THE FIRST INFORMATION ABOUT THE YI-JING IN RUSSIA

Abstract

The first information in Russia about the Yi-jing (易經, Canon of Changes) was published by the first Russian sinologist, German historian and philologist-polyglot G. S. Bayer in the two-volume Museum Sinicum (St. Petersburg, 1730) in Latin. In Russian, the primary information about Yi-jing became available to the reader half a century later thanks to the coryphaeus of Russian sinology of the 18th century A. L. Leontiev. In 1782, he published an illustrated and commented translation of a fragment from Yi-jing (named Convenient Base) as an appendix to his translation of the Manchu text of the Statutes of the Great Qing (大清會典, Dai-Qing hui-dian). A. L. Leontiev called the French abbot, who visited St. Petersburg in 1769, the initiator of his appeal to the Yi-jing, but did not indicate his name. P. E. Skachkov after V. S. Kolokolov decided that he was the famous French Jesuit missionary and versatile scientist A. Gaubil. However, he died ten years earlier. Most likely the interlocutor of A. L. Leontiev was a well-known theologian and economist-physiocrat, French abbot N. Baudeau, who held confidential negotiations with Catherine II in 1769 in St. Petersburg about the situation in Poland. The secrecy of this mission on the eve of the first partition of Poland fully explains the concealment of his name in 1782, when he was still alive and brewing the second partition. Apparently, a look at the Yi-jing of the French enlighteners and physiocrats, reported by N. Baudeau to A. L. Leontiev, prompted him to link the ancient canon with Statutes of the Great Qing.