European drama as a didactic material: Moliere and Goldoni at the lessons of Russian for Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna

Translation activities of V.A. Zhukovsky in the Russian literary criticism have been studied widely and comprehensively. However, the purposes of his translations are not limited to aesthetic, enlightenment and life-building aspects: the poet translated not only texts in which he found consonance to his aesthetic consciousness but also “on order” and for narrowly pragmatic and utilitarian purposes: these are fragmentary translations of the two most famous European comedies: Moliere's The Bourgeois Gentleman and Carlo Goldoni's The Beneficent Bear. When used as a didactic material while learning a foreign language, texts of dramas acquire special significance, for they offer samples of dialogues - the kind of speech communication essential in teaching any language as a foreign one. It is all the more interesting that Zhukovsky chooses fragments from comedies for his lessons as he never fancied the genre. However, Zhukovsky's choice of the comedy for a specific - didactic - purpose is well motivated by his aesthetic views. In the Notes on the History of Literature and Criticism, he unequivocally defined the purpose of the comedy primarily as a school of public morality. Thus, two fragments of European comedies, translated for Russian lessons with the Grand Duchess, combined two kinds of didactic purposes: strategic, i.e. educational, which Zhukovsky saw in the comedy genre in general, and tactical, i.e. pedagogical. The choice of Moliere's comedy episode, the plot of which is a lesson in orthoepy and stylistics, is clearly correlated with its pragmatic purpose. Zhukovsky intentionally inserts a piece which sets out the rules for the pronunciation of Russian yotized vowels and the specific “yery” vowel in Moliere's text. The translation is generally Russified in terms of style to reproduce the style of Russian everyday colloquial speech. The fragment about the word order in the Russian phrase translated close to the text is very expressive. The rule is especially important for the Russian-German language pair: in German, the word order is very different due to the final position of the verb in the phrase and the verb-preposition relations. Goldoni's comedy The Beneficent Bear became known in Russia almost immediately after its creation in 1771 and enjoyed particular success, which the repertoire list of Russian theaters of the late 18th and early 19th centuries shows. Zhukovsky could have known Goldoni's comedy not only by its original text, but also by the prose German version of its plot: in 1801, Johann-Jacob Engel (1741-1802), a German writer and educator of Friedrich-Wilhelm III, the future Prussian king, wrote Herr Lorenz Stark, a family novel of life and manners based on The Beneficent Bear. Both Goldoni's comedy, and especially Engel's novel must have been familiar in their originals to Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna, who was the daughter of a pupil of Johann-Jacob Engel, Prussian King Frederick-Wilhelm III: this could be a motivation for Zhukovsky's choice of the text to study Russian with the Grand Duchess. For the lessons, Zhukovsky translated Act 2 Scene 1 of the comedy: the dispute between Geronte and Dorval while playing chess, which is an example of a rapid and dynamic dramatic dialogue, representative for mastering this form of verbal communication in the process of learning a foreign language. Obviously, both Zhukovsky's strategy of translation selection and all translation innovations are subordinated to a specific purpose: to teach his royal student Russian orthoepy, vocabulary, idioms, and dialogue as a form of speech communication. However, the teaching was indirect: through reading, reproducing and analyzing a literary text, in accordance with the principle of teaching through fun. It is still necessary to note a circumstance paradoxical at first thought: the utilitarian and pragmatic purposes of these translations reflected Zhukovsky's main aesthetic ideology of the peak of his poetic talent: “Life and Poetry are one.”

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