Osokin Mikhail Yurievich – Candidate in Philology, independent scholar, Sattahip (Thailand)
The Poem of Mr. Voltaire, translated in Russia (1772) by Ippolit Bogdanovič, is a translation of Voltaire’s Epistle to the Empress of Russia, Catherine II (1771), which deals with the Russo-Tur¬kish War and Catherine’s role in the impending liberation of the Greeks from the yoke of Sultan Mustafa, the “tyrant of Byzantium”, and his Islamic barbarians. Without going into the details of Catherine’s Greek project, I wanted to find out how Bogdanovič’s translation differs from Voltaire’s original and suggest plausible explanations for these discrepancies. In particular, I examine why Bogdanovič omits the scene in the Sultan’s harem and softens Voltaire’s criticism of the Greeks who shame their ancestors by submitting to tyranny; why he dilutes the mythology of Peter I’s triumph over the climate and the creation of “new people” with the mythology of St. Petersburg as a city built in defiance of nature; and finally, why he does not translate Voltaire’s prose footnotes.
Voltaire; Ippolit Bogdanovič; translation; Catherine the Great; the Russo-Turkish War