К вопросу о значении немецких учебных пособий для преподавания французского языка в России в XVIII в.

Abstract

Both sources of the first Russian printed manual of French, issued under the auspices of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1752, were written in German. This could not but affect the choice of the texts (which were thus preferred to popular French grammars of that epoch) and the principles of their translation. The article focuses on the history of the Russian version by V. E. Teplov (titled “Novaya Francusskaya grammatika sochinennaya voprosami i otvetami. Sobrana iz sochinenij gospodina Resto i drugih Grammatik”, “The New French Grammar, composed in questions and answers from the works by Restaut and other grammars”), that exemplifies the intermediary function of German in the foreign language education in 18th century Russia. It is argued that the use of German manuals was prompted firstly, by the status of German at the Academy of Sciences and in the Russian education in general; secondly, by the fact, that the manuals of French printed in Germany were addressed to foreign students and therefore supplied with dictionaries and various exercises, highly useful for teaching French in Russia as well; and, thirdly, by the facility of their translation into Russian, as the German-Russian dictionary and grammar of German were at translators’ disposal at the time (in fact, on many occasions when French and German texts were given en regard, V. Teplov relied on the German version). The author suggests that the anonymous French grammar, ascribed to J. G. Speck and published for the first time in 1749, was translated into Russian, having been confused with the famous manual by J. R. des Pepliers, which was well-known in Russia by that time, as testified by P. F. Zhukov’s handwritten copy of the dictionary and dialogues therefrom. The titles of both manuals were almost identical: “Nouvelle et parfaite grammaire (Royale) francoise (et allemande)” and “Neue und vollstandige (konigliche) franzosische Grammatik”. Particular attention is also devoted to the French-German nomenclator by Pepliers: its Russian translation, published first as an appendix to the 1752 grammar, underwent several reprints and its materials were frequently referred to and borrowed in the subsequent manuals of French which appeared in the 1770-es and the 1780-es.