which receives language from preceding generations, the signifier becomes so firmly associated with concept that it cannot be changed or substituted. This firm association, fixed in the minds of speakers, renders language, if not quite intangible in the proper sense of that word, then at least far from the tangible object of individual or collective apprehension: 10

Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, pp. 14–15.

It is worth mentioning in passing that many Soviet linguists of a materialist orientation regarded applicability to language planning as a necessary driving force behind any theoretical linguistic research. Thus, for Evgenii Polivanov’s view that the phenomena disclosed by linguistic analysis should be understood only in terms of their relevance and importance for the future development of language and should become the material for a concrete language policy, see Vladimir Alpatov, 150 iazykov i politika: 1917–1997 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk, 1997), p. 51.

12 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, pp. 71–72.

13 Ibid., pp. 77–78.

14 Ibid., p. 74, footnote.

11

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The signifier, though to all appearances freely chosen with respect to the idea that it represents, is fixed, not free, with respect to the linguistic community that uses it. The masses have no voice in the matter, and the signifier chosen by language could be replaced by no other. [. . .] No individual, even if he willed it, could modify in any way at all the choice that has been made; and what is more, the community itself cannot control so much as a single word; it is bound to the existing language.15

Iakubinskii argues that if Saussure is right and language is intangible, unreachable for the individual or the community of speakers, then language policy as an intentional and conscious influence on language is impossible. In other words, Saussure denies the very possibility of ‘language policy’. In 1929, however, at the very height of Soviet language construction, there was clearly no actual need for Iakubinskii to prove the contrary. Iakubinskii offers nonetheless a useful refutation of the four basic theoretical reasons advanced by Saussure in support of his hypothesis: THE ARBITRARY NATURE OF THE SIGN

According to Saussure, the arbitrary nature of the sign protects language from any attempt to modify it. The linguistic sign, due to its arbitrariness, has no solid ground, nor is there a reasonable basis for discussion as to why a particular signifier has come to be associated with a particular signified, or of possible reasons for its change: ‘There is no reason for preferring soeur to sister, Ochs to boeuf, etc.’16 For Iakubinskii, Saussure’s concept is correct only from the standpoint of his abstract formal-logical way of reasoning. If viewed solely as an element of the abstract language system, the linguistic sign will, indeed, appear arbitrary, contingent, and non-motivated. It is, however, a mistake from the very outset to detach the social phenomenon of language from its basis, i.e. from society. Words, Iakubinskii argues, do not exist between the earth and the sky; on the contrary, the linguistic sign develops numerous associations with other signs within the system of language and, most importantly, in society, in the daily usage of the speaking collective. Thus, transformations of society bring about changes in the linguistic sign, which becomes susceptible to discussion and influence. This ‘discussion’, for Iakubinskii a conscious process of selection of the linguistic sign, can be public or private, collective or individual. In order to exemplify a public discussion, Iakubinskii refers to the case of the Czech language reform in the early nineteenth century,17 when Czech underwent deliberate purges and was deprived of its

15

Ibid., p. 71.

Ibid., p. 73.

17 Open public discussions of language reform procedures were not a common event in the Soviet 1920s. Such discussions are not, in general, typical of a totalitarian system, capable of enforcing its language policy through a number of state institutions. In a democratic society, however, languageplanning goals, procedures, and results normally undergo a wide public discussion. Thus, for instance, the current debate in the Russian mass media concerning the proposed orthographic reform of Russian, and the possible Tatar language transition from Cyrillic to Latin script (which recently came to an abrupt end with the prohibition of such a transition issued by the Russian Duma).

16

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words of German origin. An individual process of selection and, if necessary, change occurs when a speaker tries to adjust the way he/she speaks in a certain social situation, when peasants, for example, adjust their dialect in response to the urban norm, striving to advance themselves in a community of more educated speakers. The Czech bourgeoisie favoured the use of the word divadlo instead of the more common theatre, teatr, Theater, because for them it was a sign of distinction from the pro-German feudals, whose Czech speech was full of German borrowings. Thus, language in its development is inseparable from social processes and relations, and particular choices of particular linguistic signs can be seen to be specifically motivated.19 THE MULTIPLICITY OF SIGNS NECESSARY TO FORM ANY LANGUAGE

Saussure believed that linguistic signs are limitless, and that this is an important deterrent to language change. He recognized, however, that alphabets, which are also semiotic systems, can in case of need be changed and replaced; the number of signs in them (letters) is in practice limited within the range of 20–40.20 Iakubinskii’s response is centred on Saussure’s own inconsistency: in admitting that a written sign is not intangible, Saussure must accept the principle of identity between the systems of written and sound signs. However, the main problem is that it is not quite clear what Saussure implies when he refers to the limitless number of linguistic signs. Even the number of words in a language is not unlimited. Moreover, the number of distinctive phonemes in any language is limited within the same range of 20–40. Thus, the second argument of Saussure cannot be accepted either.21 THE OVER-COMPLEXITY OF THE SYSTEM

Language, for Saussure, constitutes a system. All its elements are interconnected, and none of them can be understood or defined independently of their relations to other elements or their position within the whole system. The speaking masses are apparently completely ignorant of this complexity of the language system and the interrelationship of its elements. This system can only be grasped through reflection; even while using the language on a daily basis, the majority of people apparently cannot reflect upon it. As for specialists, grammarians, and logicians, they can, certainly, reflect upon a language and even in theory change it, but according to Saussure, such attempts have always been futile.22 In analysing this third argument, Iakubinskii distinguishes between two aspects of the problem. On the one hand, Saussure asserts that the speaking masses are not able to reflect consciously on the language they use. Iakubinskii challenges this notion by saying that while speakers 18 The same can be said about the contemporary position with, for example, French or Icelandic, which are carefully protected from the influence of, or contamination by, other languages, and English in particular. In France there exists an official body for the supervision of the purity of the French language; in Iceland, the English neologisms present in so many other languages do not exist, and, where necessary, new words are created (a fax, for example, is simply a ‘telephone letter’, [sìmbréf]).

19 L. P. Iakubinskii, ‘Ferdinand de Saussure o nevozmozhnosti iazykovoi politiki’, Iazyk i ego funktsionirovanie (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), pp. 71–82 (pp. 76–77).

20 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 73.

21 Iakubinskii, ‘Ferdinand de Saussure o nevozmozhnosti iazykovoi politiki’, pp. 77–78.

22 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 73.

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do not, of course, think about language as a whole, they are conscious of the language they use in different situations. Language is not a unitary abstract system; it exists in the form of numerous social subsystems. In a simple but hugely effective example, a collective of speakers whose language is somehow different in pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary from that of others will become aware of this simply by hearing the difference. And once such recognition has taken place, every speaker is able to reflect on his or her own language and to change it in response to contextual circumstances. On the other hand, Saussure does not admit the possibility of conscious language change even on the part of linguists and other specialists, which means that he denies the possibility of language planning in principle. However, the argument is not supported by any illustration, apart from the remark that all such interventions in the past have failed.23 Iakubinskii argues that past experience cannot be accepted as an incontestable proof, because life is not static, and that what was impossible in the past may be possible in the present or may become so in the future.24 COLLECTIVE INERTIA TOWARDS INNOVATION

The most important consideration advanced by Saussure is simply that language is at every moment the concern of everyone. It is spread throughout society and is used by all its members continuously. Everyone participates in language. This is, according to Saussure, the main reason why language, of all semiotic systems and social institutions, is less susceptible to specifically focused initiative. It blends with the life of society, whose inertia and conservatism with regard to language is the primary force that ensures resistance to change.25 Iakubinskii is most critical of this last point. He argues that society cannot be viewed as a mythical homogeneous mass. One cannot speak of the inertia of the whole of society, since this society is subdivided into classes, and each class is inert or active in its own particular way, and in different periods of time. To illustrate his point of view, Iakubinskii again refers to the example of the Czech language reform in the early nineteenth century.

The initiative to substitute German borrowings with their Czech equivalents, undertaken by language specialists, drew a welcome response from the actively transforming class of the Czech bourgeoisie and led to fully-fledged language change, despite any possible inertia on the part of the main bulk of speakers. Moreover, the very fact that language is at every moment everybody’s concern and is constantly influenced by all ought to make it more liable to change. Variations in the language system, which occur in the process of its use, may or may not be fortuitous or transient, but, on the whole, they take place precisely because language is in constant use by the various social groups of which society is comprised.

Having analysed the four basic Saussurean arguments against the possibility of conscious language change, either on the part of society or by language specialists, 23

Ibid.

Iakubinskii, ‘Ferdinand de Saussure o nevozmozhnosti iazykovoi politiki’, pp. 79–80. We might add that Saussure is at least partial in his account of past attempts at conscious language change, which are both numerous and far from universally unsuccessful: one simple example is the deliberate changes in French vocabulary introduced at the time of the French Revolution.

25 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 74.

24

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Iakubinskii reaches an important conclusion. He once again points out the abstract, formal–logical approach to language elaborated by the Geneva School, and highlights the principle difference and innovation of Soviet linguistic method. First and foremost, Soviet scholars studied the object of linguistics, language, not as an abstract system, but in the concrete reality of its existence in society. Secondly, they took into account the subject of language, the speaking collective. And last but not least, they regarded the speaking collective as a heterogeneous mass, consisting of different social groups and classes. It thus becomes impossible to speak of language as an abstract system, since, being a social phenomenon, language must exist in the form of numerous social subsystems. With the development and change of social groups and classes, language itself must undergo development and change.26 It is no exaggeration to say that Iakubinskii effectively outlines the main principles of a new emerging branch in the study of language, sociolinguistics, whose methodological foundation, at the very least, can be attributed to the Soviet linguists and their work in the process of language construction. The sociolinguistic approach allowed the theorists and practitioners of language planning to treat language as a material reality; it emphasized the concept of language’s interrelation with society and its social organization; it highlighted the idea that language varies in different social groups and classes, and that changes in language structure are caused, among other factors, by societal development. Finally, and most importantly in the present context, this materialist approach, which refuted the overwhelming belief in the intangibility of language, formed the methodological basis for language planning, and enabled Soviet linguists to solve complex practical problems in the process of language construction.

Iakubinskii’s definitive conclusions as to the nature of language and its functioning in society can hardly provoke any scepticism. Indeed, from this sociolinguistic perspective language is regarded as a social phenomenon influenced and determined by individual, class, professional, territorial, and other differences existing in the given collective of speakers. Sociolinguistic inquiry is aimed at uncovering, recording, and explaining those differences, which in the long run are understood as the features that allow us to distinguish between social sub-variants (dialects) of language. It is certainly true that these dialects reflect the social structure of society and various interrelations between its heterogeneous members. Thus, it is worth repeating here that Iakubinskii can rightly be credited with one of the earliest formulations of sociolinguistic research principles.27 This, and also Iakubinskii’s unequivocal elucidation of the materialist basis of Soviet language reform, are powerful and to the point. However, certain aspects of his argument, specifically the polemic he conducts against the four postulates of Saussurean linguistics, are open to criticism. First, his response to the question of the arbitrary nature of the sign, which, according to Saussure, effectively prevents language from change. While 26

Iakubinskii, ‘Ferdinand de Saussure o nevozmozhnosti iazykovoi politiki’, p. 81.

