The issue of the complexity and multi-ethnicity of the Russian empire, has now fully entered the field of historiography, however, from a cultural and literary point of view, the variegated and heterogeneous Russian demographic panorama finds it difficult to enter and consolidate itself; the studies on the subject to date do not give an exhaustive picture of the Russian socio-political-cultural and literary mosaic provided by the realities, so to speak, on the margins of the Russian Empire (Kappeler, 1992). Russia’s history as a whole cannot be said to be exhaustively studied without integrating the variegated constellation of peoples with a different cultural, literary, economic and political heritage from which it was and it is nowadays constituted. Being the Tatars the most numerous on the Russian territory, after the Russians, I thought it appropriate to dwell on their history and on literary developments were set up primarily as a result of long-lived relationship with Slavic, Turkish and European populations. The image of the Tatars, in fact, carries within itself that of the Russians, of the Sunni Islamic religion, of the East and of the Kahn dynasty, at the same time, however, the transition between the many semblants is fluid, the alien attributions overlap and are conditioned each other. My PhD research work intends to be part of a recent research line, that investigates the role of intellectuals from cultural minorities in the Russian Empire, against the background of the complex issue of Orientalism. The analysis of the work of Ismail Gasprinskii (İsmail Gaspıralı) 1851-1914, the most influential Crimean Tatar intellectual working in the last decades of the Tsarist Empire, who was involved in the Tatar cultural revival between the 19th and the 20th century, gave me the opportunity to frame him not so much in a colonialist/imperialist dimension as in a dialogical perspective, under the banner of intercultural interaction and cooperation with the Russian state. Starting from a work of ‚reconstruction‘ of the Tatar-Muslim context, the introductory section of my research work examined the importance of the Tatar people as part of the heterogeneous Russian Empire. The Crimean Peninsula is functional to the discourse of the Russian multicultural universe not only because of its geographical location, peripheral to Russia and reaching out to the West, but also because of the ethno-cultural melting pot of the populations it hosts, mainly created by the numerous waves of migration that took place in the late 18th and throughout the 19th century. My work has set itself the task of reflecting, starting from the particular case of the Tatars, on the importance of dialogue with the other, the most important way to re-discuss and re-define values and beliefs, behaviour and lifestyles. This discourse formed the basis for understanding Ismail Gasprinskii’s socio-political activity, exemplified by the bilingual Russian-Tatar newspaper ‚Perevodčik-Tercüman‘ (The Interpreter), which right from the title refers to the need for dialogue, indispensable for personal and community progress. From this perspective, the concept of vnenachodimost‘ (extra-locality) proposed by Michail Bachtin will be fundamental in framing the discourse on Tatar-Russian mutual knowledge, especially with regard to the dual gaze from and towards another culture through literary texts (M.Bachtin, 1979). This historical and cultural background made it possible to introduce and understand the complex personality of Ismail Gasprinskii. In his works, Ismail Gasprinskii constantly emphasizes the need for unity and solidarity among the Muslims of Russia, with a view to modernization that is impossible except through dialogue and cooperation with Russia. He recognizes ignorance as the main cause of the backwardness of Russia’s Islamic communities, which have remained isolated and unaware of what has been discovered and happened in Europe. The newspaper „Perevodčik-Tercüman“ (1883-1914) is the tool chosen by the author to promote mutual understanding between Russian and Tatar cultures, written in both Russian and Türkî, a language that Gasprinskii proposes as common to all Turkophones. Gasprinskii’s work opens up interesting reflections on translation as a transit zone, a fertile ground for dialogue and creativity, on the relationship between the self and the other, between the self and the other. Thanks to the numerous studies on translation, (among others: S.Bassnett, 1993; H. Meschonnic, 1999; A.Lefevere, 1992) through the analysis of Gasprinskii’s literary and journalistic production, I focused on his main objective, that is to overcome differences and boundaries, to pass from a circumscribed cultural and political condition to another one of sharing with the Russians. In the light of the above, the final aim of my research was to study in depth the literary works written by Gasprinskii and published (in instalments) in the pages of the newspaper „Perevodčik-Tercüman“ from 1883 to 1905, on which no complete and contextualized studies have been conducted so far from a historical and cultural point of view, placing them in dialogue with the copious journalistic production; in particular, the genres and themes found in the selected corpus of works were identified, proceeding by thematic nuclei. The Appendix also contains a list of the texts published in the Russian section of the „Perevodčik-Tercüman“ (never fully indexed). I thought it would be useful to propose this tool, intended for Russian-speaking readers, but which could represent the basis for future in-depth studies and research that would allow to establish a dialogue between Russian and Tatar texts, in order to proceed, by means of a chart also included in the Appendix, to a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Ismail Gasprinskii’s publicity and literary production. Therefore, my study has proposed not only a general look at the subject, not limited to a review of works or articles on the proposed theme, but is enriched by considerations about the insidious concepts of identity and otherness, multiculturalism, intercultural translation, imagology, redefinition of spaces and borders (Salmon, 2013). In the course of these researches I investigated the Russian-Muslim socio-cultural system, its being and its historical representation. In particular, the Russian-Tatar border, with the attempts at Russification, represented a fruitful basis for the observation of trans-cultural artistic phenomena, a real frontier area open to experimentation with new identity mappings (Zekiyan, 1997). Furthermore, this initial phase of the research highlighted, in an attempt to research with a comparative and multivectoral approach, the need to investigate even further and in more depth the relations between Russians and Muslims useful for the formulation of new interpretative categories for the study of the journalistic and literary production of the Islamic communities of the Russian Empire (Kemper, 2021).
