Victor Zhivov's magisterial "Language and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia" tells the story of the creation of a new vernacular literary language in modern Russia, an achievement arguably on a par with the nation's extraordinary military successes, territorial expansion, development of the arts and formation of a modern empire. The language served as the primary vehicle for Russia's modernization and for its entry into the Western European cultural sphere, and Zhivov demonstrates that the unusually intense debates over it, down to violent disagreements over particular grammatical endings,...