Abstract:
The first translations of the New Testament into the Russian language, which were
carried out at the beginning of the 19th century, are usually regarded as a missionary
project. But the language of these translations may prove that they were addressed to
a rather narrow audience. As is known, the Russian Bible Society established in 1812
began its activities not with translations into Russian but with the mass edition of the
Church Slavonic text of the Bible. In other words, it was the Church Slavonic Bible
that was initially taken as the “Russian” Bible. Such a perception correlated with the
sociolinguistic situation of that period, when, among the literate country and town
dwellers, people learned grammar according to practices dating back to Medieval
Rus’, which meant learning by heart the Church Slavonic alphabet, the Book of Hours,
and the Book of Psalms; these readers were in the majority, and they could understand
the Church Slavonic Bible much better than they could a Russian-language version.
That is why the main audience for the “Russian” Bible was the educated classes who
read the Bible in European languages, not in Russian. The numbers of targeted readers
for the Russian-language translation of the Bible were significantly lower than those
for the Church Slavonic version. The ideas of the “language innovators” (who favored
using Russian as a basis for a new national language) thus appeared to be closer to the
approach taken by the Bible translators than the ideas of “the upholders of the archaic
tradition” (who favored using the vocabulary and forms of Church Slavonic as their
basis). The language into which the New Testament was translated moved ahead of
the literary standard of that period, and that was one of the reasons why the work on
the translation of the Bible into the Russian language was halted.
