Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

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The forum's main focus is the transformation and circulation of certain key concepts in Russia in the 18th century. The authors consider the change in a range of political and social concepts during this period: state, monarchy, common good, society, and friendship.

Sergey Polskoy underlines the role of translation in the formation and/or transformation of political concepts in Russia. Indeed, most of the borrowings assimilated into the Russian political vocabulary were originally elaborated by translators: this is the starting point and one of the main theses of DHI's project. Polskoy's main goal is to illustrate the process by which European political concepts were transmitted to Russia and new concepts adapted in Russian political discourse. He uses two key concepts—state and society—to analyze translation practices. As a rule, before Peter I Western political concepts were used to describe Western institutions and political life but seldom adopted in reference to Russian political realities.

From the reign of Peter the Great on, the widespread introduction of Western political concepts into Russian led to the forging of Russian words and concepts that could both describe Western realities and be used in political discussions in Russia. As Polskoy shows, the aptness of such terms in Russian depended hugely on the translator's abilities, social experience, and cultural and linguistic outlook. Differences could be seen not only in special shades of meaning that translators conferred on terms they created in Russian but in the choice of linguistic and intellectual tradition within which they thought such terms could be best expressed. Thus the clerks of the ministries or chancelleries used bureaucratic vocabulary or barbarisms, whereas translators who came from the clergy, finding no equivalents in Russian, translated using a mixture of Church Slavonic and Polish.

After Peter's death, especially in the 1740s and later, the generation of Petrine translators—who had often spent years in West European countries—imprinted the new political terminology with their particular style. A major problem in adapting new political concepts was their inapplicability within the old system of ideas about the state and the monarch. Polskoy's in-depth analysis of the translation/adaptation of the concept of "state" in Russia shows the complexity of the process by which Russians adapted Western political terms in Russia—a development that has social, political, and linguistic dimensions.

The article by Konstantin Bugrov (Institute of History and Archaeology, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences) seems to me more problematic when viewed within the context of traditional conceptual history. He explores the history of the concepts of natural law and the common good as these related to the image of the monarchy in Russia in the 18th century. [End Page 321] Reinhart Koselleck defined such concepts as natural law and the common good as describing an experience and announcing a future project or, as Koselleck called it, Erfahrungshorizont. Bugrov does not explore the shades of meaning of the Russian equivalents of these concepts. His focus is on what he calls the "manners of speech" used by the Russian elite of the time. His attention is concentrated on how a discourse on monarchy was produced in Russia and how these Western concepts were instrumental in the struggle for a certain idea of monarchy. However, it is worth noting that most of his protagonists were not part of the social elite, although they were rather close to it—for example, members of the clergy. Bugrov does not explore the social and intellectual contexts that would explain their motivations and the origin of their discourse on monarchy.

In this respect, Bugrov's study is more an exploration of the history of ideas than a case of conceptual history. He reveals the intricacies of the inner logic of the monarchical discourse in Russia: borrowing from providentialist rhetoric, it represented the prince as a protector of the people striving for national prosperity and for common good. Prosperity was, of course, seen as a means of improving the lives of the subjects but also, following a pan-European pattern, as a tool of civilization. It was no coincidence that so many reform projects were submitted in Russia during the 18th century: the lack of Westernizing dynamism, Bugrov argues, could lead to the ruler's being considered a tyrant. So in the absence of counterbalances or procedures that imposed limits (as was the case in France), the Russian monarchy, in the eyes of its panegyrists, was restrained by a necessary striving for common good. A monarch who refused to fight for his or her subjects' well-being was seen as a tyrant. Such a situation could result in the monarch's overthrow, but such conflict was considered the exception, the rule being tranquillity and the moral commitment of the monarch. Bugrov believes that is why the Machiavellian tradition, which saw the beneficial side of conflict and refused to equate tranquillity with the common good, made no headway in Russia. Moral monarchism provided numerous ways to criticize the monarchy but excluded other restraints on it. It is no coincidence that many in the early 19th century fiercely opposed bureaucratic procedure as a limitation on the monarchy.