The fact that the earliest sociolinguistic research, in terms of its objectives and methods, was carried out by Soviet linguists of the 1920s is not always recognized by Western historiographers of linguistics, who tend to date the origin of sociolinguistics to the late 1940s as a corollary of linguistic geography and area studies.

27

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Saussure speaks about the nature of the linguistic sign and formulates its arbitrariness at the conjunction of the signified and the signifier, Iakubinskii seeks to refute this concept by demonstrating that the choice of the linguistic sign and its use are not arbitrary and are in fact motivated by contextual and social circumstances.

Although it is hard to disagree with Iakubinskii’s consideration on its own, as an argument against Saussure it is untenable, since Iakubinskii analyses phenomena of a completely different realm — the choice of the linguistic sign and its use — which may not serve either as a proof or a contradiction to Saussure’s analysis of the nature of the linguistic sign. Broadly speaking, Saussure is concerned with the ontology of the sign, whereas Iakubinskii is concerned with its pragmatics, which makes his polemical argumentation less rigorous. It is important to bear in mind, however, that Iakubinskii’s article was intended more as an ideological manifesto of Soviet language planning, rather than a work of specifically scientific polemic. It is this pragmatic aim that conditions Iakubinskii’s argument, which otherwise might appear to be an inaccurate characterization of Saussure’s concept.28 Idealism, Marxism, and Materialism One important observation should be made at this point, prior to consideration of the practical effects of Soviet language construction. Soviet linguists believed that their scientific materialist method was Marxist. However, no one seemed to know for sure what Marxism in the study of language meant. Evgenii Polivanov wrote in 1927 that the main achievement of Soviet linguistics in the post-Revolutionary decade was its sociological orientation and the pioneering study of non-Russian languages.29 In 1931 Polivanov published his book Za marksistskoe iazykoznanie, which is probably, despite its explicitly polemical nature, the most unbiased and scientific attempt to clarify and systematize the ideological stance of Soviet linguistics. In spite of its merits, and its clear superiority over more vulgar attempts to do the same, Polivanov’s work remains largely an attempt to force together Marxism and Soviet linguistic scholarship. Polivanov’s failure is, however, hardly surprising, given that the task of defining Marxism in linguistics was practically impossible for a Soviet linguist of the 1920s, and indeed remains so for the contemporary researcher.

There is at least one clear reason why this should be the case. The 1920s was a period when different methodological trends were still tolerated and various interpretations of Marxism were admitted. Polivanov, for example, based his linguistic conception on Marx, as well as on Nikolai Kareev’s historiological ideas. A number of linguists were under the influence of Nikolai Marr’s Japhetic theory, which attempted a ‘dynamic’ interpretation of Marxism, but with the emphasis on an ideological tradition that can be traced back to Hegel and German Idealist 28

It is also particularly relevant not to lose sight of Saussure’s point of relative arbitrariness, which is presented in the Course less forcefully and therefore often ignored. Saussure’s idea is that while signifiers are always radically arbitrary in relation to signifieds, they are less arbitrary in relation to other signifiers. In general, Saussure’s dogma of the radical arbitrariness has been questioned by many linguists of the twentieth century, who argue that linguistic elements may differ in their degree of ‘naturalness’.

29 E. D. Polivanov, Za marksistskoe iazykoznanie (Moscow, 1931), pp. 51–56.

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philosophy. Due to its crucial role in Soviet linguistic history, Marr’s doctrine deserves a more thorough explanation. Marr and his followers claimed that their idiosyncratic theory, known first as ‘Japhetic’ and later as the ‘New Teaching on Language’, was a genuine dialectical materialist method and, consequently, a true implementation of Marxism in linguistics. Indeed, the dialectical origins of Marr’s doctrine, with its focus on history and dynamic language evolution, can be traced to leftist interpretations of Hegel. Marr spoke of the unity of the glottogonic process and the evolution of languages through a number of stages, which conserve the cultural energy of the historical period and reflect the socio-economic formation of any given society. Marr underlined the role of language crossings and the natural capacity of language for revolutionary change in response to changes in the surrounding objective world. He proposed, for example, a typological classification of languages, in which the grammatical type of language corresponded to the social formation of society and changed to reflect its socio-political transformations. Marr also claimed that all languages came into being from four sound elements, which first served as the totem names of the prehistoric human tribes and were associated with the places of their geographical origin. He believed that any word of any language could be reduced to one of the four elements or their combination, and that sound correspondences (real and/or imaginary) between many words of various languages were explained not by their genetic relation, but by similar cultural conditions of their evolution. These, and many other essentially idealist ideas of the New Teaching on Language, relate Marr to a wider romantic, or idealist, tradition, which is associated with left Hegelianism in Europe, on the one hand, and, on the other, with the so-called Lovers of Wisdom [Liubomudry] — a group of Friedrich Schelling’s followers in the 1820s in Russia.31 We need not forget, however, that Marr’s linguistics was declared and recognized as not only dialectical, but specifically materialist, to the extent of gaining the position of the official Marxist linguistic doctrine in the late 1920s. The controversy of this ascent from an ideological point of view has been widely discussed. Indeed, the successful return of idealism in Marxist clothing in the intellectual atmosphere of the 1920s is little short of astonishing, especially after the 1925 Russian publication of Engels’s The Dialectics of Nature. This work, as was the case with Anti-Dühring, was permeated with the Darwinist theory of evolution, and represented the positivist wing of Marxist ideology. With its appearance the idealist, left Hegelian tradition in Marxism began to enjoy much less popularity in Soviet intellectual circles, particularly after the official canonization of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. How was it possible, then, that 30 Boris Gasparov, ‘Tridtsatye gody — zheleznyi vek (k analizu motivov stoletnego vozvrashcheniia u Mandel’shtama)’, in Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age, ed.

by Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes, and Irina Paperno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 150–79 (p. 162).

31 For an interesting interpretation of the opposition between the ‘positivist, objectivist’ and ‘romantic, idealist’ cultural paradigms in biology, literature, literary criticism, and linguistics of the early twentieth century, see Boris Gasparov, ‘Tridtsatye gody — zheleznyi vek (k analizu motivov stoletnego vozvrashcheniia u Mandel’shtama)’; Boris Gasparov, ‘Development or Rebuilding. Views of Academician T. D. Lysenko in the Context of the Late Avant-Garde’, in Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment, ed. by John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 133–53. Boris Gasparov, Literaturnye leitmotivy. Ocherki russkoi literatury XX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), pp. 186–212.

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Marr’s doctrine did not only survive, but enjoyed increasingly strong approval from the authorities? We would suggest that, among other reasons, this could be explained by another specific feature of the New Teaching on Language, its ‘vulgar’ Marxist character, which allowed a deterministic interpretation of the relations between language and society. Marr claimed that language was a category of the superstructure and therefore that all language phenomena were directly determined by material factors, or more precisely, by the relations of production and the socio-economic structure of society. He maintained, for example, that the grammatical category of the singular number developed only with the appearance of private property, much later than that of the plural, which was supposed to prove the primacy of collective over individual ownership and, ultimately, the existence of primeval communism in early human society. However, Marr displayed obvious inconsistency by stating at the same time, and in open contradiction to Engels, that primeval society already had classes and class struggle, in which language had a class character and served as a tool of oppression and social supremacy. Furthermore, Marr insisted that the first human language was manual, and was later transformed into sound language in a revolutionary way, when the people who used it developed a new ideological consciousness on the basis of the new means of production.32 On the whole, Marr’s works are abundant with similar examples, which effectively demonstrate his ‘vulgar’ Marxist rhetoric in its application to linguistic theory. On the other hand, if we look at the New Teaching on Language from a slightly different perspective it becomes obvious that Marr’s interpretation of pivotal Marxist concepts was mechanistic and suggestive of the pre-Hegelian mechanistic materialism. Thus, Marr’s doctrine contained at least one serious paradox: its general conception of language was essentially dialectical and idealist, whereas mechanistic materialist and simplistic Marxist discourse was employed in individual explanations of language evolution and disparate language facts. This, however, was not uncommon for an epoch in which any social or scientific theory was naturally or artificially wrapped in Marxist clothing, and in which the authorities had not yet imposed any serious ideological dictate that would define the officially prescribed ‘brand’ of Marxism.

The idealist character of Marr’s theory, with its primary interest in the prehistory of language, makes it clear why the New Teaching on Language was of little, if any, use in the process of language construction. Even after it became the leading linguistic framework in the late 1920s, in practice Soviet language reform continued to be carried out along the lines of sociolinguistic research, both in terms of its theory and method. There was, however, a feature that united Marr and the activists of language construction. We have already pointed out that in the 1920s Soviet language planners ostensibly agreed, although with different degrees of commitment, that language was a superstructural phenomenon directly influenced by the social, economic, and political life of society. In fact, many Soviet linguists even believed

32 Such declarations can be found throughout Marr’s extensive works. See, for example, N. Ia. Marr, Izbrannye trudy (Moscow-Leningrad, 1933), III, 91–100; Marr, Izbrannye trudy, III, 75; Marr, Izbrannye trudy, II, 271.

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that the Revolution of 1917 had made such a dramatic impact on the Russian language that in certain cases it was possible to speak of two different languages. This is, of course, far too simplistic an interpretation, which nevertheless was provoked by the observation of the real phenomena taking place, above all, in Russian vocabulary. The recognition of apparent differences in territorial, professional, and class sub-variants of standard Russian stimulated pioneering linguistic research in social dialectology and contributed to the process of working out the sociolinguistic criteria for new literary languages. This example, we hope, effectively demonstrates that the deterministic treatment of language as superstructural was not necessarily unproductive. Furthermore, in its extreme way this perspective reflected the materialist understanding of language as a phenomenon born in society, kept alive by society and, most importantly, directly influenced, changed, and managed by society.33 This conviction epitomized Soviet language planners’ belief in the tangibility of language, its material and accessible texture, as opposed to Saussure’s abstract system or Marr’s idealist four elements. Although representing two opposing paradigms in the specific context of Soviet language construction, aspects of both Saussure’s and Marr’s theories were rejected on the same account of being idealist.

On the other hand, a productive synthesis of Saussure’s sociology and Marxist materialism, although potentially problematic in ideological terms, provided a reliable theoretical premise for the practical solution of language construction problems. Moreover, it becomes possible to say that ideological differences were outweighed and swept away by the immediate successful results of language construction, during which a sociolinguistic understanding of language was established, developed, and consolidated in the so-called materialist method as the only workable linguistic method of language reform.

The practical outcomes of post-Revolutionary language planning The achievements of Soviet language construction in the period between 1917 and 1936 are widely known and generally highly appreciated. They certainly serve as the best proof for the theoretical value, methodological accuracy, and practical efficiency of the linguistic method elaborated by Soviet theorists and practitioners of language planning. It is usually recognized that the most impressive accomplishments of language construction were the alphabet reform, the creation of literary languages and the eradication of illiteracy. Various codification procedures, such as graphization and the creation of orthographic and terminological systems, were successfully carried out and considerably extended the range of social functions of the previously unlettered languages.

