Book excerpt: This is the first complete and balanced historical grammar of Russian to appear in many years. Clear and readable, with none of the technicalities of theoretical linguistics, it is destined to become the standard introduction in English to Slavonic philology. Focusing on language as it was actually used, the book is accessible to those students of Russian whose main interest is in literature rather than philology. Vlasto traces the merging of Russian with Old Church Slavonic to the evolution of classical modern Russian -- the standard literary language -- at the end of the 18th century.