Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context E-Book

Muireann Maguire

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context examines the translation and reception of Russian literature as a world-wide process. This volume aims to provoke new debate about the continued currency of Russian literature as symbolic capital for international readers, in particular for nations seeking to create or consolidate cultural and political leverage in the so-called ‘World Republic of Letters’. It also seeks to examine and contrast the mechanisms of the translation and uses of Russian literature across the globe.


This collection presents academic essays, grouped according to geographical location, by thirty-seven international scholars. Collectively, their expertise encompasses the global reception of Russian literature in Europe, the Former Soviet Republics, Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Their scholarship concentrates on two fundamental research areas: firstly, constructing a historical survey of the translation, publication, distribution and reception of Russian literature, or of one or more specific Russophone authors, in a given nation, language, or region; and secondly, outlining a socio-cultural microhistory of how a specific, highly influential local writer, genre, or literary group within the target culture has translated, transmitted, or adapted aspects of Russian literature in their own literary production. Each section is prefaced with a short essay by the co-editors, surveying the history of the reception of Russian literature in the given region.


Considered as a whole, these chapters offer a wholly new overview of the extent and intercultural penetration of Russian and Soviet literary soft power during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This volume will open up Slavonic Translation Studies for the general reader, the student of Comparative Literature, and the academic scholar alike.

Leseprobe

TRANSLATING RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT

Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context

Edited by Muireann Maguire and Cathy McAteer

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

©2024 Muireann Maguire and Cathy McAteer (eds). Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors.

This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows re-users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for non-commercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. Attribution should include the following information.

Muireann Maguire and Cathy McAteer (eds), Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0340

In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0340#copyright

Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. This information is provided in the captions and in the list of illustrations. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.

Further details about the CC BY-NC-ND license are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web

Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0340#resources

ISBN Paperback: 978–1-80064–983–5

ISBN Hardback: 978–1-80064–984–2

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978–1-80064–985–9

ISBN Digital ebook (EPUB): 978–1-80064–986–6

ISBN DIGITAL ebook (HTML): 978–1-80064–989–7

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0340

Cover Design: Jeevanjot Kaur Nagpal

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme as part of the RUSTRANS academic project, ‘The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland, and the USA’ (grant agreement no. 802437).

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: “The Greatest Gift”?

Muireann Maguire and Cathy McAteer

EUROPE

Russian Literature in Europe:An Overview

Muireann Maguire

Catalonia

More Than a Century of Dostoevsky in Catalan

Miquel Cabal Guarro

Estonia

Russian Literature in Estonia between 1918 and 1940 with Special Reference to Dostoevsky

Anne Lange and Aile Möldre

Finland

The Pendulum of Translating Russian Literature in Finland

Tomi Huttunen, Marja Jänis, and Pekka Pesonen

France

“May Russia Find Her Thoughts Faithfully Translated”: E. M. de Vogüé’s Importation of Russian Literature into France

Elizabeth F. Geballe

Germany

Mann’s View of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Times of War and Peace: Doctor Faustus (1947)

Elizaveta Sokolova

Greece

Two Translation Periods in Dostoevsky’s Canon Formation in Greece (1886–1900 and 1926–54)

Christina Karakepeli

The Reception of Russian and Soviet Literature in Interwar and Postwar Greece

Niovi Zampouka

Hungary

“Russia has so far given humanity nothing but samovars”: On the Reception of Russian Literature in Hungary from the Beginning to Nabokov and Beyond

Zsuzsa Hetényi

Ireland

Alastar Sergedhebhít Púiscín, the Séacspír of Russia: On the Irish-Language Translations of Pushkin

Mark Ó Fionnáin

Italy

Mariia Olsuf’eva: The Italian Voice of Soviet Dissent or, the Translator as a Transnational Socio-Cultural Actor

Ilaria Sicari

Russian Literature in Italy: The Twentieth Century

Claudia Scandura

Norway and Sweden

“The mysteries of the nerves in a starving body”: Knut Hamsun and Dostoevsky

Susan Reynolds

Romania

Dostoevsky in Romanian Culture: At the Crossroads between East and West

Octavian Gabor

Scotland

Russian Poetry and the Rewilding of Scottish Literature: 1917 to the Present

James Rann

Spain

Countess Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–1921): The Single-handed Populariser of Russian Literature in Spain

Margaret Tejerizo

Ukraine

Translating Russian Literature in Soviet and Post-Soviet Ukraine

Lada Kolomiyets and Oleksandr Kalnychenko

AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST

Russian Literature in Africa: An Overview

Cathy McAteer

Angola

The Spectre of Maksim Gorky: The Influence of Mother on Angola’s Geração Cultura

Mukile Kasongo and Georgia Nasseh

The Arabic-speaking Peoples

Maksim Gorky and Arabic Literature: From The Thousand and One Nightsto Contemporary Classics

Sarali Gintsburg

Ethiopia

A Handbook of the Socialist Movement: Gorky’s Mother in Ethiopia

Nikolay Steblin-Kamensky

ASIA

Russian Literature in Asia: An Overview

Cathy McAteer

China

The Reception of Dostoevsky in Early Twentieth-Century China

Yu Hang

India

Translation as a Cultural Event, a Journey, a Mediation, a Carnival of Creativity: A Study of the Reception of Russian Literature in Colonial and Postcolonial India

Ranjana Saxena

The Translation of Russian Literature into Hindi

Guzel’ Strelkova

The Visibility of the Translator: A Case Study of the Telugu Section in Progress Publishers and Raduga

Anna Ponomareva

Tolstoy in India: Translating Aspirations across Continents

Ayesha Suhail

Tolstoy Embracing Tamil: Ninety Years of Lev Tolstoy in Tamil Literature

Venkatesh Kumar

Japan

Translation from Russian in the Melting Pot of Japanese Literature

Hiroko Cockerill

Kazakhstan

Abai Kunanbaiuly and Russian Culture: Changing Paradigms in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan

Sabina Amanbayeva

Mongolia

Cultural Dialogue between Russia and Mongolia: Gombosuren Tserenpil and the Poetics of Translating Dostoevsky’s Novels

Zaya Vandan (Translated from Russian by Muireann Maguire)

Turkey

Traces of the Influence of Russian Literary Translations on Turkish Literature of the 1900s

Hülya Arslan

Pushkin’s Journey through Turkish Translations

Sabri Gürses

Uzbekistan

From Russian to Uzbek (1928–53): Unequal Cultural Transfers and Institutional Supervision under Stalinist Rule

Benjamin Quénu

Vietnam

Translation of Russian Literature in North and South Vietnam during 1955–75: Two Ways of ‘Rewriting’ the History of Russian Literature in Vietnam

Trang Nguyen

NORH AND SOUTH AMERICA

Brazil

Translating Russian Literature in Brazil: Politics, Emigration, University and Journalism (1930–74)

Bruno Baretto Gomide

Colombia

Pale Fire of the Revolution: Notes on the Reception of Russian Literature in Colombia

Anastasia Belousova and Santiago E. Méndez

Cuba and the Caribbean

The Last Soviet Border: Translation Practices in the Caribbean during the Cold War

Damaris Puñales-Alpízar

Mexico

Three Stages in the Translation of Russian Literature in Mexico, 1921–2021

Rodrigo García Bonillas

The USA

Contemporary Russophone Literature of Ukraine in the Changing World of Russian Literature: Andrey Kurkov and Alexei Nikitin

Catherine O’Neil

Russian Literature in the Anglophone Nations: An Overview

Muireann Maguire

Bibliography

Author Biographies

Index

Acknowledgements

This book was originally envisaged as a volume of conference proceedings surveying the state of the field in Anglophone literary translation from Russian. When the Covid-19 pandemic caused that conference to be delayed and reconfigured as a non-academic event, we conceived this more ambitious (and also more logistically challenging) idea to recruit an even wider range of contributors to tell a bigger story about the worldwide circulation, reception, and influence of Russian literature in translation over the last century.

