The life of Peter the Great. Katiforo A.

“The life of Peter the Great”, which goes out in the new Russian translation, is one of the very first in European culture and the most popular biographies of the monarch-reformer. The author of the book, published in Venice in Italian in 1736, is the Italo-Greek enlightener Antonio Katiforo (1685-1763), the Orthodox priest and citizen of the Venetian Republic. In 1715, he was invited to Russia by A. D. Menshikov, but the ship on which he sailed crashed off the coast of Holland, and Katiforo eventually returned to Venice. A scientific writer, who retained a friendly interest in Russia, in the mid-1730s, at the beginning of the next Russo-Turkish war, set to a fundamental biography of Peter I. For this, he creatively revised the texts that came out in the West, including periodicals, clothing them into an elegant literary form. As a result, the reader appeared not only the biography of the emperor, but also the monumental fresco of the history of Russia at the time of its formation as superpower. For Katiforo, the image of the country as a potential liberator of the Greeks and other Balkan peoples from the Turkish conquerors was also important.

The book was immediately translated into a number of languages, including Russian - already in 1743. Published in Russian only in 1772, she nevertheless went on manuscript lists, gaining wide fame even before the press and seriously influenced domestic historiography, Pushkin used it when he collected material for Peter's history. The translation, made from the expanded publication of the "life of Peter the Great" (1748), returns a rare and valuable text to the modern reader, while commentators carefully posted all the information presented by the Venetian biographer. For his time, Katiforo was surprisingly accurate, and legendary information in any case is of value for understanding the mythopoetics of the Petrovsky image.