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Showing posts from April, 2018

008*. Anna Nikitična Arcybaševa / Анна Никитична Арцыбашева

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Our next writer  is out of chronological order , but she is next on  the list , and so this post  is  for her. An na Ar c yba š eva 's only published work seems to be the translation into Russian of " On The Commerce and Navigation of the Ancients " (О торговле и мореплавании древних), published in Kazan in 1831 , a text which Golicyn (12) found on a list of books acquired by the library of the Imperial Society of Russian History and Antiquities in 1845 . Who is she? Anna Nikitična Ar c yba š eva , née Nazvanova, figures into the long entry on her husband, the historian Nikolaj Sergeevič Arcyba š ev (1773-1841), in Vengerov's Critical and Biographical Dictionary of Russian Writers and Scholars from which we can glean several details about her life and the context in which she lived. A provincial noblewoman from the gubernija of Vladimir , she married Arcyba š ev , who was , or became, a landowner in Sivil'sk, about 100 kilometers west of Kazan&

007.3. Empress Elizaveta Petrovna / Елизавета Петровна

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T o finish up with the Empress Elizabeth,   Golicyn (110)   credits her with two other literary works: an unfinished acrostic and a "pastoral song." Both are untranslated, to my knowledge, and thus represent (together with the other two poems attributed to Elizabeth and discussed in the last two posts)  potential projects for students  who would like to try a hand at translating. The acrostic was first published in the Vorontsov Archive among Elizabeth's letters to statesman Michail Ill arionovič Vorontsov in 1870 . Judging from the dated letters published on either side , it was penned between 1742 and 1745. According to the editors of that volume, the acrostic is written in Elizabeth's own hand – no guarantee, of course, that she herself actually wrote it instead of merely copying it from another source. The words in cursive in the right-hand margin , an editorial note suggests, are added corrections. Whether these are Elizabeth's own or those of