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De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 44 (2012)

De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 44

(2012)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

The View from the Periphery: French Pedagogy and Enlightenment in Russia (Leprince de Beaumont's Magasin des enfants)
Alicia C. Montoya and Wyneke de Gelder

The pedagogical works of the London-based French governess Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont enjoyed enormous success throughout Europe. This article documents her reception in eighteenth-century Russia, where her works were sponsored by the court of Catherine the Great and were adapted to a Russian audience by prominent Enlightenment thinkers, including Peter Svistunov in 1761 and Andrey Bolotov shortly thereafter. The popularity of Beaumont's works can be explained by the synthesis they offered between a religious worldview and Enlightenment ideals of social utility and participation in the public sphere. As such, they can be viewed as representative of the mainstream, religious Enlightenment.

Introduction

The Enlightenment was long viewed - and still is, in many popular accounts - as a largely French-led, explicitly anticlerical movement of secularization and societal reform. Spearheaded by the progressive Parisian philosophes, this movement supposedly laid the intellectual foundations for our modern, secular worldview, in a diffusionary movement that spread new ideas from a number of recognized ‘centres’ to the geographical and intellectual peripheries of Europe. However, since the 1980s at least, scholars have increasingly been questioning this teleological narrative, instead proposing other accounts that focus not only on recognized ‘centres’ of intellectual debate - in particular, French and English ones - but also on various geographical peripheries.1 Content-wise, attention is also shifting to what were long regarded as the intellectual peripheries of the Enlightenment, in particular to what scholars have termed ‘the religious Enlightenment’, and to the complex interactions between various strands of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment thought.2 Rather than focusing exclusively on the works of the most secular-minded thinkers, students of the Enlightenment today also foreground the role of religious works and ideas within its major intellectual debates. Thus

David Sorkin has hypothesized the existence in eighteenth-century Europe of a broad-based religious Enlightenment with several distinguishing features, among which two of the most prominent ones were a focus on natural theology and a distinct transnational and supraconfessional appeal.

In this essay, we follow up these elements mentioned by Sorkin in his characterization of the religious Enlightenment and propose that bringing together the two strands in the larger Enlightenment debate today - the shift from centre to periphery on the one hand, and attention to religious writings on the other - can be particularly revealing for understanding the reality ‘on the ground’ of the Enlightenment. We will develop this argument through a case study of the impact of the writings of the London-based French governess Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in one of the Enlightenment's geographical peripheries, eastern Europe, and Russia in particular. Leprince de Beaumont offers an intriguing case because her pedagogical works appear to have enjoyed enormous international recognition, both within and outside France, yet are never mentioned in standard accounts of the Enlightenment. ‘The’ Enlightenment, in such accounts, seems to be denned from the position of an implied secular, Franco-British intellectual and geographical centre. Yet the full significance of Beaumont's works and many others like them, we contend, can only be properly understood when they are viewed within a broad, transnational perspective, that pays attention to the geographical peripheries of Europe as well as to the more traditionally recognized centres of Enlightenment thought. This essay claims, then, that if we look at the Enlightenment from the viewpoint of reception rather than production, taking into account what academic discourse has largely taken as the peripheries of the Enlightenment, a new picture emerges. In reassessing the impact of Beaumont in one specific ‘peripheral’ region, we focus specifically on how her works were perceived to illustrate a synthesis between a religious worldview and Enlightenment ideals of social utility, and participated in local societal and political debates, i.e. actively engaged in the public sphere. The Enlightenment they illustrated was, however, a somewhat different one than the Parisian Enlightenment of the philosophes, even though its very existence was predicated on more or less hierarchical relations of cultural translation between the same geographic centres and peripheries of which the latter were also a part.

Geographical centres and peripheries

A first way to address the problematics of centre and periphery through the



illustratie
Fig 1.: Anonymous (possibly Jean-Baptiste Leprince), portrait of Jeanne-Mane Leprince de Beaumont, eighteenth century, oil on ivory, private collection.


works of Leprince de Beaumont [figure 1] is a biographical one. For although she was French, Beaumont hailed not from the Parisian centre, but from one of the country's geographical peripheries, Lorraine. Apparently at a cultural disadvantage because of her provenance, after some years she moved to London, where she embarked on a successful career as a governess and French teacher to a series of aristocratic English girls. It was in London that her career as an author really took off, and it was there that she published the work that brought her the greatest international fame, her Magasin des enfants, in 1756. Written in French in England, the work was quickly translated into English and into several other European languages, earning her success both in its original and in its translated form. Gisèle Sapiro has suggested in her analysis of the world system of translation that ‘translations, like exportations, circulate principally from the centre toward the periphery’.3 However, what we seem to have here is a case, rather, of the periphery addressing the periphery. While London may of course not be, strictly speaking, a ‘periphery’ of Enlightenment culture, it would have acted as such for a French-language author seeking success, underlining the fact that notions of centre and periphery are relative, and depend essentially on the standpoint of the observer.

