Language machinery

« previous post | next post »

Xavier Marquez, "Stalin as Reviewer #2", Abandoned Footnotes 117/2018:

Most people reading this blog probably know about Trofim Lysenko, who, with Stalin’s help, set back Soviet genetics in the late 1940s, preventing any discussion of Mendelian inheritance. Yet Stalin’s influence on Soviet scholarship after WWII was much more far reaching. He intervened in disputes concerning philosophy, physics, physiology, linguistics, and political economy; in fact one of the epithets by which he was sometimes referred in the press was “the coryphaeus of science”, i.e., the leader of the chorus of Soviet science. (Lysenko himself used the term in his eulogy for Stalin in 1953, though it was first used in 1939).

Most of these interventions were editorial in character. He edited pre-publication drafts of articles and books, often in close consultation with their authors and at great length (he was actually a decent editor), and occasionally provided feedback on published and unpublished work. And he did this despite the fact that he was the undisputed ruler of one of the victors of World War II, a country that was facing the gigantic task of reconstruction after one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. In short, he was the editor and reviewer from hell.

The story of Stalin’s intervention into Soviet linguistics is particularly funny, at least in the morbid way that anything from that time can be funny. And it also brings out some interesting points about how official ideological commitments both constrained and enabled Stalin and Stalinism.

For those who might have missed the reference, "Reviewer #2" is "all that is wrong with the peer in peer review"; "the reviewer who trashes a perfectly good piece because it isn’t the piece he would have written";  a "condescending asshole" who "actively misinterprets everything you say"; etc.

FWIW, this reminds me that Dan Everett's argument in Language: The Cultural Tool reminded me of Stalin's position in "Marxism and Problems of Linguistics" — though Dan is not so focused on class struggle -:):

Language exists, language has been created precisely in order to serve society as a whole, as a means of intercourse between people, in order to be common to the members of society and constitute the single language of society, serving members of society equally, irrespective of their class status. […]

In this respect, while it differs in principle from the superstructure, language does not differ from instruments of production, from machines, let us say, which are as indifferent to classes as is language and may, like it, equally serve a capitalist system and a socialist system. […]

Language […] is connected with man's productive activity directly, and not only with man's productive activity, but with all his other activity in all his spheres of work […]

Update — in the comments, languagehat points us to "a Yuz Aleshkovsky song so well known it has its own Russian Wikipedia article; it begins 'Comrade Stalin, you are a great scholar; you understand linguistics.'", and to a youtube performance (one of many, it seems…):

 



7 Comments

  1. Jerry Friedman said,

    February 19, 2018 @ 1:26 pm

    I didn't know about the numbered reviewers. Standardization is needed—Tenure, She Wrote says Reviewer #3 is the aggressive one and Reviewer #2 is just right. (#1 is too timid and nice to be helpful.)

    If I were the dictator of a country, I'd spend a lot of time on editorial work, maybe even at the expense of purges.

  2. D.O. said,

    February 19, 2018 @ 2:20 pm

    Stalin might have been a decent editor (though I doubt it), but he was a terrible writer. But I would have forgiven him if he had just stuck to writing and editing. And that other guy should have stuck with painting. Next time you read a terrible piece of writing or see a really ugly painting think about possible alternatives…

  3. R. Fenwick said,

    February 20, 2018 @ 4:11 am

    @D.O.:

    And that other guy should have stuck with painting.

    But he could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon! Two coats!

  4. languagehat said,

    February 20, 2018 @ 10:25 am

    Stalin might have been a decent editor (though I doubt it)

    I don't; good editors are often bad writers, and his mind-set would seem to have been a good one for editing. I've seen other references to his skill at editing (Kotkin mentions it in the second volume of his biography), and I have no reason to doubt it.

    «Товарищ Сталин, вы большой учёный» ["Comrade Stalin, you are a great scholar"] is a Yuz Aleshkovsky song so well known it has its own Russian Wikipedia article; it begins "Comrade Stalin, you are a great scholar; you understand linguistics." Even if you don't know Russian, you might enjoy this lively performance.

  5. Joe Fineman said,

    February 20, 2018 @ 9:59 pm

    It is amusing that on the video, the caption is cut off after the "bol'" in "bol'shoi", which makes it seem to say, "Comrade Stalin, you are a pain".

  6. MikeA said,

    February 21, 2018 @ 11:35 am

    See Also:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborators_(play)

    Wherein Stalin is more than an editor to Mikhail Bulgakov

    Spoiler: It does not end well.

  7. David Marjanović said,

    February 21, 2018 @ 12:35 pm

    Tenure, She Wrote says Reviewer #3 is the aggressive one and Reviewer #2 is just right. (#1 is too timid and nice to be helpful.)

    That's exactly my experience from the one time I actually was lucky enough to get three reviewers. Most journals only use two.

RSS feed for comments on this post