Russian into Soviet: Dmitrii Ushakov, Sergei Ozhegov, and the Politics of Lexicography in the 1920s to the 1950s

Eleanora Gilburd, “Russian into Soviet: Dmitrii Ushakov, Sergei Ozhegov, and the Politics of Lexicography in the 1920s-1950s.” This presentation investigates the making of Russian normative dictionaries, Ushakov’s canonical four-volume Interpretive Dictionary(1935-1940) and Ozhegov’s Concise Dictionary (1949 on). The author discusses the enduring agendas of both lexicographers and locates their Soviet projects (in orthography, orthoepy, and “the culture of speech”) in a longer trajectory of language reforms and normalization stretching from the 1890s. She looks at what was gradually classified as substandard or antiquated speech and pushed beyond the boundaries of literary language; considers the concealment or excision of loanwords; and shows how, by the early 1950s, active vocabulary was substantially reduced and the range of metaphorical meanings narrowed. The paper argues that the Russian literary norm codified in these dictionaries (especially in Ozhegov’s) habituated political set expressions as exemplary models of “cultured” speech.