Writing from the margins of Parisian literary society, in Lorraine and later England, Leprince de Beaumont also consistently sought support from the margins, throughout her long career. Thus from the very outset she actively sought the patronage of Stanislas Leszynski, King of Poland, at whose court at Nancy she hoped to obtain a post. When it came time to publish her first major work of pedagogy, her novel Civan, roi de Bungo, in 1754, she dedicated it to Joseph II of Austria. This prompted one of the Parisian philosophes, Grimm, to remark snidely that ‘comme l'esprit philosophique n'a jamais approché des frontières d'Autriche, je ne doute point que Le Roi de Bungo ne paraisse à Vienne un grand ouvrage’.4 Right from the beginning, it appeared that

Beaumont's critics stressed her geographically peripheral position as a means to discredit her works. And right from the beginning, European peripheries appear to have responded exceptionally well to them. The available evidence is unfortunately fragmentary, since no exhaustive study has ever been undertaken of Leprince de Beaumont's life and work, but what data we do have suggests that her works enjoyed widespread success and spawned numerous imitations, from Spain to Scandinavia, in geographically close countries such as the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic as well as remote ones such as the recently independent United States and Mexico.5 The first translations of her most popular work, the Magasin des enfants, appeared in England and Holland in 1757, i.e. in the countries geographically closest to France. However, the works spread very quickly. In 1757 already she was translated into Swedish, and the first Russian translation appeared a mere five years after its original French-language publication, in 1761. While another philosophe, Voltaire, dismissed her as ‘mademoiselle Beaumont-le-prince [...] qui fait des espèces de catéchismes pour lesjeunes demoiselles’ (Dl4235),6 her success and visibility were demonstrated by the fact that her works were translated into over a dozen European languages, often appearing in multiple translations in the same language, and continued to be reprinted well into the nineteenth century. In addition, evidence from private library auction catalogues from the Dutch Republic, which was the centre of the European book trade in the eighteenth century, indicates that Leprince de Beaumont might well have been, after Voltaire himself, the most read eighteenth-century author of all. Her pedagogical works were present in fully fifty percent of all the privately-owned libraries studied, while by comparison, Rousseau's were in 43 percent and Diderot's in 27 percent. Of other eighteenth-century authors, only Voltaire surpassed her in terms of sheer presence and number of books listed in the libraries.7

Beaumont's Magasin des enfants in eastern Europe

Although Leprince de Beaumont was a prolific author, her most successful work was her Magasin des enfants, a volume of pedagogical dialogues between a fictional governess and her young pupils, intended for a juvenile

audience, which she first published in London in 1756. Unable to find a publisher willing to take upon himself the financial risk of publication, she published it by subscription, obtaining two crucial money payments from the imperial court of Russia, from Catherine the Great herself, to support her. Just as she had previously sought support from Poland, it was now another eastern Europe periphery that made her career possible. And so perhaps not entirely surprisingly, it was in eastern Europe too that Beaumont obtained some of her greatest commercial success, with translations into at least six local languages:8

 

Hungarian (1781, 1793, 1848)
Polish (1768, 1770, 1773, 1774, 1780, 1784-1786)
Russian (1761-1767, 1765, 1774, 1779, 1783, 1784, 1785, 1788, 1789, 1792, 1794, 1795, 1800-1801, 1817, 1834, etc.)
Serbian (1794)
Czech (1813, 1837)

 

So far, the available data is incomplete, depending often on chance findings, and there are surely more translations than those we have listed here.9 There is much work to be done still on Beaumont's reception in eastern Europe, although the evidence we do have is highly suggestive, and indicates that Beaumont remained well-known well into the nineteenth century. Thus Anna Nikliborc, in an article on French children's literature in Poland, writes that ‘the fame of Mme Leprince de Beaumont extended beyond her own age. Mrs Clementine Hoffmann Tanska - a Polish woman writer of the nineteenth century - presented in one of her novels a morning scene at the family castle of count Krasinski, where the young girls at their morning toilette listened to the Magasin being read aloud while their chambermaid did their hair’.10 In Bohemia, Leprince de Beaumont's Magasin des pauvres was translated by K.I. Thám (after a German version) only in 1813, and then adapted again in 1837, testifying to her relatively late reception among Czech-speaking readers.11

The Russian case: Book history data

For one country, Russia, we do however possess a one-of-a-kind, invaluable source, the Soviet-produced Union Catalogue of Russian Books in the Civil Orthography in the Eighteenth Century, 1725-1800, which lists practically all the works published in Russia during the eighteenth century.12 Several translations and re-editions of works by Beaumont published before 1800 are listed in the Union Catalogue:

 

Magasin des enfants (1756) 1761-1767 1776; 1788; 1783; 1792; 1794; 1795; 1800
Lettres de Mme du Montier (1756) 1765  
Magasin des adolescents (1760) 1774 1788
Education complète (1753) *1779 1787 (reissue of unfinished 1779 ed.)
Magasin des jeunes dames (1764) 1784 1788; 1800-1801
Le Mentor moderne (1773)   1785
Mémoires de Mme de Batteville (1766) 1789  

 

Besides these translations, the Union Catalogue also mentions three other editions of works by Leprince de Beaumont:

 

1.Various works of Madam de Beaumont. Part 1 (1780)
2.The force of natural inclination, or the Peasant poetess in the work of Leprince de Beaumont (1785)
3.Amusing, interesting and edifying tales. Taken from the second and the third part of the French Magasin, or the edifying and spiritual library of M.P. Debeaumont (1795)13

While the origin of the last work is clearly the Magasin des enfants, as stated in the title, that of the others remains uncertain.14 The Union Catalogue lists twenty-two editions of Leprince de Beaumont, which means that in purely quantitative terms, her presence in eighteenth-century Russia was slightly higher than that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.15 Indeed, Rousseau met with a mixed reception in Russia.16 Catherine the Great, who supported Beaumont, rejected Rousseau's denial of the value of formal education.17 Print runs of Beaumont's works were large, with, for example, around 2000 copies printed of the first edition alone of her Magasin des enfants (1500 copies for part one, 2000 for parts two and four, and 2079 for part three).18 In comparison, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, that according to Gary Marker, who has extensively studied eighteenth-century Russian book history, ‘managed to strike a responsive chord’ among Russian readers, reached 3000 copies over four separate editions.19 Likewise, he considers a print run of 4000 copies, spread over five separate editions, for Abbe Prévost's Aventures d'un homme de qualité to constitute an exceptionally large one.20 Further confirming this picture of commercial success, new editions of Beaumont's works continued to be published in Russia during the nineteenth century. The catalogue of the Russian National Library lists a translation of her Magasin des pauvres (1768) from 1808, reprinted in 1834, and new editions of the translation of her Magasin des enfants in 1804, 1808-1811 and 1817.

