A. F. Labzin is the Author of “The Lamentations of Jeremiah, Translated into Verse”: The Experience of Attribution

Abstract

This article is about “The Lamentations of Jeremiah, translated into verse”, published without a signature in the magazine “Evening Dawn” (1782). We prove that the author of this work was A.F. Labzin (1766–1826), an influential writer in the reign of Alexander I, translator of European mystics and publisher of the magazine “Zion Bulletin”, who participated in the activities of the Russian Bible Society. This Paraphrase of The Lamentations of Jeremiah is one of the first works of Labzin and the most voluminous of those written in verse, and in the history of Russian literature this is one of the first complete paraphrase of an entire (albeit small) Biblical book.