THE ALLEGORIES OF F. GLINKA IN SWEDISH TRANSLATIONS BY C. S. FORSSMAN (ON THE HISTORY OF RUSSIAN-FINNISH LITERARY RELATIONS)

The paper focuses on a little-known episode from the history of the Russian-Swedish-Finnish literary relations in the first quarter of the 19th century. It highlights Swedish translations of F. N. Glinka's moralizing allegories "The Unknown one" and "Mystery" that have been published in 1824 in Stockholm and Helsingfors. Both translations were made by an official of the Imperial Finnish Senate, a professional translator from Russian and an admirer of the Russian literature - Carl Samuel Forssman (1795-1852). The paper claims and substantiates the assumption that the reason for a special attention of the Finnish translator towards the work of Glinka comes to be their mutual interest to the works of Byron. The Swedish translation of "Mystery" was published altogether with the translation of D. Polidori's "Vampire" made by the same Forssman. As a title page of the book says Byron goes as the story's author, whose work, as an analysis of the Swedish translation of "Vampire" shows, was quite familiar to Forssman. "Mystery" of Glinka and his prose translation of Byron's "Darkness" were published in the "Competitor of Enlightenment and Charity" in 1822 belonging, in the Russian author's opinion, among didactic "prose poems". The author concludes that Forssman was aware of Glinka's byronism which, most probably, drew attention to his work.