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Pugachev Goes Global: The Revolutionary Potential of Translation

This chapter by Malte Griesse explores the reverberations of what was probably the most serious revolutionary event in eighteenth-century Europe before the French Revolution: the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773–75. This Cossack “uprising” was led by Emel’ian Pugachev, who posed as Peter III, the tsar who had been ousted and assassinated in 1762. After the rebellion was suppressed, Catherine the Great, Peter III’s widow and successor, attempted to silence all discussion of the events in Russia. She was unable, however, to control their reverberations abroad. Griesse examines two accounts of the uprising by foreign writers. The first is a 1775 biography of Pugachev in French (allegedly a translation of a Russian original) that represents the rebel as a cosmopolitan figure and Enlightenment reformer. The work serves both to critique despotism in France and to challenge Catherine II’s monopoly on Enlightenment discourse in Russia. The second text, which seems a reaction to the first, is an anonymous German account of the revolt, which depicts Pugachev as an illiterate brute. Griesse analyzes the contexts in which these works were published and traces how these representations were “retranslated” into Russian when the taboo began to be relaxed.