Please join Simon Franklin for a conversation with Ekaterina Schulmann about his new book Troublesome Words: A Cultural History of Russian (Reaktion, August 2026).

Over the centuries, the Russian language has been shaped by competing visions of what it should be and who it belongs to: from 18th-century scholars seeking to establish a language of culture worthy of Russia’s imperial status, to writers asserting their own linguistic authority as creative individuals – or, conversely, seeking to reflect the linguistic authenticity of the masses – to cultural revolutionaries challenging the boundaries of language itself. The ritualised conformity of Sovietspeak gave way to the radical destabilisation of norms that accompanied the implosion of the USSR and the explosion of digital media, and, in the past couple of decades, to state legislation asserting control over the language used in its name.

Troublesome Words also follows the Russian language’s interactions with the wider world. It has been an instrument of imposed cohesion in a multilingual empire, and it has dispersed across the globe with waves of emigration – to a point where linguists begin to ask whether one can still speak of one standard Russian language, or of a polycentric world of Russophonia.

Simon Franklin paints a portrait of an ever-shifting linguistic landscape, alive despite attempts to fix and label it. Language can be performed and manipulated, something to share or to gatekeep. Innovation is either progressive or poisonous (depending on who you talk to). Norms of language are both necessary and resented. Moving from the halls of government to the language classroom, and from the prescriptive to the quirky and human, Troublesome Words reveals how language shapes – and is shaped by – power, imagination and our changing world.

Simon Franklin is Emeritus Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. His publications range from the history and culture of early Rus to 20th-century Russian poetry. Franklin’s books include Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), National Identity in Russian Culture. An Introduction (co-edited with Emma Widdis, Cambridge University Press, 2004), The Russian Graphosphere, 1450-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature (co-edited with Rebecca Reich and Emma Widdis, Cambridge University Press, 2024). In 2008 he was awarded the Lomonosov Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences – the Academy’s highest honour. He is a Trustee of Pushkin House, and from 2004 to 2009 he was Chair of the Board, overseeing the move to Bloomsbury Square.

Ekaterina Schulmann is a leading Russian political scientist, whose research focuses on legislative institutions, bureaucracy, and policy-making in modern autocratic systems, particularly in Russia. Since relocating to Berlin in 2022, she has held a non-resident fellowship at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and lectures in political science at Freie Universität Berlin's Osteuropa Institut. Schulmann is the author of several political science publications in Russian and a co-author of The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin’s Russia (Brookings Institution Press, 2018). She is also a Trustee of Pushkin House.

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