Whilst analysing the semiological aspect of Saussure’s theory we have emphasized its utmost significance for the phonological work carried out during the alphabet reform. In order to devise alphabets for languages without a writing tradition or to modify the existing ones, it was necessary to identify the meaningful sound 33 Further possible implications, particularly within the so-called ‘totalitarian’ framework, suggest that understanding language as superstructure equated it with consciousness, and thus implied societal (or rather, authoritarian) management and control of people’s consciousness through the creation of a Soviet brand of Newspeak.

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distinctions existing in a language. Only when units of meaning, phonemes, were identified, did it become possible to understand the rules of their combination into words and hence to devise written signs suitable for their representation. Saussure’s concept of abstract sound pattern in this particular case was ironically (in the context of the whole anti-Saussurean debate) understood as contributing to the idea of the tangibility of language, as it provided a basis for overcoming the discrepancy of individual physical sounds and for the codification of abstract phonemes in written symbols.

This example again demonstrates how Soviet linguistic method emerged from the intrinsic contradictions of Saussure’s framework. We have seen that Saussure’s emphasis on the social nature of language, its semiological character, and the primacy of its synchronic aspect stimulated the evolution of Soviet linguistic method.

In the intellectual atmosphere of the prevalent Marxist philosophy it was further enriched by the concept of the materialist development of language due to its direct interrelation with society. Bringing to light the social stratification of society facilitated the emergence of the sociolinguistic conception of the social variants of language, which in turn contradicted Saussure’s concept of the abstract language system. Thus, having departed from Saussure, Soviet linguists came to oppose him on the question of the abstract character and intangibility of language. The latter debate was prompted by certain Marxist concepts, on the one hand, and by the practical tasks of language construction, on the other. Confronted by the necessity of immediate solutions for language planning problems and their implementation, the activists of language reform could not but believe that a consciously organized influence and control of language on the part of society was not only theoretically possible, but also practically realizable. What emerged was a materialist linguistic method, a synthesis of Saussure and Marxist orthodoxy that proved, above all, to be practically effective. As such it allowed Soviet linguists to create new alphabets and literary languages for more than one hundred peoples, introduce education and publishing in all the national languages of the country, and effectively and dramatically reduce illiteracy rates.

Biographical note Vladislava Reznik is a PhD candidate at the University of Strathclyde. She received her first degree in English and French philology at Donetsk State University, Ukraine. Her current doctoral research focuses on the analysis of the evolution of Soviet linguistics in the 1920s– 50s, with specific emphasis given to the development of a materialist linguistic paradigm and sociolinguistic approach to language. Other research interests include the historiography of linguistics and cultural studies, as well as the sociology of language, and modern language planning and construction. She is currently employed as a Russian lectrice at the Slavonic Studies Department, University of Glasgow.

Slovo, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2003

The Burden of Ideology: Pasolini as Czech Poet in Bestia da stile CHARLES SABATOS University of Michigan While Pier Paolo Pasolini is widely considered one of the most important Italian literary figures of the post-war period, and his films are acclaimed worldwide, his play Bestia da stile (Beast of Style) has received very little critical attention. An odd mix of esoteric poetic devices, aspects of classical tragedy, and twentieth-century historical references, Bestia da stile features Pasolini’s typical juxtapositions of high philosophy and explicit, unconventional sexuality. The most compelling quality of the drama is its utterly unorthodox combination of Marxist political ideology with considerations of sexuality and style. However, its uniqueness lies in Pasolini’s daring choice to ‘translate’ his own experience into the Czechoslovak cultural context (partly inspired by the self-immolation of the Czech student Jan Palach in 1969). Bestia da stile begins in 1938, shortly before the Nazi occupation, and follows the main character Jan’s development as a poet among the wartime partisans and under the Communist regime. Through this fictionalized alter ego, Pasolini draws on Marx, Gramsci, and Lukacs to denounce the influence of bourgeois ideology on both sides of the .

‘Iron Curtain’ and to imagine alternate outcomes for his own experience.

The experience of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s continues to fascinate many people, but after decades of mythologizing the undeniable cultural achievements of the period have turned into the romanticised cliché of ‘socialism with a human face.’

This brief but fertile period of liberalization is notable not only for the lasting artistic achievements of the Czechs themselves, but also for its almost irresistible appeal for writers beyond the ‘Iron Curtain.’ Two of the most insightful portraits of Czechoslovak culture in the 1960s and 1970s came from Italian literary and cultural historians attempting to recreate the ‘imagined community’ of a unified Central Europe, with Czechoslovakia at its heart: Angelo Maria Ripellino’s Magic Prague (which evokes the German/Czech culture of Prague in the late Habsburg period) and Claudio Magris’s Danube (with an extensive chapter on Slovakia). A third Italian portrait of Czechoslovakia from this period, however, has remained almost unknown, although its author was far more famous than either Ripellino or Magris: the play Bestia da stile (Beast of Style) by the poet, novelist, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. While Pasolini is widely considered one of the most important Italian literary figures of the post-war period, his play Bestia da stile has received very little critical attention. However, it is a vivid and provocative work that engages so intimately with modern Czech history, and in such challenging ways, that it cannot be easily appropriated by nationalist or Marxist ideology. © School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London, 2003

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In one of the few English-language critiques of Bestia da stile, William Van Watson notes that it ‘has generally been considered the least theatrically effective of the plays, more schematic than dramatic. . . [the] extremely metaliterary nature of the play has led some critics to consider it Pasolini’s worst.’1 One reason for this might be the fact that Pasolini had worked on it over a ten-year period, from 1965 until his shocking murder in 1975, when the play was still left incomplete.

Although Bestia da stile was first published in 1979, a complete critical edition was not published until 2001. Another reason for critical misgivings may be Pasolini’s rather anomalous choice of a fictional Czech poet named Jan to be his main character. Aurelio Roncaglia’s afterword to the first full publication of the work gives a clearer appreciation of its significance, while acknowledging its inherent limitations: ‘The form as we have it before us is substantially an arduous poetic palimpsest. . . [which leaves] subtly embroidered regions to be sewed, an agonizing attempt with an extraordinary intensity — not only in a stylistic, but also in an ideological sense.’2 This description pinpoints the play’s most compelling quality: its utterly unorthodox combination of political ideology with considerations of sexuality and style.

Keala Jewell’s analysis of Pasolini’s work, while it does not deal directly with Bestia da stile, describes Pasolini as one of the leading post-war Italian writers whose ‘poetic experiments aimed furthermore to demonstrate that considerations of form — forms that bear the marks of history — are inseparable from considerations of ideology.’3 The student and aspiring poet Jan is introduced in the springtime of 1938, shortly before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. During the war, he participates in the resistance along with a gang of partisans, but his parents are left to die in Nazi camps. After the war, he becomes a national poet and wins the Stalin Prize for Poetry, only to be denounced by the younger generation, who see him as a pillar of the culturally repressive regime. The play is an odd mix of twentieth-century cultural references and esoteric poetic devices with aspects of classical tragedy, such as a Chorus that comments on the characters’ actions. David Ward places Bestia in the context of Pasolini’s other tragedies, which ‘as well as denouncing the strong grip bourgeois ideology has taken over all areas of daily life. . . also focus on the sites of possible resistance to this new Power, and on who the Resisters might be.’4 Jewell emphasizes the heavy influence of Gramsci on Pasolini’s concept of ideology: Attempting to save the Marxian concept of ideology, as articulated both in the preface to the Critique of Political Economy and in The German Ideology, from overly mechanical materialist conceptions of the relationships of economic base and cultural/intellectual superstructure, Gramsci developed a notion of ideology/hegemony not only as ‘false consciousness’ but as a potentially positive 1

William Van Watson, Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Theatre of the Word (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), p. 101.

2 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Porcile, Orgia, Bestia da stile (Milan: Garzanti, 1979), p. 315.

3 Keala Jewell, The Poiesis of History: Experimenting with Genre in Postwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 4.

4 David Ward, A Poetics of Resistance: Narrative and the Writings of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), p. 156.

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and unifying ‘conception of the world.’ Pasolini regularly employed the Gramscian term hegemony not only in the fifties but even more frequently when discussing the ‘Italianization of Italy’ under neocapitalism.5

The influence of Gramsci can be seen in Pasolini’s 1960 work Passione e ideologia, where he examines Italian literary history and, according to Jewell, ‘points out that the national literary ideology has been sadly devoid of the class consciousness that might have led to other outcomes.’6 The uniqueness of Bestia da stile lies in Pasolini’s daring choice to transpose his own passions and ideologies onto the Czechoslovak context, in which he expands his personal insight into a Gramscian ‘conception of the world.’

Pasolini’s sympathies with the Czechs may be traced to his childhood in Friuli, the region of Italy bordering on Slovenia with strong historical connections to the Slavs and to the Habsburg Empire. After a visit to Prague in 1965, he began work on his second drama, which he tentatively entitled Il poeto ceco (The Czech Poet). Only later did he decide on the title Bestia da stile, or Beast of Style, which uses the term ‘beast’ in the same sense of ‘beast of burden’ to illustrate his concept that the writer must be the bearer of style for a society. Three different drafts of the play exist in the Italian National Library in Rome. Between 1965 and 1974, according to Barth David Schwartz, Pasolini ‘returned to the manuscript, updating — stratum on interacting stratum — what he sometimes called his autobiography.’7 Joseph Francese has described Bestia da stile as an attempt ‘to explain the motivation of Pasolini’s poetic research in the 1970s. . . As a poet, his duty was not so much to make history as to be history.’8 The character of Jan is a thinly fictionalized alter ego of Pasolini, or at least, as Van Watson puts it, ‘an attempt to recount the development of his psyche, of his artistic sensibility, and of his intellect.’9 At the same time, he uses the class-consciousness so pervasive in the Czechoslovak ‘national literary ideology’ to imagine ‘other outcomes’ for his own experience. For Pasolini, with his strong Marxist sympathies, the Czechoslovak experience certainly held some fascination, but he did not accept it unreservedly. He had harsh criticism for the ways in which Marxist criticism was manipulated and distorted on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain.’

Hannah Arendt, like other commentators, has emphasized the unusually liberal nature of Czech nationalism: ‘some Czech statesmen, the most liberal and democratic of the leaders of national movements, once dreamed of making the Czechoslovak republic a kind of Switzerland.’10 She concurs with the widespread perception of the Czechs as exceptionally resistant to the appeal of fascism: ‘Fascist movements spread from Italy to nearly all Central and Eastern European 5

Ibid., p. 76.

Ibid., p. 31.

7 Barth David Schwartz, Pasolini Requiem (New York: Pantheon, 1992), p. 627.

8 Joseph Francese, ‘The Latent Presence of Crocean Aesthetics’, in Pasolini Old and New: Surveys and Studies, ed. by Zygmunt Baranski (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), p. 153.

9 Van Watson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, p. 102.

10 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), p. 273.

