In the world of Russian philology, artificially divided into "nashi" and "wanderers" - those who, for various reasons, found themselves outside their homeland and served for many years in isolation from the national science, there are special figures who stood, perhaps, apart and still have not received wide recognition in Russia. This cannot be said fully about the famous linguist S. I. Kartsevsky, although his scientific works (primarily on modern linguistics) are almost not used in universities. The reason for this may have been that since the late 1920s he was not published in Russia, and a significant part of the philological heritage of the scientist was made up of works in French, published, as a rule, in publications inaccessible to our audience in the 1930s and 1950s. Therefore, the name of S. I. Kartsevsky, so well-known to European linguists, is revered at home only by experts and connoisseurs of "antiquities". At the same time, it is forgotten that it is precisely there, in the revolutionary (literally and figuratively) polemics of the 1920s, that the foundations of the true philological meaning of modern linguistics rest, those ideas and developments that outstripped and somewhat anticipated the development of domestic science. Therefore, the publication of the volume of selected works of S. I. Kartsevsky, carried out by the publishing house "Languages of Russian Culture" (Moscow, 2000), is very timely, as it opens up to Russian readers the unknown and forgotten S. I. Kartsevsky - one of the active participants of the Prague Linguistic Circle.

The presented book thematically combines four sections: I. Works on the theory of language. P. Works on the vocabulary of the Russian language of the first quarter of the XX century. III. Reviews. IV. Application.

The most extensive part - the theory of Russian linguistics-covers the debatable problems of the formal grammatical direction in Russian philology in the 1920s, when both here and abroad our scientists were engaged in a heated debate about how to develop and teach theoretical questions of grammar. Along with the apologists of this trend, who to a certain extent were influenced and continued the traditions of the Fortunatov school (D. N. Ushakov, N. N. Durnovo, A.M. Peshkovsky, etc.), S. I. Kartsevsky does not fully accept this "fashion", which had many supporters and propagandists in the 1920s. "Under administrative pressure," he writes, "grammatical formalism risks turning into a kind of protective color for the unfortunate "crabs" (pp. 25-26). Your own

page 121

he expressed his views on this problem and polemics in his work "On the formal-grammatical direction", where the stumbling block was the question of form, which was solved differently by the followers of F.F. Fortunatov and S. I. Kartsevsky. After a series of well-aimed remarks (he performs a downright detailed analysis of the theses of his opponents), the author makes the following generalization in the final chords of the article:: "We use speech not only to express concepts and judgments. In addition to this "intellectual" function, it also performs another, no less important, although directly opposite: - it serves us to identify our feelings in order to infect our interlocutors with them. Both the intellectual and emotional planes are constantly intertwined in practical life. Speech reflects the conflicts that arise in this case: its logical basis is constantly destroyed under the onslaught of "psychology" and is again restored by the consciousness of speakers. This duality of speech is also twofold in language, both in the field of vocabulary and grammar" (pp. 38-39). And further: "Here lies one of the most important problems of linguistics, but formalist grammarians do not notice it" (p. 39). Kartsevsky illustrates this thesis with the following example: "Most words," he says, " are intended not to define and name, but to describe, to appeal to your imagination, to be expressive. Therefore, words (not terms) have several meanings: for example, mare-female horse, instrument of torture, gymnastic apparatus, swear word, etc. "(Ibid.).

Another argument of the scientist also seems very bold (especially at that time). "The point is," he notes, "that synchrony does not mean immobility" (p.41). This is another thesis that separates "official" and "unofficial" formalists. The former, in his opinion, " approach the language mechanism, stop it, begin to disassemble it into parts and describe these parts - this is what they consider static. But after all, the purpose of the machine is to act, and the purpose of language is to function as a tool for exchanging thoughts and feelings (emphasis added). - O. N.) between members of the same language collective" (Ibid.).

Speaking further, Kartsevsky emphasizes that the knowledge, discoveries and hypotheses of scientists are ultimately designed to contribute to the competent assimilation of the native language system and mastering the culture of native speech. He comes to the following conclusion: "High school classes should give students a number of scientific (here and further emphasis is ours. - O. N.) information about the language. Until now, our society has been completely ignorant in this respect. This will also include information about the Russian sound system and the relationship between pronunciation and spelling. At the lower level, this type of information should not exceed the minimum set by the specific needs of school work, for example, spelling. In all the same os-

page 122

Otherwise, you need to keep in mind the spiritual, semantic side of your native speech (italics by the author. - O. N.), a system of meanings, and not a dead analysis, as a result of which the living tissue of the language is arbitrarily cut into useless pieces" (p.45).

Here it is worth noting that the principled nature of S. I. Kartsevsky, a scientist, and the sharply polemical orientation of some of his assessments did not leave Fortunatov's followers indifferent. But if the materials of this discussion, which was a stumbling block for grammarians in the 1920s, are fairly well reflected in periodicals of those years and books, then it is always interesting to look beyond the official linguistics, which often reveals the hidden strings of human intuition. So, one such fragment was noticed by us when studying the scientific heritage of M. N. Peterson. N. N. Durnovo in a letter to him in 1926 unexpectedly retorts: "Kartsevsky scolds in all articles (here and further, our italics. - O. N.) formalists, and when he goes from general phrases to business, he does a very good job, not at all going against the formal direction" (Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. F. 696. Op. 1. Ed. chr. N 192. L. 1).

