The purpose of this study is to analyze the normalizing process of the Russian literary language in the second half of the 18th century in relation to styles of authors of that period. At the beginning of the 18th century the bookish, written Slavic l ...

The purpose of this study is to analyze the normalizing process of the Russian literary language in the second half of the 18th century in relation to styles of authors of that period. At the beginning of the 18th century the bookish, written Slavic language was perceived as the literarty language of the higher level, while the spoken Russian was of the lower lever. They began to have competition with each other. The most urgent problem which the 8th century was faced with was to limit the literary function of the written Slavic as a continuation of the Church Slavic tradition and to upgrade the spoken Russian to be fully integrated into the literary language. The spoken Russian had been mainly used for folklore and nonliterary purposes. What had complicated the situation was the influence of western languages, including Polish.
Lomonosov attempted to solve this confused situation by designing "the three styles," high, middle and low. This epoch-making theory was an eclectic one in the sense that it tried to allocate proportionally elements of the written Slavic and the spoken Russian in accordance with styles and genres. The historical significance of this theory was to recognize the literary status of the spoken Russian theoretically for the first time and to retain the literary tradition by acknowledging the literary status of the Church Slavic rather than eliminating Slavic tradition as shown in the example of Serbo-Croatian literary language. Therefore, this theory led the development of the Russian literary language in the direction of synthesizing all the factors, written and spoken. But this theory was destined to be a transitional one. Its artifitial design of distributing styles along with genres prevented the theory from being fit to the literary reality. In addition, it could not dffectively cope with influences of foreign languages, especially of French, by looking away from their influences.
The second half of the 18th century was the period of dissolving the three styles. Karamzin's "new style" was an attempt to westernize the Russian literary language by substitutting French elements for Church Slavic ones. But it was merely a moderniantion of the high style.
On the other hand, there were attenpts to democratize the language. Krylov's fables elevated the literary function
of the low style, while Radiščev, following Deržavin's path, demonstrated the possibility of amalgamating the literariness of the high style and the spokinness of the low, based on the middle style, in order to deliver his own progressive ideas effectively.
In this respect, the modernization, i.e. westernization and democratization, of the literary language of the 18th century was the process of experimenting with and synthesizing all the varieties of styles and genres, not of enhancing or eliminating any of the styles or genres. Finally, the pattern of normalization of the Russian literary language of the 18th century can be schematized in relation to styles of authors as follows.