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countries (the Czech part of Czechoslovakia was one of the notable exceptions).’11 The fate of Czechoslovakia after Munich prompted strong reactions in the West, including the following quote from Mussolini (which Arendt cites with ironic agreement): ‘If Czechoslovakia finds herself today in what might be called a “delicate situation” it is because she was not just Czechoslovakia, but CzechoGermano-Polono-Magyaro-Rutheno-Rumano-Slovakia. . .’12 For many at the time, the British/French abandonment of Czechoslovakia symbolized the liberal West’s final rejection of its duty to stand against totalitarianism, and Czech themes were taken up by a number of Marxist and leftist writers. While in exile in the United States, Bertolt Brecht wrote a dramatic adaptation of Jaroslav Hašek’s classic Good Soldier Švejk, updated to World War II, while Albert Camus’s absurdist play Le malentendu, written in 1942, was also set in Czechoslovakia. However, Brecht’s work is essentially a pastiche and Camus’s use of the Czech setting is entirely symbolic; neither of them approach Bestia da stile in its strangely authentic complexity.

Pasolini described his visit to Prague, and his encounters with Czech and Slovak writers, in an account published in Vie Nuove on 11 February 1965: They are fighting for an ‘institutionalized guarantee’ of the freedom of the writer, against political ‘controls’ on their work. This is an inconceivable problem for western Marxists, one of the most serious in the countries where Marxism is in power. It seems to me (naively, it’s true) that this control or this censorship could have been rendered ineffective by an effective use of the freedom of the writer, which is an overture to critical and cultural complexity much more than ‘poetry’ (that is to say, in a certain way, action.)

At the end of this short essay, he included a poem (which he called ‘the introductory verses to Il Rio della Grana’) in honour of the Czech and Slovak writers he had met. It is in this poem that he suggests for the first time: ‘My hero could be a Czech poet.’

The only Slovak writer Pasolini mentions by name is the Communist poet Laco Novomeský (later to play a major role in Bestia da stile) whom he thanks ‘for his virgin eyes.’13 Pasolini’s description of his visit in The Divine Mimesis includes a similarly provocative comparison of Italian and Czechoslovak poets. ‘With their good clerk’s clothing — forced into some second job to earn a living — the Italian poets, in a similar gathering, would have had rather the appearance, not so much of poets, but of clerks.’ The Czech and Slovak poets present inspired a different sort of pity: ‘No sooner does a man represent — with his own physicality — the proper means for earning his bread, than he provokes pity.’14 The only escape from this vulgarity is through style: ‘The first quality of the poet is the elevation of his style, the purity of his speech. . . Poetry is the only communication which escapes — not 11

Ibid., p. 308.

Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 270.

13 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Le belle bandiere (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1996), p. 295. (A poem entitled Il Rio della Grana did appear in Pasolini’s Alì dagli occhi azzurri, but without the Prague section.)

14 Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Divine Mimesis (Berkeley: Double Dance Press, 1980), pp. 42–43.

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from economic determinism, which nothing escapes, but from every determined determinism: from the moment in which the poet, as I said, no longer identifies with any economic figure.’15 The ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 brought rapid changes to Czechoslovak society, which could hardly have been imagined at the time of Pasolini’s 1965 visit, but the Warsaw Pact invasion on 21 August reversed those reforms just as quickly as they had been brought about. All of these events had some effect on Pasolini’s work, and certainly added to the ‘extraordinary intensity’ noted by Roncaglia. The most critical event of this period for Pasolini’s work, however, was the self-immolation of the student Jan Palach in Wenceslas Square in January 1969, widely seen as the end of the hopes for change. Although much of Bestia da stile had already been composed, Pasolini gave his previously anonymous main character the name ‘Jan,’ and in fact there are a number of parallels with Palach: for example, while Pasolini’s Jan is a young student in 1938 who fights against the Germans, Jan Palach had just begun his university studies in 1968 before his protest against the Russians. Less than a month after Palach’s death, Pasolini devoted one of his weekly newspaper columns to the Czech student, declaring that his ‘protest was not anti-Communist.

It demonstrates, on the contrary, to what level of idealism a young Communist, born and raised in a Communist world, can be driven. An idealism which allowed him to commit an act worthy of an ancient age; of a modern Vietnamese saint.’16 For Robert B. Pynsent, who has examined the ‘Czech martyr complex,’ Palach is not only the latest in the tradition of national martyrs, but is in fact ‘a solar deity of a kind’ whose ‘self-immolation, the rays of his burning body in Wenceslas Place, represent the sun’s self-consumption,’ while popular feeling kept his memory alive for twenty years ‘like the memory of Christ in the disciples between Good Friday and Easter Day.’17 Episode 1 of Bestia da stile takes place on the banks of the Moldau in southern Bohemia, outside the village of Semice. The first letters of the opening lines of the play, sung by the Chorus, spell out ‘VIVA LO STYLE’ or ‘Long Live Style.’ The Chorus sings about the traditional springtime custom of carrying a straw man on a stick and throwing it into the river: ‘And we, peasants | and petty bourgeois, as Lenin defines us, and as we are, | we watch this tradition and identify with it.’18 The scene then turns to Jan, whose opening lines mark him as a profane Christ figure: ‘Twenty years in the land of Bohemia! | And here I agonize in the blood of the forest.’ His ‘agony’ is partly due to class awareness: ‘This river, | since I am the son of landowners, | should be more mine than yours, | but instead it belongs entirely to you.’19 In one sense, Jan reflects the ‘relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent,’ as Marx describes it in The Eighteenth Brumaire: 15

Ibid., pp. 48–49.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il caos (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1979), p. 129.

17 Robert B. Pynsent, Questions of Identity: Czech and Slovak Ideas of Nationality and Personality (Budapest: CEU Press, 1994), p. 209.

18 Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Bestia da stile,’ in Teatro (Milan: Garzanti, 1988), p. 599.

19 Ibid., p. 600.

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What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not go beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same tasks and solutions to which material interest and social position practically drive the latter.20

Yet Jan’s ‘agony’ is heretical in both Christian and Marxist terms, since even as he loftily refers to himself as ‘a petit bourgeois | with a small yet infinite world,’ he is actually standing in the trees and masturbating by the side of the river — which in turn profanes the nationalist mythology of the great Czech river, the Moldau. This location almost literally resonates with the opening chords of Bedrich Smetana’s ‘Vltava’ (better known in English by its German name of ‘Moldau’).

The name Semice has a multilingual symbolism, since the root ‘seme’ means ‘seed’ in both Italian (‘seme’) and Czech (‘semeno.’)21 ‘The ‘immense desire to give birth to this seed and to create’, Jan states, ‘becomes within me a desire to be covered with shame.’22 Pasolini apparently took the name ‘Semice,’ as well as most of his details on Bohemian folklore, from entries in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which includes the following entry: ‘In Semic (Bohemia) the custom of beheading the King is observed on Whit-Monday. . . In every farmhouse the King is chased round the room, and one of the troop [of young people], amid much noise and outcry, strikes with his sword a blow on the King’s robe of bark till it rings again.’23 Frazer’s work has an additional intertextual significance; it ends with a section on ‘ritual burning of men and effigies,’ including the practice of human sacrifice: ‘in the fire-festivals which we are discussing, the pretence of burning people is sometimes carried so far that it seemed reasonable to regard it as a mitigated survival of an older custom of actually burning them.’24 The only moment when this episode seems to invoke Jan Palach is also one of its most sexually explicit, when Jan declares: I want them to find me dead, my member in the air, pants stained with white semen, among the sorghum lacquered with liquid red blood.

I am convinced that even extreme acts of which I alone, the actor, am the sole witness, at a river that no one goes to, will finally become meaningful.25

The ‘shameful’ sexuality of Pasolini’s Jan (incestuous and homosexual desires, relieved by masturbation) is his way of mentally surpassing the ‘limits’ of petit bourgeois expectations of marriage and procreation: for him, as for Jan Palach, ‘extreme acts’ are part of a search for meaning.

20

Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. by Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 462.

Pasolini was probably not aware of the additional symbolism of the Czech word ‘sem,’ meaning ‘here.’

22 Pasolini, ‘Bestia da stile,’ p. 602.

23 James Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: MacMillan, 1956), p. 347.

24 Ibid., p. 756.

25 Pasolini, Bestia da stile, p. 601.

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This setting also has an intriguing connection with Czech film history. The actual village of Semice in south Bohemia is just outside the town of Písek, the birthplace of filmmaker Václav Krška.26 In his 1956 film St¡ibrný vítr (The Silver Wind), set in Písek and based on a novel by Frana Šrámek, Krška depicts the sexual awakening of a sensitive young poet at the turn of the century. The imagery of its first scene (in which a group of youths goes to the river to swim, but the main character sets himself shamefully apart) coincides intriguingly with that of Pasolini’s Episode 1.

As Josef Škvorecký has explained, ‘The film was found to be overly erotic, and even homosexual motives were discovered (naked behinds of youngsters swimming in the river flashed across the screen) and a ban followed . . . before the work was finally released for showing.’27 In his interviews with leading Czech directors, Antonin J. Liehm notes, ‘Krška was inherently apolitical, and to top it off, a homosexual, which two attributes in combination were scarcely forgivable at that time.’28 It is even conceivable that Pasolini would have met Krška (Czechoslovakia’s only major gay director) during his visit to Prague.

In Episode 2, set in Semice, the Chorus again opens the scene, describing the deceptive calm of the last years of peace against an increasingly ominous political setting: Prague is celebrating the glory of her sisterhood with Paris. . . Hungary is under an iron regime capable of having given Lenin some ephemeral hopes. . .

The Slovaks are exhilarated by their folklore. . .

In Germany our elder brothers are preparing great new things. . .

Peace! Peace!29

Pasolini’s Jan voices a loyalty to authority at odds with his aesthetic antipathy to both fascist and Communist ideology: The luminous Certitude which emanates from my Crusader eye come from. . . the common idea, which I share with my people — and which is deep enough to go beyond words – that every institution is just. . .

I am ready to die for those who win.30

The scene ends with a parade of characters, ranging from abstract and mythological figures to actual contemporary philosophers, and includes mice, flies, frogs, ordinary villagers, and bureaucrats. Karl Mannheim enters with the brief observation: ‘The fanatical asceticism | of the intellectual | is the compensation for | a more fundamental | integration | with his social world.’31 As Mannheim states in his ‘Ideology and Utopia’: 26

Písek is on the Otava River, although not far from the Moldau. There is another Semice on the Elbe east of Prague.

27 Josef Škvorecký, All the Bright Young Men and Women (Toronto: Peter Martin, 1971), p. 39.

28 Antonin J. Liehm, Closely Watched Films (White Plains, NY: Intl. Arts and Sciences Press, 1974), p. 152.

29 Pasolini, ‘Bestia da stile,’ p. 606.

30 Ibid., p. 609.

31 Ibid., p. 617,

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The task of a study of ideology, which tries to be free from value-judgments, is to understand the narrowness of each individual point of view and the interplay between these distinctive attitudes in the total social process. . . The problem is to show how, in the whole history of thought, certain intellectual standpoints are connected with certain forms of experience, and to trace the intimate interaction between the two in the course of social and intellectual change.32

The following scenes show the ‘intimate interaction’ between Jan’s exaltation of the aesthetic and the misery of his personal life.

Episodes 4 and 5 of Bestia da stile take place during the Slovak resistance to the Nazi occupation, or Slovak National Uprising. In the post-war period, the history of resistance to fascism was glorified across both Western and Eastern Europe.

