Meet the Poet and Theorist: Pavel Arsenev presenting Russian as a non-native language (Le russe comme non maternelle)

Russian as a non-native language (Le russe comme non maternelle), Pavel Arsenev (2024) Editions Vanloo

In his essay, the Sorbonne's Paul Arsenev reflects on his life as a Russian in exile and the status of losing his mother tongue to instiutionalized censorship. In his daily life, Paul Arsenev's Russian is stripped and limited to normative formulae. When a standarized language attacks its own instutions, the question remains: what have we become?