St Petersburg University hosts the 50th Lyudmila Verbitskaya International Scientific Philological Conference
The conference was held from 15 to 23 March. It was devoted to a wide range of topical issues in linguistics, literary criticism, language teaching methods, and interdisciplinary research.
Vladimir Kazakov, Professor in the Department of Russian Language at St Petersburg University was the first speaker to open the conference. ’It is already half a century since the Philological Conference has been held by St Petersburg University. It is a large-scale philological forum that invites around 800 Russian and foreign researchers from all over the world in 11 research areas, to gather in 52 sessions,’ said Professor Kazakov. He also added that the online format, which the conference adopted two years ago, has not affected its content or the quality of communication, and it will, as in the past, bring together scholars from various fields of study and scientific schools.
In his address, Associate Professor Mikhail Koryshev, Senior Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Philology at St Petersburg University, stressed that the University maintains the traditions of the St Petersburg school of philology, which were promoted by Lyudmila Verbitskaya. There is also a revival of research areas that were once actively pursued by the University’s scholars, such as Celtic and Kashubic studies. The University has also expanded into new research and education areas, e.g. the study of minor languages of Italy and Romansh languages of Switzerland, including the Luxembourgish language.
Peter the Great as a philologist
Petr Bukharkin, Professor in the Department of History of Russian Literature of St Petersburg University, delivered the first plenary report about Peter the Great as a philologist. He began by quoting the words of literary scholar Ilya Serman about the Emperor: ’Peter the Great was by no means a man of letters or vocation, he was not an enlightened ruler as Frederick II in Germany or Catherine the Great in Russia. Nor was he a patron of the sciences and arts, as it happened in the history of Europe, even though his father and elder brother played a significant role in their development.’
The year 2022 will mark the 350th anniversary of the birth of Peter the Great. The Emperor issued a decree establishing St Petersburg University 278 years ago, in 1724.
Petr Bukharkin noted that Peter the Great, who was certainly not a philologist either in the modern sense or in the understanding of his times, could be called a philologist in the figurative sense — not metaphorical, but metonymic. ’It is possible to construct an argumentative logical sequence that will lead us to see Peter the Great as a philologist and to relate his activities to a complex body of knowledge that philology deals with,’ he added.
The report by Professor Petr Bukharkin focused on two aspects: the linguistic policy of Peter the Great and the linguistic behaviour of the Tsar-Emperor, his "linguistic personality".
The main event in the language policy of Peter the Great was the creation of a civil script, which began in 1707 and was completed with the publication of a new alphabet in 1710. The new system was based on the Moscow civil script of the end of the 17th — beginning of the 18th century modelling Latin antiqua. Previously, the Church Slavonic half-uncial was used in both civil and religious typography. However, after the reform of Peter the Great half-uncial remained only in church books. Peter the Great not only initiated the reform of the civil script, but was directly involved in its development. For example, the Russian State Historical Archive contains the ’Civil alphabet with moral teachings’, corrected by the Emperor’s hand.
The first book in a new script, "Geometriia slavenski zemlemerie" ("The Geometry of Slavic Land Survey"), was published in 1708.
Many researchers view the development of the civil script as another move by the tsar to secularisation. Petr Bukharkin, though, argues that this reform was no less dictated by his ambition for westernisation. The reform, however, was carried out on the basis of national traditions. ’Peter the Great preserved the Cyrillic script, but brought it as close as possible to the Western, Latin alphabet. By keeping it Cyrillic, the script preserved the remembrance to the Greek language,’ said Professor Bukharkin. The same objective was pursued in the policy on the language of printed books, at the heart of which was the idea of clarity, simplicity, and ’the preservation of both meaning and spiritual value’.