The editors would like to thank our families, for all their support during the preparation of this book; our contributors, for their unflagging enthusiasm; and the anonymous external readers of this book at manuscript stage, whose enthusiastic and insightful reviews buoyed our faith in the project. We thank Professor David Brandenberger and Dr Barbara Wyllie for their assistance with the verification of an elusive reference.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme as part of the RUSTRANS academic project, ‘The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland, and the USA’ (grant agreement no. 802437).

Introduction: “The Greatest Gift”?

Muireann Maguire and Cathy McAteer

©2024 Maguire and McAteer, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0340.00

In a 2015 interview with an American professor of literature, conducted in the peaceful surroundings of a villa near Cumae in Italy, the writer Boris Akunin remarked: “Russian literature is the best thing to happen to my country; it is also the greatest gift Russia gave to mankind”.1 For well over a century, this attitude to Russian literature (or, more precisely, Russophone writing, incorporating all the regions of post-Soviet space) has been a truism in Western humanitarian circles: to read Russian literature was to acquire wisdom, unsparing psychological insight. Russian prose was also a powerful critique of totalitarianism and injustice—and a summons to the realisation of spiritual responsibility, whether you were reading Pasternak or Tolstoy. In April 2022, two months after the second Russian invasion of Ukraine, an essay by the celebrated Ukrainian novelist Oksana Zabuzhko targeted this complacent Western vision of the invader’s literary field. Russian literature, she argued, was “one flesh” with Russian society (and its crimes); the mistake the West has made was to assume a separation between literature and state. “[T]he road for bombs and tanks has always been paved by books […]. It is time to take a long, hard look at our bookshelves”, she wrote in a blistering and widely cited TLS opinion piece.2

The ability of Russian literature to inspire, or to acquire, hearts and minds has long been exercised through a wide range of ‘soft power’ strategies, as well as through coercive educational policies of Russification. This process has never been studied on a global scale or even on a comparative, multilingual basis. Its results have, however, been critiqued, not only by scholars from directly affected nations but by Western critics newly aware of the negative potential of Russian influence. Literature, traditionally seen as a critic of the Russian state, is now often regarded as its ally. Whether the great authors associated with the Russian canon, such as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, can genuinely be considered complicit with their nation’s imperialist and militarist policy is arguably an anachronistic question. While some continue to debate the morality of funding the translation of contemporary Russian writers, the influence of the nineteenth-century ‘classics’—and, especially in the Global South, of Soviet Socialist Realist prose—is already established and enduring. Their pre-eminence as models for emulation, whether creative or personal, and as vectors of philosophical and ethical enquiry, is a fact of global culture. The major questions explored by the essays in this volume include how this pre-eminence was achieved, and how Russian literary influence has evolved abroad during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: as our contributors show, it has developed spontaneously, trans-creatively, and often (from the perspective of Russian or Soviet statecraft) counterproductively.3

From 1938 until its demise, the Soviet state funded the translation of Russophone literature into both globally prevalent and geographically peripheral languages, through several heavily subsidised publishing firms under the umbrella of the Foreign Languages Publishing House. This task, which employed hundreds of translators and censors (including many foreign nationals), was sustained over so many decades partly to honour a Leninist ideological commitment to the internationalisation of culture, but primarily as an exercise in soft power. (The mission of its literary-fiction-focused subsidiaries Progress and Raduga (Rainbow) has since been assumed by new Russian state-appointed organisations such as the Russkii Mir Foundation, founded in 2007, and the Institute of Translation (Institut Perevoda, or IP), a non-profit organisation established in 2011.) Despite the scale of Progress’s achievement, it has never been the subject of a full-length scholarly monograph in English (several essays in this volume offer windows on its activity in specific language areas).4

While the political impact of Progress proved negligible (and recent Russian soft power has proved similarly ineffective in terms of securing economic or political allegiance), the cultural penetration achieved by Russian literature in the twentieth century is incalculable, particularly in countries of the Global South where Soviet Communist classics were widely and almost freely distributed, and where Russian political influence was regarded sympathetically (although only in a few nations, like Cuba, was this opinion consistently held by the political mainstream).5 Sometimes Russian literature failed to take root in the target culture (as in the case of Colombia: see the chapter by Anastasia Belousova and Santiago Méndez). Elsewhere, it thrived despite political suspicion (as in Greece or Brazil); the underfunding of translation and persecution of individual translators (as in Turkey); or ideological dissimilarities, as seen in the history of translating Dostoevsky in Buddhist Mongolia and Communist China respectively, in chapters by Zaya Vandan and Yu Hang. China’s President since 2012, Xi Jinping, is a self-professed ardent reader of Russian literature; while he values Tolstoy (and War and Peace) highest of all, he has claimed that the Soviet-era writer Mikhail Sholokhov and particularly the nineteenth-century radical Nikolai Chernyshevsky provided important models for his own experience of privation and exile. Great Russian literature, translated via Soviet propaganda, is thus reinscribed as cultural capital in the public biography of China’s leading politician: truly transcreation in action.6

This unpredictability of literary influence has led to an imbalance in academia: Western overemphasis on the reception of nineteenth-century Russian literature in Anglophone countries, and neglect—now beginning to be rectified by recent scholarship—of Russia’s profound cultural influence on the rapidly evolving societies and politics of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. As one senior Latin American Slavic Studies scholar said, when the editors of the present volume mentioned their plans to produce the first global history of the translation and reception of Russian literature, “I have been waiting a long time for this book”. Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context is the first scholarly anthology to describe not only the history of literary translation and translators from the Russian language since approximately 1900 (and in several cases, even earlier) in more than fifty countries across the world; it is also the first extended study to examine how translated Russian literature has influenced creative production in those nations, over the same timescale, up to the present day. By implication, these essays are also a map of Russian and especially Soviet soft power: our contributors on Scandinavia, Latin America, Africa, India, East Asia, and the formerly Communist nations of Eastern Europe demonstrate how funding for the transmission of Russian books (in terms of both physical export and intralingual transfer) has waxed and waned in harmony with both Soviet influence and internal political trends in the nations affected.