On the pages of the book under review, other questions are raised in the field of the theory of the Russian language and, importantly, how to apply it in practice in educational work. Many works of S. I. Kartsevsky were devoted to this. Among them, we note the articles included in the book and which remain acutely relevant today: "About one question of morphology", "On the question of voices in the modern Russian literary language", "On the structure of the Russian noun", "Non-union and subordination in the Russian language", "Comparison", " Preface to the book "Russian language. Part 1. Grammar of"".

Special mention should be made of the reprinted textbook of S. I. Kartsevsky "A repeated course of the Russian language", first published in 1928. This book can hardly even be called a textbook in the accepted sense of the word, with its certain dogmatism, which, however, is not denied by the scientist at the final stage of training, because "only he is able to give the student a short (hereafter discharge of the author. - O. N.) "a complete, harmonious and clearly formed idea of the subject" (p. 99). The course of S. I. Kartsevsky, in the presence of a code of "grammatical truths", permeates the "spirit of scientific research", with its experimentation, appeal to the reader not only as a "consumer" of educational products, but also as an accomplice and, if you like, a developer of the process, interested not in a simple presentation of the facts of the language, but in the direction of attention students 'interest in different aspects of the subject, stimulating the "emotional field" on the basis of which a genuine interest in the language can arise. Already at the beginning of the book, the author makes an accent that is not quite convenient (for grammarians).

page 123

the meaning of the subject and its purpose: "The first and most important belief that (...) the student must learn from this book that language is a social institution" (p. 101).

We will not dwell in detail on the chapters of the textbook by S. I. Kartsevsky. Everyone can get acquainted with them on their own if they wish. Let's just say that with the seemingly traditional course scheme (Our speech. Phrase structure. Word structure. Nouns. Verbs. Adjectives. Adverbs. Service words. The sound structure of speech. It is distinguished by the non-mechanical, developing nature of the academic presentation, the richness and consistency of the illustrative base, the ability to understand and listen, and, as a result, the appeal to future readers, who, we hope, will find in it a lot of new, promising and lively ideas.

The works published by the author of the book in other sections also deserve attention. These are very interesting observations of S. I. Kartsevsky on the sociolinguistics of the native language. The surge of such works (see, for example, the articles and books of E. D. Polivanov, V. B. Shklovsky, A.M. Selishchev, G. O. Vinokur, etc. ) in the 1920s is explained not only by the change of generations of linguists and ideology, but also by the appearance of a large number of new words and phenomena, increased attention to the external side of the language, etc. its carriers. The book publishes such works of the scientist as" The Russian language and the Revolution"," Hack","Language, War and Revolution". The last work, published for the first time in Berlin in 1923 as a separate booklet, is the result of the scientist's personal observations on the influence of war and revolution on the Russian language; here an attempt is made to determine the meaning of verbal expression of those years for the entire system of the Russian language.

The third section of the book - "Reviews" - included the most noticeable, in the opinion of the compiler, author's miniatures of the scientist, who always responded to the research of his colleagues with concise, sharp and businesslike reviews. Here you can find reviews by S. I. Kartsevsky on the books of G. O. Vinokur " Culture of Language. Essays on linguistic technology "(1925), journal "Native Language and School", collection of articles " Methodology of the native language. Linguistics. Stylistics. Poetics" (1925) by A. M. Peshkovsky, as well as his comments on the latter's textbooks, reviews of the publication of the Syntax of the Russian Language (1925) by A. A. Shakhmatov and the book by S. Bally "Language and Life" (1926).

The last section of the book - "Appendices" - will be of interest to historians of science, as it contains the first published materials of meetings of the Moscow Dialectological Commission. S. I. Kartsevsky took an active part in its work even before leaving abroad: he made reports, conducted polemics with those present, mainly

page 124

thus, on the problems of morphology of the Russian language. Here, not only the theses of S. I. Kartsevsky's speeches are noteworthy, but also authentic fragments of the discussion in which the luminaries of science of those years took part: M. N. Peterson, N. N. Durnovo, D. N. Ushakov, A.M. Peshkovsky, etc., as well as the still very young P. G. Bogatyrev, P. O. Yakobson, G. O. Vinokur. The published protocols reveal many unknown episodes of the commission's activities; it was there, in its depths, that S. I. Kartsevsky's future fundamental works were partly born.

In conclusion, it is worth saying a few words about the author of the idea of reprinting scientific works of S. I. Kartsevsky - Professor of the Charles de Gaulle University (France) I. I. Fougeron, who prepared this book for publication. She was faced with a difficult task of selecting and commenting on texts. But first of all, we would like to mention the fact that the author is well acquainted not only with the French archives of S. I. Kartsevsky, but also conducts investigative work in Russia, which resulted in the publication in this book of the previously unpublished manuscript of the article "On the question of deposits in modern Russian" and the most interesting minutes of the meetings of the Moscow Dialectological Commission of 1918. When this review was already written, the publishing house informed us that another volume of Kartsevsky's works was being prepared for publication-the fruit of the tireless work of Madame I. I. Fougeron. We hope that it will also present other facets of philological research of the original Russian scientist and teacher.

Permanent link to this publication: