Review of: S. V. Pol’skoi & V. S. Rzheutskii, eds., Laboratoriia poniatii. Perevod i iazyki politiki v Rossii XVIII veka. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2022.
This article examines the three translations of Nikolai Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler published in nineteenth-century France. Relying on Descriptive Translation Studies so as to challenge ...the traditional narrative about the political innocuousness of Karamzin’s travelogue, it reconstructs the historical contexts of the three publications in order to highlight the political agendas of their translators and/or translating patrons. Far from being the innocent product of the translators’ sheer curiosity, the three translations prove to be political objects, used at three key moments in the history of Franco-Russian relations in the nineteenth century, in order to call for political change, to try and restore Russia’s damaged reputation, or to attempt to forge new diplomatic alliances.
This paper focuses on Karamzin’s depiction, in Letters of a Russian Traveler, of Abbé Miolan’s failed hot air balloon flight in Paris in July 1784. After briefly tracing the history of aeromania in ...late eighteenth-century France and England, as well as its contemporary Russian reception, notably by Catherine the Great, the paper identifies Karamzin’s sources of information on the event and analyses the reasons why the Russian writer mentioned it in his travelogue. It demonstrates that Karamzin’s depiction of a physical experiment embodying European capacity for innovation in the late eighteenth century was not an expression of scientific curiosity. Instead, the young writer used the episode as a metaphor of social and political management, in order to reflect on the questions of social autonomy and the relation of the enlightened public with State power in both France and Russia. By depicting Miolan’s failed flight as a condemnable nuissance to public order, reminiscent of the revolutionary trouble he had witnessed during his journey through France, Karamzin showed his endorsement of Catherine’s conservative conception of the Enlightenment. By depicting how the French public sphere dealt with Miolan and possibly implicitly comparing it with the way Catherine had dealt with Radishchev, he nevertheless showed the superiority of self-regulation over political violence in managing the nobility’s growing longing for autonomy.
Review of:Anthony Cross, In the Lands of the Romanovs. An Annotated Bibliography of First-hand English-language Accounts of the Russian Empire (1613-1917). Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2014, ...419 p. ISBN 978-1-78374-057-4
This article examines the three translations of Nikolai Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveler published in nineteenth-century France. Relying on Descriptive Translation Studies so as to challenge ...the traditional narrative about the political innocuousness of Karamzin's travelogue, it reconstructs the historical contexts of the three publications in order to highlight the political agendas of their translators and/or translating patrons. Far from being the innocent product of the translators' sheer curiosity, the three translations prove to be political objects, used at three key moments in the history of Franco-Russian relations in the nineteenth century, in order to call for political change, to try and restore Russia's damaged reputation, or to attempt to forge new diplomatic alliances.
This paper focuses on the disruptive nature of Aleksandr Griboedov’s play Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma) for 19th-century readers. After a brief review of the reactions of various notable writers and ...critics concerning non-canonical aspects of the play’s plot, structure, characterization and politics, it focuses on two lesser-known texts which document other aspects of Woe from Wit’s reception: a late nineteenth-century anonymous pornographic spoof and Evdokia Rostopchina’s 1856 sequel The Return of Chatskii (Vozvrat Chatskogo). As it turns out, both these hypertexts voiced deep concerns about the disturbing social order painted in Woe from Wit and aimed at fixing it by restoring the traditional gender and class roles shaken up in Griboedov’s original.
L'article examine dans quelles langues les étudiants de l'université de Strasbourg issus de l'Empire russe étudiaient dans le dernier tiers du xviiie siècle. Après avoir distingué deux groupes ...d'étudiants – aristocrates scolarisés à l'École diplomatique de Schoepflin et Koch d'un côté, hobereaux ou fils de prêtres issus des séminaires de l'Empire russe et scolarisés à la faculté de médecine de l'autre – l'article montre quelles disciplines appelaient le choix du français, de l'allemand ou du latin, pour l'un comme pour l'autre groupe. Dans le cas des aristocrates, le français dominait largement dans les enseignements généralistes dispensés à des jeunes gens destinés essentiellement à la carrière diplomatique ou à celle des armes. L'allemand, par comparaison, ne jouait ici qu'un rôle très secondaire, de même que le latin. Dans le cas des étudiants de la faculté de médecine, à l'inverse, les trois langues revêtaient une grande importance, selon une logique distinguant entre matières théoriques et matières pratiques, les cours magistraux étant dispensés en latin à l'université et les travaux pratiques en allemand à l'hôpital municipal et en français à l'hôpital militaire. L'article s'appuie largement sur les archives Golicyn du RGADA pour les étudiants du premier groupe et sur celles de l'université et de la ville de Strasbourg pour le second. Il propose en annexe des curricula vitae inédits, en latin et en russe, d'étudiants russophones de la faculté de médecine de l'université de Strasbourg, ainsi que la liste des thèses qu'ils y soutinrent en latin.
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