The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Aesopian Language

(from the name of the ancient Greek fabulist Aesop), a special type of cryptographic or allegorical writing used in literature, criticism, and journalism in order to circumvent censorship when such literary activity is denied freedom of expression.

An example of Aesopian language was the technique worked out in the Russian press between the late 18th and the early 20th century—that is, the system of “deceptive means,” or of encoding (and decoding) freely conceived ideas—as a reaction against the ban that forbade mention of certain ideas, subjects, events, and persons. Specific examples of such techniques were the use of images derived from fables and of allegorical “fairy-tale descriptions,” particularly in the work of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, who in fact popularized the term “Aesopian language”; semi-transparent circumlocutions and pseudonyms, such as those used by A. V. Amfiteatrov in The Obmanovs (Deceivers), his feuilleton about the tsar’s family (the Romanovs); more or less covert allusions; and irony—which, when “clothed in tactfulness,” was invulnerable to censorship. “Foreign” subject matter was used to disguise condemnations of actual conditions in Russia, and common phrases became gibes, as in the case of the expression “At your service, Sir,” which was a reference to A. S. Suvorin’s newspaper Novoe vremia. Readers knew that “the big job” stood for “revolution,” that “the realist” was K. Marx, and that “those missing from the anthologies” meant V. G. Belinskii or N. G. Chernyshevskii. When so used, Aesopian language was accessible to the general reader and served as a tool not only of political struggle but also of realistic literary craftsmanship. In France, H. Rochefort was master of the Aesopian language.

In time, the typical techniques used in Aesopian language became part of the satiric style, and today’s writers resort to such techniques independently of censorship pressures. Whether used separately or combined with other means of creative linguistic expression, these techniques have become attributes of specific writers’ styles, as exemplified by A. France’s Penguin Island, the works of M. A. Bulgakov, K. Čapek’s The War With the Newts, and various literary genres of science fiction and humor.

REFERENCES

Chukovskii, K. Masterstvo Nekrasova, 4th ed. Moscow, 1962.
Bushmin, A. S. Satira Saltykova-Shchedrina. Moscow-Leningrad, 1959. Chapter 6.
Efimov, A. I. lazyk satiry Saltykova-Shchedrina. Moscow, 1953. Chapter 8.
Paklina, L. Ia. Iskusstvo inoskazatel’noi rechi: Ezopovskoe slovo v khudozhestvennoi literature i publitsistike. Saratov, 1971.

V. P. GRIGOR’EV

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References in periodicals archive

They describe theoretical issues, including the specifics of the Soviet literary field, the role of Aesopian language, Soviet multinational literature, and the strategies of Soviet Lithuanian writers; Lithuanian literature, including atheist autobiographies, Soviet poets, literary criticism, the reception of the Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Lithuania, and Eimuntas Nekrosius' Kvadratas/The Square; and literatures of other Soviet republics, including Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, and Estonia.

The Literary Field Under Communist Rule

The public literature and slogans of the various communist parties are replete with what is known as "Aesopian language," allowing its authors to propagate a specific message understood to their ideological adherents but unbeknownst or seemingly benign to the average unsuspecting person.

The Communist pedigree of the clenched-fist salute: symbolism has been very important to the communist movement because its members are trying to achieve an end goal, not convince society that they are right

In his discussion of Russian "Aesopian language," Lev Losev argues that writers in that tradition composed literary works made up of "screens," which hide valences in a literary text from some of its readers, and "markers," which indicate the presence of, or directly reveal valences in a text to other readers.

The poetics of hinting in Wild Grass

Like the Horkheimer circle emigres speaking carefully to avoid right-wing attack and-skeptical of the American working class' revolutionary potential--writing for an audience that was elsewhere or yet to come, many introductions to critical theory seem to speak an "Aesopian language" or send "messages in a bottle." More concerned with shoring up some "line" than offering multifaceted accounts, such introductions present controversial arguments to insiders and a deceptively unbiased face to the outsider.

Stephen Eric Bronner: Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction

Great writers and journalists often used "Aesopian language" to communicate with their most careful readers: they expected their audience to read between the lines and to catch even very subtle allusions.

Censorship in Russia: Old and New Faces

Lioudmila Savinitch, who analysed the use of Aesopian language in the Russian press of the 19th century defines the Aesopian language as

Was it all pure propaganda? Journalistic practices of 'silent resistance' in Soviet Estonian journalism/"Vaikse vastupanu" praktikad Eesti noukogude ajakirjanduses

(Stone 1956, 1) It is interesting to note that Stone uses Aesopian language and parody to amplify his point.

Amoozin' but confoozin': comic strips as a voice of dissent in the 1950s

To circumvent censorship, Eastern European theatre artists had mastered to perfection an Aesopian language in which they could say almost anything, and which made the stage all the more important and urgent, compared to other media.

The tradition of the non-traditional: Bulgaria's National Theatre may represent the establishment, but it still leads the experimental pack

The enduring scale of faint differences amid policy, on occasion highlighted in prior studies such as Lev Losev's On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature, Arbeiten und Texte zur Slawistik, 31 (Munich: Saguer, 1984), underscores the need for instructive texts such as National Identity but, paradoxically, emphasizes the fact that subtlety is also something understated, not quite said.

National Identity in Russian Culture: An Introduction

Second, they represented a translation from Aesopian language and euphemism to conversational German, on behalf of the slow-witted, the saboteurs, and so on.

To the editors

Such application appears limitless: an official Russian translation of The Lord of the Rings in 1991, available underground for many years, saw the text function as a kind of Aesopian Language, (44) substantiating the ability of escapism to be subversive, socially sanctioned, and yet deconstructing the dominant discourse as it purports to reinforce it.

Applicability and truth in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion: readers, fantasy, and canonicity