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Ippolit Bogdanovich and Voltaire’s Épître à l’impératrice de Russie: Adapting Praise

Identification

Public canonical key

doi:10.3828/mlo.v0i0.515

Authors

Andrew Kahn

Reported year

2024

Reported language

fr

Source type

article

First detected

2026-11-09T19:13:48.281901+00:00

Last metadata observation

2026-11-09T19:13:48.281901+00:00

Last HTTP verification

Not checked

Institutions reported by the source

University of Oxford

Documentary abstract — original language

The age of Catherine the Great was also the great age of Russian court poetry. Praise for the monarch, written by scientists, physicians, men (and women) of letters, trumpeted a standard set of virtues attributed to the Minerva of the North. If the ideological content of poems and especially the ode was not formally prescribed, the conventions of panegyric and rhetorical flourishes nonetheless imposed formulaic content. Writers bent on delivering a specific message understood that giving advice was not a straightforward matter, resorting to the arts of praise to create the illusion that everything suggested was already acceptable to the enlightened monarch. Ippolit Bogdanovich was one of the most versatile poets of the period, appreciated for his original compositions and recognised for his adaptations of French poetry. He was also one of the most adept at the graceful packaging of didactic themes or conveying a policy suggestion. This essay considers how his translation of Voltaire’s Épître à l’impératrice de Russie (1771) reworks a famous poem of praise. Adaptation of a foreign work proves to be an opportunity to exploit well-received tropes in the service of a subtle change of message. Within its conventional duty to praise, Bogdanovich’s rewriting of Voltaire shifts the emphasis away from the theme of Orientalism and Catherine’s Turkish Wars to the benefits of reason and civilisation. The effect is to present a different perspective on the value of the empress’s achievements, offering praise but also implicitly a challenge to her to be better than Voltaire’s more militaristic portrait would have her be.

Identifiers

OPENALEX

W4404823354

DOI

10.3828/mlo.v0i0.515

Documentary context

Documentary family

Scholarship

Source-reported types

article

Jurisdictions studied — explicit sources

RU

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAlex · Record 1 · Record 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.515
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W4404823354

Documented bibliographic relations

Source-declared references and links; they do not establish legal support or UGLC qualification. Up to 20 outgoing references are displayed.

• openalex:w2095296105 · CITES
• openalex:w2322196365 · CITES

1 incoming references within the detected corpus

Documentary status

Relevance pending

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