Drawing from anthologies of poetry from the Italian Resistance, Pasolini concludes: ‘The Resistance taught us above all to believe once again in history, after the evasive and aestheticizing introversions of twenty years of poetry.’33 Yet he feels that this ‘committed’ poetry actually rests on the residue of the previous bourgeois artistic culture. According to David Ward, the purpose of Pasolini’s play is ‘to rescue marginal characters from their marginality,’ and ‘to rescue language from the silence into which it has fallen.’34 The scenes of the partisan struggles, set in the mountains, are made up mostly of monologues which take place, somewhat paradoxically, between two characters. ‘Contestation, not mere repetition,’ says Katherine Verdery, ‘is the vehicle of ideology: a word or symbol is a means of forming consciousness only if it arouses a counterword, a reply.’35 In the first half of Episode 4, Jan’s monologue is interrupted by the ghost of his friend Karel, who has been executed as a partisan, and the poet Laco Novomeský appears in the second half of the scene. Both of them symbolize groups who had been marginalized in the interwar Czechoslovak Republic: Karel representing the peasants, and Novomeský the Slovak nation. Pasolini, who published a considerable amount of verse in Fruili dialect, may have sympathized with Novomeský for using a language often seen as provincial by the hegemonic Czech literary establishment. Novomeský’s career also embodied the reversals and contradictions characteristic of Communist writers in Czechoslovakia: a surrealist in the 1930s, he was imprisoned in the 1950s as a ‘bourgeois nationalist,’ as were many Slovak Communists. Milan Kundera later described Novomeský as one of the ‘eager culprits [who] were ready to help their executioners all the way to the stake, and kept crying “Long live the Party!”’ After Novomeský was released from prison, Kundera continues, he ‘wrote a cycle of poems to the glory of this fidelity. The people of Prague nicknamed these poems “Joseph K.’s Gratitude.”’36 In 1967, 32

Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955), p. 81.

Jewell, Poiesis of History, p. 19.

34 Ward, Poetics of Resistance, p. 163.

35 Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 126.

36 Milan Kundera, ‘Prague: A Disappearing Poem,’ in Granta, 17 (Autumn 1985), 92. (Interestingly, in his revised version of this passage, which appeared in his 1988 The Art of the Novel, Kundera concealed Novomeský’s name under the pseudonym ‘A.’) 33

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Novomeský and Kundera were two of the major participants in the Writer’s Union Congress which helped to create the conditions for the ‘Prague Spring,’ yet after the Soviet invasion the Slovak poet became a staunch supporter of ‘normalization’, while the Czech novelist went on to become one of the regime’s most outspoken critics in exile. Pasolini’s fictionalized Novomeský concludes Episode 4 with an odd variation on Marx’s commodity fetishism: ‘We shall give [the poor] our money | and the goods that we shall have produced; | and in exchange, we shall take their pain, | thrifty bourgeois that we are, and we’ll spend it little by little.’ Echoing Pasolini’s earlier reference to Novomeský’s ‘virgin eyes,’ Jan replies thoughtfully, ‘Good night, connoisseur in pain, | with two blue eyes like two transparent sacks. . . but me, I shall not be able to sleep | for my heart has been wounded by an idea.’37 Episode 5, essentially a continuation of the previous scene, begins with Jan’s spirited declaration: ‘An idea of style: a stylus! . . . It’s an idea that has to do with red. . . The red of this flag | that was used to wrap Karel’s body.’38 Even in the very center of the struggle against fascism, Jan is just as isolated from those around him as he had been in the opening scene on the banks of the Moldau. Again a profane Christlike figure, he sits awake while his companions sleep. While Jan’s soliloquy begins with a paean to the modernist artists who had inspired him, including Mayakovsky, Rimbaud, and Eisenstein, his ideals are gradually shifting toward Marxism: ‘In any case, between twenty and twenty-four, | be aware, my sleeping companions — | so mysteriously continent and capable of prudery — | a heart has changed character.’39 Kaela Jewell has explained Pasolini’s ambivalent stance toward modernism: Pasolini took the position that modernism by gearing itself against ‘what we can no longer do’ failed to understand that tradition cannot really be rejected, only understood in ways motivated by ideological considerations. . . In Pasolini’s view, ideologies of poetic subjectivity must be examined historically, since history is the locus of their transmission.40

This conflict between the ideological and the aesthetic parallels the inner ‘contradiction’ detailed by Lukacs in History and Class Consciousness: ‘In the case of the bourgeoisie. . . these factors combine to produce a class consciousness but one which is cursed by its very nature with the tragic fate of developing an insoluble contradiction at the very zenith of its powers.’41 The contradiction can partially be resolved through translation, as Jan declares: How easy it is for me to return. . . from Zaum to dialect, then to dialect in Czech, in literal translation

37 38 39 40 41

Pasolini, ‘Bestia da stile,’ p. 631.

Ibid., p. 632.

Ibid., p. 634.

Jewell, Poiesis of History, p. 7.

Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), p. 61.

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in order to sing this red with the innocence of a poet and the innocence of a worker.42

At the same time, as Jewell notes, Pasolini is aware that in ‘translation — whether from formlessness into form or from one language to another — something is inevitably lost. . . but [he] claims that poetry in dialect comes closer to the real, enigmatic text.’43 Jan’s own ‘change of heart,’ from a conflicted petty bourgeois to a committed Communist, parallels his translation of his own work from Zaum (the nonsense language of the Russian Futurists) to Czech dialect: by producing poetry in the spoken language rather than the literary norm, he is able to overcome the class consciousness that has alienated him from his contemporaries.

His experimentation with Futurism to create ‘workers’ poetry’ also foreshadows the familiar path from surrealism to socialist realism taken by many Communist poets.

This is one of Pasolini’s most clearly autobiographical passages in Bestia da stile, and does have parallels in the Czech case, even if a slight inaccuracy can be noted: the Czech language of Jan’s native South Bohemia is not particularly marked as ‘dialect.’ The appropriate Czech analogue for Pasolini’s Friuli would be the Silesian dialect of Lachian, which already had a noted literary tradition thanks to the poet Ondra Lysohorský. As the Slovak–American poet and translator Carolyn Forche notes: ‘although [Lysohorský’s] poetry was popular in Russian translation, the poet offended Czech Communists by writing in Lachian.’44 Unlike Laco Novomeský, who subverted his individuality to the prevailing ideology, Lysohorský’s relationship toward language and society remained ambivalent, and in 1969 he even devoted a poem to Jan Palach. Thus his literary career is a more suitable parallel to Pasolini’s, ideologically as well as linguistically.

In Episode 6, the Chorus returns to greet Jan upon his arrival in Prague, not long after the liberation from the German occupation. They begin: ‘The first time that we appeared was under the legalistic form | of peasants and petty bourgeois; | now we have appeared transformed into partisans.’45 They congratulate Jan for his descent into the ‘hell’ of Prague’s petit bourgeois society: They were real hells and not just linguistic ones!

Life there was incandescent . . . because political ideology and human religion were petrified in the most extreme confusion: in fact, had the petty bourgeois of Prague ever lifted a finger to build the socialist society?

No, he was dead, he was only dead, he did not know how to do anything but to be dead.46 42

Pasolini, ‘Bestia da stile,’ p. 635.

Jewell, Poiesis of History, p. 112.

44 Carolyn Forche, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 434.

45 Pasolini, ‘Bestia da stile,’ p. 642.

46 Ibid., p. 644.

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Jan revels in his newfound role as a spokesman for the new socialist society: What happens here in my soul, in the centre of Prague, is an indication of what happens in the world.

So much so that I could be merciless, yet gently just like all of those who act in the name of Reality.47

His words carry a deeper significance, however, since the treatment of poets in the early years of the Communist regime did serve as a wider indication of the ideological struggle between the two dominant world systems. Novomeský reappears with a warning about the dangers to come, but Jan chides him: ‘Always, always, the reproaches that are made to poets | are made for non-literary reasons.’48 Again privileging style over ideological content, Jan unknowingly contributes to the conditions that later lead to his own downfall. As Lubomir Dole¥el has recently observed, this conflict is still relevant in literary studies today, particularly in the Prague context: ‘ideological pragmatics and structuralism have remained in the irreconcilable opposition in which we find them in the thirties.’49 Pasolini refused to consider himself a ‘spokesman for his audience’s own cultural, historical, and mythic heritage,’ or ‘as the privileged narrator of the tale,’ and used his knowledge of the relationship between literature and history ‘to structure poems that continually displace aesthetics and ideology.’50 Episode 7, which takes place on Red Square in Moscow, begins triumphantly with Jan being awarded the Stalin Prize for poetry, but suddenly turns into the most shocking scene in the play. The ghost of Jan’s mother enters with blood-curdling screams and vulgar curses for Jan. Calling him ‘my little Jew prodigy,’ she repudiates him (in Lukacs’s terms) ‘at the very zenith of his powers’: My extreme disappointment, which transformed into the silence of the Apocalypse, was not that my womb conceived a good Communist, but that it conceived a bad bourgeois.51

It is in this episode that Pasolini’s association of fascism with motherhood reveals its true horror, as the mother eagerly recounts tales of death in the Nazi concentration camp (including, ironically, her own.) This is one of the most significant ways in which Pasolini goes against not only the ‘history of thought’ but against his own ‘forms of experience.’ In real life, according to William Van Watson, Pasolini’s father was ‘a military man, a fascist, and a man of the sword,’ whose ‘drunken, aggressive scenes. . . only served to strengthen the bond between mother and 47 48 49 50 51

Ibid., p. 646.

Ibid., p. 647.

Lubomir Dolezel, ‘Poststructuralism: A View from Charles Bridge’, Poetics Today, 21 (2000), 640.

Jewell, Poiesis of History, p. 86.

Pasolini, ‘Bestia da stile,’ p. 659.

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child.’ The use of the mother (traditionally the bearer of domestic values) to symbolize the growing power of the fascists shows Pasolini’s determination to resist all ‘limits’ of expected gender roles. Like Pasolini’s last film, the horrifying Salo: The 100 Days of Sodom, this episode grotesquely exposes the almost pornographic side of fascist brutality, and would be almost inconceivable from a writer less iconoclastic than Pasolini. It also marks Jan’s decisive turn from the aesthetic toward politically engaged art.

In the following scene, as the play’s Chorus informs us, Jan is burned in effigy, echoing the traditional burning of the straw dummy in the first episode: In Prague, a hundred young people — Handsome twenty-year-old boys, students — Merry and dangerous — Have come to St. Nicholas Square, under the fine rain of ancient times Or of spring.

There they have burned — along with those of other Greats And Masters — Without even knowing them Very fanatically — the image of Jan. They made a fire there As light as youth And, incredible thing, history was not offended.53

While there is also an underlying connection with the self-sacrificial fire of Jan Palach, the poet Jan is on the other side of events in this case, opposing the youth rather than being their guiding inspiration. Walter Siti and Silvia DeLaude note that it is ‘as if Jan Palach himself (and his companions) had burnt the protagonist Jan, making his rebirth possible; and as if the qualities of ‘creatural opposition’ of the protagonist Jan, worn out and approved by Communist conformity, could come forth in a hypothetical ‘white’ or anticommunist revolution.’54 In fact, as Van Watson suggests, ‘Jan has transformed himself from a Christlike martyr into a Pilate,’ through his inability ‘to discern that the communist hierarchy is just another manifestation of bourgeois authority and closure.’55 Episode 9 is a dialogue between Revolution and Capital, which in David Ward’s terms ‘confirms that all activity — conformist or revolutionary — takes place under the aegis of Capital.’56 As the scene opens, Revolution and Capital are fighting over the soul of the poet. As Revolution observes: ‘Divided as he is | between the old Communism | and the new, he’s | simply living | a desperate time.’ With the response, ‘my cynicism is much | more subtle than yours,’ Capital observes: I have already had so much history behind me that even admitting 52

Van Watson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, p. 4.

