Confronting Linguistic Legacies

This chapter sets out to investigate how the implications and broader dimensions of the Soviet linguistic legacy is represented in two post-Soviet prose texts, Evgenii Popov’s novel Podlinnaia istoriia ‘zelenykh muzykantov’ (The True Story of the ‘Green Musicians’, 1998) and Vladimir Sorokin’s short-story ‘Monoklon’ (2010). Popov’s ‘novel in footnotes’ comments on a text from the 1970s (reproduced in the novel), using humour and satire to expose the emptiness of clichés and make links to the present-day language debates. Sorokin, in turn, invokes the historical memory of Soviet speak through fragments, slogans, words and concepts, creating in his text a ‘simultaniety of the non-simultaneous’ by juxtaposing elements from two very different parts of the Soviet past and showing the need to tackle this past (or these pasts) in present-day Russian society.