Destiny of Church Slavonic Language Heritage in Modern Russian Speech Culture

Abstract

This article reviews a situation caused by such reasons as persecutions on Russian Orthodox Church in the 20th century, withdrawal of religious texts from school and high school education (first of all, Bibles), which led to the loss of Slavic church linguistic heritage by the Russian and Russian-speaking society. In practice it extremely impoverished the stylistic opportunities of the modern Russian literary language. It turns out that this loss is especially evident in the field of phraseology, in its broad sense, and lexis that defines ethical notions and concepts expressing the world of emotions. On the example of a number of poetic and prosaic texts of the Russian literature of the 19-20th centuries, the author shows that, without the knowledge of basics of the Slavic church language and Bible texts (Old and New Testament), a full perception of Russian classical literary works of the 19-20th centuries is not possible. It is asserted that many lexical and phraseological units of the Slavic church language have conceptual, ethical, and esthetical value for the contemporary Russian literary language, and that their “reanimation” is possible if programs of school and high school education will include the study of the Bible as the literary work possessing the major art and ethical importance.

Keywords

• Slavic church language
• modern Russian literary language
• Bible
• language preservation
• language development