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Wealth, Nobility and Sentiment: Aleksei Malinovskii’s Translation of August von Kotzebue’s Poverty and Nobleness of Mind as Self-Fashioning
The paper argues that the new emotional models elaborated within the sentimentalist culture of the late eighteenth century were appropriated not only by the aristocratic elite but also by some educated members of the Russian “middle class”. The author focuses on the biographical details of the archivist, bureaucrat, and translator Aleksei Fedorovich Malinovskii (1762–1840) who authored a translation of the drama Poverty and Nobleness of Mind by August von Kozebue (1795) staged not only in Moscow Public Theater but also privately at Count Aleksandr Vorontsov’s estate theater in 1799. The paper considers the performance of the play that debated the issues of love and noble honour and used the language of sentiments as a form of a dialogue between Malinovskii and his patrons that, eventually, paved the way to justifying his eligibility as a prospective marriage partner for Vorontsov’s niece Anna Petrovna Islen’eva.