French in Russia

A cultural and social history of language cannot be written without a broad range of primary sources. For a history of French in Russia, some documents are already available in published form, but a great number of relevant documents from Russian and some other archives are still to be published. Even documents which have been published have rarely been analysed in terms of the cultural and social history of French understood as a lingua franca, a prestige language, a medium for new cultural values and notions, a tool of cultural propaganda and so forth.

Our purpose in collecting these documents is therefore to provide the beginnings of a corpus on which such a history can be based.

The dataset contains pairs of documents. In each pair there is (i) a text, or excerpts from a text, or a set of texts or excerpts (with our editorial notes) and (ii) an essay (also with notes) which introduces the text(s) in question.

The collection of texts published here represents the first batch of a small sample of the innumerable primary sources available for a multidisciplinary study of the history of the French language in Russia.