Илья Федорович Копиевский (Жизнь и судьба одного просветителя петровского времени)

In 1699, on the initiative of Peter the Great, the printing of Russian secular books began in Amsterdam, most of which were textbooks: on history, arithmetic, astronomy, navigation, and foreign languages. The compiler, translator, and publisher of these books was a native of the lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Ilya Fedorovich Kopievsky (or Kopievich). For many decades, historians have turned to the biography of this man, but it is still full of gaps and factual errors. The article summarizing the various information about Kopievsky available today (from archival documents to the latest works of historians) contains a detailed reconstruction of his life path. It also includes materials to return to the question of the contribution of this enlightener to the cultural reforms of Peter the Great.

Mavens, Mavericks, and Managers: Educational Projecting and Politicking in Petrine and Post-Petrine Russia

Igor Fedyukin, The Enterprisers: The Politics of School in Early Modern Russia, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2019; 328p. ISBN: 9780190845001.

From the Editors

Editorial

База данных “Россия в западноевропейской прессе XVIII века”

This paper presents the results of an educational and research project entitled “Russia in the Western European Press of the Eighteenth Century.” Between 2016 and 2020 students from The Higher School of Economics University in Moscow translated texts of eighteenth-century Western European periodicals related to Russia. In the first part, the authors describe how this work was organized and outline the manner in which the translations are presented on the project website. The second part provides a case study of some news sent by a correspondent in St. Petersburg to The London Gazette in 1714 and 1715. The authors argue that in this period the information received by The London Gazette from St. Petersburg was very close to the dispatches sent to the Secretary of State for the Northern Department by George Mackenzie, the official British resident in the new Russian capital. Although Mackenzie probably did not write to The London Gazette himself, he was apparently involved in the communications, since most of the Russian news was published during the time when the resident was in St. Petersburg. The same correlation between the publication of news received directly from Russia and the period when British diplomats were in residence in Moscow or St. Petersburg can be traced to at least the years between 1709 and 1728. The fact that the above-mentioned example from The London Gazette came to the authors’ attention when it was being edited for publication in “Russia in the Western European Press of the Eighteenth Century” gives hope that other news items included in the online project will become a starting point for more scholars of eighteenth-century Russia.

Review of Pierre Le Grand: La Russie et le monde by Thierry Sarmant

Thierry Sarmant, with the collaboration of Jean-Pierre Samant, Pierre le Grand: La Russie et le monde. Paris: Perrin, 2020.500 p. ISBN: 978-2-262-04814.

Иностранные языки в России XVIII в

This article presents a summary of the reports and transcripts of the discussion held on October 24, 2020, at a panel on the functioning of foreign languages in 18th-century Russia, which took place during the international conference "Müller Readings-2020." The attendees discussed different approaches to the subject using various historical examples, such as the language of the manuscripts presented to Peter the Great and Catherine I; the languages of Russian-Turkish diplomacy in the reign of Peter the Great; the problems of the horizon of the translator and the genre conditionality of the use of languages; their use in the initial period of the existence of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences; and the problems of publishing foreign language sources. Several reports were devoted to the history of teaching foreign languages among various social strata, as well as to the methods of teaching languages in the 18th century.

Василий Татищев, “искусной архитект” Фридриха Барбароссы и кто-то третий

The author attempts to find out under what circumstances Vasilii Tatishchev could have come to his assertion that Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa had sent an architect to Andrei Bogoliubskii, prince of Vladimir. Despite the wide popularity of this Tatishchev's argument among today's historians of architecture, it has never become the subject of a special study. Meanwhile, this case allows a deep look into the specific research methods of a historian in the first half of the eighteenth century, as well as into his narrative strategies and value orientations.

Louis Henri de Nicolay between France and Russia

Louis Henri de Nicolay, un intellectuel strasbourgeois dans la Russie des Lumières. Sous la direction de Rodolphe Baudin et Alexandra Veselova [Études alsaciennes & rhénanes]. Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2020. 279 pp. ISBN 9782868207548.

The Corpus of Russian Translations of Social and Political Works of the Eighteenth Century

The project that has been carried out at the German Historical Institute in Moscow since 2016 continues the engagement of the Institute in the development of the history of concepts in Russia. The previous project, “The History of Concepts and Historical Semantics,” which was led by Ingrid Schierle and Denis Sdvizkov (both research fellows at the German Historical Institute in Moscow at the time), was undertaken between 2008-2014. It consisted of a series of conferences and resulted in several publications; namely, two volumes devoted to the history of key concepts in the Russian imperial period. However, the main focus of the current project is on translation as a laboratory of the Russian language of “civil sciences.” The project is being coordinated by Sergey Polskoy (Higher School of Economics, Moscow) and Vladislav Rjéoutski (German Historical Institute in Moscow). In addition, the editorial work on the database is being carried out by Evgenii Kushkov (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), with Vadim Popov (GHI Moscow) also being responsible for statistics and the visualization of the results of the project.

Через штиль и шторм: история чтения в России XVIII столетия

Damiano Revecchini and Raffaella Vassena, eds. Reading Russia: A History of Reading in Modern Russia, vol. 1. Milan: Ledizioni, 2020, 295 p. ISBN 9788855261920.