Professor Bukharkin argues that this is the essence of Westernisation, which is often seen through the prism of industrial progress. However, the linguistic behaviour and portrait of Peter the Great show that there were much deeper motives behind it. He was not interested in simply transferring the achievements of European civilisation, but in assimilating its spirit and mentality. ’It is no coincidence that the reform of Peter the Great coincides with the proto-Enlightenment, a remarkable event of New History that signalled the emergence of civil society and respect for an individual human being,’ said Petr Bukharkin. ’The paradox of the emperor’s personality is that he demonstrated little humanity not only towards his foes, but even towards his comrades-in-arms’, added the scholar. In his letters, however, Peter the Great used the form of address in the second person plural, which was a formal expression of respect and recognition of another person, just emerging in Russia at that time.
’The initiatives of Peter the Great in the field of philology clearly demonstrate the main result of his reign: Russia, like a vessel, enters the world of the dominant countries, becoming part of the political society, not as a savage armed to the teeth, but as a country that seeks to absorb the values of the Christian world, of which it was a part. Civil society emerges two generations later, at the end of the 18th century, during the reign of Catherine the Great, successor of Peter the Great. Juri Lotman reminded of this fact in his scholarly and popular writings on the 18th century’, said Professor Bukharkin.
Russian language and literature in Spain
Professor Rafael Guzmán Tirado presented a report ’Nationally oriented approach to teaching the Russian language and Russian literature: from the experience of the University of Granada’.
’We are living through a difficult time. That is why, for me personally, and I think for many of you, the work and spirit of this remarkable person, who loved her job and dedicated her life to it, is of particular importance. The noble mission of Lyudmila Verbitskaya, like mine and yours, is teaching Russian language and Russian culture and development of Russian studies’, said Professor Tirado.
In his report, Professor Tirado spoke about the projects in the field of Russian language and literature at the University of Granada. One of the main principles underlying them is the idea of dialogue between cultures. The projects in Russian as a foreign language were developed by a research group created in 1996 at the Department of Greek and Slavonic Philology at the University of Granada and were supported by the Russian World Foundation and International Association of Teachers of Russian Language and Literature. They include congresses, seminars in Russian as a foreign language and translations, development of teaching materials, online educational resources, and the journal Cuadernos de Rusistica Espanola, which is the only Spanish-language journal listed in the Web of Science (WoS).
I would like to note that as the President of the International Association of Teachers of Russian language and Literature, Lyudmila Verbitskaya made an invaluable contribution to the development of Spanish-Russian studies. She actively supported various scientific and cultural events at the University of Granada, held under the auspices of the Association, during the last two decades.
Rafael Guzmán Tirado, Professor of the University of Granada
Professor Tirado spoke in more detail about two initiatives: an interactive educational complex "Russia and Spain: Dialogue of Cultures"; and a multimedia educational resource for Spanish-speaking students "Russian Literature in the World Education Process". Information is also available on the portal "Russian language in Spain". (elrusoenespana.com).
The first project, developed jointly by Russian and Spanish scholars, offers texts for reading and speech development that reflect the historical and cultural contacts between our countries. It includes multimedia, interactive, learning and teaching components and is designed to meet the needs of all levels of learners.
The same working group produced the platform "Russian Literature in the World Education Process". ’This project gained relevance due to the shortage of textbooks or multimedia resources on Russian literature in Spain or in Latin America,’ said Rafael Guzmán Tirado, Professor at the University of Granada. He added that courses on the history of Russian literature offered by the faculties of humanities and translation and interpreting have been very popular with students. The only Spanish textbook on the subject was written in 1936 and is now unavailable to students. Students have to turn to English- and French-language sources, which, according to the scholar, pay insufficient attention to the history of Russian literature. The resource "Russian Literature in the World Education Process" also offers a comparative approach to Russian and Spanish cultures. The first component of this resource was the monograph Historia de la literatura rusa, which includes an overview of Russian literature from the 11th to the 21st century.
The works of Eugene Vodolazkin were included in The Almanac of Contemporary Russian Prose, which has been translated into several languages, including Chinese and Turkish.