Despite its ultimate failure as a political entity, the Soviet Union achieved enduring moral authority over much of our planet’s land surface, thanks in large part to the production and distribution of Russian literature in multiple languages through Moscow’s Foreign Languages Publishing House and its worldwide network of translators. Our contributors on Finland liken this variable influence to the action of a pendulum.7 By revealing the mechanisms of soft power and its extraordinary transnational reach, our volume is a useful model for future studies of how any nation can achieve political ascendancy through cultural appeal. At a time when Russia’s geopolitical approach is changing again from soft power to hard conflict (currently in Ukraine, a country whose complicated cultural relationship with Russian literature is analysed in this volume), it is politically useful to be aware of the extensive groundwork laid by the former.

A further achievement of this volume is to demonstrate, yet again, how Translation Studies is “intimately linked” to Comparative Literature.8 As this overlap has become increasingly obvious to academics and students in both disciplines, it has become almost impossible to study one effectively without some awareness of the methodology of the other. Some of our contributors (especially those writing about Western Europe, where Russian literature has been available in translation for at least two centuries and has therefore substantially influenced cultural imaginaries) have leaned towards comparative methodology, arguing for the influence of particular Russian writers on national literature at a specific moment. Hence, we have included essays about, for example, the influence of Tolstoy in translation on Turkish, Telugu, and Tamil literature; and about Dostoevsky’s reception in Germany by Thomas Mann. Other contributors have opted for a historical approach, outlining the lives and cultural impact of specific translators of or advocates for Russian literature, such as Japan’s Futabatei (from the first category), Spain’s Emilia Pardo Bazán and France’s Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé (from the second).

Each case study reinforces the message that the translator’s importance transcends the sum of their word count. Microhistorical details such as translators’ motivation, pay, and individual social contexts are clearly crucial, especially for sociologists and cultural historians; however, the enduring significance of the translator’s function lies in their role as gatekeepers for the receiving cultures.9 By translating (and in many cases adapting) Russian literature into their target languages, they opened up new literary subjects, techniques, and styles for other writers, introducing Dostoevsky’s psychological realism (often with shocking effect in the target culture’s critical ecosystem), but also the technophilic, self-annihilating aesthetic of interwar Socialist Realist production novels. As we unite in this volume multiple national histories of Russian literature in translation, we discover how integral translated Russian literature was for the great pre-modernist and early twentieth-century publishing houses offering cheap, mass-market literary fiction: Selzoff’s Russian Authors Library in Brazil, Allen Lane’s Penguin in Britain, Albatross and Tauchnitz in Germany, Govostēs Editions in Greece, the Shinchō paperback series in Japan, and Johan Sørensen’s Norwegian ‘Library for a Thousand Homes’, to name some of those discussed by our contributors. Several publishers dedicated book series exclusively to Russian authors. All changed the cultural direction of popular reading in their home nations.

Compiling an edited volume of genuinely global scope is not without its challenges. Our global remit implied the need to recruit global scholars, for many of whom English is a second or third language; as editors, we worked especially closely with these authors to reconcile them with unfamiliar academic style. We selected our contributors through a combination of direct invitation and advertisement, seeking out acknowledged subject experts in every field, not necessarily professional academics (and occasionally accepting more than one contributor to cover different aspects of the reception of Russian literature within a single language). Another challenge has been the regrettable gaps in our range: we were not able to commission essays offering a historical overview of the translation and reception of Russian literature in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, much of the African continent including South Africa, Australia, or New Zealand (in the case of the last two nations, our chosen contributor was prevented from completing their essay by illness and overwork; most of the writing and editing for this volume was undertaken under the exceptional circumstances of a global pandemic).10 At least four major world languages, each essential for the translation and mediation of Russian literature, are under-represented in this volume. On reflection, we find this omission less grave than it may seem. As explained below, our volume’s contributions are organised geographically, with each ‘continent’ prefaced by a short essay prepared by the editors providing an overview of the reception of Russian literature since 1900 throughout that region. This allows us to briefly summarise the significance of omitted nations or translators and signpost to further and more specific research, as our extensive Bibliography already does and as we have encouraged all of our contributors to do.

In its current form, this volume includes essays on the French, German, and North American reception of Russian literature, dealing with individual critics (de Vogüé), authors (Fedor Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann; Andrey Kurkov and Alexey Nikitin), and specific historical moments (the evolving reception of Russophone Ukrainian authors in the West, for example). We also note two key points in defence of our omissions: first, that new studies of Russian literary transmission within the cultures we left out, including academic monographs, are already available or in preparation.11 In some cases, such as French, these have been available for years (Hemmings’s authoritative monograph was published in 1950). Second, the history of Russian influence on Anglophone literary culture has already been largely told, albeit piecemeal, through various articles and monographs published in recent decades; indeed, research on the Anglophone countries tends to monopolise study of the translation and reception of Russian literature. We therefore find it appropriate and perhaps even necessary that the history of the transmission of Russian literature into the Anglophone world, which has for so long been over-represented in academia, should be under-represented in our volume.12 (On the other hand, the essays from the Global South which we have curated here do constitute—in some cases for the first time in English—their nations’ history of cultural contact with Russia). Our overview of the absorption of Russian literature into the Anglophone intellectual everyday follows our section on the Americas, forming a coda to our volume.

Methodology

The chapters in Translating Russian Literature are both geographically diverse and chronologically broad, covering an eventful century of socio-political change: two world wars, the Russian Revolution and subsequent Cold War and mass migration, both of individuals and their literary influences. To instil theoretical and epistemological coherence we asked all our contributors to follow a clear methodological framework, derived primarily from Translation Studies (with some input from Comparative Literature). This interdisciplinary framework offers a useful set of theories to unite the many case studies of translators and translated literature in our volume. It conveniently accommodates strands of research that share space with (and often overlap) book history, comparative literature, sociology, microhistory, publishing, linguistics, diplomacy, and soft-power politics.

The theorists whose key works we identify as particularly apposite here—Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch—have been credited with taking the field of Translation Studies in all these directions. Casanova’s World Republic of Letters (1999, reprinted 2007) and both of Damrosch’s texts What Is World Literature? (2003) and Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020) have equipped translation scholars with paradigms with which to investigate both broad and nuanced factors determining target/source culture relationships and underscoring the transnational circulation of texts.13 Such research now commonly encompasses global perspectives, particularly the Global South, producing compelling case studies that define the cultural connection between national dominance and domination, the role of power in driving literary trends and carving epicentres of book production (and hence, of translation). Socio-political developments drive the movement of people and texts, unexpectedly propelling writers and translators into a new public domain, shaping literary canons, and forming new or cementing old (often lasting) impressions, alliances, and sometimes, resentments between nations.

