PURPOSE OF THE PROJECT AND DEVELOPMENT DURING THE PROJECT PERIOD

The main purpose of the project was to strengthen an international and interdisciplinary collaboration between leading and younger researchers in history and philology from Sweden, the US, and Russia. The handwritten Russian translations of European newspapers and political pamphlets that were produced in Moscow in the seventeenth century have been the primary focus. An edition of these translations from the early 1670s was planned (and this edition was printed in 2017). We also intended to study cultural exchanges between Western Europe and Russia on a more general level. In connection with this, an intensive cooperation with another ongoing international research project, viz. a project that studied the cultural impact between Western Europe and Russia in the seventeenth century with a focus on the Russian theater's history in the 1670s, led by Claudia Jensen (Seattle) and funded by the "National Endowment for the Humanities" (No. RZ-51635-13); this was in progress for about the same period as our project was running. When we applied for funding of our project, we did not yet know about this theatrical project, so the purpose of our work shifted somewhat when we learned about the "American" project: in addition to our original focus on newspaper translations from Western European languages into Russian, another priority area arose within the general field of "intercultural exchange between Western Europe and Russia". Since the "American project" was also studying issues such as information transfer and cultural contacts between Western Europe and Russia, and since even the research material – both printed newspapers and other archival material from the 1670s – largely overlapped, a cooperation seemed not only natural, but also inevitable. Together with Claudia Jensen, members of our project group (especially Ingrid Maier, but also Stepan Shamin) have written several large articles (in English, German, and Russian), a monograph in Russian (Jensen and Maier, 2016), and one in English (Jensen, Maier, Shamin; the latter has been accepted by Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, and will be printed in 2019).

SHORT SUMMARY OF IMPLEMENTATION

During the project period, the participants were working with different tasks. Ingrid Maier, the project leader, was in charge of all contacts with the group of scholars who worked at the State Archives for Ancient Documents (RGADA) and the Institute for Russian Language in Moscow, in particular Stepan Shamin. The project’s postdoc Christine Watson and the doctoral student Olena Jansson (the latter financed by the Department of Modern Languages through counterparty-financing), both placed in Uppsala, dedicated focused on specific research problems (see more details in the publication list). The joint edition of Russian newspaper translations from the early 1670s was printed in Moscow in 2017 (806 p.), jointly edited by Vadim B. Krys'ko of the Russian Language Institute in Moscow and Ingrid Maier.

Our plan that most of our publications within the project should be co-authored by a historian and a historical linguist turned out well: most publications are indeed written by a linguist (Maier, Jansson, Watson from Uppsala) and a historian (especially Shamin in Moscow, Waugh and Jensen in Seattle).

A large number of articles on specific research problems have been published by all participants of the project (see the list of publications), and a monograph by Ingrid Maier and Daniel Waugh with the preliminary title "Cross-cultural communication in Muscovite Russia: foreign news in context" is in its final stages.

THREE IMPORTANT RESULTS OF THIS PROJECT AND ITS CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH FRONT

Our research into the newspaper translations made in Moscow during the seventeenth century has considerably improved our knowledge about questions concerning the translators: who were those people who translated the West-European newspapers (mainly from German and Dutch, in rare cases also from newspapers printed in Latin)? How did they learn their foreign languages (or Russian, when we are dealing with people born and grown up outside Russia)? Such aspects were studied in some articles, and especially in the upcoming monograph by Maier and Waugh. The translations were almost exclusively anonymous, but through careful studies of, above all, the translators' handwritten first drafts, we have been able to associate some translations with concrete persons, so that we were able to study their personal style; as a result, in some cases we have been able to demonstrate the translators’ "foreign accent" and thus contribute to the discussion of their geographical origin. In the case of some translators who officially were foreigners, but had been born and/or grown up in Moscow, we were able to demonstrate that their Russian skills were almost perfect, while their knowledge of their official "mother tongue" was not always so perfect (that is, we have found many misunderstandings in their translations). Much of this is in contrast to the widespread opinion in the scholarly literature that the Muscovite translators' knowledge of Russian was quite poor. Our results will certainly lead to a more nuanced picture.

