Russian translations of the New Testament in the XIX century: searching for a worthy language

Purpose: The paper gives a historical review of the New Testament translations into Russian with an emphasis on their stylistic strategies and decisions. Its main chronological framework is the XIX century, beginning with the translation of Russian Bible Society (1821) up to the translation of Konstantin Pobedonostsev (1906), but the preceding and subsequent attempts are also touched upon. Results: During this period the translators focused their main attention on the stylistics and selection of the language means rather than on the accuracy and the equivalence to the original text. According to Philaret (Drozdov), Metropolitan of Moscow, the dignity of the text must be accompanied by an appropriate dignity of the language wherever possible, and in this way the language of the Russian translation of the Scripture has to become model not only for the language of spiritual writings, but for the literary language in whole. Previously, till the XVIII century, the sacred meanings were usually expressed with Church Slavonic, and it was only since XIX century that the Russian literary language has been covering also the domain of the church writings. Different translators of the New Testament in this epoch had a common view about the requirement of the dignity of the Scripture language, but the realization of this general principle was quite different. Some translators, like Vasily Zhukovsky and later Konstantin Pobedonostsev, used a rather slavonicized language, they also often applied some slavonic words and constructions for the stylistic purpose even where the Church Slavonic text does not contain such means. But the main line was established by Metropolitan Philaret who restricts the use of lexical slavonicisms by two possibilities. First, he propose to use a Slavonic word or expression if its Russian equivalent is stylistically inappropriate or it is less precise, but on condition that this Slavonic word or expression does not contradict the clarity criterion. Second, he establishes a stylistic context differentiation: sometimes one should choose a slavonicism not because there is no Russian equivalent, but according to the “tone of speech” in “high” context like prophecy or liturgical words. Metropolitan Philaret sees the language dignity primarily not in the use of slavonicisms, but in the compliance with standards of Russian grammar, yet he always tries to choose words and constructions which are closer to church Slavonic. Some grammatical features (a wider use of participles instead of attributive subordinate clauses, optative mood with da, reversed word order in attributive phrases, imet’-construction instead of byt’, double accusative or nominative etc.) can be considered as a proposed new set of stylistic indicators for the church-biblical register of Russian. Conclusion: Searching for a worthy language was the main objective for almost all the translators of the New Testament; that was Nikolay Glubokovsky who first shifted the focus to the textual criticism and semantic accuracy. But Glubokovsky did not reject the requirement of the language dignity; on the contrary, he analyses Pobedonostsev’s text and totally approves of his approach. Later, we can still see elements of the language dignity idea in Bishop Cassian’s translation (fully published in 1970), but in 1990s new translations it was almost totally abandoned, and no one of these latter translations has become widely accepted. If a new revised version of Bible translation into Russian is elaborated, the language dignity idea and the XIX-century attempts on seeking it should be properly taken into account.