Alexander D. Nakhimovsky's work provides a rare opportunity for a non-Russian audience to familiarize themselves with the unique and, sadly, rapidly fading world of Russian peasantry through the prism of the language of their non-censored, sincere, and often deeply moving accounts of everyday rural life in the twentieth century. The author conducts an insightful and rigorous analysis of a corpus of written and oral recorded samples of peasant speech of various genres and from a range of sources covering the period from the end of nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The chronological framework of the work traces the evolution and gradual decline of rural dialects during the time of the most rapid and unprecedented transformations in the history of the Russian language. Most of the materials employed by the author, with a few exceptions, had been published in various Russian sources and remained largely inaccessible to the broad academic community outside of Russia. The author not only introduces this corpus of valuable linguistic data to the Anglophone reader, but also provides an extensive ethnographic and historical commentary to each document, which makes the work relevant to a wide range of scholarly interests.

One of the central arguments of Nakhimovsky's work is that the language of peasants should be recognized as a distinct type of social dialect alongside such varieties as urban vernacular and standard (literary) language. It is indeed difficult to argue with this statement and, in fact, as the author points out himself, the initial suggestion as to the social nature of rural dialects, and to recognize a degree of social stratification within them can be traced back to the works of Nikolai M. Karinskii. It is remarkable that the first insight of this kind was made by Karinskii as early as 1903 in his article “O bronnitskikh govorakh” (On the Dialects of Bronnitsa). Karinskii later introduced the concept of social language stratification within rural communities in his research work after the revolution, first at the Institute of Literature, History and Language and then the Institute of Linguistics, and his pioneering work in rural social dialectology inspired a series of projects conducted by his colleagues Georgii K. Danilov and, later, Afanasii M. Selishchev. As the author notes himself on several occasions, unfortunately, the political climate of the late 1920s and 1930s brought a range of promising scholarly projects to a very premature end, including those on rural social dialectology. The reassertion of the social nature of rural dialects in The Language of the Russian Peasants in the Twentieth Century and the recognition of Karinskii's and Selishchev's work in this area is, therefore, particularly important. One can, however, argue that rural dialects present equal interest to regional and social dialectologists, very much in the same way as certain types of urban vernacular (regional characteristics of which have been studied by early Soviet linguist Boris A. Larin). It is also interesting to quote in this connection William Labov, who has “resisted the term sociolinguistic for many years since it implies that there can be a successful theory or practice which is not social” (Labov, 1991: xv).

The book is organized on the chronological principle, which vividly presents the gradual evolution and then erosion of the rural dialects under the increasing influence of urbanization. One of the arguably most significant contributions of the book to the field of Russian dialectal studies is the detailed classification and analysis of the social varieties of rural dialects spoken in contemporary Russian villages presented in Chapter 4. The author uses an extensive pool of resources from the 1950s to the early 2000s to provide a multifaceted sociolinguistic picture of modern rural communities (a more extensive use of the collection of oral recordings from the Sector of Dialectology and Linguistic Geography, IRIa RAN, could have provided more detail). Considering the extent of urbanization of the contemporary village, the extrapolation of indigenous rural elements from the samples, as well as quantifying the degree of their distinctive features which separate them from other types of social dialects presented a significant challenge. This was successfully addressed in the monograph through the application of a well-designed methodology and ample illustrative material.