Izmail Ivanovich Sreznevsky

Until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, few people took an interest in Russia’s ancient linguistic or cultural history. There were, of course, a few scholars who studied ancient texts and historians who collected old manuscripts, but for most Russians, Russian antiquity was far from their everyday concerns.

After the reign of Peter the Great, Russia applied considerable effort to adopting European culture, as a result of which, traditional Russian culture was given short shrift. This situation was not, however, unique to Russia. Something similar had taken place in the West. The eighteenth century was the age of Classicism. The only antiquity that mattered was that of ancient Greece and Rome, the eternal and immutable culture that was seen as Europe’s common heritage. The heroes, gods, and legends of Greek and Roman antiquity offered the ideals against which everything else was to be measured.

But for some reason, with the passage of time, the situation began to change. As the nineteenth century progressed, more and more Russian writers, philosophers, and historians began to ponder their own country’s past, what it was that made Russia unique, its folklore, its ancient culture, its rituals and customs. What had only recently been viewed as no more than the uncivilized behavior of simple folk now became a subject of study and contemplation.

Classicism gave way to Romanticism, and the “national idea” came into mode. This cultural shift did not, at first, seem terribly significant against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Napoleon’s march across Europe, and other upheavals around the turn of the nineteenth century. But without an appreciation of this changing worldview, it is difficult to understand romantic poetry, with its valorization of centuries past, or the revival of interest in folklore, the development of scholarly ethnography, the beginning of political nationalism, or the emergence of national pride, along with its evil twin, chauvinism.

In the early nineteenth century, following in the footsteps of Germany and France, Russia also began to discover its historic roots. Some Russian men of letters began to voice indignation over French influence on Russian literature and advocated a return to the “true,” archaic Russian language. These purists were subjected to bruising mockery, although a little over a century later it suddenly became clear that their approach also had great literary potential. Similarly to how Arnim and Brentano in Germany began to collect and even compose folksongs, in Russia, the Kireyevsky brothers began studying Russian folklore and publishing Russian traditional epics, bylini.

It is a core Slavophile belief that Russian culture and history are distinctly different from those of the West. The emergence of Slavophilism was accompanied by a growing interest among philologists in the study of the Russian language, not only in its current form, but in its historical development, connecting linguistic evolution with history and the study of the ancient religion and rituals of past generations.

This was the line of investigation that absorbed Izmail Sreznevsky, one of the first to attempt to approach the Russian language as a developing system and to analyze its ties to the history of the Russian people. At the same time, Sreznevsky took an approach that was both unheard of and exceptionally relevant for his time. In the 1830s he began to examine not just Russian, but related languages.

Sreznevsky lived in Kharkov for many years. While there, he began to study what back then was referred to as the “Malorosiysky [little-Russian] dialect” of the Russian language – what we now call Ukrainian. In the mid-nineteenth century, Ukrainians were not generally viewed as having their own distinct language. Sreznevsky was also not sure that Ukrainian deserved that status, but the vast material he compiled in his study of the Ukrainian past laid the evidential foundation upon which Ukrainian nationalists would later rest their assertions. What had been viewed as no more than an exotic offshoot of literary Russian was suddenly transformed into a subject of scholarly study.

And Sreznevsky did not stop there. He was interested in all Slavic dialects and languages, which together attested to a single, ancient, half-forgotten linguistic whole. He was fascinated by the cryptic language of the Ofenya – traveling peddlers, and published an entire monograph on what would now be called their “jargon.” He set out for several years to travel Slavic lands and traverse those portions of the Austrian and Ottoman empires settled by Slavs. Furthermore, this traveling was done on foot, since riding in a carriage he would have missed too many opportunities to hear how people actual spoke.

Sreznevsky was a true scholar: he analyzed ancient manuscripts, spent years compiling a dictionary of ancient Russian language, and created a classification system for Slavic dialects. Although his interests were primarily scholarly, this professor – who eventually was admitted into the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and wrote many works beyond the comprehension of dilettantes – was caught up in the same current of thought as politicians, philosophers, and cultural figures.

The nineteenth century saw an explosion of nationalism, the first manifestations of which were of the noble “liberation” variety: Italians wanted to free themselves from Austrian oppression; the Bulgarians and Serbs sought emancipation from the Ottomans. At the same time, nationalism represented people’s quest for their own roots. This was the sort of nationalism associated with the emergence of Russian Slavophilism, with its emphasis on the distinction between Russian and Western history; of Ukrainian revolutionaries engaged in the exploration of Ukrainian history and literature in its own right, separate from Russian culture; of Balkan intellectuals, who created alphabets and grammars for languages that have only recently gained legitimacy. All of these aspirations sought support in the work of scholars like Sreznevsky. Their rigorous academic research was grasped at by those engaged in a struggle for freedom and national identity and by intellectuals working to instill a sense of national awareness in their people.

In the case of Russia, nationalism had another political dimension. Talk of Slavic oneness, of the unification of all Slavic peoples, was the domain not only of philosophers, but of diplomats thirsting to take control of the Bosporus, to turn Istanbul back into Constantinople and make it the capital of a Slavic, Orthodox state. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 brought with it heated discussion of Pan-Slavism, a movement that was surely close to Sreznevsky’s heart. For some, this discussion represented a genuine concern for and sense of solidarity with their “brother Slavs” living under the Turkish yoke, but politicians, as is their wont, used these sentiments to their political advantage and as a justification for war.

Can we assign scholars like Sreznevsky any of the blame for this? Of course not. He was driven by scientific curiosity, not expansionist ambition. He studied languages, researched their development, compared them.

Could he have imagined that the many peoples across whose lands he walked, filling his notebooks with their legends and songs, would in the twentieth century hurl accusations against one another, insult each other, and, on some occasions, fight each other in brutal wars, launched under the banner of national pride, identity, and the quest for roots? Probably not. After all, he was just interested in historical linguistics.