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A Writer from Istanbul Who
Served Three Tsars
Adventures of Femistokl (Priklyucheniya Femistokla, 1763) the first Russian novel written on
the state and politic moral teaching;
Rewarded Loyalty or Adventures of Lizark and Sarmanda
(Nagrazhdyonnaya postoyannost’ ili priklyucheniya Lizarka i Sarmand , 1763 and 1788)
printed twice;
Moral Prose Fables (Nravouchitel’n e basni v proze, 1764);
Painful Love of
Marquis de Toledo (Gorestnaya lyubov’ markiza De Toledo, 1764);
Letters of Ernest and
Dorovara (Pis’ma Ernesta i Dorovar , 1766) in which the artist expressed his thoughts on
slavery; translation of
Polish History Edited by Priest Solignac (İstoriya pol’skaya,
sochineniya abbata Solinyaka, 1766) from French and
History of Russia (İstoriya Rossii,
1767-1769) in which he was able to write down the period until 1213 which is considered to
be his most significant work by the Russian researchers. Emin also published a journal called
Hell’s Post (Adskaya Pochta) in which he wrote most of the articles for 6 months in 1766
(Tsimmerman, 1912, p.230).
3. Emin’s Life Story
Emin was able to fit a quite number of translations and original works in his short literary life
and some of his works were published more than once, because he was popular among the
ordinary literate people. It is quite surprising to know that Emin came to Russia in 1761 and
learned Russian later. What is more surprising is that Emin’s life story still remains a mystery
despite the unearthed archive documents. It is possible to divide the studies on Emin’s life
story into two as the studies conducted by his contemporaries, friends and Russian literature
researchers of the 19
th
century and studies conducted by the researchers, who accessed the
documents in the State Archives of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs today. In 1898,
researcher A. Lyashchenko said: “
Emin’s life before emerging in Russia is unclear to us,
because he tells the unfortunate events he had experienced in different ways” (Lyashchenko,
1898, p.5). Emin presented or told some of his biography to his contemporaries by means of
his works in so much different ways that even the information found in archive documents
failed to answer all questions regarding his real identity and what he had experienced before
coming to Russia.
First efforts to create the biography of Emin were made just after his death by the famous
journalist and writer N. I. Novikov, his first publisher S. L. Kopnin and M. K. Ovchinnikov
who got the publishing rights from Kopnin. The first question that concerned all of them was
the roots of Emin and each one of them answered this question in their own way. According
to the biography by Novikov, Emin was born in circa 1735 to a poor family in Poland, in a
small town on the Poland-Russia border (Beshenkovski, 1974, p.187). Publisher Kopnin
created a biography based on what Emin said as well as the information he obtained from the
annex of Emin’s
Road to Salvation (Put’ k spaseniyu, first published in 1806). According to
this, Emin was born in a small Hungarian town called Lippa on the Turkish border in 1735
and his father was Hungarian and mother was Polish (Beshenkovski, 1974). On the other
hand, Ovchinnikov used the words of a reliable person who had known Emin in his childhood
days. According to this old acquaintance, Emin learned Latin and had grammar, rhetoric,
philosophy and religion education at the Kiev Academy with him. In other words, Emin was
actually born in either Russia or a Polish village near Kiev (Beshenkovski, 1974).
The information given by Novikov and Kopnin regarding later years of Emin is similar.
According to Novikov, a Jesuit Priest taught Emin Latin and all the subjects taught at the
schools in that period and took him to Europe and Asia. However, they had an unfortunate