Book Launch. The Power of Language and Rhetoric in Russian Political History by Richard S. Wortman

Please join us to celebrate the publication of Richard S. Wortman’s The Power of Language and Rhetoric in Russian Political History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

In this book Wortman examines the rhetorical force of certain key words in the discourses of Russian state, political thought, and literature. He shows how terms for cultured conduct (kul’turnost’), political affection (love, liubov’, joy-radost’ etc.), personhood (lichnost’), truth (pravda) and geographical integrity (tsel’nost’) assumed almost sacral meaning. He considers how these terms took on a life of their own, imposing the designs of the Russian state and defining the hopes of educated society in the process.

By exploring the usage of these words in a wide range of texts, Richard Wortman provides glimpses into the ideas and feelings of leading figures and thinkers in Russian history, from Peter the Great to Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Berdiaev, as well as writers like Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev, and Fedor Dostoevsky, giving a sense of the intellectual and emotional universe they inhabited.

Richard Wortman is Bryce Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University.