2. Slavonicizing Purism and Its Reconceptualization in Religious Literature

Abstract

381 principles, as the realization of a single linguistic imperative, or for that matter a single cultural one. Selection becomes a matter of authorial taste and resourcefulness, and it is precisely here that the search for the correct path for the literary language culminates. Hunting for paths is replaced by the pursuit of the best linguistic means to embody the concrete goals of the author in the context of one particular text. This was achieved by the stabilization of the literary language, as general theoretical problems were now transformed into issues of literary stylistics. And so in the conflict between archaists and innovators we see not a clash between Europeanized and traditional culture, but one of literary trends, a conflict that may be situated fully within the framework of Europeanized Russian culture. The very narrowing of the issue from a broad cultural to an intra literary one testifies to the fact that the cultural antagonism that shook Russia during the Petrine and post-Petrine periods had taken a secondary place, if it still existed at all. Of course, on the larger Russian scale this antagonism was still there, and the lower levels of society continued to view the world in far different categories from those of the educated class. However, for the dominating culture those other categories no longer held any interest, and ceased to be a factor in its development. The dominating culture attained that level of self-sufficiency at which cultural oppositions merge with the battle between literary trends. This circumstance prepared the ground for the synthesizing stabilization of the Russian literary language which Pushkin was able to accom plish. But this development also brought the literary language into a new phase of development, beyond the parameters we set out to examine in this book—the history of the harmo nization of European and traditional values in Russian culture and the literary language. The debates between archaists and innovators might have served as the epilogue to this investigation, were it not for one arena of literature in which the struggle between secular and religious traditions retained its impor tance: the religious literature of the first half of the nineteenth century.