History of the First Translation Project of the Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure

Abstract

This paper reconstructs the history of the attempts to translate the Course in General Linguistics (Saussure, 1916) into Russian in the early 1920s –the first, chronologically, to be known– and contributes to the recovery of the intellectual environment and of the epistolary networks that favored the diffusion of Saussure’s ideas in Moscow –whose echoes would later have a direct impact on the production of the Linguistic Circle of Prague. We hope to contribute to a better understanding of the circumstances inherent to the first reception of Saussure’s work in Russia, particularly in Moscow, and of the consequences that these circumstances had on the later development of linguistics, especially on the so-called “structural” current.