In 1903, a British inventor provided a circle of Russian revolutionaries with an airship. The radicals, led by a brilliant Jewish revolutionary and his daughter, set out to destroy oppressive governments from their floating fortress.
To access the Clapham headquarters of these sky-bound socialists, visitors needed to ability to speak at least four European languages to a sentry guarding the building. Multilingualism, in addition to a comfort with flying, was a precondition for this movement.
This was the strange plot of the 1893 novel The Angel of Revolution, which I first encountered through Faith Hillis’ history of the Russian exile ‘colonies’.
Hillis’ study was one of several recent reads that have provided me with new perspectives on one of my favourite topics: language learning and early 20th century radical politics.
Far from the hobbyist pursuit that it is sometimes considered today, learning languages was once regarded as a crucial component of political education. The linguistic entry requirements of a clandestine London hangout described in the Angel of Revolution are a useful metaphor for how multilingualism provided a pass into new revolutionary worlds.
This was not just the case for people immersed in a foreign language as a result of political exile. Aindrias Ó’Cathasigh’s recent article on Peadar Ó’Maicín (1878-1916) traces the life of an Irish socialist who saw language learning as a crucial component of emancipatory politics at home. The circumstances of Ó’Maicín’s death (he was killed by friendly fire while participating in the Easter Rising of 1916) adds an element of pathos to his story.
Although Irish was his main passion, Ó’Maicín was also an advocate of Esperanto, the invented language whose heyday took place before the First World War. Created by Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenoff in the late 19th century, Esperanto was an attempt to create a universal language. Nowadays cast as something pursued only by nerdy Utopian eccentrics (such as myself), learning Esperanto was once a pillar in a broader anti-imperialist argument.
In the vision of someone like Ó’Maicín, Irish would be the language that an independent Irish nation spoke within its own borders while Esperanto would be Ireland’s link to the wider world. The need to speak the language of the oppressor would thereby be circumvented.
Esperanto (as the language in which this newsletter is written attests) did not emerge victorious from the language wars. Although some modern Esperantists still hold out hope for the finvenkismo - the final victory of Esperanto dominance - the death knell of the language’s path to universality was arguably sounded when the League of Nations rejected it as an official language. The Communist International, which initially supported the League of Communist Esperantists, also failed to adopt it.
A novel that kept me turning over questions of radical language was Moriel Rothman-Zecher’s extraordinary new book Before all the World.
Written in a mix of English and Yiddish transliterated directly into English, thereby retaining the compound words of Yiddish, and with some Russian sprinkled in, the novel is a wonderfully inventive story of queer romance and radical politics that moves between the Pale of Settlement, interwar New York and 1930s Moscow.
The book resurrects not only lost political dreams, but also demonstrates the extraordinary linguistic vibrance of the communities who dared to dream them. I was reminded me of the important point made by historian of language learning John Gallagher: ‘contrary to nativist rhetoric, it is monolingualism – not multilingualism – that is the elite imposition’.
Rothman-Zecher’s book reveals how experimental styles can capture something important about the linguistic diversity of the past that conventional academic writing can obscure.
Professional convention requires me to render a multilingual world in a form of English recognisable to other academics. But in doing so I impose categories and framings that would have been unfamiliar to the people of the past I am trying to recover. In the step between the archive and my own account, a vivid world is dulled.
As I work more regularly on my own book, I am searching for a writing style that underlines how you once needed to storm the Tower of Babel before you reached the Bastille.
Although the global dominance of English has deprived the Anglophone world of much of its linguistic diversity, language learning is still much more than simply a hobby. It remains, in many cases, a deeply political act.
P.S. If you know someone who might find this newsletter interesting, I would really appreciate it if you would share it with them. In these early days of building a community on Substack, peer-to-peer recommendations really help. Dankon!
Your article makes me think of New York City in the 1920s, when small presses were aplenty, they all craved content, and translating was a serious part of publishing.