In a comprehensive article on the history of the post in Russia, Waugh could show that –although the Russian international postal service was established somewhat later than in most West-European countries – the delay was not really so significant: almost as soon as the international service was set up in East Europe, in 1665, an international postal line to and from Moscow was established, the explicit purpose and main task being to enable the import of foreign newspapers and other news (manuscript newsletters, pamphlets, etc.). It has been shown that Mitau, the capital of the Duchy of Kurland in the seventeenth century, played an important role in the cultural exchanges between Western Europe and Russia.

Maier and Shamin have been able to prove (in their article from 2018) that newspaper translations that newspaper translations that were not made for publication in Peter’s newspaper (Vedomosti, since 1703) but were created for other reasons were in fact still being made as late as 1724, something that has not been known before. It had been assumed before this that handwritten newspaper translations that were not intended to be published were no longer being produced after a printed newspaper had been established by Tsar Peter. However, this was not the case, for as late as one year before Peter's death (1725) manuscript newspaper translations were still being produced. Up to now, these have been completely unexplored, allegedly in part because they are kept in a hard-to-access archive. It has been shown that these translations mainly dealt with Russian affairs, that is, Peter I was anxious to find out what was being written about Russia in the foreign press; then – if necessary – he would send protests to the "responsible" parties (for instance, to the governments of the countries or cities where the newspapers had been published). By comparing the translations with the foreign printed originals, we were able to show that it was still very much the same newspapers that had been translated already in the 1670s, although French had now been added as a new, very important language. We have also been able to prove that the translation techniques in 1724 were still the same as in the 1600s. 

NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS THAT HAVE BEEN GENERATED BY THE PROJECT

An important task for further research is examining news reporting in the opposite direction, from Russia to Western Europe, in the 1600s. As a result of our research, we now know very clearly which Western newspapers the Russian tsars subscribed to (after 1665, when there was an international postal service and subscriptions were possible) and ordered to be translated; who the translators were; according to which principles they chose the news reports to be translated, and so on. However, we still know very little about the news flow in the opposite direction: which diplomats, merchants, soldiers, etc. provided the West-European newspapers with information about Russia? Russia played an increasingly important role in the newspapers published, above all, in the German empire and the Dutch Republic, but only very few of the "Moscow correspondents" during the seventeenth century have so far been identified. Since both manuscript newsletters and the reports printed in the published newspapers were almost exclusively anonymous, it is a big challenge to try to identify by name some of the correspondents and their working methods. (See, however, the article by Droste and Maier, 2018, in the list of publications.)

It would also be very rewarding to investigate which manuscript newsletters (as opposed to printed newspapers) the Russian court received and to what extent these were translated.

Maier, Jansson, Shamin and Waugh will continue to work on these and other issues generated by the project, in Jansson’s case at least until the end of the doctoral appointment (approx. 2021). 

THE PROJECT’S INTERNATIONAL DIMENSIONS, FOR INSTANCE, INTERNATIONAL CONTACTS

The constellation within the project was very international from the very beginning, with participants from Sweden, Russia, and the United States. Through the "cross-fertilization" with Claudia Jensen’s project on the history of the Russian theater in the 1670s the international element became, if possible, even more important. Both Dan Waugh and Claudia Jensen have visited Uppsala on several occasions, and Ingrid Maier has been in Seattle for working meetings. Maier has also worked at the archives in Moscow during two longer periods (2014 and 2018), and so did Watson. Jansson has been both in Moscow and St. Petersburg on several occasions. Waugh, Maier, and Jensen lectured at an international conferences in Cambridge (2014). The project also organized an international workshop in Uppsala (2015), where Waugh and Jensen were lecturing; the other participants came from Russia, Great Britain, France, Germany, Estonia, and Sweden. The project arranged one more workshop in Uppsala, viz. in the autumn of 2018, this time with researchers only from Sweden and Russia. Maier and Jansson had presentations about project-related issues.

