Aleksandr Semyonovich Shishkov
Aleksandr Semyonovich Shishkov (1754-1841) was a prominent Russian statesman and literary figure known for his conservative and Slavophile ideologies. He served in the admiralty, where he advocated for the education of young naval officers. Shishkov believed in the distinctiveness of Russian culture and opposed the uncritical adoption of Western influences, particularly in literature and language. His significant work, "Rassozhdenie o starom i novom slove rossiiskago iazyka," published in 1803, argued that the Russian language should draw upon its Church Slavonic roots rather than borrowing excessively from Western languages, especially French. He emphasized the value of peasant storytelling as a model for authentic Russian literature. His ideas sparked significant debate in Russian literary circles, reflecting the broader cultural tensions between Slavophiles and Westernizers. To further promote his literary vision, Shishkov founded the Colloquy of Lovers of the Russian Word, which aimed to foster a distinctly Russian approach to literature.
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Aleksandr Semyonovich Shishkov
Statesman
- Born: March 20, 1754
- Died: April 21, 1841
- Place of death: St. Petersburg, Russia
Biography
Aleksandr Semyonovich Shishkov was born on March 20, 1754, and was a conservative statesman, working for many years in the admiralty, where he sought to foster the education of young naval officers. He was a Slavophile, one of a broad group of Russian thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who considered Russian culture to have a unique character which should not be diluted by the heedless adoption of Western cultural elements such as parliamentary democracy. He carried that philosophy into his ideas about Russian literature and argued that the wholesale borrowing of Western words, particularly French, was impoverishing rather than enriching the Russian language.
His 1803 Rassozhdenie o starom i novom slove rossiiskago iazyka, in which he laid forth his philosophies of what Russian literature ought to be, extolled Church Slavonic as the root and source of the Russian language. The 1803 discourse called for Russian writers to look to Church Slavonic as a source for new words rather than to merely borrow a convenient term from a Western language. He also called for writers to look to the genres of storytelling common among the peasants of the countryside for both models of simple, straightforward language and for narrative structures that would create a truly Russian literature, rather than merely the aping of Western literature in an increasingly Westernized Russian language.
The publication of this work sparked an intense debate in Russian literary circles, which split along lines paralleling the Slavophile and Westernizer divide in political discourse. Shishkov founded a literary group, the Colloquy of Lovers of the Russian Word, for the promotion of his views on the proper direction for the development of Russian literature. Shishkov died in 1841.