Reviewed by Sarah Turner, University of Waterloo

In this ambitious book, Ian Press traces the development of Russian from its prehistory to the mid-twentieth century. The title notwithstanding, P’s primary concern is with written rather than spoken language. The book combines historical grammar, a sociolinguistic history, and forays into literary history and interpretation.

In the introduction (1–10), P summarizes earlier attempts to characterize the relationship between Church Slavonic and vernacular East Slavonic. He suggests that the linguistic situation of the early medieval period can be described as triglossic, with different varieties of language seen in ecclesiastical texts, historical writing, and legal texts. Ch. 1 (11–22) outlines the linguistic prehistory of East Slavonic and gives an overview of the origins and characteristics of East Slavonic literature.

In Ch. 2 (23–92), which opens with a history of Kievan Rus′, P lists early attested developments in the sound system, describes the major linguistic features of the ecclesiastical, business, and so-called worldly-literary languages, and discusses the status and interrelationship of these language varieties with particular reference to the work done in this area by H. G. Lunt. Ch. 3 (93–169) treats the political, linguistic, and cultural histories of the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries. Ch. 4 (170–232) provides an account of eighteenth-century debates about the normalization of Russian. Ch. 5 (233–72) outlines the language of the post-Puškinian period.

Chs. 2–5 include samples of texts ranging from the colophon of the eleventh-century Ostromir Gospel to popular fiction of the early twenty-first century. English translations and linguistic commentaries are provided for the extracts in Chs. 2 and 3. The six appendices (274–345) include examples of the Church Slavonic component of modern Russian, morphological tables with commentary based on Valentin Kiparsky (Russische historische Grammatik. Band II: Die Entwicklung des Formensystems. Heidelberg: Winter, 1967), and extracts from classic and more recent studies of the Russian language. The bibliography is divided into two sections, one on language (346–54) and the other on history, literature, and culture (355–62), although some works referred to in the text do not seem to be listed in either section.

By P’s own admission (240), some sections of this book would have benefited from more time to come to fruition. The book as a whole would have benefited from a clearer focus as well as from the attention of an editor. It is written in an informal style, often reminiscent of lecture notes, which compromises the clarity of the exposition and may prove confusing to newcomers to the subject. If these shortcomings could be overcome in a second edition, the book would be very useful to students of Russian linguistics because it draws on recent work not available in English and covers a wider time period than other books in the field.