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PAR.TISAN REVlEW
tic zones, more dialects, from north to south, than there are in either
eastbound or westbound directions. There are so many Russian-speaking
nations, peoples, dialects, groups, and tribes or former tribes living
around Moscow that people sometimes do not understand each other
even when they are discussing simple things connected to the lexicon of
the household or of common plants, for instance. One of my jobs as a
student in the university was to try to draw a linguistic map of the names
for flowers, berries, and mushrooms in northern Russian dialects. Unfor–
tunately, the catalogue of words for these objects was too small and
scattered for the job to be completed. There was very little catalogued
about these innocent berries and flowers, in contrast to the huge cata–
logue of Lenin's words that were found. (Those students who had cho–
sen Lenin for their linguistic project were rewarded, but those who did
not were rewarded in a different sense. We stayed free from Lenin's lexi–
con.) Nevertheless, it was clear even from our small catalogue that there
are many areas, just little strips of land, that have different words for the
same things. And I can easily imagine that people from the far north, like
Arkhangelsk, a big city in northern Russia, do not understand those who
live in the far south, like Stavropol for example, where Gorbachev comes
from.
There were of course other reasons aside from language why we did
not understand Gorbachev, and it really had more to do with his intel–
lect than with his lexicon. Yet there are dialects that become languages if
they are isolated from the mainstream, and when they return to the
mainstream they stop being dialects. It depends on isolation, on foreign
influence, on whether a particular dialect or language happens
to
have a
great writer. A great writer, especially the first great writer, the founder
of a literary language, appears in each culture from time to time, and one
of the features of his greatness is that he establishes a certain standard
which from time to time becomes a literary norm. The legitimacy of
that norm can never be subject to question, because everyone accepts it as
such, just as you cannot discuss whether, for example, "inch" is better
than "centimeter": it's just "inch," and that's it. You may be angry with
the "inch," but it's here to stay. For example, it was Pushkin who estab–
lished such a strong literary norm that we all write in Pushkin's language,
even though people in the villages don't speak that language. They have
other syntaxes; we don't understand each other.
The old Russian town of Novgorod, in the north, was in the tenth
and eleventh centuries a republic. It was like a Greek polis and existed
quite autonomously, with a democratic system in which people voted
and elected their representatives. Relatively Westernized, Novgorod was
prosperous and traded with what at the time were Sweden and
Germany. Its people read and wrote books; they wore leather boots.