Casanova’s and Damrosch’s discourses on European literatures extend as far east as Bulgaria, Romania, and the Czech Republic, to Marx, Kafka, Kundera, and Kiš; they travel beyond to China, Japan, Africa, Latin America, and India. They evidence political, literary, linguistic, and social conditions behind the circulation of texts and their trajectories from obscurity to the world stage. There is, however, one creation story (with the exception of a few fleeting references) that eludes their full attention and yet merits scrutiny: the Russian/Soviet paradigm. Casanova offers passing commentary in the course of the World Republic on the Russian/Soviet context, and Damrosch refers to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov and Russian formalists as part of a global tapestry of literary contributors, bit parts in a bigger, more complex picture. In each case, however, they resist the temptation to linger on and explore more fully the potential of what is a rich and fascinating case study, emerging from the Soviet desire to disseminate its literature (and political presence) around the world. Our edited volume, the first of its kind to address Russian literature in a global translatorial context, tracks the migration of the Russian literary canon across all continents, and its translation into local languages over the span of one century. It identifies the networks of agents who facilitated such literary migration, while evaluating the cultural impact of the Russian (and Soviet) canon on each receiving nation. We have therefore applied a number of versatile methodological strands to construct a macroscopic case study of each discrete literature, allowing us to find out exactly what drives the transmission of Russian book culture abroad.

Our volume asks the same sociological questions that have occupied major translation scholars (Casanova and Damrosch, but also Anthony Pym, Johan Heilbron and Gisèle Sapiro) over the past two decades. How has Russian literature arrived in neighbouring and not-so-near countries? Who has financed its journey (and why?)? Which social agents (publishers, editors, translators, ambassadors) have facilitated its publication, and how has it been received, by scholars, critics, and casual readers?14 What were the principal pivot, or bridge, languages which carried Russian literature to nations such as Spain where few translators knew Russian, and how does the transmission of, for example, Pushkin or Gorky map onto pathways of colonial influence? Inspired by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose ideas similarly challenge disciplinary boundaries, we have asked about Russian literature around the world: “Who are the discoverers, and what interest do they have in discovering these things?”.15 In the field of Russian literary translation studies, such prior enquiry has typically been directed at language-specific configurations rather than forming a synchronous image of Russian literature’s global reception.16 The ambitious historiography we have collated here constitutes a step-change in Slavic literary translation scholarship.

Other emerging trends in Translation Studies have facilitated our methodological choices. In the last decade, the entire field has experienced a theoretical shift towards sociological and archival research, a key example of which is Jeremy Munday’s approach. Munday’s microhistorical and Bourdieusian methodology, which validates the (often unnoticed) agency of translators and seeks to make them visible, has led to new scholarship in the field of Russian Translation Studies in, for example, Cathy McAteer’s Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics (2021), and now here in this volume.17 Munday advocates use of translators’ notes, drafts and manuscripts, archived correspondence, and analysis of paratexts in order to understand the wider “role of translation in concrete socio-historical contexts”.18 This call for understanding reflects our own desire not only to identify the translators and their motivations for translating Russian literature around the world, but also to contextualise their activities in the wider literary community. The interconnected nature of agency in the literary field—a reliance on a complex network of facilitators—merits exploration beyond the scope of the translator alone, inviting comparable analysis of other types of facilitator. Only by surveying the spectrum of key agents and their socio-historical/socio-political contexts can Munday’s aspiration “to uncover the power relations at work in the production of the literary text” be satisfactorily fulfilled.19

Thus, we have invited our contributors to draw on primary archival and paratextual material to construct microhistories of translators, publishers, and cultural mediators who have promoted Russian literature in foreign locations over the past century. In a further advancement, we have encouraged microhistorical explorations of any specific national writer, genre, or literary group within the target culture who translated, transmitted, or adapted aspects of Russian literature in their own literary production. In this regard, we honour Casanova’s commitment to understanding world canon-formation, we extend Klaus Kaindl’s, Waltraud Kolb’s and Daniela Schlager’s innovative line of enquiry into the sub-field of literary translator studies, and we complement the intricate socio-cultural research carried out by scholars like Rebecca Beasley and Peter Kaye in the field of transnational Russian studies.20

Outline

The thirty-seven essays in the present volume are divided into three sections, by continent, in rough chronological order of the major stages of diffusion of Russian literature abroad. Within each section, essays are arranged in alphabetical order by country name.

Europe

We begin in France, famous for the contribution of Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé to the reception of Russian literature with his vastly influential (and popular) Le Roman russe (1886). Elizabeth Geballe uses the writings of Rachel May and David Damrosch, in addition to existing scholarship on the history of Russian writing in French translation, to argue that de Vogüé was a uniquely influential figure in the process of ‘transculturation’ of Russian prose. As she writes, this celebrated mediator “shaped the expectations of the French reading public” through the metatexts he supplied for his own and others’ translations of leading Russian writers. In their essay on ‘Russian Literature in Estonia Between 1918 and 1940’, Anne Lange and Aile Möldre show transculturation in action in another context: the influence of Russian literature (specifically Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) on the Socialist Realism of Estonian author and translator Anton Hansen Tammsaare (1878–1940). This is a particularly interesting case study, given the hegemonic influence of Russian culture on Estonian writers before and after the two-decade window of Estonian national independence. Similarly, Finnish writers have had to cautiously negotiate a balance between establishing their own national culture and language while determining the extent of influence from the literature of their vast and sometimes overweening neighbour, Russia. Tomi Huttunen, Marja Jänis, and Pekka Pesonen frame their study of the interrelationship between Russian and Finnish literature, ‘The Pendulum of Translating Russian Literature in Finland’ (from the late eighteenth century to the present day), as a deliberate attempt to reverse the traditional trajectory of Casanovian analysis. That is to say, rather than looking at how peripheral languages are translated into major global languages (as Casanova does in The World Republic of Letters), they analyse the reverse process: how Russian is translated into Finnish, and with what effect. They use the metaphor of the ‘pendulum’ to vividly illustrate the variations in the transmission of Russian literature according to political relations and cultural fashions. The remaining essays in this section discuss the influence of Russian literature on Germany’s Thomas Mann (Elizaveta Sokolova), Greece (Christina Karakepeli on the Greek reception of Dostoevsky, and Niovi Zampouka on the translation and reception of Russian literature more generally), Hungary (Zsuzsa Hetényi provides an overview of the translation and literary influence of Russian writers in Hungary since the early nineteenth century, including her own activity as a translator of Bulgakov), Spain (Margaret Tejerizo on the impact of the populariser Emilia Pardo Bazán) and also Catalonia (Miquel Cabal Guarro), Ireland (Mark Ó Fionnáin focuses on Irish-language translations of Pushkin), Italy (with a general survey by Claudia Scandura following Ilaria Sicari’s study of the important translator and advocate for Russian dissidents, Mariia Olsuf’eva), Scandinavia (Susan Reynolds documents reception in Norway and Sweden), Romania (Octavian Gabor on translation, philosophy, and political resistance), Scotland (James Rann on the Russian influence on twentieth-century Scots poetry), and finally, twentieth-century relations between Russian literature and Ukrainian culture, colourfully described by co-authors Lada Kolomiyets and Oleksandr Kalnychenko as resembling “the slow but increasingly deadly compression of a rabbit by a boa constrictor”.