Pasolini, ‘Bestia da stile,’ p. 665.

54 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Teatro, ed. by Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2001), p. 1202.

55 Van Watson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, p. 107.

56 Ward, Poetics of Resistance, p. 156.

53

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that he should lose it, it’s OK: for nothing stops my earth-shaking Progress from around the world.57

Revolution boldly asserts, ‘True unity, | like a new wind, | swells my flag,’ and Capital finally concedes its right to Jan, ‘As for that man, | if you really do not want to lose him, | I leave him to you: drunk | with grass and darkness.’ As Pasolini makes clear in his own introduction, the true ‘end’ of the play, ‘(whose resonance in the silence of the ‘end’ is usually the most beautiful stylistic aspect of the work) is there,’ in the last words of Episode 9.58 For Georg Lukacs, ‘the task of orthodox Marxism. . . is an ever-renewed struggle against the insidious effects of bourgeois ideology on the thought of the proletariat.’59 Pasolini, however, contends that ‘blind action . . . is ultimately a conservative move because it only confirms one of the lynchpins of bourgeois ideology, the valorization of practicality and utilitarianism.’ Rather, it would be ‘potentially revolutionary. . . to reverse the priority of action over thought and elaborate new, as yet unidentified ways of putting up genuine resistance to what [Pasolini] calls the circle of bourgeois codes and practices.’60 Parallel with Pasolini’s privileging of ‘thought’ over ‘action’ can be seen, according to Keala Jewell, in the work of Hannah Arendt: ‘Thought, Arendt asserts, as such comes to outvalue historical memory.’61 Pasolini’s somewhat iconoclastic stance prefigures the dissident movements of the 1970s in Czechoslovakia (best known in the West through the writings of Václav Havel) which drew on highly philosophical sources in order to formulate its resistance to totalitarianism.

The main body of Bestia da stile is followed by six ‘fragments’ which were evidently sections from the later phase of development, and which Pasolini was not able to develop further and fit into the flow of action. Fragment 3, set in Paris, is a short monologue by the apparently middle-aged Jan: ‘I have a feeling of profound and desperate rancour, of deception as silent as it is definitive, of humiliation which does not only degrade the old man who I am, but retrospectively all of my youth.

This rancour, this deception, this humiliation derives from the fact that I have not lived like Aliosha, though I was capable of it.’ This ironic comparison to Dostoevsky’s Karamazov brother highlights the difference between Pasolini’s world-weary Jan and the real-life Jan Palach’s intense idealism. ‘I wanted to invest my feelings with interest and in a larger circle of people. I wanted this naively. I believed that thus my feelings would still ennoble themselves, and above all that they would grow, sincerely. Instead of that, they became infinitely smaller and pettier.’62 The ‘insoluble contradiction’ between ideology and style has pushed Jan back into the bourgeois ‘pettiness’ from which he emerged.

57 58 59 60 61 62

Pasolini, ‘Bestia da stile’, pp. 677–78.

Ibid., p. 682.

Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 24.

David Ward, ‘The “Manifesto per un nuovo teatro”’, in Pasolini Old and New, p. 328.

Jewell, Poiesis of History, p. 2.

Pasolini, ‘Bestia da stile’, p. 691.

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Fragment 4, set in Prague, begins with the Chorus, who announce that ‘Jan’s last work is the rewriting | of a classic work by Vlad’imír Janáïek’ | . . . a great petty-bourgeois painter (lost in the extermination camps.)’63 Giuseppe Zigaina has astutely noted that ‘Vlad’imír Janáïek’ is most likely an invented name, something ‘between [the Russian Formalist] Propp’s first name and the surname of the famous Czech musician [Leoš Janáïek.]’64 Even in this imaginary and tangential reference, Pasolini is able to connect Prague’s structuralist tradition with its greatest interwar composer, merging theory and aesthetics into a single character. This fragment also seems strangely premonitory, since Bestia da stile was Pasolini’s own last work.

He read the final fragment, a long poem that draws extensively from the Italian translation of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, at a discussion with students shortly before he was killed in 1975.

Pasolini’s death occurred in an ambiguous and ignominious situation which could not be straightforwardly appropriated as a heroic sacrifice: he was murdered in his own car by a teenage boy after picking him up on the street and making sexual advances. The incident was seemingly a random and spontaneous act; as the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia observed, ‘Pier Paolo Pasolini died as one can die falling in front of a tram: in an accident like any other.’65 However, many suspected a larger plot against Pasolini for his political outspokenness, and saw him as a martyr for his lifelong resistance to prevailing ideologies. Van Watson notes, ‘Over five thousand people showed up for his memorial services in Rome’s Campo de’Fiori, where, ironically, heretics had been burned by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages.’66 As Guiseppe Zigaina explains, ‘Pasolini’s death has triggered a cognitive leap which has stripped his writings of their hypothetical, pretextual dimensions, or at least of a certain kind of functionality, investing them instead with a new and, in some ways, disquieting light.’67 Given Pasolini’s lifelong search for means of resistance to all forms of cultural hegemony, his ‘arduous poetic palimpsest’ Bestia da stile serves as a fitting final work. Despite its incompleteness and obscurity, it remains a compelling critique of both West and East European ideologies, through its ‘translation’ of Pasolini’s disquieting life into the context of Czechoslovak history.

Biographical Note Charles Sabatos is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, where he is working on interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches to Czech and Slovak cultural studies. In addition to Czech and Slovak literature and film, his interests include modern East European and American fiction, translation studies, and depictions of the immigrant and exile experience. His translation of Ever Green is . . . by the Slovak novelist Pavel Vilikovsky was recently published by Northwestern University Press. He also holds an MA in International Studies from the University of Washington.

63 64 65 66 67

Ibid., p. 692.

Giuseppe Zigaina, Pasolini e l’abiura (Venice: Marsilio, 1993), p. 293.

Van Watson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, p. 17.

Ibid., p. 2.

Giuseppe Zigaina, Pasolini Between Enigma and Prophecy (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1991), p. 6.

Slovo, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2003

Reviews

The Case for Auschwitz. By ROBERT JAN VAN PELT. Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 2002. 464 pp. $45. ISBN 0 253 34016 0 (cloth).

In Chapter Two of The Case for Auschwitz, Robert Jan van Pelt ruefully notes that ‘for the duration of the case I was to engage the most tedious task of all: proving the obvious’ (p. 100). Reviewers have a similar problem: how to review a work which provides not only a breathtaking overview of the evidentiary basis for the design and use of the Auschwitz gas chambers (with superb illustrations), but also the attacks on that evidence by ‘negationists’, and an account of the trial for which van Pelt did much of the research contained in the book (in a report identified simply as ‘The van Pelt Report’ on Emory University’s very useful website www.holocaustdenialontrial.com). The Case for Auschwitz is by turns gripping, informative, and thought-provoking, in prose which has the gift of rendering complex information in comprehensible terms without condescension or confusion.

It is a phenomenal achievement, and should be an automatic addition to reading lists of courses on the Holocaust. There are, however, two issues which deserve discussion in the seminars which will already have been inspired by this book.

The first is the way in which it at times, perhaps unconsciously, mirrors crossexamination in its handling of testimony and evidence. Van Pelt has a tendency to present the reader with a piece of evidence in full whenever it is discussed — the testimony of Henryk Tauber, a Sonderkommando, the letter by Karl Bischoff referring to a Vergasungskeller, and analysis of aerial photographs by John Ball are cited in this way — and this can leave the reader slightly confused as to whether the evidence has been introduced before or whether there is a slight variation which justifies repetition. It resembles the use of documentation employed by Richard Rampton and Heather Rogers in their interrogatories of Irving based on van Pelt’s report (partially reproduced on pages 413–20), and the subsequent cross-examination.

This creates tension in the text which is at times appropriate and at times not. It does, however, make the book easier to extract — a virtue for those who will certainly wish to make it assigned reading.

The title may also cause concern. Van Pelt concludes the acknowledgements with ‘the simple observation that the use of the preposition ‘for’ in the title of this book reflects some of the bitter ironies raised in the trial’ (p. xv). Tension between the possible meanings of ‘The Case for [the existence of] Auschwitz’ or ‘The Case for [building] Auschwitz’ is best resolved by remembering van Pelt’s statement in the opening sections of his report declaring his ‘loyalty with the victims of Auschwitz and against their murderers’ (van Pelt report, Preface, Section 5). The title is grimly ironic, illustrating the urgency of the need to make the case for the existence of Auschwitz against those who deny or minimize it. © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2003

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These however, are only quibbles. The Case for Auschwitz is masterly and will guide scholars for many years to come in the difficult but necessary task of proving the obvious. They will take with them van Pelt’s calm confidence in the nature of our changing understanding of ‘Auschwitz’ as an historical event; from something tangible to something ‘located somewhere in the realm framed on the one hand by a judge’s ‘reasonable doubt’ and on the other hand by the always receding horizon that promises unqualified certainty’ (Report, Preface, Section 5). He manages this remarkable feat by illustrating the value of converging evidence rather than a ‘smoking gun’ (David Irving’s need for which is an unexplored aspect of both the trial and denial in general). As van Pelt puts it, in words recalling Mr Justice Gray’s judgement against Irving: ‘the totality of the available evidence ought to persuade any objective and reasonable historian that Auschwitz was not merely one of the many concentration or labour camps established by the Nazi regime but that it also served as a death or extermination camp where hundreds of thousands of Jews were systematically put to death in gas chambers by means of hydrogen cyanide’ (p. 411). By patiently compiling the evidence, van Pelt has undeniably made the case for Auschwitz.

JAGIELLONIAN UNIVERSITY

JAIME ASHWORTH

‘Saviours of the Nation’: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism.

By JASNA DRAGOVIÇ-SOSO. Hurst & Company, 2002. viii + 293 pp. £16.50. ISBN 1 85065 457 3 (paperback).

Intellectuals and their role in Serbian public life during the 1980s and early 1990s have featured in numerous studies to date. However, they have rarely been the focus of discussion until now. Most authors have included mention of their influence as part of a broader analysis of political events. The general view expressed is that intellectuals legitimized the growth of radical chauvinism in Serbia by bemoaning the current state of affairs, seeking scapegoats outside the national community, and in particular by revising history and invoking nationalist mythology. They articulated some vague, populist undercurrents and in doing so helped to shape public opinion. Jasna Dragoviç-Soso offers a more detailed analysis of the role of Serbia’s intellectual elite during the critical period when the former Yugoslav state was disintegrating and the ground being prepared for civil war.