Of Leprince de Beaumont's works, her Magasin des enfants was, in Russia as elsewhere, the most successful. Translated into Russian as Children's School (Detskoe učiličše), eight different editions of it (as opposed to mere reprints, which we have not included here) were published in the course of the eighteenth century, followed by at least three further ones at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These eight separate editions mean that Children's School was published more often in eighteenth-century Russia than translations of Abbé Prévost's novels and Alain-René Lesage's Gil Bias, two works that

according to Marker were bestsellers in eighteenth-century Russia with, respectively, five and seven editions.21 Now numbers of editions do not, of course, necessarily indicate success, since they could also be the result of state propaganda, especially given that the Magasin des enfants had, through the figure of Catherine the Great, obtained state support. However, in the case of this work we have enough additional evidence indicating that there really was a large audience for it.

One of the most striking pieces of evidence in this context is the fact that in 1792 a second translation of the Magasin des enfants was produced by Timofey Mozhayskiy. The second translation was more modern in its language and was published as a parallel edition, indicating that there was some demand for the Magasin des enfants as a schoolbook. According to the Lexicon of Russian authors, the parallel French- and Russian-language text in Mozhayskiy's new translation of the Magasin des enfants served as teaching material and this edition was extremely successful.22 Other uses of the Russian Magasin des enfants in an educational setting are suggested by the fact that in the earlier translation produced by Peter Svistunov in 1761 (on which more below), Beaumont's originally brief lessons on Russian geography were substantially revised and expanded. And in the reissue of Mozhayskiy's translation in 1800, the very precise geographical description of Russia was again revised and brought up to date.

That Mozhayskiy's translation was especially sought-after is suggested by the fact that it was reissued three times during a ten-year span and, in addition, in every case it was done so by private publishing houses, for whom the choice to publish was more closely tied to the popularity of a title than was the case for the state publishers.23 The translation was published by I.K. Schnoor (Saint Petersburg, 1792), F. Meyer (Saint Petersburg, 1794) and A. Reshetnikov (Moscow, 1800). Svistunov's earlier translation was also a commercial success, with a second edition published in 1778, for the Russian Academy of Sciences, by the publisher-bookseller Ivan Glazunov. The entire print run of five hundred copies went directly to the bookseller, according to A.A. Zaic, while a further 812 copies were sent to the bookseller N.N. Vodop'yanov.24 This indicates that all copies of this edition were distributed, rather than remaining in the publisher's warehouse. Equally significant is the fact that Glazunov's order is

one of the earliest examples of the influence exercised by a bookseller on the choice of material to be published. Marker writes that this kind of interaction, which gave a more market-driven character to the Russian book trade, became fully established by the last decade of the eighteenth century.25 Beaumont's work probably sold well for Glazunov, as Zajca remarks that his influence as a publisher contributed to his success as a bookseller.26 Both the first and second reissues of the Children's School by the Academy of Sciences were however illegal ones, produced without the translator's permission. In 1789 Svistunov complained about the breach of his copyright in the periodical Moscow announcements (Moskovskija vedomosti) and also reported that he still had copies of the original edition left for sale at a reduced price.27

Individual readers

What do we know about actual readers of the works of Leprince de Beaumont? Here again, unfortunately, much of our information is anecdotal, and hence - not

illustratie
Fig. 2: List of subscribers in Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Magasin des enfans, (London: Haberkorn, 1756).


surprisingly - comes from the kind of aristocratic readers who were most likely to leave records of their reading experience. When publishing the fourth and last volume of her Magasin des enfants, Leprince de Beaumont did herself include a revealing list of subscribers [figure 2]. This list tells us that among the Magasin des enfants' original readers in Russia were the empress Elizabeth, the future Peter III and Catherine the Great. In her ‘Avertissement’ preceding the book Beaumont further explained that it would have been impossible for her to publish a French-language book in London without first obtaining a number

of subscribers. Without the support of various members of the Russian court, she wrote, her Magasin des enfants might perhaps never have been printed.28

The list of Russian subscribers reveals that practically all of the most influential families and individuals at court were represented. Among the subscribers, for example, were I.I. Shuvalov, Catherine's favourite and the first curator of the University of Moscow, K.G. Razumovsky, the president of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, A.M. Golitsyn, who at that time was the Russian ambassador in London, and various members of the Vorontsov and Sheremetev families. According to N.A. Kopanev, when the children of the Russian subscribers of the Magasin embarked on the grand tour that was a standard component of their aristocratic education, many of them stayed with the families of the English subscribers, and vice versa, so that the subscription list could serve as a key in studying relations between the English and Russian court.29 The driving force behind these subscriptions must have been Catherine herself, who corresponded with Leprince de Beaumont and supported her with financial gifts. It therefore may well have partly been a question of politics for court members to subscribe to the work, but their interest was surely also related to the importance that French culture had acquired during Elizabeth's reign. French culture was used by the Russian aristocracy starting with the reign of Elizabeth as a means to create a common identity. In the period during which the Magasin des enfants was being published, the Russian elite was engaged in learning French. That the importation of the Magasin was related to these larger developments is shown by Catherine's personal copy, which reveals that the book was used in teaching French to her son Paul Petrovich, the future Paul I.30

