Victor Zhivov's Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia is one of the most important studies ever published on eighteenth-century Russia. Historians and students of Russian culture agree that the creation of a Russian literary language was key to the formation of a modern secular culture, and this title traces the growth of a vernacular language from the «hybrid Slavonic» of the late seventeenth century through the debates between «archaists and innovators» of the early nineteenth...