Article

Name: Alien Creativity of Russian Macaronic Poetry

Authors: V. Z. Demyankov

Institute of Linguistics RAS (Moscow, Russian Federation)

Abstract:

Traditionally, the status of foreigners in Russia, especially of West-Europeans, is fairly high. My linguistic analysis of Russian literary sources of the 18 th to the 21 st centuries aims at eliciting presumptions (i. e. indi- rectly expressed opinions) and/or stereotypes of foreigners disclosed in occurrences of Russian lexical items such as ‘inostranets’ (“foreigner”). This procedure yields a list of typical culturally relevant “parameters of aliens” in Russian culture. Stereotypes of alien behaviour and allien appearance, for short, stereotypes of “Russian aliens” are specific for Russian culture and include a privileged social status and extraterritoriality. Foreigners are typically expected to be both intellectually superior in issues of civilization and utterly ignorant of virtually all Russian peculiarities of everyday life and of Russian customs.

Russian macaronic verses combining Russian with West-European expressions used to be popular in Russia, but they are much less frequent nowadays, i. a. because of certain shifts which the concept of “alien” underwent in the last decades of Russian history. The humor of Russian macaronic poetry is based on a sort of travesty, when a person held to be a foreigner because of admixture of foreign expressions (and therefore automatically occupying a priviliged position) proves to be a pretender. “Alien creativity” of Russian macaronic verses may be looked at as a by-product of cultural adaptation of Russian culture to Western civilization.

Keywords: language as system (saussurean “langue”) vs language as linguistic activity (saussurean “langage”), poetic “langage”, macaronic verse, creativity

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