Poor but Noble: Alexei Malinovskii’s Translation of the Drama Poverty and Nobleness by August von Kozebue as a Way of Social Self-Representation

• In Event: New Approaches to Translation in Russia during the Age of Enlightenment

Abstract

The productive concept of «emotional community» was recently used by Andrei Zorin to interpret the emotional culture of the thin layer of Russian aristocrats at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. This paper, based on the newly unearthed biographical details of the archival official and historian Alexei F. Malinovskii (1762–1840), questions the adoption of the model of “personal involvement” through translation by the inferior social strata at the same period. The son of a parish priest, Malinovskii used to translate German dramas to be performed at the Moscow Public theatre in the 1790s. In 1799, the drama by Kozebue Armut und Edelsinn in his translation (Bednost’ i blagorodstvo dushi) was also staged in the estate theatre of Count Alexander Romanovich Vorontsov. Malinovskii had obtained a certificate of his allegedly noble origin and started to purchase estates and serfs. Through the translation of this play, Malinovskii asserted himself as (legally) noble. Translating the philistine drama by Kozebue, Malinovskii interpreted his social experience the way the aristocrat Andrei Turgenev interpreted his love experiences working on the translation of Schiller’s drama Intrigue and Love.

Author

• Maya Borisovna Lavrinovich, NRU Higher School of Economics (Russia)