HUMAN AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN RUSSIA:
INVENTION OF SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION
Call for papers for a conference in Paris on “Human and Social Sciences in Russia; inventionof scientific language and translation” (24-25 May 2013), held as part of the ANR“Schusocru” research project: “The constitution of human and social sciences in Russia:
networks and circulation of models of knowledge from the 18th century to the 1920s”.
Conference languages will be French, Russian and English. Those who wish to take part are
invited to send the topic of their paper and a brief description (between 10 lines and a page)by 30 September 2012 at the latest. Sending address: astafok@hotmail.fr, andberelowi@ehess.fr
From the 18th century, the constitution of scientific fields in Russia, particularly in what are
known as the human sciences, followed many paths but it was largely based on transfers,borrowings, and implantations from Western Europe in the creation of institutions, theeducation of specialists, and the circulation of books. Against that background, the inventionof scientific language in the various disciplines is of particular interest and merits historicalresearch. This topic immediately raises another question, namely which national language wasused to transmit knowledge. Use of the languages in which the knowledge was originallywritten (Latin, French, German, etc.), known not only by practitioners from the scholarly
centres of Europe, but also by the first Russian specialists, was soon paralleled by the end of
the 18th century by translations into Russian of Western scholarly publications. These
included those published in Russia in their original languages, as at the Academy of Sciences.
Later, in some rare, but significant cases, Russian works were translated in Western languages.
As a result, translation became a process of cultural exchange and of construction of science;
it led to an intense labour of linguistic adaptation and invention, first of lexical terms and thenof syntax, of a scope and scale that need to be measured: the language of science, an object ofinvention, immediately became an object for communication, education and public instruction.
The history of these developments in Russia remains largely unexplored. Although afew disciplines, such as philosophy (almost by definition), sociology, linguistics, psychology,economics and history (particularly Begriffsgeschichte), have been covered by this sort ofexamination and research, Russia has been little involved in these approaches, except for
those fields where major discoveries were made that transcended “Russian”, such as theliterary and linguistic studies of the first third of the 20th century. But this examination issparse, fragmentary and, not least, not sufficiently supported by close diachronic study ofphenomena often thought of as beyond time and space. The history of scholarly translations is
at best touched upon in monographs on the reception in Russia of a particular author(philosopher, say, or historian). The history of the key concepts that were used to constitutescientific discourse, translated or transcribed from “scholarly” languages and then gaining alife of their own in Russian, is virtually a blank sheet.
The conference will be a first step to remedy this. Its relative novelty encourages us tocover a vast field both in chronology and number of disciplines. The chosen period stretchesfrom the mid-18th century up to and including the 1920s. These dates (also those of the ANR“Schusocru” research project to which the conference belongs) cover the beginnings of thehuman sciences in Russia and the invention of the social sciences just before the Great Turnof the 1930s and display a certain continuity for our purposes. The disciplines covered are thehuman and social sciences as a whole.
The papers we expect may be devoted to micro-study(a word, a concept, a book, anauthor, etc.) or wider views, including cross-disciplinary work. Without restricting the scope���of possibilities for specialists interested in this project for their own field, we wouldemphasise the following points:• The presence of foreign books and foreign languages in scholarly centres. This
type of research does not concern only the early period. Even at the start of the 20thcentury, the question of acquiring basic works and learning essential languages was
still sufficiently problematic for the topic to remain relevant. The study of libraries,
both university and private, and of modes of acquisition, standard matters for book
historians, has much to contribute here. And the scholarly use of Latin, German andRussian in certain institutions exposed to multilingualism by their design (Academy ofSciences) or location (Universität Dorpat ) is another way of addressing the same
topic. It may be possible to establish a general or more detailed periodization for agiven scholarly field as a function (among others) of the rise and fall of interest in
foreign publications.
• Periodization and background of translations. It is particularly important toexamine the early period of translation, when it was argued to be necessary foreducational purposes (by the historian Pogodin in the early 1830s, for example), butthe question remains valid even when, at the end of the 19th century, translations fromFrench, German and English were to some extent commonplace. The choice of books
to be translated, the identity of the translator, the translator’s resources, the choices
made in translating words difficult to transpose (neologism by use of the original wordor calque, use of an existing Russian word, transcription) are often of interest. A
simple bibliographical or statistical analysis of translations may lead on to furtherquestions. For example, did the emerging nationhood that affected the human sciences
to an extent as yet unknown, including scientific discourse, have any influence ontranslation and if so of what sort? This “national” angle may also lead to otherperiodizations, as mentioned above.
• Translation as access to universality. When citing foreign authors or describing
realities outside Russia, specialists would sometimes deliberately choose terms takenfrom a specifically Russian lexical field, referring to specifically Russian realities.
This approach (equivalent terms = equivalent realities) may form the foundation forconstructions that transcend national borders. It was adopted, for example, by thehistorian Pavlov-Sil’vanskij, to assert the existence of a Russian “feudalism”
equivalent to the “feudalism” in Western Europe. This goes beyond the issue oftranslation and is rather an attempt at breaking down boundaries (or generalising ordeleting local features), which may be particularly significant in the social sciences(history, sociology, ethnography), with many examples in the early 20th century.
Translation of Russian texts in Western languages was a part of the same process.
• Cross-disciplinary diffusion. The importance of a given discipline at a given momentin the study period may have played a part in the adoption of words and phrases, andconsequently topics from other fields. The dominance of linguistics around the year
1900, of French and British sociology in Russian social sciences, are reasons to
consider transfers not only, and not so much, from one language to another, one
discipline to another, but more transversally (several languages, several disciplines). It
would be instructive to examine to what extent vigorous scientific movements such as
Russian formalism, “social” history and Orientalism, were largely determined bylinguistic configurations specific to Russian universities.
!"#$%&'()%*+#,%&%$-&."%-+/+0&1#0#"23+)456&
Schusocru project coordinators,
���Members of CERCEC 7!"#$%"&'()$*'"+&'"+&,-#'"+&%*++".&/0*/0+1"#&"$&/"#$%"2"*%-3)"#86&!9!::;<=>:
40+$05-678-$901:;5%.&<"%":-=17"8"++;5%&>&���