The Foreign Censorship Committee as an Institution of Cultural Transfer: The Fate of Italian Books and Translations from Italian in Censorship Documents of the 1830s-1850s

Abstract

The article investigates foreign censorship as an institution of cultural transfer in the Russian Empire and its impact on the reception of Italian literature between the 1830s and 1850s. Drawing on archival materials, the authors demonstrate that censorship decisions were determined not only by the norms of the Censorship Statute (1828) but also by a broader constellation of factors including the contemporary political climate, the language of translation, the social status of translators, and the personal predispositions of censors. Special attention is given to the contrasting trajectories of original Italian editions and translations from Italian within the imperial censorship system. While books in Italian were rarely banned (except in the late 1840s), translations from Italian –  especially into Polish – frequently provoked censorship interventions. Through case studies of Russian and Polish translations of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, Polish translations of works by Carlo Goldoni and Dante Alighieri, and the French prose translation of The Divine Comedy by Félicité Robert de Lamennais, the study reveals the complex and mutable mechanisms that governed institutional control over foreign and translated texts.