The American Declaration of Independence in Russian: The History of Translation and the Translation of History

Abstract

This essay continues Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov's work on the ideas of the Declaration of Independence as they were accepted in Russia from 1776 till our days. The purpose of this second piece is to look at the relationships between the famous American document and its Russian readers from a slightly different angle. We would like to shift attention from a focus on the general flow of ideas in the style of intellectual history to a practical historical analysis of the translations in which the main elements will be the texts, their interpretations, and their historical significance. As Bolkhovitinov's essay has shown, Russian acquaintance with the Declaration of Independence has a long and turbulent history: it embraces welcoming gestures by the Empress Catherine the Great and careful study of the text by such enemies of absolute rule as the Decembrists. Nonetheless, only the reforms of the 1860s brought the possibility of the first publication of the text in Russia and in Russian. We may speak about two periods in the Russian history of the declaration using the date of the publication of the first Russian translation in 1863 as a milestone. While from the very beginning English and French versions of the text published abroad were accessible to the educated and interested audience, it was the first Russian translation that opened the way to the intercultural existence of the famous American document in Russia. Since that time numerous translations of the full text of the declaration have been completed.1 The first Russian translation not only introduced a broader Russian audience to the declaration but also launched a kind of contest involving the authors of the document and its Russian interpreters. The prize they competed for was the mind and