Ingrid Maier, born in Tailfingen, West Germany, in 1951. Ph.D. from Uppsala University. Professor of Russian Language at Uppsala University.
Fellow (1 September 2000 – 30 June 2001)
My academic year at NIAS has been very productive in many ways: I have written several important chapters of my monograph about verbal government in seventeenth-century Russian newspaper translations and an article about the cultural and historical background of these hand-written ‘newspapers’. I have also co-authored two major articles on related issues. However, the project I mainly worked on was to find which Dutch source texts were used to make the seventeenth-century Russian newspaper translations still preserved in the National Archives in Moscow. To this end, I looked through all surviving Dutch newspapers from 1660 to 1670 and compared them with the Russian translations. This work was extremely time-consuming since my starting point was thousands of Russian newspaper articles with no indication whatsoever as to the newspaper (or even the language) from which the translation had been made. Moreover, the relevant Dutch newspapers are kept at many different archives (both in the Netherlands and in other countries), and the microfilms I had to use were mostly of extremely bad quality. Nevertheless, I managed to find nearly 250 different newspaper articles in Dutch and 200 printed in German as well as in some other languages. These articles, newly typeset by me, will appear as a substantial supplement to the sixth volume of Vesti-Kuranty, the printed edition of seventeenth-century Russian ‘newspapers’ (to appear in 2004). My part of the publication dealing with the foreign sources, which may be published as a separate volume, will also contain an extensive introduction about the cultural background of the first Russian newspaper translations.