Russlands rebeller: Protest og reaksjon i Putins Russland (2011–2020)

the immediate post-Petrine period, 6.7, in which the “topics” of texts investigated are glossed over in three lines, and a succession of sections of about half a page each in Chapter 8. More generally, one may wonder whether the chronological focus of Rosén’s study and the corpus of extant documents written by members of social groups beyond the political and social elite and the small circle of trained scribes are broad enough to yield data that would demonstrate conclusively whether the language situation in eighteenth-century Russia underwent gradual or rapid, radical change. The underwhelming conclusion to Chapter 6 illustrates this problem: the texts written in Russian in the 1740s “provide glimpses into parts of the linguistic reality” but “come nowhere near to showing us the true picture of the Russian linguistic situation” in that decade (p. 111). That said, Rosén has taken a careful first step in a stretch of territory that is relatively unexplored by historical sociolinguists and has produced a useful prospectus for future scholars who plan to enter it.