Meanwhile, the speaker has arrived in London for another round of Pushkin House events, including a discussion of Professor Simon Franklin's new book, Troublesome Words: A Cultural History of Russian. Professor Franklin is the co-editor of The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature, which I spoke about earlier.

My admiration for Professor Franklin is somewhat mingled with resentment, because his Russian is so much better than mine — more varied and supple, reaching deeper into the depths of history and much less peppered with Anglicisms. The book, however, is fascinating, so I'll endeavour to keep my envy in check, at least for tomorrow.

НАСТОЯЩИЙ МАТЕРИАЛ (ИНФОРМАЦИЯ) ПРОИЗВЕДЕН И (ИЛИ) РАСПРОСТРАНЕН ИНОСТРАННЫМ АГЕНТОМ [ФИО] ЛИБО КАСАЕТСЯ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ ИНОСТРАННОГО АГЕНТА [ФИО] НОРМА ПРИЗНАНА НЕЗАКОННОЙ РЕШЕНИЕМ ЕСПЧ

https://www.pushkinhouse.org/calendar/6031

"Please join Simon Franklin for a conversation with Ekaterina Schulmann about his new book Troublesome Words: A Cultural History of Russian (Reaktion, August 2026).

Over the centuries, the Russian language has been shaped by competing visions of what it should be and who it belongs to: from 18th-century scholars seeking to establish a language of culture worthy of Russia’s imperial status, to writers asserting their own linguistic authority as creative individuals – or, conversely, seeking to reflect the linguistic authenticity of the masses – to cultural revolutionaries challenging the boundaries of language itself. The ritualised conformity of Sovietspeak gave way to the radical destabilisation of norms that accompanied the implosion of the USSR and the explosion of digital media, and, in the past couple of decades, to state legislation asserting control over the language used in its name.

Troublesome Words also follows the Russian language’s interactions with the wider world. It has been an instrument of imposed cohesion in a multilingual empire, and it has dispersed across the globe with waves of emigration – to a point where linguists begin to ask whether one can still speak of one standard Russian language, or of a polycentric world of Russophonia.

Simon Franklin paints a portrait of an ever-shifting linguistic landscape, alive despite attempts to fix and label it. Language can be performed and manipulated, something to share or to gatekeep. Innovation is either progressive or poisonous (depending on who you talk to). Norms of language are both necessary and resented. Moving from the halls of government to the language classroom, and from the prescriptive to the quirky and human, Troublesome Words reveals how language shapes – and is shaped by – power, imagination and our changing world".