The Sage King, the Enlightened Monarch, and the Russian Fatherland: Denis Fonvizin’s Translation of The Great Learning in Eighteenth-Century Russia

Abstract

This article examines Denis Fonvizin’s 1779 Russian translation of The Great Learning as a case of cross-cultural conceptual mediation between Confucian ethics, Jesuit translation, Enlightenment political thought, and the emerging language of the Russian national consciousness. The article reconstructs the successive transformations of the text from Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian redaction to Abbé Pierre-Martial Cibot’s French Ta-Hio, ou la Grande Science and finally to Fonvizin’s Russian Ta-Gio, or The Great Learning, Containing in Itself All of Chinese Philosophy. It argues, first, that The Great Learning provided a moral-political structure linking self-cultivation, family order, rulership, and cosmic legitimacy; second, that Cibot recast this structure through the languages of natural theology, virtue governed by reason, social contract, and enlightened monarchy; and third, that Fonvizin inserted this mediated Confucian vocabulary into the political context of Catherinian Russia. In Fonvizin’s hands, the Confucian sage king became a moral custodian of the Russian fatherland, a monarch whose legitimacy depended on his capacity for moral self-perfection and whose authority rested on providing the fatherland with a moral foundation through the cultivation of virtue, reason, and the pursuit of the common good. The article thus shows how even mistranslated or highly mediated knowledge of China could acquire real conceptual force in the formation of eighteenth-century Russian political thought.