«…Не Стерн или, по крайности, не Верн»: К описанию французского генезиса карамзинского Стерна

Abstract

The article is an attempt to specify the genesis of the image of Laurence Sterne as it was created and presented by Nickolai Karamzin in the early 1790s. Karamzin’s Sterne, the most influential among other such attempts in Russian culture, turns out to be primarily French and imitative. Namely, the fragment “A Poor Man and His Dog”, presented in Karamzin’s Moscow Magazine (1792) as “Sterne’s work”, appears to be a translation not of Sterne but of an interpolation made by his French translator into the French version of Tristram Shandy. The very choice of fragments from Sterne presented in the Moscow Magazine (1791–1792) reflects not the editor’s own taste, but is a replication of the most common items from popular anthological editions of “The Beauties of Sterne”. Karamzin’s culturally influential decision not to translate and consequently not to introduce into Russian culture the original English notions of ‘sentimental’ and ‘humour’ is explained by the fact that he had viewed them through the prism of particular French texts-intermediaries. Karamzin’s insistence on reading Sterne “with tears in the eyes” and on alluding to him (in Letters of a Russian Traveller) primarily in melancholic charnel locations that made Sterne practically indistinguishable from Edward Young goes back not to the original Sterne, but to his later French imitators, such as François Vernes. Karamzin’s Sterne is contrasted with the assimilation of original narrative experiments and humour of Tristram by other Russian authors of the same period but of a different circle, Fyodor Rostopchin and Ivan Martynov.