A Study Based on Old Slavic Texts and Russian
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ORIGINALS AND TRANSLATIONS: A STUDY BASED ON OLD SLAVIC TEXTS AND RUSSIAN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY JOURNALS BY VITALIY SIMANKOV, A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2012 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES AT BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, RI MAY 2017 © Copyright 2017 by Vitaliy Simankov CURRICULUM VITAE Vitaliy Ivanovich Simankov was born in 1973. In 1997 he graduated from the Kharkov Pedagogical Institute. In 2011 he started his study at the Department of Slavic Studies, Brown University. His current research interests include ethnic genesis of the Russians; ‘dead languages’ in Early Medieval Europe; attributing / de-attributing authorship; and eighteenth-century literature. His list of selected publications is as follows: BOOKS: – Из разысканий о журнале «Прибавленiе къ Московскимъ Вѣдомостямъ», или об авторстве сочинений, приписывавшихся Н. И. Новикову, И. Г. Шварцу и Ф. В. Каржавину. Харьков, 2010. JOURNAL ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS: – Из разысканий о журнале «Невинное упражнение» (1763) // Von Wenigen: [Сборник к юбилею Н. Д. Кочетковой]. СПб.: Изд-во Пушкинского Дома, 2008. С. 149–157. – Об авторстве статьи, приписывавшейся Н. И. Новикову, или Три анонимных сочинения // Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia Newsletter. 2009. Vol. 37. P. 54–71. – Из разысканий о журнале «Вестник Европы» (1808–1810) // Жуковский: Исследования и материалы. Томск: Изд-во Том. ун-та, 2010. Вып. 1. С. 106–125. – Из разысканий о журнале «Вечерняя Заря» (1782) // XVIII век. СПб.: Наука, 2011. Сб. 26. С. 169–187. – [Комментарии и примечания] // Жуковский В. А. Полное собрание сочинений и писем. М.: Языки русской культуры, 2014. Т. 10 (Проза 1807–1811). iv – Трагедия Н. Н. Сандунова «Сидней и Энни» и репертуарная политика Петровского театра в 1780-е годы // Petra Philologica: профессору Петру Евгеньевичу Бухаркину ко дню шестидесятилетия. СПб.: Нестор-История, 2015. С. 83–99. (Литературная культура России XVIII века. Вып. 6). (Совместно с Е. Д. Кукушкиной). – Источники журнала «Детское чтение для сердца и разума» (1785–1789) // XVIII век. М.; СПб.: Альянс-Архео, 2015. Сб. 28. С. 323–374. – К вопросу об ономастическом противоречии в «Скупом рыцаре» // Временник Пушкинской комиссии. СПб.: Росток, 2016. Вып. 32. С. 243–253. – «Детское Чтение» (1785–1789) и «Детския Забавы» (1792): Рецепция немецкого протестантизма в детских изданиях XVIII в. // ВИВЛIОθИКА: E-Journal of Eighteenth- Century Russian Studies. 2017. Vol. 5. (forthcoming). – Сюжет «Чудовищный шантаж» в русских переводах и переложениях // XVIII век. М.; СПб.: Альянс-Архео, 2017. Вып. 29. (Совместно с Е. Д. Кукушкиной) (forthcoming). – Таушев Александр Федорович // Русские писатели. 1800–1917. Биографический словарь. М., 2017. Т. 5. (Совместно с Т. Ф. Нешумовой) (forthcoming). He is one of the numerous contributors to: – A Tapestry of Russian History: The Volynsky Family, 1380–1987 / [By] Igor Kurukin [and Artemis Joukowsky]; Ed. by Martha Sharp Joukowsky; Co-ed. and indexed by Nan McCowan Sumner-Mack. Providence, RI: Joukowsky Family Foundation, 2016. He also translated into Russian many poems by Jean-Baptiste Chassignet (1571–1635), George Herbert (1593–1633), Edward Taylor (c. 1642–1729), Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), etc. v PREFACE: The purpose of this dissertation is to review the most hackneyed problems characteristic of Russian eighteenth-century studies, namely the question about the origins of Russia and of the originality of texts, which were either found in church holdings or anonymously published in the journals of the time. The groundbreaking reforms introduced to Russia by Peter I switched his country’s cultural orientation from its former Eastern vector to a decidedly Western direction. This required a new understanding of Russia’s future as well as a new awareness of its past, new forms of learning were to be promulgated, and new models for literary expression, as understood by the West, were to be found. Needless to say, dissemination of Western knowledge and Western literary values required translation, and a host of anonymously translated texts, predominantly from German, French and, later on, English, flooded the Russian journals and periodicals of the second half of the eighteenth century. Somewhere down the line, however, such anonymously published translations began to be viewed as original pieces written by some Russian literati of the eighteenth century. In chapters 2 and 3, a critical stance is taken towards the stereotype assumptions regarding Nikolay Novikov (1744–1818), a publisher, philosopher, and writer. More than twenty essays are known to have been attributed to him since the nineteenth century. A detailed analysis of the literary works in question shows that they were all attributed to Novikov by mistake and wrong judgment. The journals under consideration here are as follows: Utrennii svet (The Morning Light, 1777–1780), Moskovskoe ezhemiesiachnoe izdanie (The Moscow Monthly Magazine, 