Lexical Features of the Narration about Political Power in the Russian-Church Slavonic Translation of the Atlas Blaeu

In the middle of the 17th century, the geographical treatise “Theatrum orbis terrarum, sive Atlas novus”, known as the Atlas Blaeu, was translated in Moscow. Among the descriptions of individual European states, it contains two chapters on the Moscow Kingdom. A large fragment in the first of them, namely the story of the supreme power in Moscow, dates back to the famous work of Giles Fletcher “Of the Russe Common Wealth” (1591), or rather to its translation into Latin “Russia seu Moscovia itemque Tartaria” (1630). The article will show how the lexical organization of Fletcher's text, which broadly includes Russian vocabulary in the English text, was preserved in Latin translations of this work and influenced the translation carried out in Moscow in the early 1650s. Russian vocabulary is used in the chapters on Moscow, translated by Epiphany Slavinetsky, which are based on Russian cultural realities and thus differ significantly from the translation of the main text of the Atlas Blaeu. The Moscow chapters are not included in the whitelist of the complete Blaeu Atlas translation, and we suppose one of the reasons is not only the content of chapters that include negative information about Moscow and its inhabitants, but also the understanding of its linguistic features by the scientific translators. Unlike the Church Slavonic—oriented translation of the first volumes of the Blaeu Atlas, the translation of chapters about Moscow can be named only as Russian-Church Slavonic, while Russification was carried out in these chapters at the lexical level, which was the most important for the translators of Atlas Blaeu.