ИСТИНА

The novel by the French writer Marmontel “Bélisaire" was translated into Russian thrice. (1768, 1769, 2018). In France the novel was condemned by Sorbonne’s censorship. The first translation was made by the courtiers of Catherine II and was edited by the Empress herself. The French Slavist Jean Breuiller noticed a lot of inaccuracies in this translation and qualified it as a deliberate misrepresentation of the original text. When considering three lexical units (philosophie, système, fanatisme), it can be concluded that the deformation in the first translation had an aesthetic purpose for the text to sound archaic.