Dragoviç-Soso demonstrates the shift in focus amongst Belgrade’s intellectuals from democracy and human rights at the beginning of the 1980s to the national question in Serbia at the end of the decade. She traces this change in the debates of the period both internally within Serbia and among groups of intellectuals from the different Republics which formed the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Serbian writers, members of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and even university professors are accorded a public profile which has no equivalence in Britain or the United States. Such voices are more commonly given a platform in Eastern Europe. This social role of the committed intellectual is partly a legacy of the Communist era when opposition parties were banned and individual resistance

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was the only conduit for any kind of dissent. To an extent this background explains the powerlessness of Serbian intellectuals during the 1980s. Their experience was as commentators, watchdogs, and non-conformists. Thus, it is not surprising that they were at their most effective in single-issue cases which crossed ideological divides and brought together liberals, nationalists, conservatives, and others against government injustice. Indeed, at the time such labels were applied sparingly as the real battle was seen to be between a Communist political elite bereft of new ideas and dissenters willing to raise their heads above the totalitarian parapet. The most striking factor is the weakness of the Belgrade intelligentsia as a political force. It was always ready to take part in public forums, to debate issues, and to act as the champions of worthy causes, but it did not and could not form a coherent organizational base and accept the mantle of an opposition movement. Intellectuals tended to participate in vague coalitions and disparate committees based on long-term friendships rather than form high-powered think-tanks intent on shaping government policy. The influence exerted by intellectuals on public opinion is another matter.

Dragoviç-Soso deftly deciphers the shift in focus from issues of human rights to the national question during the 1980s but does not expand on the connection between intellectuals, the political ruling class, and the growing sense of unrest generating changes in public opinion. Who was leading whom as the stakes were raised from local dissatisfaction to questions affecting the essential structure and unity of the Yugoslav state?

The book is most illuminating in discussion of the relations, or lack of them, among intellectuals in Serbia and the other Republics. Attempts to unite Yugoslavia’s intellectuals were frustrated because of the different directions which debates were taking about the future of the country. The author’s comparison of the Serbian Academy’s ‘Memorandum’ and the ‘Contributions for a Slovenian National Programme’ which appeared a little later highlights particular areas of convergence and divergence in attitudes towards the common state. In many ways the impact of intellectuals in other Republics seems to have been more decisive than in Serbia.

The book is weakest in discussion of the contributions to the debates and circumstances in Serbia made through literary texts. Fictional worlds are built on narrative point of view, specific story situation, and very often psychological ambiguity which resist the kind of direct relation to the real world which Dragoviç-Soso’s singular interpretations imply. However, she presents a clear account of events concerning the role of intellectuals in Serbia during this crucial period, uncovering previously held half-truths and pointing the way forward for further research into this important area.

UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM

DR DAVID A. NORRIS

The Politics of Symbol in Serbia: Essays in Political Anthropology. By IVAN ÏOLOVIÇ.

Translated from the Serbian by CELIA HAWKESWORTH. London: Hurst & Company, 2002. xii + 328 pp. £16.50. ISBN 1 85065 556 1 (paperback).

The French Structuralist Roland Barthes in his book Mythologies (Paris, 1957) takes for each chapter a topic from the everyday world of mass consumption and

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examines it not for what it is but for the plethora of meanings it leaves in its wake.

Subjects such as ‘The World of Wrestling’ or ‘Steak and Chips’ become semiotically charged icons of popular culture. By decoding the signs Barthes opens up the value system hidden behind these modern myths and exposes the duplicity of bourgeois norms. Ivan Ïoloviç treads in the footsteps of Roland Barthes in writing his book The Politics of Symbol in Serbia. But, whereas Barthes was concerned with building on the Saussurean legacy of linguistic theory, Ïoloviç is driven by far more urgent demands. He describes a world in which the unthinkable is transformed into a desired aim and violence is justified by invoking mythologizing techniques. Ïoloviç’s book is divided into four parts: The Serbian Political Ethno-Myth, From the History of Serbian Political Mythology, Characters and Figures of Power, and The Age of the Crowd. In Part 1 he discusses the consolidation of the Serbian national community into a single entity formed at the confluence of certain mythic structures. In these essays with titles like ‘Story’, ‘Time’, ‘Nature’, ‘Frontiers’, and so on, Ïoloviç reinforces many of the usual criticisms made against the regime of Slobodan Miloševiç and its propaganda exploiting the fears of the population at a time of great uncertainty. However, in Ïoloviç’s handling of these issues another purpose is also present which hovers behind the immediate task. He is not only concerned with the myths peddled by the Miloševiç regime, but also with the pervasive and unavoidable role of symbolism in political life. The fact that democracies have their myths too leads Ïoloviç, the political anthropologist, to a pessimistic conclusion. Critical vigilance is a necessary tool in the face of the powerful messages which governments are capable of distributing. Myths about the origins of today’s troubles can transform grandiose concepts such as sacrifice, revenge, and retribution into attractive and speedy solutions to economic and social ills. However, it is not easy to maintain a discriminating and impartial stance. Critics themselves do not exist outside the culture in which those same myths have their origin. Their symbolic force rests on their function to make an infinitely complex reality into something more manageable. There is no outside vantage point from which to peer in on the world, to watch it as it unfolds and to offer independent judgements.

Hence, Ïoloviç draws our attention to the assumption that ‘the prevalence of a critical spirit in society is not only a worthy aim, but also attainable’ (p. 85).

Times of crisis and tension are more likely to throw up the kinds of rallying cries in which political symbols and myths abound, but the raw material of which they are made is already lying around waiting to be moulded again to fit new circumstances. Ïoloviç takes the traces of that raw material as the topic for Part 2 of his study by examining how previous generations at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century were also touched by similar concepts: for example, the representation of Serbian identity as pure and authentic in comparison to the inauthentic nature of the decadent West. In Part 3, he provides thirty-two case studies in which what seems to be a passing incident or event reported in the daily press is taken as the beginning of a deeper reflection on the state of Serbia in the 1990s. The first case opens with an advertisement for a spiritual workshop. From there the author considers the way in which things spiritual have replaced things ideological in contemporary Serbia, leading to manifestations of the Church

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and Orthodox teaching invoked in service to the nation. The book closes with a cautionary essay written in the wake of Miloševiç’s fall from power in October 2000.

Vojislav Koštunica is the new President and he has announced his intention not to move into the presidential palace. Ïoloviç hopes that this gesture reflects a genuine rejection of the ostentatious and theatrical claims of the previous regime’s mythologizing practices because Koštunica’s intention ‘is a question not of modesty but of meaning’ (p. 308). The Politics of Symbol in Serbia is an acute analysis of the manipulation of such meanings in Serbia of the 1990s to legitimate a world gone mad.

UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM

DR DAVID A. NORRIS

Albanian Identities, Myth and History. Ed. by STEPHANIE SCHWANDNER-SIEVERS and BERND J. FISCHER. London: Hurst & Company, 2002. xvii + 238 pp. ISBN 1 85065 571 5 (hardback), 1 85065 572 3 (paperback).

The remark that Albanian history, society, and culture are a blank spot on the cultural geographies of most English speakers is itself a mythologizing commonplace, but it is no less ‘true’ for its mantric repetition. This collection of nineteen essays, filling in a gap of knowledge on contemporary Albanian Identities, Myth, and History, is particularly welcome. Editors of any compilation are faced with the difficulty of bringing together a variety of approaches and quality of work. The approaches used in Albanian Identities range from history and anthropology, through literary criticism and media analysis, to personal memoir.

The book is split into five categories: I. The History of Albanian Myth Production; II. Myths in Communist Politics, Society and Culture; III. Nationalist Historiography — or Friends, Foes and Heroes; IV. Myths and Contested Boundaries; and V. Myths of Democracy, Development and the Future.

These sections are preceded by a solid introduction by Schwandner-Sievers, and a very short but stimulating piece by George Schöpflin, ‘The Nature of Myth’, that can be fruitfully read as a supplement to his masterful 1997 essay ‘The Function of Myths and a Taxonomy of Myths’1. However, Schöpflin’s injunction that ‘attempts to demystify, or deconstruct myth, to make its falsity evident, are misplaced’ (p. 26) rings strangely when set against the tone of other essays in Albanian Identities.

Furthermore, Schöpflin himself has at times taken well-considered pot shots at clay idols, and in this essay does not hesitate to remark on Serbian national myths that: ‘It was too easy to legitimate violence in the Serbian case by reference to Kosovo’ (p. 30). This is doubtless so, but the boundary is extremely vague between attempts to deconstruct myth, and decrying the damaging effects of any given myth. Indeed, merely calling a historical narrative a ‘myth’ is to challenge its validity in most contexts, no matter how strenuously we claim the contrary.

1 George Schöpflin, ‘The Function of Myths and a Taxonomy of Myths’, in Myths and Nationhood, ed. by Geoffrey Hosking and George Schöpflin (London: Hurst & Company, 1997), pp. 19–35.

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For the most part the other contributors avoid directly addressing the issue of the legitimacy of myth as such. Some of the Albanian contributors even offer valuable alternative narratives in their historical exposés.

One other author does touch briefly upon the issue of the legitimacy of myth.

That great smasher-of-idols, Noel Malcolm, has written one of the strongest pieces in the collection, a study on narratives of Albanian ethno-genesis, and the role played by the American diaspora in their creation. In it Malcolm writes: ‘I do not use the terms “myth” and “mythic” to imply that everything so labelled is false or absurd; some of these myths rested on serious historical arguments, elements of which are still accepted by modern scholars’ (p. 72). The commitment implied (and displayed throughout the essay) toward accuracy and verifiability is reminiscent of Malcolm’s earlier efforts which also intentionally challenge other national myths.2 The tension between professional historical narrative, political imperatives, and cultural sensitivity toward the legitimacy of myth, have evoked fruitful work throughout Albanian Identities.

While myths from the Communist period in Albania are explored, one myth not treated in the book is the newborn narrative of Albanian resistance to Communism in Kosovo during the Tito era. This myth disregards the inter-national nature of the Communist period and Communism’s ability to corrupt and co-opt its citizens regardless of ethnic background. The myth portrays the crimes committed in the name of Communism in Tito’s Yugoslavia as solely the work of ethnic ‘others’, or at most national traitors in the form of Albanian collaborators. In a pattern familiar to those acquainted with the mythologizing of Communist crimes in post-Soviet republics, the crimes committed in the name of denationalized Communism are thereby nationalized. Communism becomes part of a greater conspiracy against the nation, and crimes committed under Communism against those of other ethnic backgrounds become irrelevant. Ultimately, in the Kosovar context, Communism in Yugoslavia might come to be reframed as solely Serbian. For example, Communist repression is represented as merely part of a long pattern of Serbian abuse in Smail Imeri and Mejdi Popaj’s 2001 film Kur Shpirti Ndërron Jetë. Here Albanian involvement in Yugoslav Communism is just hinted at by the occasional appearance of a figure who spies on his fellow Albanians from behind tree trunks and walls, and by a sadistic Serbian(ized?) police chief who speaks Albanian and weeps when listening to Albanian folk music.

The dangers inherent in some myths, and their potential for abuse are clear, and are deserving of exposure. Albanian Identities provides stimulating illumination of Albanian national historical mythology. On finishing the book this reader wished only for more.