Africa and Asia

As mentioned above, this section is particularly revealing about the under-researched activities of the USSR’s Foreign Languages Publishing House, an important instrument of Soviet soft power. Essays by Nikolay Steblin-Kamensky (Ethiopian translations in the Amharic language), Anna Ponomareva (the Telugu section of Progress Publishers), and others vividly illustrate both the reach and the diversity of Russian literature as cultural propaganda in the developing world during the second half of the twentieth century. We have also included essays describing the reception of Dostoevsky in China (Yu Hang) and Japan (Hiroko Cockerill), while Trang Nguyen contrasts the transmission of Russian literature and the reading habits of the public in North and South Vietnam, respectively. The exceptional complexities of reception, transmission, and translation in multilingual India are outlined in essays by Ranjana Saxena (overview), Guzel’ Strel’kova (Hindi), Ayesha Suhail (Tolstoy in translation), and Venkatesh Kumar (Tolstoy in Tamil). Anna Ponomareva’s contribution on translations into Telugu was mentioned above. The former Soviet republics in Asia are represented by Kazakhstan (Sabina Amanbayeva) and Uzbekistan (Benjamin Quénu), while Zaya Vandan describes the complex reception policy of Mongolia. Turkish reception is discussed in two essays: a historical overview from Hülya Arslan and a Pushkin-specific study by Sabri Gürses. In an appropriate parallel to Nikolay Steblin-Kamensky’s essay on Gorky’s Amharic reception history, Mukile Kasongo and Georgia Nasseh have co-authored an article about the ‘spectre’ of Gorky in Angolan writing. This Lusophone strand resonates with Bruno Barretto Gomide’s essay on Brazilian reception of Russian literature in our ‘Americas’ section, which includes some of the same writers, translators, and publishers. Such confluences emphasise the interrelationships created in the reception of Russian literature through multiple intermediary languages and overlapping cultures. Finally, Russian prose in the Arab world—again, primarily translations of Gorky—is introduced by Sarali Gintsburg.

Americas

For the reasons explained above, we have included only one essay dealing directly with North American reception (although Muireann Maguire includes the US in her summary of Russian reception in the Anglophone world). Catherine O’Neil’s essay focuses on Russophone Ukrainian literature in translation in the twenty-first century. However, our exploration of Russian literature in Latin America is both diverse and far-reaching. Bruno Barretto Gomide details the several stages in the transmission of Russian translations to Brazil, culminating in their consecration in university curricula, partially thanks to the work of the Russian-Jewish émigré scholar-translator, Boris Schnaiderman. Anastasia Belousova and Santiago Méndez present an interesting anomaly: the lack or failure of Russian literature in Colombia, which they ascribe to an absence of cultural curiosity or political stimuli. Damaris Puñales-Alpízar discovers echoes of late Soviet culture in Cuba, while Rodrigo García Bonillas traces the scholarly and cultural impact of Russian literature (including book series) in Mexico.

Conclusion

Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context aims to provoke new debate about the continued currency of Russian literature as symbolic capital for international readers, in particular for nations seeking to create or consolidate cultural and political leverage in the so-called ‘World Republic of Letters’. These essays also benefit researchers aiming to examine and contrast the mechanisms of the translation and reception of Russian literature across the globe. We hope our contribution will inform and inspire students and scholars in the fields of both Slavic and Translation Studies, as well as book historians, and practitioners and researchers across the translation and publishing communities.

1 Boris Akunin in conversation with Stephen M. Norris, ‘Interview with Grigorii Chkartashishvili (Boris Akunin)’, in The Akunin Project: The Mysteries and Histories of Russia’s Bestselling Author, ed. by Elena V. Baraban and Stephen M. Norris (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), pp. 30–41 (p. 36). Akunin (which means ‘villain’ in Japanese, a language from which he translates) is the pen name of Grigorii Chkartashishvili, an ethnic Georgian who is probably the world’s most successful post-Soviet Russophone author; with the initial ‘B’ of ‘Boris’, the moniker refers playfully to the famous nineteenth-century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Akunin openly rejects Vladimir Putin’s regime; he left Russia in 2013.

2 Oksana Zabuzhko, ‘No Guilty People In The World? Reading Russian Literature After Bucha’, trans. by Uilleam Blacker, Times Literary Supplement, 22 April 2022, pp. 7–8 (pp. 7–8). https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/russian-literature-bucha-massacre-essay-oksana-zabuzhko/. For a more nuanced, but still cumulatively damning, treatment of the theme of imperialism in nineteenth-century Russian literature, see Ewa M. Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (London and Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000). See also Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

3 An intriguing example of transcreation is the 2011 novel Maudit soit Dostoïevski by French-Afghan writer and director Atiq Rahimi, translated by Polly MacLean in 2013 as A Curse on Dostoevsky. The book recreates the events and characters of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment with a cast of young Muslims contending with corrupt and brutal police on the streets of Kabul in the recent past. Among other possible readings, the novel offers a satirical commentary on Russian interference in Afghan politics.

4 For an overview of Progress’s achievements, see Rossen Djagalov, ‘Progress Publishers: A Short History’, in The East Was Read: Socialist Culture in the Third World, ed. by Vijay Prashad (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2019), pp. 83–93 (which in turn draws on Petr Petrov’s Russian-language monograph, K istorii izdatel’stva ‘Progress’ (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1987). Articles in our current volume which throw light on Progress include Nikolay Steblin-Kamensky’s study of translation into Amharic and Anna Ponomareva’s experience as a translator for Progress’s Telugu section.

5 On the ineffectiveness of Russian cultural soft power, see Sergei Medvedev, ‘In Search of Past Glory: Russia’s Cultural Statecraft in the Age of Decline’, in Russia’s Cultural Statecraft, ed. by Tuomas Forsberg and Sirke Mäkinen (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), pp. 226–38.

6 See, for example, ‘A Look at What’s on President Xi Jinping’s Shelves’, China Daily, 18 October 2016, https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2016-10/18/content_27093635.htm

7 See Tomi Huttunen, Marja Jänis, and Pekka Pesonen, ‘The Pendulum of Translating Russian Literature in Finland’, in the present volume.

8 Susan Bassnett, ‘Preface’, in Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, ed. by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 1998), pp. vii-viii (p. viii). Although more than two decades have elapsed since Bassnett and Lefevere made this argument (Bassnett even suggesting “that Translation Studies should be seen as the discipline within which comparative literature might be located, rather than the other way round” (ibid.)), there is still considerable reluctance to admit the resonances between these two disciplines, perhaps especially in Slavic Studies.

9 On microhistories, see Anthony Pym, Method in Translation History (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); on translatorial social contexts and personal histories (habitus and hexis), see Daniel Simeoni, ‘The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus’ (Target, 10:1, 1998, pp. 1–39) and David Charlston, ‘Textual Embodiments of Bourdieusian Hexis’, The Translator, 19:1, 2013, pp. 51–80. On gatekeeping, see William Marling, Gatekeepers: The Emergence of World Literature and the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

10 Similarly, we lost our Israel contributor to academic precarity, while our Poland author, who works for a Polish university, withdrew almost immediately after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine: apparently Polish University faculties would not tolerate any new research on a Russian theme, even the historical reception of Russian literature in Poland.

