База данных “Россия в западноевропейской прессе XVIII века”

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an educational and research project entitled “Russia in the Western European Press of the Eighteenth Century.” Between 2016 and 2020 students from The Higher School of Economics University in Moscow translated texts of eighteenth-century Western European periodicals related to Russia. In the first part, the authors describe how this work was organized and outline the manner in which the translations are presented on the project website. The second part provides a case study of some news sent by a correspondent in St. Petersburg to The London Gazette in 1714 and 1715. The authors argue that in this period the information received by The London Gazette from St. Petersburg was very close to the dispatches sent to the Secretary of State for the Northern Department by George Mackenzie, the official British resident in the new Russian capital. Although Mackenzie probably did not write to The London Gazette himself, he was apparently involved in the communications, since most of the Russian news was published during the time when the resident was in St. Petersburg. The same correlation between the publication of news received directly from Russia and the period when British diplomats were in residence in Moscow or St. Petersburg can be traced to at least the years between 1709 and 1728. The fact that the above-mentioned example from The London Gazette came to the authors’ attention when it was being edited for publication in “Russia in the Western European Press of the Eighteenth Century” gives hope that other news items included in the online project will become a starting point for more scholars of eighteenth-century Russia.

Keywords

• early modern journalism, news reporting, digital humanities, Rossica, Peter the Great