Leprince de Beaumont's Magasin des enfants might have been intended by Catherine in the first place for the education of the young Paul, for the work was expressly dedicated to him. Beaumont's dedication to the two-year-old future czar read: ‘A son Altesse Imperiale PAUL Petrowitch, petit-fils de PIERRE le Grand, neveu d'ELIZABETH, Mère et Législatrice de ses Sujets etc. etc. etc’. This dedication was probably a recognition of the financial

support provided by the Russian court in publishing the book. The praises of Peter the Great and the Russian Empire in the text of the Magasin itself were probably also the result of this transaction, and may indeed have been added by someone other than the author herself. Kopanev, indeed, suggests that both these additions and the text of the dedication were composed in Saint Petersburg by Beaumont's Lorraine-born literary colleague the chevalier de Lussy (Théodore-Henri de Tschudy), who had previously included texts by Beaumont in his journal Le Caméléon Littéraire (Saint Petersburg, 1755), or by his co-publisher the chevalier de Mainvilliers.31

The original copy of the Magasin in Catherine the Great's library also carries material traces of a child's reading. Kopanev points out the ‘many ink stains in the first part’ and the notation in a child's handwriting: ‘Je commence aprendre dusucre.lendi’.32 He attributes the child's handwriting to Paul Petrovich because only he could have handled a copy from the Hermitage library in such a manner. Kopanev further comments on the handwritten sentence that the young Paul was not allowed to eat sugar until the age of three or four, leading him to date his use of the Magasin to the first years after the work had appeared. However, one wonders whether this is correct, since it would be exceptional for a three- or four-year-old child to write so well at such an age. In any case, it does seem clear from this annotation that the Magasin was used in teaching him French, for while the text is in French, he had clearly not yet fully mastered its spelling.

One particularly intriguing aspect of Leprince de Beaumont's Russian readership concerns the precise nature of the Russian Orthodox response to her religious teachings, as reflected by Orthodox readers of her works. Thus one of the 1269 books that the archbishop, professor of philosophy and rector of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, Georgy Konisskyj (1717-1795), left in his private library was a Russian translation of the Magasin des enfants.33 His ownership of it might suggest that Beaumont's work fit into the policy of religious Enlightenment pursued by Catherine and by Konissky, who was one of her most powerful ecclesiastics. Konissky's zeal in bringing enlightenment to Orthodox believers was motivated specifically by the fact that his bishopric

was the only Orthodox constituency to fall under Polish rule, with Catholic authorities putting pressure on Orthodox believers in the bishopric to join the Catholic union. Upon Catherine's accession to the throne in 1762, Konissky specifically asked for the empress’ support against Catholic repression. And in order to keep his parish within the Orthodox faith, Konissky sought the moral and intellectual enlightenment of the clergy, for whom he created a school and printing press in 1757. Not only does this confirm that the archbishop worked closely with the imperial court; it also suggests how, paradoxically, a Catholic work could be used to seek a middle path between strict Russian Orthodoxy and encroaching Catholicism.

Neither Konissky's ownership of Children's School, nor the Russian aristocrats' subscription to the Magasin des enfants, nor the book's use by Catherine the Great and her son Paul, can of course really testify to the ways in which ‘ordinary’ readers - however the ‘ordinary’ reader might be defined, in an eighteenth-century context - reacted to Beaumont's works. These were all exceptionally high-placed readers, so that despite their belonging to a geographical periphery, they can be said to have occupied a central place, in terms of socio-cultural and political power, within their own society. This is a second reminder of the fundamental instability of notions of centre and periphery. As important as it is to identify and explore relations between central and peripheral works and traditions at a transnational level, attention should also be paid to hierarchical relations between various players within the political-literary system at a national level. While the Parisian philosophes could denigrate Beaumont for her popularity in backward Austria, her influence far beyond Paris put their own works at a disadvantage in other contexts, reducing them there to an unexpected peripheral role.

A work of religious Enlightenment

A second clue to explaining the favourable Russian reception of Beaumont's Magasin des enfants, besides the central position occupied by Beaumont's patron Catherine the Great, surely lies in her moderate intellectual positioning - as suggested too by archbishop Konissky's ownership of her book. Indeed, Beaumont's works were characterized by their attempt to reconcile the new ideas of the philosophes and the Enlightenment's valuation of reason with a more traditional, faith-based worldview. Not only did the Magasin offer a compendium of the most up-to-date scientific knowledge, ranging from the natural sciences to literature and geography. Its synthesis of reason and

faith was realized in Beaumont's concept of natural theology, or the idea that personal observation of nature and attentiveness to one's own inner conscience, initially unfettered by religious dogma, could bring one closer to God. Because of this natural theology, scientifically studying the wonders of the natural world, as the young protagonists of the Magasin were urged to do when venturing out into nature, would both reveal the greatness of God's creation and became an instrument of salvation. Summing up this union of faith and reason in the programmatic preface to her Magasin des enfants, Beaumont urged:

Il faut les [les enfants] convaincre incontestablement, de la nécessité de pratiquer ce que vous exigez, & vous les verrez se livrer de bon coeur à tout ce que la raison, & non votre caprice, leur ordonne. Nous avons pour cela deux moyens, la religion & la raison: il ne faut jamais séparer ces deux choses, & je me flatte de les avoir unies dans le Magasin des enfants.34