11 On France, see, for example, the following monographs and dissertation: Leonid Livak, How It Was Done in Paris: Russian Émigré Literature and French Modernism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); F. W. J. Hemmings, The Russian Novel in France: 1884–1914 (London: Oxford University Press, 1950); and A. McCabe, ‘Dostoevsky’s French Reception: from Vogüé, Gide, Shestov and Berdyaev to Marcel, Camus and Sartre (1880–1959)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow, 2013). On Spain, see Lynn C. Purkey, Spanish Reception of Russian Narratives, 1905–1939: Transcultural Dialogics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See also our Bibliography.

12 On the reception and translation of Russian literature in the UK, please see Rebecca Beasley’s work (mentioned elsewhere here and also listed in our Bibliography). While the present volume does not cover the history of Russian translation in the US in detail, under the auspices of the same research project we plan to publish two monographs on this subject, both currently in preparation. Muireann Maguire’s monograph, working title Russian Silhouettes, will provide an outline history of US-based literary translators active from the late nineteenth century to the present day, with particular focus on those translators who were also active as editors or publishers. Cathy McAteer’s monograph Cold War Women: Female Translators and Cultural Mediators of Russian and Soviet Literature in the Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), will examine the careers of twentieth-century female translators who were also advocates for Russian culture and for Russophone writers.

13 See Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. by Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999; 2nd edn, 2007) and David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)and Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

14 Pym, Method in Translation History; Johann Heilbron and Gisèle Sapiro, ‘Outline for a Sociology of Translation: Current Issues and Future Prospects’, in Constructing a Sociology of Translation, ed. by Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins Translation Library, 2007), pp. 93–107.

15 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas’, in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. by R. Shusterman (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), pp. 220–28.

16 On Anglophone translation, see Rachel May, The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994); on Russo-Chinese translation, Mark Gamsa, The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature: Three Studies (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2008); and on Brazilian reception of Russian literature, see Bruno Barretto Gomide, Da Estepe à Caatinga: O romance russo no Brasil (1887–1936) (São Paulo, Brazil: Editora de Universidade de São Paulo, 2011).

17 Cathy McAteer, Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics (London and New York: Routledge BASEES Series, 2021), https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003049586/translating-great-russian-literature-cathy-mcateer; https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003049586.

18 Jeremy Munday, ‘The Role of Archival and Manuscript Research in the Investigation of Translator Decision-Making’, Target, 25:1 (2013), 125–39.

19 Jeremy Munday, ‘Using Primary Sources to Produce a Microhistory of Translation and Translators: Theoretical and Methodological Concerns’, The Translator, 20:1 (2014), 64–80.

20Literary Translator Studies, ed. by K. Kaindl, W. Kalb, and D. Schlager (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins Translation Library, 2021); Rebecca Beasley, Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism, 1881–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Peter Kaye, Dostoevsky and English Modernism, 1900–1930 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Europe

Russian Literature in Europe:

An Overview

Muireann Maguire

©2024 Muireann Maguire, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0340.01

The larger European languages, particularly French and German, have always acted as pivots for the transmission of Russian literature beyond the borders of the Russian nation. The complex relationship of cultural imitation, trade, and mutual conquest between the Russian Empire and the nations of Western and Central Europe created a dynamic whereby French and German (together with English, the dominant language of another close partner through trade, diplomacy and dynastic intermarriage) were typically the first foreign languages in which major works of Russian literature appeared.

The present volume includes case histories spanning the European continent from Norway to Catalonia. As in other sections, our contributors on Europe offer a variety of approaches: some offer a history of the reception and translation of Russian literature within a specific nation or region (Estonia; Finland; Hungary; Denmark and Norway); others examine the life of a single translator, writer, or other cultural advocate whose interaction with Russian authors altered his or her country’s reception of Russian literature (France, Germany, Italy, Spain), while others follow the reception history of a particular Russian writer within a single cultural field (Catalonia, Ireland, Germany, Greece); still others combine overall reception history with a mix of these approaches (Greece, Hungary, Scotland, Italy again, Romania, Ukraine). We welcome this plurality of models, and in this brief introductory essay we will suggest why it is important to trace the reception history of Russian literature in Europe not only from a strictly chronological and geographical perspective, but also through the complex history of literary influence. While neither space nor expertise permit us to include an overview of every nation or region of Europe, we attempt here and elsewhere to point our readers to additional texts which offer more specific case histories, including studies of those major European nations whose reception history is not fully covered elsewhere in this volume.

The first reason to chart the European penetration of Russian literature is borne out by the later sections of this volume: precisely because of the unhappy history of European imperialism, the languages of Europe acted as pathways of transmission of Russian literature through each other’s territories and, even more importantly from a world literature perspective, to their colonies across the globe. Hence, the Spanish reception of Russian prose (which, as our contributor Margaret Tejerizo informs us, was jump-started by the remarkable Emilia Pardo Bazán with a series of lectures delivered at the Madrid Ateneo during the late 1880s) went on to colour its Latin American reception, as discussed in the ‘Americas’ section of this volume. While we lack a direct contribution on the Portuguese-language reception of Russian writing, later chapters in this volume explore the influence of Russian writers on the culture of Brazil and Angola respectively, both former Portuguese colonies. The French diplomat and critic E.M. de Vogüé, who taught himself Russian while serving as secretary to the French Embassy in St Petersburg, later (through a series of articles and a book) persuaded not only his French contemporaries of the importance of the great Slav Realist authors, as Elizabeth Geballe shows in her essay, but at the same time facilitated the reception of nineteenth-century Russian prose in Spain, Portugal, and far beyond, thanks to translations of his criticism.1 By retracing how European critics and writers interpreted Russian literature, we gain insight into how that same literature was re-translated and re-configured abroad, into other world languages.

A second reason is the fact that so many major European writers owe their inspiration to Russian literature. Some admittedly so, others more covertly. In the case of writers like Thomas Mann or Romain Rolland who openly advertise their debt to Russian writing, it is useful to know which translations they used; in the case of those writers who may have adapted Russian themes without acknowledging them, it is pragmatic (when building a case for influence) to know which translations they would have been able to access, or how Russian literature was evaluated in their culture at the time of writing. It is also helpful, from the cultural historian’s standpoint, to understand which critical essays changed attitudes within a nation in favour of Russian influences (or indeed the reverse); a particularly complex task in the twentieth century, when reading of nineteenth-century Russian prose was impossible to extricate from the supposed Communist threat to national integrity (particularly in Spain or Greece, which were for many decades controlled by anti-Communist dictatorships).