The speaker reported that a few weeks ago the writer Eugene Vodolazkin visited Spain to present the Spanish translation of his novel "Laurus". Professor Rafael Guzmán Tirado was one of the translators. The novels "The Aviator" and "Brisbane" have also been published in Spanish.
Professor Rafael Guzmán Tirado concluded by saying that the results of the projects exceeded the expectations of its developers. The focus on the dialogue and interaction between the two cultures ensures that Spanish students do not just mechanically learn the material, but are emotionally involved in the learning process, actively participating in discussions and sharing their opinions. ’Russian cultural phenomena reflecting direct contacts and impact on the students’ native culture evoke more feelings and emotions than those that are not immediately associated with it,’ said Rafael Guzmán Tirado.
Problems of linguistic reconstruction and the dating of narratives in the Greek epic tradition
A report presented by Nikolai Kazansky, Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, focused on the reconstruction of the proto-language text. The scholar compared the linguistic data with the image on the seal, known as the Pylos Combat Agate since 2017. The seal was found in a burial site of the mid-15th century BC (excavations of J. Davis and S. Stocker). The drawing shows a hero armed only with a sword attacking a fully armoured warrior. The hero grabs the crest of his opponent’s helmet, turns the head of the opponent and kills him with the sword. It is obvious that this technique was only possible with a helmet of a very specific design, which was common between 1600 and 1450 BC, i.e. long before the earliest Greek texts written in Cretan-Mycenaean syllabic linear writing (1400-1200 BC). Similar motifs on other artefacts found in Mycenaean and some Cretan cities show that the subject was popular in the middle of the second millennium BC and probably reflected the epic narrative of that time.
Being part of the centuries-old Greek epic tradition, the Homeric poems reflect the narrative conventions and mastery of storytelling, developed over the centuries. The Iliad (song 3, verse 369) recounts how Menelaus, during a fight with Paris, seizes him by the helmet and, wrenching it, drags Paris towards the Greek army. Several phrases in this passage may have appeared in the first half of the second millennium BC, as they accurately depict the details of the combat technique: he grabbed the crest of the helmet of a particular design (the epithet used is not found elsewhere) and, using it as a lever, turned the opponent’s head. The Homeric narrative ends with Aphrodite carrying Paris away from the battlefield by tearing his helmet strap, and leaving Menelaus with an empty helmet in his hand. Nikolai Kazansky believes that this ending, different from the scene depicted on the ’The Pylos Combat Agate’, is the author’s interpretation, which should be dated to the last (Ionian) stage of the Greek epic tradition (around the 8th century BC).
In 2021, St Petersburg University launched its first bachelor’s programme in Comparative-Historical Linguistics. Besides ancient languages and subjects related to the theoretical issues of linguistics, the curriculum includes an introduction to general courses in Philology (textology, text interpretation) and to related areas of Humanities.
Answering the question about the diversity of data necessary for such a linguistic reconstruction, Nikolai Kazansky pointed out that it requires not only knowledge of ancient Indo-European languages (e.g. Ancient Greek, Latin, Old Slavonic and Old Indian), but also of history, archaeology, ethnography, genetics and palaeobotany.
Between the lexicon and the grammar
Dmitrij Dobrovolskij is Chief Research Associate at the Vinogradov Russian Language Institute and the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor of Stockholm University. He presented a report "Between the lexicon and the grammar: on the syntax of idioms". ’There is a certain transitional zone between grammar and lexicon. Though worse described than grammar and lexicon, this zone is quite extensive and essential for the language as a whole as it contains all phraseology’, said Professor Dobrovolskij. In his presentation, he made interesting observations on the relationship between the semantic structure of the idiom and its potential for syntactic variation. Thus, different idioms behave differently with regard to passivisation. For example, the combination "to break the ice" (in a relationship) can be transformed into "the ice (in their relationship) has been broken", but "gasp out one’s life" does not allow the transformation into "one’s life has been gasped out". Such seemingly unpredictable differences in the syntactic behaviour of idioms have semantic roots, noted the scholar.