Many important research contacts were established during international conferences. Some of these contacts also resulted in joint publications, for example two articles co-authored by Maier and Gleb Kazakov from Freiburg, and one by Maier and Aleksandr Lavrent'ev, Moscow (both had participated in our workshop in Uppsala in June 2015). The project’s doctoral student Olena Jansson established contacts with Russian researchers at three conferences in Moscow (2015, 2017, 2018); these contacts have also resulted in publications (co-authored with S. Alpatov resp. S. Shamin), and Watson has published an article with Shamin, Moscow (for details on all these articles and book chapters see the list of publications).

Since our main focus has been the translations of West-European newspapers and pamphlets into Russian, a cooperation with researchers and institutions studying the history of the press, especially in German-speaking countries and in the Netherlands, was very important. For instance, we have been able to profit from Arthur der Weduwen's research on the Dutch newspapers in the seventeenth century (two large volumes that appeared in 2017, but his results were partly available to us earlier), and he has benefited greatly from Maier's previous research on the history of the Dutch press (see his preface in the two-volume work “Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century”, Leiden and Boston, 2017). A close collaboration with the German research institute "Deutsche Presseforschung" in Bremen, where Maier has spent part of her research time, was very fruitful for the edition of Russian newspaper translations from the 1670s, which also contains transcriptions made from the translated foreign papers, as far as these have survived. As a consequence of this cooperation, the planned edition, “Vesti-Kuranty 1670-1671”, was completed and printed within the project period.

DISTRIBUTION OF RESULTS TO OTHER RESEARCHERS AND GROUPS OUTSIDE THE SCHOLARLY COMMUNITY

All participants of the project have made their scholarly articles and book chapters available online, either by publishing them in open-access publications from the outset, or through parallel publishing, or both. We have also distributed printed copies of our books to various libraries (which is especially important now, when many libraries do not buy so many books), and also to individual researchers. A conference volume was produced after our workshop in Uppsala (held in June 2015), together with researchers from Trondheim. (Christine Watson was one of the editors; see the list of publications.)

We have presented our research at many international conferences, sometimes also for larger audiences in connection with guest lectures, and at a public lecture at the Department of Modern Languages in Uppsala. Maier has held talks in Moscow (on several occasions), Freiburg, Tübingen, Heidelberg, Potsdam, Dresden, Berlin and Stockholm; Watson in Berlin Harvard, Wroclaw, Napels, and in Stockholm (twice). Doctoral student Olena Jansson had three lectures in Moscow at interdisciplinary conferences, where she informed about the research project; she also included material from the project in her university course about the history of the Russian language in the spring term of 2018.

Maier and Jansson have been interviewed for the Uppsala University magazine (formerly called "Horizon"), which is also published in English (Uppsala University Magazine) about their research on a genealogical tree of the Russian tsars, another result of cultural contacts between Western Europe and Russia. As we determined, the genealogical tree (which is kept at Uppsala University Library) was produced in Sweden by a Russian prisoner during the Great Northern War with Russia (1700-1721). A short version entitled "The author of a unique genealogical tree has been revealed" will soon be published in the printed version of the magazine (and also on http://www.uu.se/en/news-media/new-horizons/ , where there will also be a link to a slightly longer text under the title "Genealogical tree tells a story of war and captivity").

All project participants make their research results available through social media, especially via the international portal www.academia.edu, where currently 23 million publications are freely available for over 75 million participants, many of whom are not researchers themselves, but only affiliate to take part in international research. This portal is used extensively by researchers in Russia and other countries of Eastern Europe, as they generally do not have access to Western publications in any other way. Our own publications are being read and downloaded every single day. The “Swedish” researchers in the project group also publish their research in parallel via the Swedish research portal DiVA (http://uu.diva-portal.org ). The members of our research group have also been active in updating articles for Wikipedia.