ABSTRACT
N ikolai Alekseevich Polevoi was a journalist, novelist, dramatist, historian, critic, and translator. Together with his brother, Polevoi published an influential liberal literary journal the Moscow Telegraph [Moskovskii Telegraf, 182534], which strongly promoted the ideas of the new Romanticism. The author of a controversial History of the Russian People [Istoriia russkogo naroda, 1818-29], he also wrote several historical novels and melodramas. In the 1840s, after the prohibition of the Moscow Telegraph, he turned to translations. His successful prose translation of Hamlet was produced in Moscow in 1837 with the famous Russian actor Pavel Mochalov in the main part. His free translation of Ugolina, a play by a German pre-romantic writer H. W. Gerstenberg, was staged a year later. Polevoi’s encyclopedic orientation, his interest in European history and culture is evident in his critical comments on translation which further promote the ideals of creative literature, especially works of the Romantic writers, and the importance of their transposition onto the Russian soil. At the
time, when the first full edition of Goethe’s work was being published in Russian, Polevoi raises the questions of selection and quality in major translation projects of literature.
