„Pizarro” Eestis. August von Kotzebue teoste inglise adaptsioonid Eesti raamatukogudes ja nende tulmelugu

Pizarro in Estonia: English adaptations of August von Kotzebue’s works in Estonian libraries and their provenance Around 1800, the German dramatist August von Kotzebue was immensely popular in the Anglophone world. Since his fame as a playwright began in Tallinn and he was married to three noblewomen from Estonia, this article examines whether any of the numerous English adaptations of his works reached Estonia. Based on the collections of Estonian research libraries, it appears that only a few such texts have survived: Kotzebue’s memoirs describing his deportation to Siberia in 1800, and two adaptations of his play Die Spanier in Peru, one by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and another by Thomas Dutton. By analyzing marks of provenance and accession book entries, the study attempts to identify the owners of these volumes in order to determine the readership of English-language books in Estonia. It seems that the censorship policies of the Russian Empire around 1800 prevented the import of English editions at the height of Kotzebue’s fame in England (1798–1800). The earliest evidence of an adaptation in Estonia dates from 1819, the year of Kotzebue’s assassination, in Tartu. The copy of Sheridan’s Pizarro held at the Tallinn University Academic Library is probably a counterfeit edition of an English print (1799), very likely produced in Germany. It belonged either to the teacher and folklorist Alexander Heinrich Neus or Moritz Gedner, the censor of foreign newspapers in Riga, and entered the collection in 1867 or 1868. Dutton’s adaptation belonged to Friedrich Wilhelm Becker, a teacher at the Tallinn Gymnasium, and was donated in 1848. The interest in English appears in both cases to coincide with an interest in Swedish. One copy of the Siberian memoirs, translated by Benjamin Beresford (1802), belonged to Oskar Kallas, Estonian ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1922–1934, and is preserved in the Estonian Literary Museum. Another copy of this translation was acquired by the Tallinn University Academic Library in the 21st century, in 2006.