Not surprisingly given her scientific bent, Beaumont also used the same critical vocabulary as the Parisian philosophes. She repeatedly invoked reason as a source of knowledge of the world, and she used the same metaphor - ‘lumières naturelles’ (i.e. Cartesian lumen naturale, that was to be opposed to divine light) to describe it. The truth of religion according to her was not to be accepted on simple authority, but must be proved by the judicious use of reason. Coupled with this was a notion of innate religion that appeared intimately linked to her transnational reception. As David Sorkin has argued, the religious Enlightenment was a movement that transcended national boundaries. While its ideas could be locally grounded, as was Beaumont's faith, in specific confessions such as the Catholic one, in actual practice they easily crossed local, national and confessional boundaries.35

Starting with her first major publication, Le Triomphe de la vérité in 1748, Leprince de Beaumont clearly inscribed herself in the religious Enlightenment concern with natural religion. In this novel, the plot told of a young boy who was raised by his parents in isolation from the world, in order to discover whether human beings had in them an innate or natural idea of God. The novel's narrator justified this experiment by writing that all human beings possessed a ‘voix intérieure qui nous convainc par les seules lumieres naturelles, de l'existence d'un Etre juste’.36 This idea of innate faith allowed Beaumont to compare the

European world to the non-European one. In her Magasin des adolescentes she painted a sympathetic portrait of her young Amerindian heroines, just as she did in her later work Les Américaines, ou La preuve de la religion chrétienne par les lumières naturelles (1769). All these so-called savage people, indeed, were potential Christians:

Si l'on fait réflexion que les Sauvages les plus grossiers, reconnoissent un Etre Supérieur auquel ils s'adressent, on verra qu'elle [the young protagonist's mother] ne devoit pas douter un moment du succès de son entreprise; puisqu'il ne s'agit que de prouver à son Epoux, que l'impression de la Divinité est innée dans l'homme.37

The idea of a natural religion shared by all human beings, regardless of race or national provenance, potentially opened up Beaumont's works to a much larger audience than only the French Catholic that one might otherwise ascribe to her. Coupled to this idea of natural theology was that of personal faith, and a philosophy of virtue (vertu) that emphasized the everyday praxis of faith rather than abstract precepts. Despite Beaumont's own Catholic origins, this ideal of reasonable faith clearly resonated with non-Catholic readers too. Translators often adapted her works, apparently without too much difficulty, to other confessional contexts.38 Beaumont insisted herself on the non-dogmatic character of her works, even going so far as to write that she would not mind being taken for a Methodist, so long as her moral teachings were clearly understood:

Je serai fort heureuse si on se borne à me ranger parmi les méthodistes que je ne connois pas, ou du moins que je connois peu [...] Je veux qu'en finissant de lire ce Magazin des Adolescentes, on puisse faire la même question qu'on a faite en finissant celui des Enfans & mes autres ouvrages. Quels sont les sentimens de l'auteur en fait de dogme? Quelle est la communion qu'elle suit? Mais dans le même tems, je ne veux pas laisser mes sentimens indécis sur la morale.39

This tolerant and resolutely non-theological approach owed its being not to the arcane debates that were taking place during these years at the Sorbonne and among the inner circles of the Parisian philosophes, but to the discourse of

religious Enlightenment that was gaining currency in Europe as a whole, and that included authors in eastern Europe and Russia too.

Religious readings: Svistunov's and Bolotov's translation of the Magasin des enfants

The hypothesis that, besides state backing for her works, it was Beaumont's synthesis of a religious and a rationalistic Enlightenment worldview that accounted for her success in Russia appears to be supported by a closer examination of the two most successful Russian translations of her Magasin des enfants, that of Peter Svistunov, published in 1761, and that of Andrey Bolotov, which appeared shortly thereafter.

The first of these two translations was published in 1761 by Peter Svistunov, under the title Children's School, at the Infantry Cadets Corps school for the lower nobility, where he had previously been a student. It was not uncommon for graduates of the Cadets Corps to publish such translations, for this school was a breeding-ground for a new, self-styled class of literati that viewed as its calling the enlightenment of the Russian public at large.40 Svistunov may have translated the Magasin not only out of personal affinity, but also because of the work's popularity at court. It was, in any case, in keeping with the tenor of his previous translations, which included a translation of L'Indiscret that had introduced the dramatist Voltaire to Russian-speaking readers, and a number of comedies by Molière.41 Throughout Svistunov's career, he sought the attention of powerful patrons to help him better his own position, eventually reaching the all-but highest rank in the civil service and holding various influential government positions, including that of senator.42

Svistunov explicitly viewed his translation in the context of the Enlightenment and the ‘new Russia’. Alluding to the present growth of knowledge in Russia, he substantially expanded the encyclopedic information contained in the Magasin, and praised Peter the Great and his enlightened successors for their campaign against ‘the previous ignorance’. His expansion of the lessons on the history and geography of Russia was the most substantial. Not only did he adapt the lessons in Beaumont's original, which had already briefly touched on his fatherland. At the beginning of the third part he described all the governorships of Russia (in Svistunov's translation, sixteen in all), each time quizzing the fictional pupils on the provinces that made up each

governorship and on the most important cities and historical curiosities of each province. This addition of local material appears to indicate that his translation was expressly meant to be used as a schoolbook.

In his preface Svistunov further explicitly mentioned the Christian content of Beaumont's Magasin. Concentrating primarily on the biblical stories, he passed over the work's ideal of natural theology, thereby making the Magasin more conservative than it actually was. Revelation, in Svistunov's view, was indispensable. As Sorkin writes: ‘Natural religion alone was incapable of teaching morality and true belief. Only reason and revelation were equal to the task’.43 By insisting on a ‘correct understanding’ of the Bible and its moral lessons, Svistunov revealed himself less a tolerant thinker than a dogmatic one. In his presentation of the Magasin he pointedly gave a special status to the Bible, even going so far as to claim that Beaumont's most important aim had been to teach religion and virtue, and that she had included lessons on geography, the natural sciences, and classical antiquity in the Magasin only to vary the content or to distract her pupils. The relationship that Beaumont had emphasized in her Magasin between religious and secular knowledge was not reproduced by Svistunov. Instead, Svistunov seemed to foreground a perceived opposition between the two.

