Conceptional Transfer and Early Russian Modernity (Reflection on: Laboratory of Concepts: Translation and Languages of Politics in Russia in the 18th Century. Ed. by S.V. Pol’skoy and V.S. Rzheutskiy. Moscow: NLO publ., 2022)

Abstract

The authors of the book investigate the practices of translation in the context of socio-cultural transformations in the early years of the Russian Empire. Europe and Russia in the Age of Enlightenment were radically different semiotic systems, so the interpreters of western philosophy and political literature sparked a sort of “cultural revolution” in terms of the transfer of ideas and concepts, the genesis of a new public language. Early Russian interpreters introduced the world of western thought and the languages of politics and social thinking to the elites and to the emerging civil society. And as such the corpus of Russian interpretations is a more eloquent reflection of intellectual evolution than the original writings of Russian thinkers of that time. And given the fact that in those times translations would always involve the inception of new lexical and semantic elements, the “laboratory of concepts” scientific metaphor used in the book to denote the intellectual origination of Russian modernity is absolutely justified.