Abstract
"Aesop's Language" as a Way to Escape Novoyaz
After the October Revolution, the socialist power which intended to acquire holy and absolute qualities for its ideological thoughts acted in a way to reinforce its legitimacy, to completely yoke the society and to govern it such. In order to reach to its goal, it established plans knowing that the most significant factor is language in having its authority accepted and in creating a world of total movements with an intention to impose intellectual and behavioural stereotypes. Later, it attempts to maintain the consistency and the continuity of the political culture which it had established and developed using totalitarian language and which would be called novoyaz. A new discourse (newspeak) arose based on manipulation to create a cognitive system in which individuals are shaped according to the political power. Novoyaz refers to the politicization of language by creating a new dictionary, producing complicated abbreviations and establishing new words that are unique to soviets (sovietism) in order to cause new associations of political words in consequence of the new regime. As a new instrument for manipulation and mobilization, this new discourse (newspeak) creates a cognitive system required for deploying individuals according to the power.Novoyaz divides writers who sustain their existence through language into three categories: the first group is the writers who produce works in the light of social functions of novoyaz by assuming the status quo as a protective role; the second group is the writers who chooses emigration since they observe the inconsistencies of ideological practice and do not accept the new discourse; and the third group adopts Aesop’s language for they cannot emigrate but also reject to take place among the masses in conformity with the status quo. Aesop’s language which contains the rich layers of allegorical expression language provides a new language possibility for the third group in reaching to the reader by escaping the Soviet censorship committee. This study discusses the deliberate changes on language units after the October Revolution and the Soviet intelligentsia’s political deployment of itself against these changes.
Keywords
Aesop’s language, novoyaz, october revolution, the Soviet Union, totalitarianism