Exploring the Ottoman Empire
The article analyses for the first time the discourse related to Islam and the Ottoman Empire, the formation of which in Russia can be attributed to the last quarter of the seventeenth century. We assume that this discourse, which introduced religious terms and concepts poorly mastered by the tradition, was not something unified and monolithic at the initial stage. For a long time, the perceptions of Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Russia were fragmentary and incomplete. The cultural assimilation of basic concepts was generated by historical events (wars and conflicts of different countries with the Ottoman Porte), as well as religious discussions (the dispute over the transubstantiation of the Holy Gifts), and was further supported by the foreign policy of Peter the Great. The formation of the new discourse took place to a large extent through translations. At the centre of this process were translations from Polish, in particular the Polish historian Szymon Starowolski᾽s book The Court of the Cesar of Turkey (Dwór cesarza tureckiego i rezydencja jego w Konstantynopolu, 1646), which was extremely popular in Eastern Europe). The translation attributed to S. Chizhinsky dates back to 1679; a little later, translations of this book by A. Lyzlov (1686) and M. Kropotkin (1691) appeared. A preliminary comparison of how the names of sacred rooms and clerics are rendered in the translations of A. Lyzlov and M. Kropotkin shows that there are overlaps and divergences in the strategies of narrative construction and selection of lexical units, caused, in particular, by prior reading experience. The translations of the late seventeenth century prepared the formation of a demand for a comprehensive study of Islam and the Ottoman Empire already in the Petrine period, which was answered by the works of the diplomat P. A. Tolstoy and the scholar and politician D. Kantemir. A more consistent and extensive study of texts related to the new discourse will allow us to better understand the stages and details of the adaptation of the ‘alien’, as well as to clarify the composition of the translators who formed the ‘contact groups’ operating in this sphere.
DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2024.1.02