The culture of footnotes: Prince Peter Ivanovich Shalikov translates Vicomte François-René de Chateaubriand

Abstract

At the end of the 18th — beginning of the 19th century Russian men of letters often provided their own creations, both prose and poetry, with footnotes. Peter Ivanovich Shalikov (1768 or 1767 — 1852) was no exception; he enthusiastically commented both on his original works and on the texts that he translated. Among the latter were two books by François-René de Chateaubriand, Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem (1815–1816) and Recollections of Italy, England and America (1817), that Shalikov not only rendered into Russian but provided with numerous commentaries. Many of them were encyclopedic, metalinguistic notes that included references to the original, translations of foreign words or reflections on the passages from other authors quoted by Chateaubriand; others presented Shalikov's literary position and purely Russian point of view on Chateaubriand. Finally, in a number of cases, Shalikov puts his comments next to the author's, which is ironic because Chateaubriand himself liked to provide his own texts with footnotes. By following this practice Shalikov seems to equate himself with the translated author. He comments on someone else's text as his own, because he commented on his own texts as if they were someone else's.