It is remarkable how often Russian literature was perceived (by both critics and writers) as a completely fresh alternative to the materialist trends dominating European Realism; how frequently its aesthetic was welcomed as spiritual and philanthropic. (This idealistic reception would, in the long term, undermine the commercial success of Russian literature, especially in Anglophone nations). This reputation for higher spirituality, ostensibly inherent to Russian literature, encouraged similar responses from its readers, as in the following analogy. Dostoevsky famously wrote from Siberian exile in 1854 to one of his benefactors, Natalia Fonvizina, that “if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth […] then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth”.2 A character in a 1914 short story by the Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno protested:

My vision of Russia […] arises from my reading of Russian literature […]. My Russia is the Russia of Dostoevskij, and if that is not the real, true Russia of today, then all that I am about to say will lack any real practical value but not any other value. I vote for the triumph of the philosophy […] that is to be found in Dostoevsky.3

In other words, where Dostoevsky stood for Christ against the truth, Unamuno’s character stood for Dostoevsky’s imagination against the truth of Russia.

This quotation highlights the importance of studying the history of the transmission of Russian literature to the nations of Europe: for many European writers, and for their readers, Russian literature represented a state of psychological and spiritual truth-telling which was not contingent on historical or political conditions. As fiercely as it might be criticised on aesthetic grounds, it remained—for many European critics—an enduring moral exemplar. Meanwhile, up to the present day, an uncountable number of European writers (and film-makers) are inspired directly or indirectly in their own creative work by reading ‘the Russians’. Sometimes this influence can be traced through obvious parallels or the author’s own admission, as in the essay on Thomas Mann and Dostoevsky in this section; often the influence is unacknowledged or unconscious. There is even a third category, consisting of writers inspired to write non-fiction about the Russians they admire, and/or to translate their work into their own language—like the French novelist Prosper Mérimée, who wrote articles for the Revue des Deux Mondes in the 1850s about Pushkin, Turgenev, and Gogol (and translated work by all three, not without some errors), or the case of André Gide’s 1926 study of Dostoevsky.4 And of course, there is a fourth category: philosophers and other creative intellectuals who found their thinking enriched by the experience of reading Russian literature in translation. Gide, for example, began his Dostoevsky with an epigraph from Nietzsche: “‘Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal.’”5 The Norwegian author Knut Hamsun, whose reception of Dostoevsky is discussed in Susan Reynolds’s chapter in the present volume, falls into several of these categories.

Not all discoveries of Russian literature were as happy as Mérimée’s or Nietzsche’s—nor as spontaneous. In the present volume, Lada Kolomiyets and Oleksandr Kalnychenko describe how Russian literary culture was forced on Ukraine through a combination of strategic rewards, political persecution, and mass state-subsidised translation. The history of Polish-Russian literary contact is at least equally fraught and complex; for every Polish scholar “fanatically enamored [sic]” with the work of a Russian author,6 a multitude of ordinary Poles were compelled to study their uncongenial neighbour’s prose canon in school. Although Poland did not lack skilled translators, including the prolific Seweryn Pollak (1907–87), Andrzej Stawar (1900–61), and the poet Julian Tuwim (1894–1953) whose translation of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman (Mednyi vsadnik, 1833; Jeździec miedziany, 1932) became the canonical Polish version, a 1947 reader survey showed that the majority of the Polish public had only ever heard of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (that is, out of all Russian authors; yet they were familiar with over 150 other foreign writers). A decade later, more than half the books provided for schools, libraries, and book clubs in Poland were translations from Russian: but, in a seemingly odd decision by the Soviet authorities responsible for this unsubtle Russification of the Soviet literary field, few of these were nineteenth-century classics. Instead, Polish readers were treated to contemporary fiction by Mikhail Sholokhov, A.N. Tolstoy, Viktor Nekrasov and other, lesser luminaries of Soviet Socialist Realism: “millions of copies of the mediocre, dull novels that characterized Soviet fiction after the Zhdanov decrees of 1946”.7 As Seweryn Pollak reflected in a wry 1947 article on translation, a translator was rarely free to choose their texts on aesthetic grounds: political contexts took precedence.8

A third justification for our case studies is the light they shed on the lives and professional networks of dozens of translators who made the cultural exchanges described above possible, but who would otherwise be lost to history. These range from culturally peripheral figures like Juli Gay, the obscure Catalan translator of Dostoevsky, rediscovered by his twenty-first century successor (and our contributor) Miquel Cabal Guarro; or the Jesuit classicist Fr. Gearóid Ó Nualláin, whose early twentieth-century Irish-language adaptations of Pushkin and Tolstoy are touched upon by Mark Ó Fionnáin in his chapter in our volume. Several essays mention the importance of the German translations (of Pushkin, Turgenev, Lermontov and others) produced by Friedrich Martin von Bodenstedt (1819–92), a Hanover-born polyglot who taught himself Russian and Persian. As a professor of Slavonic Studies (and later of English literature) at the University of Munich, he translated Russian and Ukrainian poetry; despite his failings, his versions of these authors would be re-translated into Hungarian, Turkish, and other languages, as our contributors show, with lasting influence on the literatures of those nations. Genuine polyglots like Von Bodenstedt deserve re-evaluation today: what can we learn about their success as intercultural communicators in an age where resurgent populism and nationalism challenge the values of multilingualism and tolerance?

Similarly, major European translators of twentieth-century Soviet and dissident literature are in danger of being lost to history, apart from a few notes in the front matter of a paperback. There are casualties of the translator’s infamous ‘invisibility’ in every national culture.9 In France, significant twentieth-century translators include the Prague-born academic and translator of Pasternak, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn, Michel Aucouturier (1933–2017);10 René Huntzbucler, the translator of Gorky (Mother, 1906; La mère, 1952), Vsevolod Ivanov, and Konstantin Simonov; Claude Ligny, first French translator of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (Le Maître et Marguerite (Editions Robert Laffont, 1968)); Françoise Marrou-Flamant (1931–2015), whose widely acclaimed version of Bulgakov’s novel was published by the prestigious ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’ and Folio series in 2004 and 2017 respectively;11 and Bruno de Schloezer (1881–1969), one of France’s most eminent (and prolific) translators of Tolstoy.12 As this incomplete list shows, Francophone translators include émigrés, academics, amateurs, authors, journalists, and some who filled more than one category (often at the same time). Their personal and professional networks are exceptionally rich in national and international historical resonances and cultural influences. France—like every other European nation—is overdue for an historical investigation of its heritage of literary translation (and not only from Russian).

One major French exception to the translator’s usual obscurity is the ‘Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger’; this prestigious literary prize, established in 1948 and funded since 2011 by the hotel firm Sofitel, rewards both the author and translator of the best foreign novel translated into French during the previous year. In 1968, translations of Solzhenitsyn’s novels The First Circle (V kruge pervom, 1968)and Cancer Ward (Rakovyi korpus, 1955–68)were honoured;13 more recent Russophone laureates have included Vasilii Grossman (1984), Mikhail Shishkin (2005), Marina Tsvetaeva (2011), Guzel’ Iakhina (2021), and Maria Stepanova (2022). The prize favours translations of contemporary fiction and essays: only once, in 1957, was a nineteenth-century Russian author honoured. This was Pavel Melnikov-Pecherskii’s In the Forests (V lesakh, 1874; Dans les forêts, translated by Sylvie Luneau in 1957).14 Analogously with the Anglophone International Booker Prize (which, since its establishment in 2004, splits its prize money equally between the author and translator), the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger bestows symbolic capital as well as publicity on both author and translator; recent awards to authors whose work is considered original, polemic, or at least interrogative (such as Shishkin, Stepanova and Iakhina) indicate a desire to encourage the dissemination of Russian literature abroad, although this may change post-2022 to align with the critical reaction against Russian culture in some Western countries.

