Oleg Rusakovsky presented his
publication of a historical text - an undiscovered until recently German-language diary dating back to the middle of the 17th century. Its author, Christoph Bousch, was captured at the beginning of the Russo-Polish War of 1654-1667 and served as a translator in the Ambassadorial Chancery, the then equivalent of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Bousch kept his diary in secret: serving the Russian tsar, he at the same time hated and despised the Russians and sympathized with the Poles suffering under the "Muscovite yoke". His text is imbued with a tragic sense of the duality of an unwilling emigrant suffering from his own double loyalty. Written with no hope of lifetime publication and no apparent addressee, the diary is now, 350 years after the author's death, seeking its way to the reader. Oleg opened the door to his own professional workshop and described how he prepared this text for publication, from the moment he first discovered the German manuscript to the final stages of translation and commentary.
The full version of the lecture can be viewed
here.