ST ANTONY’S COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

2

ERIC BECKETT WEAVER

For example: Noel Malcolm, Kosovo, A Short History (London: Macmillan, 1998) and Noel Malcolm, Bosnia, A Short History (London: Macmillan, 1994).

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Prussian Attitudes Towards the Koÿciuszko Insurrection. On the basis of the correspondence between Frederick Wilhelm II with Leopold Heinrich Goltz, the Prussian Envoy (dispatches of 1794 from Berlin to Petersburg and from Petersburg to Berlin). By HENRYK KOCÓJ. Cracow: Jagiellonian University, 2002, pp. 178.1 The latest study by Henryk Kocój, an appreciated and recognized historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century diplomacy, has appeared on the bookselling market. This new study concerns the attitude of Prussia towards the Koÿciuszko Insurrection as seen in the correspondence between Leopold Heinrich Goltz, the Prussian envoy in St Petersburg, and the King of Prussia, Frederick Wilhelm II. The study is a continuation of the author’s previous research; his earlier publications have included the diplomatic correspondence of Austrian, Prussian, and Saxon envoys posted in Warsaw at the time of the Koÿciuszko insurrection.2 This time, the author concentrates on the Prussian and Russian diplomatic game taking place in Petersburg. The author uses the archives stored in the then Russian capital to examine Russia’s changing standpoint towards the insurrection and to illuminate the Prussian and Russian negotiations behind the scenes of the final partition of Poland.

The study consists of an introduction and fifty-three dispatches translated into Polish, including the letters of the Prussian king and his envoy in St Petersburg, annotated extensively by Kocój, and a detailed summary in French and German.

The study begins with a letter by the Prussian king dated 11 April 1794, written just after he had received the first news about the outbreak of the insurrection. The news about the events in Poland and anticipation of their further development soon dominated the Prussian correspondence. In his note of 11 April, Frederick Wilhelm II wrote that he expected the outbreak of the insurrection to exclude Russia from the international political game for a time while it focussed its efforts on the events taking place in Poland. Therefore, he ordered his envoy to observe carefully all the reactions and decisions in St Petersburg relating to the Polish insurrection and the situation in Russia. Goltz’s notes provide a lot of valuable information on Russia’s international affairs, her finances, the situation of the army, and the attitudes of Russian society. However, the most valuable part of this correspondence is related directly to the Koÿciuszko insurrection.

Initially, both Frederick Wilhelm II and his representative in St Petersburg disregarded the outbreak of the insurrection. They thought it was a rebellion, which, although potentially dangerous, stood no chance of long-term success. This 1

Polish title: Henryk Kocój: Prusy wobec powstania koœciuszkowskiego. Na podstawie korespondencji Fryderyka Wilhelma II z pos¢em pruskim w Pe tersburgu Leoploldem Heinrichem Goltzem (depesze z Berlina do Petersburga i z Petersburga do Berlina z 1794 roku). Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagielloñskiego (Kraków, 2002), ss.178.

2 Powstanie koÿciuszkowskie w ÿwietle korespondencji pos¢a austriackiego w Warszawie. Listy Benedykta de Cache do ministra spraw zagranicznych J.A. Thuguta (Warszawa, 1985). Oprac. H. Kocój, L. Bucholtz: Powstanie koÿciuszkowskie w ÿwietle korespondencji pos¢a pruskiego w Warszawie. Listy Ludwiga Bucholtza do Fryderyka Wilhelma II (styczeæ – czerwiec 1794). Oprac. H. Kocój. Warszawa 1983; J. J.Patz: Z okien ambasady saskiej. Oprac. Z. Libiszowska i H. Kocój. Warszawa 1969.

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belief resulted from the fact that the insurgents did not have sufficient funds, arms, or even ammunition. Only the activities of French emissaries in Turkey and Sweden aroused some concerns, as they were trying to induce those countries to antiRussian action. Soon, however, the ineffectiveness of such endeavours led to an increasing certainty that the Polish insurgents would remain abandoned. Nevertheless, beginning at the early stages of the uprising, the Prussian king repeatedly offered his military aid to the Empress of Russia. However, it was only in May 1794 that Prussia and Russia agreed on a joint plan to suppress the uprising. One consequence of this agreement was the defeat of the rebel army in the battle of Szczekociny. As a result, the Prussian king recognized the real possibility of another partition of Poland.

It is worth remembering that Frederick Wilhelm II mentioned such a possibility as early as April 1794, and in May he wrote about ‘a new project of partition’.

However, he was convinced that Catherine II should initiate it herself, as his demands might discredit him unnecessarily. Meanwhile, to his dissatisfaction, St Petersburg did not reveal its plans as to the future of Poland, merely demanding aid and cooperation from Prussia suppressing the uprising. Russia’s standpoint particularly irritated the King because, in spite of Prussia’s new demonstrations of friendship and support for Russia, the policies of the Berlin court did not meet with the approval of Russian political elites, and Goltz himself complained about the scepticism with which he was treated by Russian politicians. However, in spite of this, the battle of Szczekociny and the situation on the French front line caused the possibility of a partition to become more of a reality. That issue, however, required Berlin to engage in arduous negotiations with Russia and to limit trade with Austria. Crucially, Prussia’s position, which was still strong after the battle of Szczekociny, was shaken in September by the disgraceful retreat of the Prussian army from the siege of Warsaw. Kocój’s study does not touch on that period. The last note of the Prussian king, included in the study, dates from the second half of August, when Goltz was replaced as envoy by Friedrich Bogislaw Emanuel Tauentzien. Tauentzien finally signed, on behalf of his king, another partition agreement effectively liquidating the Polish state.

Kocój’s study has some shortcomings. First of all, there is no chapter which would introduce the reader to the epoch in question. There is also no editorial note in which the call numbers of the dispatches (transferred from Merseburg to Berlin by the time of the author’s research) are given. The biographical notes included by the author and quoted on several occasions also raise some objections since they contain contradictory details. For example, on page 145 the author writes that Caesar, the Prussian envoy in Vienna (whose first name has not been established by the author) was posted there until 1800, while his biographical note on page 75 states that he stayed only until 1796. On page 48 the author incorrectly states that Charles Whitworth was an English envoy. The same description is used of Robert Liston on page 80. In fact, they were both British envoys. Indeed, Robert Liston was Scottish, not English.3 On page 88 the author writes about Duke Charles d’Artois, while on page 134 the same person is presented as Karol d’Artois. Such neglect can 3

J. Ehrmann, The Younger Pitt. The Reluctant Transition (London, 1996), p. 8.

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lead to the creation of fictional characters, which would easily be noticed in an index of characters but, unfortunately, such an index is missing from this study. The book would also benefit from an exploration of the nature of the mission of the Duke of Nassau and Count Lindenau in St Petersburg. The purpose of Spencer and Grenville’s mission in Vienna should also be explained, since it had repercussions in both diplomatic and political circles.4 Nevertheless, it should be stated that this study constitutes a necessary contribution to future reconstructions of the attitudes of the European powers to the Koÿciuszko insurrection, whereas the above comments, of minor character in principle, do not decrease the value of the study and can be easily addressed in the next edition.

SCHOOL OF SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

DR WOJCIECH JANIK

Through the Embers of Chaos: Balkan Journeys. By DERVLA MURPHY. London: John Murray, 2002. 399 pp. £20. ISBN 0 7195 6232 5 (hardback).

Through the Embers of Chaos is a thoughtful and insightful journey through a literary field with no shortage of commentators. What distinguishes this account of the death of Yugoslavia from the others is its sincere human perspective, along with its unconventional perspective on the international community’s role in the conflict. This anthropological foray is a welcome hiatus from the actiondriven, intervention-centric political dramas with which we have become all too accustomed.

Looking beneath the political veneer that overshadows this part of the Balkans, Murphy reveals a former-Yugoslav populace surprisingly less concerned with their ethnic categorization and statehood than international mediators and diplomats would have us believe.

Armed with one of the more peculiar instruments of authorship, the 74-year old human rights campaigner and veteran of post-conflict situations takes us on a two-year, 2000 mile ride on the back of a second-hand bicycle. This snail-like pace affords Murphy the kind of observation and reflection entirely missed by many academics, authors, and reporters more used to travelling by helicopter or Armoured Personnel Carrier.

Murphy’s travels take her through all six of the former Yugoslav republics, along with Kosovo and Albania. This seemingly modest travel diarist asks straightforward and difficult questions of ordinary people demonstrating a largely unreported commonality that bonds Albanians, Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians. This bond is based on the shared notion of loss common to all parties, but Murphy’s conversations reveal more: that the political antagonism that dominates and poisons state relations is largely absent at the local level of many ex-Yugoslav communities.

4

See among others: Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third. From Original Family Documents by the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos (London, 1853), pp. 258–59; The Journal and Correspondence of General Sir Harry Calvert (London, 1853), p. 281.

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Murphy has the laudable ability to see extremists as extremists and not as Croat or Serb extremists. This healthy disdain for ascribing a nationality to violence, both elevates her from charges of ethnocentricity, and implicitly yields a more troubling and disconcerting observation: that we are all, fundamentally, capable of extreme and callous violence, and that the only thing that stops us are our ties to one another, developed over centuries, and yet severable — as the Yugoslav example demonstrates — in a matter of months.

Responsibility for Yugoslavia’s demise rests squarely, in Murphy’s opinion, with its political elite (Miloševiç, Tudjman, and Izebegoviç), but equally with the international community. With thinly-veiled contempt, Murphy argues that the ‘deeply flawed’ and ‘neo-colonialist’ political wisdom that has guided the international community from the early 70s is fundamentally self-centric. Murphy doesn’t stop there, referring to the impotent acronyms of reconstruction — OSCE, UNDP, EU etc. that in her opinion exist only to provide over-paid jobs to expatriate ‘experts’, whose credentials are in many cases questionable.

From the IMF’s austerity measures of the 1970s, to the US’s geopolitical wrangling of the 1980s, to NATO’s bombing of Serbia; all this, we are told, adds up to an inconsistent and ultimately destabilizing international agenda that precipitated Yugoslavia’s undoing. Dayton is singled out for particular contempt, resembling a fatuous, ivy-league concoction of ‘complimentary regions’ that resulted, instead, in a severed state, wholly disjointed and untenable. Murphy reminds us that within these political units and sub-divisions live men and women whose lives are profoundly affected by the deeds of these men stooped over maps 5000 miles away at an air force base in Ohio.

Underlying this criticism of the international community is the debatable assumption that Yugoslavia was not necessarily destined to disappear. Others have argued convincingly that the end of the Cold War assured Yugoslavia’s slide into civil war; Murphy does not agree. Her critics in Zagreb or Pristina would surely charge her with ‘Yugonostalgia’, and to a degree this is probably true. Indeed one has the impression that Murphy fondly regarded Tito’s creation as a fundamentally just, though flawed, state.

By the time her bicycle finishes its 2000-mile journey, a picture emerges of a Yugoslavia destroyed by a politically-driven moral vacuum that sanctioned mindless depravity, and let seventy years of progress die an undignified death. Refreshingly for a Balkan commentator, Murphy does not try and put her stamp on ‘understanding’ the conflict, but rather uses a simple narrative to tell a new version of an old story.

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

ZACHARY TAYLOR