Until the aftermath of the French invasion of Russia in 1812, cultured Russians spoke and—as Tolstoy dramatized in War and Peace—even thought in French. When Pushkin began his writing career, “Russian” was a hodgepodge of Church Slavonic, borrowed Latinate words, and a bureaucratic jargon called Chancery. The Russian language lacked words for many articles of clothing, and for important concepts like privacy and imagination.