Maya Lavrinovich (Higher School of Economics, Moscow) deals with both the dissemination of Western ideas and social practices in 18th-century Russia. Lavrinovich explores the understanding of "friendship" deployed in the correspondence of Count Aleksandr Vorontsov, a member of the social elite of the Catherinean Age, and Aleksei D´iakonov, an obscure official who was Vorontsov's client. By analyzing their unpublished correspondence, [End Page 322] Lavrinovich reveals that Vorontsov used sentimentalist language and addressed his client as "friend," trying, it seems, to erase or at least obscure the social boundaries between them. Lavrinovich connects this attitude with masonic ideals and practices, but also with the ideal of some kind of social equality. Although social equality, even as a rhetorical formula, was hardly possible between an aristocrat and a peasant in 18th-century Russia, it was progressively becoming possible between an aristocrat and an educated commoner such as D´iakonov, and it unfolded in rhetorical terms.

Lavrinovich notes the role of language choice in establishing such an egalitarian relationship between two persons of completely different social standing. Seemingly equivalent concepts, foreign and Russian, could be used by Russian interlocutors, but in reality each of these concepts brought along a whole set of ideas and hinted at practices with which the authors engaged in various ways. Lavrinovich mentions another correspondence between a patron and his client, the same Vorontsov and Aleksandr Radishchev, author of A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, for which he was exiled to Siberia. One significant difference between these two correspondences was indeed the possibility of language choice for Radishchev, who had a good command of French. This language offered "equality devices" (including formulas of address) of which D´iakonov seemed unaware or which he was unwilling to use when he addressed Vorontsov. Friendship as a form of rhetoric was a relatively new phenomenon, which allowed grandees to reinterpret patron-client relationships. D´iakonov, in contrast, adopted vis-à-vis his patron an attitude that reflected their respective positions on the hierarchical ladder, thus conforming to the traditional behavior of a Russian official and avoiding Western rhetoric—or at least, taking an extremely cautious approach toward it. What reasons pushed him to renounce this possibility of "friendship" between him and his patron? Maya Lavrinovich proposes several possible responses to this question.

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In all three cases the authors deal with concepts borrowed from West European languages and cultures, thus avoiding a narrowly national approach and contributing to the history of cultural transfers and the transnational history of concepts, a goal that historians of concepts have been advocating for several years.⁶ [End Page 323]

Every translation is cultural. If the role of translation (be it proper translation or interpretation of a borrowed concept in an original writing in a target language) is indeed key to the transfer of concepts from one culture to another, Margrit Pernau has warned against numerous complications inherent in the analysis of this process. What gets lost in translation? A lot, if we take into account that concepts reflect experiences that are bound to differ in different historical and regional settings; that concepts involve interpretation; and that our analytical categories are close to the historical language, in fact much closer than we like to imagine and, in this sense, "conceptual historians inevitably remain part and parcel of the history they are investigating."⁷

Such translated, borrowed concepts hardly reflect the social experience of the target society: Russian society, in our case. Their adaptation and usage certainly do, however, and all three authors link the concepts they explore to social practices even as they engage with this question in varying degrees. For Polskoy, the adaptation of Western concepts is necessarily embedded in the social history of translation in Russia: the social and cultural background of the translators explains the "quality" of the terms they forged; however, one wonders to what extent we can know how the translators themselves understood the concepts they translated. Although sometimes we have prefaces written by translators, such documents are relatively rare in 18thcentury Russia, and the context does not always allow us to conclude with certainty how the translator understood the concept being translated.

Bugrov hints at the role of social and institutional contexts in the discussion about monarchy and the common good in Russia. He does not, however, undertake a close exploration of these contexts, which could be a promising direction. Indeed, it would allow us to better understand the position of authors who produced the discourse about monarchy and the common good in Russia. Political concepts and discourses reflect power relations and the position of the author, even in the case of borrowed concepts, and the exploration of such relationships by means other than the analysis of the discourse itself can add a valuable dimension to the history of concepts. In that regard, Lavrinovich goes farther than Bugrov by discussing not only rhetorical obstacles between correspondents belonging to different social worlds but also their respective social and cultural capitals, which explain their recourse to, and renunciation of, certain concepts.

In a sense, such borrowed concepts anticipate options to be realized in the future.⁸ Lavrinovich seems to suggest that in the correspondence she analyzes [End Page 324] the concept of "friendship" is more performative in essence than reflective of any real social or psychological relationship between the correspondents. In the sermons of the priests in Bugrov's study, too, the concept of the common good announces a potential future rather than describing any field of experience (Erfahrungsbereich, in Koselleck's term); hence it is basically performative in nature.