In keeping with this viewpoint, Svistunov embraced Beaumont's philosophy of virtue, writing that knowledge without virtue was the equivalent of ignorance: ‘And if this [virtue] is not in our education, then all our teachings are neither useful nor praiseworthy, but dangerous and deserving of ridicule; or, put more concisely: then all our enlightenment is darkness: all our knowledge, ignorance’.44 The tension between knowledge and virtue was due to Svistunov's double role, for on the one hand he sought the improvement of the Russian state, but on the other considered himself the moral conscience of his readers. In his first role he focused on disseminating secular knowledge, but in the second one he focused on religious teachings. He proposed, therefore, not so much a harmonious synthesis of faith and reason, but rather their simple juxtaposition.

Shortly after the publication of Svistunov's translation of the Magasin des enfants, in 1763 or 1764, the Russian philosopher Andrey Bolotov (1738-1833) began work on an imitation entitled Children's Philosophy.45 Bolotov

had a specific aim in mind, for he wrote the first part in order to interest his young wife, whom he had married in 1764, in philosophy, and to form her with his own ideas. The following parts he used to educate his own children, among others. At the same time his imitation of the Magasin des enfants should be viewed against the background of the Enlightenment projects Bolotov developed after he had withdrawn to his country estate in Dvoryaninovo in 1762. The decision that year by Peter III to exempt noblemen from state service had far-reaching consequences.46 While it allowed aristocrats to return to their estates, the idea of state service continued to live on. As Marc Raeff writes, ‘the normative pattern of eighteenth-century Russia stressed the nobleman's duty to serve and be useful to the state, the monarch, the country, and to engage in a purposeful public activity’.47 For Bolotov the idea of social utility and his own contribution to society remained important, even in his country retreat. Bolotov felt his contribution to society was in enlightening the public at large, by providing instruction in practical scientific and moral knowledge.48 His Children's Philosophy was one of his first contributions to this ideal of Enlightenment launched from the rural periphery.

Bolotov had developed as a thinker while stationed in Königsberg as secretary and later translator in 1758-1761 under the governor-general of Prussia. There he attended philosophy lectures, participated in public university disputes and socialized with Moscovite students.49 In the development of his philosophy the ideas of the German Enlightenment served as his frame of reference. Whether Bolotov had already read the Magasin des enfants in Königsberg, or encountered the work through Svistunov's translation upon returning to Saint Petersburg remains unclear. In any case, his early encounter with the Magasin testifies once again to the Russian elite's familiarity with the work. For Bolotov too belonged to the Russian elite, and was closely connected to court circles. In 1776 he took up the function of district governor for Catherine the Great, after having held the same position from 1774 to 1776 in the district of Kiyasovka. Beyond Russia itself, he was made an honorary member of the Saxon royal economic association in Leipzig in 1794, demonstrating the extent and influence of his personal network.

The fact that Bolotov titled his imitation of Leprince de Beaumont's work

Children's Philosophy indicates that he read the Magasin des enfants as a philosophical work. Much more than Svistunov, Bolotov viewed Beaumont as a representative of the religious Enlightenment, clearly foregrounding in his adaptation her concept of natural theology. In his memoirs Bolotov referred to Children's Philosophy as proof that his own practice of natural theology (his own term) was so deeply ingrained that he was even able to teach it to children. In this context, he also referenced another influence on his thinking, besides that of Beaumont, that of the Swiss philosopher-theologian Johann Georg Sulzer.50 Bolotov described how he encountered Sulzer's work in Königsberg, and fully embraced his ‘blessed art of rejoicing at the beauty of nature’ and his ideas on the order of the universe.51 While Bolotov thus encountered natural theology through Sulzer, he must surely have recognized it also in Beaumont's Magasin. The form he adopted in Children's Philosophy, in any case, was clearly inspired by her, for not only did he address a juvenile audience. Like her, he also used simple dialogues that were both clear and lively and appealed to children's own experience.

In total Children's Philosophy was to have comprised eight parts, but only the first two were published, for reasons that remain unclear.52 Parts one and two dealt with metaphysics and cosmology, while parts three to eight, that remained in manuscript form, dealt with physics, mineralogy and botanics. This made Bolotov's adaptation a more encyclopedic work than Beaumont's Magasin, especially in its extensive treatment of the natural sciences. As an Enlightenment thinker Bolotov is indeed best known for his contributions to physics and agriculture, in the form of papers written among others for the Free Economic Society and for his own economics journal, The Village Resident (Sel'skoj žitel'), published in 1778-1779.53

Like other religious Enlighteners, Bolotov saw no barrier between his secular and religious interests. This is clear in the way in which he brought together, in Children's Philosophy, his interests in nature, philosophy, theology

and education. This matter-of-fact synthesis was proclaimed in the very first sentence of his preface, in which he expressed his wish to unite knowledge of God, of the world and of humankind. In Children's Philosophy, natural theology served as the link between these different varieties of knowledge, since through observation of the natural world, a knowledge of God could be obtained that had broader implications for humankind.

