Abstract
The project that has been carried out at the German Historical Institute in Moscow since 2016 continues the engagement of the Institute in the development of the history of concepts in Russia. The previous project, “The History of Concepts and Historical Semantics,” which was led by Ingrid Schierle and Denis Sdvizkov (both research fellows at the German Historical Institute in Moscow at the time), was undertaken between 2008-2014. It consisted of a series of conferences and resulted in several publications; namely, two volumes devoted to the history of key concepts in the Russian imperial period. However, the main focus of the current project is on translation as a laboratory of the Russian language of “civil sciences.” The project is being coordinated by Sergey Polskoy (Higher School of Economics, Moscow) and Vladislav Rjéoutski (German Historical Institute in Moscow). In addition, the editorial work on the database is being carried out by Evgenii Kushkov (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), with Vadim Popov (GHI Moscow) also being responsible for statistics and the visualization of the results of the project.
Highlights
The well-known series of publications entitled Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, which were coedited by Reinhart Koselleck and his collaborators,[2] was the starting point for our project
The main focus of the current project is on translation as a laboratory of the Russian language of “civil sciences.”
The project is being coordinated by Sergey Polskoy (Higher School of Economics, Moscow) and Vladislav Rjéoutski (German Historical Institute in Moscow)
Summary
The well-known series of publications entitled Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, which were coedited by Reinhart Koselleck and his collaborators,[2] was the starting point for our project. Koselleck’s idea was to undertake a sort of archaeology of the most important historical concepts that describe society, the main social groups, and relations between them, and to show the semantic changes that occurred in the meaning of the terms we use today. He wanted to understand what these words meant in the early modern period before they swiftly began to change their meaning around the 1770s. The increasing abstraction of concepts leads to the possibility of charging them with various ideologies and meanings, which often depend on the social position of the speaker The advantages of such a project for our understanding of the past and of the changes which occurred in our society during the modern era are obvious. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the clerks of the Muscovite chancelleries (prikazy) used bureaucratic vocabulary in their translations, while translators from among the clergy, finding no equivalents in Russian, mostly translated in a mixture of Church Slavonic and Polish
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