The role of translation in the westernization of Russia in the eighteenth century

In the eighteenth century, Russia passed through a period of sweeping social reforms. Russia was modernized, and modernization was viewed as westernization. Russia had to accomplish the modernization as quickly as possible and catch up with the rest of Europe, a formidable task requiring transfers of Western European knowledge and values on a massive scale. Translation became the sole means of carrying out these transfers in the least time-consuming fashion.;Translation was regarded as a boundary phenomenon of the system (in this case, the Russian Empire). Serving as the system's boundary, translation opened the system to influences from the environment. In eighteenth-century Russia, intrasystemically, translation became a crucial means of introducing new ideas, helping to change the official discourse by introducing a heterodoxa (an alternative social discourse). Translation came to the fore of the social stage and became a principal means of renegotiating the systemic communication. Intersystemically, translation also was instrumental for the system's projecting information about itself into the environment. Finally, translation played a crucial global-systemic role. Europe integrated into a global functional super-system (Luhmann) where law, economy, science, and art formed international functional subsystems, no longer divided by national frontiers. Translation was a sine qua non enabling Russia to become part of this global system.;My research focuses on the social role of translation. I applied Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory as well as some concepts from works by Pierre Bourdieu and Lev Gumilev. Luhmann's theory provided a stimulating theoretical basis for analyzing major translation flows, the place of translation in the overall social system of the Russian Empire as well as the contribution translation made to the process of Russia's unfolding westernization. Bourdieu's concepts helped consider the role of agency in the translation 'field' and explain the distribution of symbolic capital in society that led to foregrounding translation as a major means of westernization. Gumilev's ideas about ethnogenetic evolution made it clear that the eighteenth century was the acmetic stage of the evolving superethnos and that is why became such a pivotal period in Russian history.