Just like the Magasin des enfants, Children's Philosophy too was made up of a series of dialogues. These took place between a mother, Mrs. C** - not, as in Leprince de Beaumont, a governess - and her two children, Theona (aged fourteen) and Cleon (aged thirteen). But contrary to the Magasin des enfants, the dialogues interrupted the regular lessons of the children. Mostly the dialogues took place in the garden, where Theona and Cleon would take walks between their lessons. Often third parties joined in: visitors from a neighbouring village, a neighbour girl or a governess. As in the Magasin des enfants, the garden setting provided the occasion for several lessons on nature. And just as in the Magasin des enfants, these lessons were so many exercises in natural theology, since in Children's Philosophy knowledge of God was based on personal exploration and experience of nature.

The articles of faith that Cleon and Theona were taught in Children's Philosophy were always explained with reference to their own experience. Thus Mrs. C** explained in the eleventh dialogue of the first part that the Creator had not only created everything with infinite wisdom, but that everything also had a special purpose and that there was nothing without use. When Cleon asked what kind of use that could be, his mother did not refer him to the Bible, but instead to what he and his sister had recently experienced:

See, on Whit Sunday it snowed. Everyone was scared and thought the grain would freeze, but afterwards we saw ourselves that the snow had not been without reason. Under the ground by the grain a large quantity of worms had appeared, but because of the harsh cold they all died: God does everything with a reason, we only do not know these reasons and do not always see them.54

God was presented as a Creator who looked after his creatures and whose providence could be detected in nature. As in the Magasin des enfants, this happened through reference to personal experience. At the same time the influence is clear in this passage of the teachings of Leibniz and Wolff

about the harmony of creation. These ideas, which Bolotov had assimilated in Königsberg and which found a good reception in Russia, too, were thus integrated with the influence of Beaumont. Just as importantly, such lessons could be viewed in the framework of natural theology. As Cleon summed up in the ninth dialogue: ‘From natural things we can discover most clearly God's omniscience’. The second part of Children's Philosophy dealt primarily with nature. At the beginning the children were taught that knowledge of nature was necessary in order to have knowledge of God. It was no longer theology that was the starting-point, as in the book's first part, but physics:

Whatever understanding you now have of God and of his traits and perfections [...] You will never have a complete and convincing understanding of his omniscience, goodness, love and other perfections, if you do not know physics.55

The reference to physics also explains the encyclopedic character of Bolotov's book, for Bolotov believed that only an all-round knowledge of the natural world could provide insight into the being of God.56 As Tatjana Artem'eva writes, Bolotov and his contemporaries used the term physics to describe all the sciences that dealt with knowledge of the natural world, in opposition to theology, that studied ‘the other world’.57 Or, put somewhat differently, physics studied the Book of Nature, theology the Book of God. Later on in part two Bolotov explicitly linked physics to natural theology, writing about the former that ‘this science is closely related to natural theology [...] and can in a certain sense be considered an extension of it’.58 Underlining this connection between nature and religion, Bolotov's Children's Philosophy bore an epigram taken from the Psalms: ‘Open my lips, Lord, and my mouth will declare your praise’ (51.15). Bolotov thus presented his book as a work of praise to God, as was characteristic of the tradition of physico-theological literature.

But the dialogues in Children's Philosophy did not deal only with God and nature. Humankind also had a central place in Bolotov's philosophy. And just as in the Magasin des enfants, here too virtue was a central concept, as Cleon and Theona were told in the first part:

[Philosophy] teaches us not only to act judiciously, but is above all able to teach us how to
be virtuous, so that everything will like you, and more, so that you will be happy during your whole life. This all you will acquire, if only you are dedicated and hardworking.59

These words show Bolotov to be an Enlightenment pedagogue in the tradition of Beaumont, for he too saw a relation between study and moral betterment on one hand, and virtue and happiness on the other. But other more specific elements of Beaumont's philosophy of virtue were evident in Bolotov's Children's, Philosophy. One of the most important was his preference for the simplicity of the countryside, a preference in which the influence of Beaumont and Rousseau perhaps came together.60 Just like Beaumont, too, Bolotov placed virtue above religious dogma. This was an emphasis on praxis and on practical morality rather than abstract formulas that was characteristic of religious Enlighteners, and that included also a focus on personal faith and on personal choice.

In Beaumont's Magasin des enfants the focus on personal faith was linked to ideals of toleration. Not a specific confession but the individual's personal relationship with God was given centre stage. In Children's Philosophy, contrary to the Magasin des enfants, there is a recognizable, specific confessional context, namely that of the Russian Orthodox church. This was to be expected in the Russian Enlightenment, since Russia knew only one official church tradition. Nonetheless, in Children's Philosophy the ideas of personal faith and tolerance also surfaced. These could be seen, for example, in Cleon's asking, in the fifth dialogue, where God could be found. His mother answered that God was omnipresent, whereupon his sister concluded that ‘therefore, mother, it must also be possible to worship God everywhere, and not only in the houses and where there are icons: but also in the garden and in every place’. These words betrayed a certain freedom and tolerance. In her answer to Theona, Mrs. C** treated this enlightened form of faith as normal and explained that icons were no more than a crutch or aid for less enlightened believers: ‘For sure, my dear. Icons exist for those who have no direct awareness of God’.61 Just like Beaumont, Bolotov therefore was seeking a new purity within his own church. Church traditions, in this case icons, were relegated to a second place. Theona's specific reference to the garden as a place to worship God was another expression of Bolotov's natural theology, for God was present above all in his creation. And not for nothing was the garden mentioned here. In

Bolotov's work there was a clear association between his own garden and the garden of Eden.62

Sorkin's characterization of the religious Enlightenment fits Bolotov's work particularly well: ‘The religious enlighteners were not trimmers but sincere believers and apologists who mounted an energetic attack in the public sphere on deists and unbelievers in order to defend the Faith, and that defense included their writings in other fields’.63 Precisely because Bolotov's work also had a scientific component, he was a prime representative of a religious Enlightenment that combined religious views with empirical knowledge. Leprince de Beaumont's Magasin inspired him to address his own religiously inspired philosophy to a non-leamed audience, for he found in her work a method to teach children natural theology and was attracted in particular by Beaumont's philosophy of virtue.

