The possibility of the equal mastery of two languages is the subject of continual discussion, not only in the scientific community but also among writers, for instance Nancy Huston and Lyuba Yurgenson. Publications on bilingualism are numerous and constantly increasing, following progress in cognitive linguistics and neurolinguistics. In this chapter we will pay attention only to the particularities of the written speech of one bilingual person.

L.V. Sherba introduced the term pure bilingualism. He believed that in such bilingualism the language systems exist separately in the conciousness and assumed that such bilinguals have difficulty in translating from one language to another. As a typical example of such pure bilingualism Sherba proposed the linguistic situation in the Russian aristocratic community of the nineteenth century and the French-Russian bilingualism of the Russian nobility. Since the gouvernantes (nannies) who spoke only in French with their pupils were the ‘source’ of this bilingualism the direct learning method was named the ‘gouvernante method’. The language skills obtained from the nannies could be further perfected during travels abroad. References to this method can be found in all Soviet and Russian publications dealing with bilingualism. However when researchers discuss this type of bilingualism they more often remember Pushkin's Tatiana with her bad Russian and the characters of Tolstoy's War and Peace, which was written for French speaking Russian readers without translations of the novel's French passages.