1781), Vecherniaia zaria vi (The Evening Dawn, 1782), Pokoiashchiisia trudoliubets (The Labourer at Rest, 1784–1785), Pribavlenie k Moskovskim Vedomostiam (A Supplement to the Moscow News, 1783–1784), and Detskoe chtenie dlia serdtsa i razuma (The Children’s Readings, Calculated to Amuse the Mind and Heart, 1785–1789). As the study shows, these Novikov’s journals predominantly used texts translated from foreign sources and can hardly be called ‘original’. False attributions in the eighteenth-century literature are not specific to Russia only; on the contrary, they can be identified everywhere, including France, Germany, England and colonial America. For example, many writings originally published in the Pennsylvania Gazette have been ascribed to Benjamin Franklin without any evidence whatsoever, and it is possible to de-attribute a number of essays allegedly written by the ‘Essential Founding Father’ (such as The Lying of Shopkeepers, Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness, etc). On the other hand, the in-depth analysis of Russian eighteenth-century journals made it possible to tentatively assign a number of formerly anonymous poems to such important literary figures, as M. V. Lomonosov, A. N. Radishchev, M. N. Muravyov, A. F. Malinovskii, A. F. Merzlyakov, V. T. Narezhnyi, etc. These findings are especially shown in Chapter 2. Nikolay Novikov is also one of the prominent figures to be considered in the deliberations about the Russian national identity, since he was the publisher of the Drevniaia Rossiiskaia Vivliofika, an edition which highly stimulated the study of the ancient Russian manuscripts. This process eventually led to the discovery of the Tale of Igor’s Campaign, the most enigmatic work of the Old Rus’. For obvious reasons, we are not going to dwell upon the history of the Tale studies – the vii literature dedicated to this manuscript is incredibly huge, and the 5-volume Encyclopedia on the Tale might serve as a rather convincing argument. Instead, we will focus on a number of issues which escaped the attention of many historians or failed to find any reasonable explanation for the following questions: 1) why are we unable to identify any rhythmic structure in the Tale, if it is a song or a poem? 2) why do we see a striking resemblance between the Tale and French chivalric poetry? 3) how can we explain some exotic words of obscure origin, e.g. haralug, kagan, the river- name Siurliy, etc.? In order to tackle these controversies, we have to go back to the very beginning and review the established theory of the Scandinavian origin of Rus’ as developed by Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer (1694–1738), Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705–1783), Johann Thunmann (1746–1778) and other eighteenth-century scholars. Having scrutinized the arguments presented by the Normanist school, we managed to find a number of mistakes in their linguistic and historical interpretations. For instance, the Rhos names of the Dnieper rapids in Constantine’s De Administrando Imperio were always regarded by the Normanists to be of Scandinavian origin. But, as our study shows, the linguistic arguments most scholars take for granted are a gigantic hoax. The Rhos language is not of Scandinavian origin. It is a dead language which most likely can be traced back to the Scythians (this idea was intuitively expressed as early as 1750 by M. Lomonosov!). The reconstruction of the Rhos language has never been done before; and in Chapter 1 we present our first attempt to reconstruct, and identify the nature of, the dead language. We employ the term “Rhos” to avoid the unnecessary confusion with the present-day Russians. The Rhos and Slavs were ethnically and linguistically different tribes. As the latest DNA findings viii suggest, the haplogroup G2a, characteristic especially of the present-day Ossetian people, could be a decisive genetic indicator for the Rhos. The Eastern Slavs took over the Rhos ethnonym and came to be known as the Russians. The Pre-Mongol Rus’ was definitely bilingual, but it is still an open question whether the Rhos lost their language in the XII–XIII c. or even later. On one of the jugs discovered at Novogrudok (present-day Belarus) we have stumbled upon an inscription (olekъsn) which is impossible to explain by means of Slavic languages, even though such attempts were made. From our perspective, the inscription is done in Rhos and it simply means ‘a beer jug’. Based on this inscription dated to the XII–XIII c., it might be argued that the Rhos still retained their linguistic identity in the mentioned period. If this is the case, then some Old Slavic texts have to be re-contextualized. For instance, our findings suggest that the Tale of Igor’s Campaign might be a Slavic adaptation of a text originally composed in verses in the Rhos language. The Slavic adaptation is done in prose, and that is why many scholars failed to identify any rhythmic structure in it. In order to further our understanding of the Old Slavic texts, it might also be suggested that the Primary Chronicle could have been initially compiled in Rhos too, and afterwards it was translated into a Slavic language.