Leprince de Beaumont's lively and clear dialogue format was the most important formal element that Bolotov adopted in his imitation. Bolotov continued to use the dialogue format in his other works, written after the Children's Philosophy, which remain in manuscript form, including The Art Cabinet of the Soul, The Village Academy and Children's Theology.64 Bolotov went on to create the first children's theatre in Russia in Bogorodic, and wrote several pedagogical plays for it. His debt to Beaumont's work is clear in his re-use of the characters of Cleon and Theona in a play like The boastful man (Čestoxval). In Bogorodic Bolotov also used his Children's Philosophy in teaching students at the boarding house that he founded there. Children's Philosophy might not have been as influential in Russia as Beaumont's Magasin des enfants, but there nevertheless was clearly an audience for it.

Svistunov's and Bolotov's reception of Beaumont's Magasin des enfants was probably so positive - certainly when compared to the reception accorded in Russia to other Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau - because her work fit perfectly with the focus, within the Russian Enlightenment, on a physicotheological vision that sought to unite faith and reason. In addition, the Magasin was fully compatible with the state's leading role in propagating Enlightenment ideas, a state nexus that was indeed one of the distinguishing features of the Russian Enlightenment compared to other varieties. The Magasin des enfants was a useful tool in Catherine the Great's drive ‘to put Russia's children on

a strictly rationalist diet, incorporating a useful dose of utilitarian religion’,65 for Catherine considered religion a crucial instrument in maintaining public order and morality. In her policies, she repeatedly emphasized the importance of public safety in a multinational empire and above all the need for religious tolerance.66 The moralistic and tolerant character of the religious education provided by the Magasin thus perfectly reflected both the rationalistic religious views of Catherine and those of Russia's aristocratic and intellectual elite, of which Svistunov and Bolotov were two of the most prominent members.

Conclusion

The old image of the Enlightenment as part of a broader movement of secularization tended to concentrate on the writings of the small Parisian coterie of philosophes, with the atheist Diderot at its centre, because this group represented the most anti-religious phase of the Enlightenment. But given the evidence for the success of religious-pedagogical authors such as Leprince de Beaumont, one can ask whether the writings of this small group of authors were really as influential as they held themselves - and nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians after them. Some of the most radical texts of Diderot, significantly, had to await the nineteenth century for their first complete publication. The radical Enlightenment, as even one of their most vocal defenders, Jonathan Israel, freely admits, was the work of a very small avant-garde elite. Once the history of ideas chooses to privilege not this intellectual elite but the authors who enjoyed widespread commercial success, and especially those who operated in a truly transnational context, including the geographical peripheries of Europe, what stands out instead is the persistence of a religious understanding of the world. What drew her eastern European and Russian readers to the works of Leprince de Beaumont was a moderate vision in which the reason of the French Enlightenment and religious faith, including local traditions such as those of the Russian Orthodox church, could go hand in hand.

In France itself, this religious Enlightenment was marginalized by the radicalization of the philosophes' discourse after the Prades affair.67 Assuming an increasingly radical anticlerical stance, the avant-garde of French intellectuals dismissed Leprince de Beaumont's works. Yet abroad, Beaumont continued to be seriously read as an original thinker. Outside France, her works placed her

solidly within the mainstream of philosophic thought in Europe, which was more moderate than its French counterpart, and sought to create a new ideal of reasonable faith acceptable to all parties. When viewed from the geographical periphery of eastern Europe and Russia, in short, the Enlightenment's most representative and influential authors might well have been not so much (as one would expect) Voltaire, Rousseau, and the radical philosophes, but rather, more accessible religious-pedagogical such as Beaumont. This should, at the very least, make us rethink conventional approaches in literary historiography that continue to privilege the same names and the same small group of combative intellectuals. The evidence on Beaumont's eastern European and Russian reception invites us, instead, to focus not on ‘the’ Enlightenment as such, but to adopt a notion of Enlightenment as a series of interlocking, and perpetually shifting relations between various intellectual and geographical centres and peripheries.68 In addition, the eastern European resonance of the works of Beaumont, by crossing confessional and national borders, provides a remarkable illustration of the way a new transnational space was being created for literature during the eighteenth century, through translations and the increasing circulation of texts. In this new transnational space, hierarchies between geographical centres and peripheries were multiple and continually subject to revision, and ideas long held to be at the periphery of Enlightenment discourse - specifically, notions associated with the religious Enlightenment - actually often played a central, if as yet insufficiently recognized role.

About the authors

Alicia C. Montoya is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Literary and Cultural Studies at the Radboud University, Nijmegen. She is the author of Marie-Anne Barbier et la tragédie post-classique (Paris 2007) and Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge 2013), and co-editor of Women Writing Back / Writing Back Women (Leiden 2010), Early Modern Medievalisms (Leiden 2010), and Enlightenment and History / Lumières et Histoire (Paris 2010). Email: A.Montoya@let.ru.nl.

 

Wyneke de Gelder studied Slavic languages and cultures at the University of Groningen, and holds a Research M.A. degree from the Research Master Literary and Cultural Studies Programme at the University of Groningen. Email: wynekedegelder@gmail.com.

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