This paper presents a digital edition of the manuscript of the first Russian
translation of Leprince de Beaumont’s The Beauty and the Beast fairy tale (1756),
aligned to its French original. The translation was made in 1758 by a twelve year-old
girl, Khionia Demidova (1746-1792), and dedicated to her elder brother. Its original
manuscript is conserved at the scientific library of Saratov State University (no. 456).
This document is interesting from several points of view: the “naive” translation made by
a young girl allows us to understand how the French literature was perceived in the 18th
century Russia, what aspects of the French language and socio-cultural phenomena of
the Western Europe were difficult to understand, and how the socio-cultural phenomena
of the Western Europe were perceived. The peculiarities of Khionia’s spelling and
punctuation provide data on her knowledge of Russian grammar and orthography. The
digital edition includes a multi-layer transcription of the source document aligned with a
digital fac-simile and the original French text. It is published online on the TXM-IHRIM
web portal (https://txm-ihrim.huma-num.fr). The workflow of the edition Microsoft
Word, Oxgarage and TXM may be reused for similar editions and text corpora.