A final reason for recovering national histories of translation, and of translators, can be applied even more generally. Any comparative and diachronic study of the reception history of Russia, such as we have attempted for Europe, helps scholars of cultural transmission to determine the most favourable conditions for this phenomenon to occur (if, indeed, these circumstances can be reliably categorised). As Hemmings notes in his history of France’s reception of Russian literature between 1884 and 1914, there was no particular reason why this reception could not have taken off nationally well before the 1880s: translations were available, cultural contacts were extensive, the reading population was large. He points out that “a perfectly satisfactory translation of War and Peace” barely sold any copies in Paris in 1879 yet, “six years later the book was a best-seller”.15 It is difficult not to accept Hemmings’ argument that Russian literature must have acquired during the 1880s a “special appeal” for French readers, produced by a collection of identifiable circumstances, which it did not possess earlier: what we might call a perfect storm of favourable conditions.16 He lists the conditions applicable in the French case: France’s need (since 1870) for a political ally against Prussia; the insidious appeal of popular romances set in Russia; the growth of critical interest in Russian literature, accompanied by the foundation of the first academic chairs in Russian Studies at French universities; and, not least, the critical discovery of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky by de Vogüé, which led the way for other writers to be translated and enjoyed.17 Analogously, in this section on the European reception of Russian literature, and indeed in this book as a whole, we compare and discuss the conditions for that reception to work: to inspire emulation, to provoke debate, and to infiltrate a culture’s imaginative categories. Can any such set of favourable circumstances be described? In the essays which follow this section, we will discover which conditions were necessary for Russian literature, in translation, to take root among its European neighbours.

1 See F.W.J. Hemmings, The Russian Novel in France 1884–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), esp. pp. 27–48.

2 Cited by Joseph Frank in Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 220.

3 Cited by William B. Edgerton in ‘Spanish and Portuguese Responses to Dostoevskij’, Revue de Littérature Comparée 55:3 (1981), 419–38 (p. 423).

4 See Hemmings, The Russian Novel, p. 5, p. 7. On Mérimée’s translations, see also John L. Chamberlain, ‘Notes on Russian Influences on the Nineteenth Century French Novel’, The Modern Language Journal 33:5 (1949), 374–83. Chamberlain reports that despite publishing his translation of Pushkin’s ‘The Queen of Spades’ (‘Pikovaia dama’, 1833; ‘La dame de pique’) in 1849, Mérimée wrote to his Russian ‘friend and mentor’ Varvara Ivanovna de Lagrené (née Dubenskaia): “I wish that I could tell you, madame, that I am making progress in the Russian language, but it seems to me, on the contrary, that the study of it becomes harder day by day. I can never find even one line of poetry which I can understand at once, without looking up one or two words.” (p. 374).

5 André Gide, Dostoevsky, unknown translator (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1925). https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.169976/2015.169976.Dostoevsky-By-Andre-Gide_djvu.txt.

6 This is how Roman Jakobson described the attitude of the great Polish Pushkinist Wacław Lednicki (1891–1967) in ‘Polish Scholarship and Pushkin’, The American Slavic and East European Review, 5:1/2 (May 1946), 88–92 (p. 89). By Lednicki’s own admission, other Poles (including the poet Adam Mickiewicz) viewed Pushkin more soberly, judging that his unwilling subservience to the Russian Tsar tainted the quality of his poetry. See Wacław Lednicki, ‘Pushkin, Tyutchev, Mickiewicz and the Decembrists: Legend and Facts’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 29:73 (June 1951), 375–401.

7 Maurice Friedberg, ‘Russian Literature in Postwar Poland: 1945–1958’, The Polish Review, 4:1/2 (Winter-Spring, 1959), 33–45 (p. 35), https://www.jstor.org/stable/25776220. I am indebted to Friedberg’s article for the statistics on Polish readers cited in this paragraph.

8 Cited by Friedberg, ‘Russian Literature in Postwar Poland’, p. 34. For the early modern history of Polish-Russian literary relations, see Paulina Lewin, ‘Polish-Ukrainian-Russian Literary Relations of the Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries: New Approaches’, The Slavic and East European Journal, 24:3 (Autumn 1980), 256–69, https://www.jstor.org/stable/307180. For more on the impact of Soviet literature behind the Iron Curtain, see the relevant articles on Poland, Hungary, the former Yugoslavia and other Eastern European nations in Translation Under Communism, ed. by Christopher Rundle, Anne Lange, and Daniele Monticelli (Cham: Springer/Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

9 See Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

10 For more biographical details, see Catherine Depretto, ‘Michel Aucouturier (1933-2017), Cahiers du monde russe 59:1 (2018), 143–52, https://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/10292.

11 On translations of The Master and Margarita into French, see this French-language interview with the novel’s latest translators: Annick Morard, ‘André Markowicz et Françoise Morvan: ‘“Le Maître et Marguerite” est un acte de résistance en soi’, Le Temps, 1 December 2020. https://www.letemps.ch/culture/livres/andre-markowicz-francoise-morvan-maitre-marguerite-un-acte-resistance-soi.

12Schloezer was born in Vitebsk, now in modern Belarus, also the home-town of his near-contemporary Marc Chagall. Celebrated as a musicologist and a philosopher (and a devotee of Lev Shestov), Schloezer translated Tolstoy’s War and Peace for Gallimard (La Guerre et la Paix, 1960). For more information, see B.J. Bisson, ‘Boris Shlezer: paradoks perevodchika’ [‘Boris de Schloezer: A translator’s paradox’], Voprosy literatury, 1:1 (2020), 220–30.

13 The French translations referred to here were Le Premier Cercle, by Louis Martine, and Le Pavillon des cancéreux, by Michel Aucouturier.

14 See ‘Palmarès du prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger’, http://www.lalettredulibraire.com/Palmarès-du-prix-du-Meilleur-Livre-Etranger

15 Hemmings, The Russian Novel, pp. 2–3 (p. 3). He is referring to La Guerre et la Paix, roman historique (St. Petersburg, 1879), attributed to Princess Irène Paskévitch. Turgenev, then living in Paris, enthusiastically sent copies to French literary friends and critics, including Flaubert, Zola, and Daudet (see Hemmings, p. 20).

16 Ibid., p. 3.

17 Ibid., pp. 3–10.

Catalonia

More Than a Century of Dostoevsky in Catalan1

Miquel Cabal Guarro

©2024 Miquel Cabal Guarro, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0340.02

Introduction

Since the first work by Fedor