This forum examines the translation of English literature into Russian during the early Soviet period, offering case studies of how a diverse cohort of translators, editors, scholars, and writers—including Maxim Gorky, Nikolai Gumilev, D. S. Mirsky, Mikhail Morozov, Boris Pasternak, Gustav Shpet, and Alexander Smirnov—worked to bring to Soviet readers classic and contemporary works by English authors, such as W. H. Auden, Samuel Coleridge, William Shakespeare, and Laurence Sterne. The four articles in the forum offer new insights into the politics and practices of literary translation as a highly productive form of cultural mediation in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s. The articles also contribute to a new subfield within translation studies that analyzes archival materials, such as translators’ correspondence and translation drafts, in order to gain a better understanding of various processes of translation.

Emily Finer is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the University of St Andrews. Her current research interests include the cultural reception of Charles Dickens and his novels in the Russian-speaking world; multilingualism in Polish, English, Jewish and Russian language cultures; and human translanguaging in space. Julie Hansen is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at the Department of Modern Languages at Uppsala University. Her research interests include memory studies, multilingual literature, and translation studies. She is co-editor of the volumes Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Literature (2013) and Living through Literature: Essays in Memory of Omry Ronen (2019). Peter Budrin is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. His current research focuses on educational and cultural institutions that functioned as zones of intellectual autonomy in Soviet Russia. His upcoming monograph explores the Soviet reception of the eighteenth-century British writer Laurence Sterne.

Founded shortly after the October Revolution of 1917, the World Literature publishing house (Izdatel'stvo Vsemirnaia literatura) was among the key cultural institutions of the early Soviet era. It offered a refuge for many writers and translators who were left without means for existence, while also advancing new approaches to translation and text editing. This article addresses the role of British literature within the canon of world literature proposed by the publishing house through an examination of the legacy of translations and editorial paratexts in books by British authors, as well as in the Sovremennyi zapad (The Contemporary West) magazine released by Vsemirnaia literatura. Although the economic hardships prevented the publishing house from realizing its broad agenda, over seventy books were published, as well as critical reviews and articles devoted to British literature. Taken together, they point to the emerging new trends in the Soviet translation practices. In addition, materials drawn from early theoretical publications (Principles of Artistic Translation) and a close reading of several excerpts from Nikolai Gumilev’s translation of Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, show a fluid boundary between the emerging Soviet translation canon and the rich pre-revolutionary tradition of literary translation, which subtly influenced the new environment.

Maria Khotimsky is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the Global Languages Department at MIT. Her research interests include literary translation in Russia, content-based language pedagogy, and translingual poetry. She is the co-editor of The Poetry and Poetics of Olga Sedakova: Origins, Philosophies, Points of Contention (2019) and Olga Sedakova: stikhi, smysly, prochteniia (2017).

The article examines the translation of Shakespeare in Soviet Russia in the context of Soviet cultural politics, translation ideology, and canon formation of the 1930s. I trace the process of the establishment of a distinct discipline of Shakespeare studies (shekspirovedenie) in the context of the introduction of socialist realism as the main dogma of Soviet culture, focusing on the spectrum of interpretations of the notion of “realist translation” by literary functionaries, the prominent Soviet Shakespeare scholars Alexander Smirnov and Mikhail Morozov, and the poet and translator Boris Pasternak. Reinterpreted in terms of socialist realism, the concept of the realist translation, which was never clearly defined, served as an instrument of criticism and ideological control, and Shakespeare scholars and translators were forced to carefully maneuver between the ideological demands and their actual views on translation. At the same time, for Pasternak and many other artists of that time, realism became an existential category intrinsically connected with poetic freedom.

Aleksei Semenenko is Associate Professor in Russian at the Department of Language Studies at Umeå University. He is the editor of Satire and Protest in Putin’s Russia (2021) and the author of Hamlet the Sign (2007), The Texture of Culture: An Introduction to Yuri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory (2012), and other works on translation, literature, and semiotics.

This article explores a little-known encounter of the Russian philosopher Gustav Shpet (1879–1937) with the writings of the eighteenth-century British writer Laurence Sterne (1713–1768). From the early 1930s, Shpet was working on a new translation of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy under contract with the Academia publishing house. This project was tragically interrupted in 1935 by the arrest of Shpet and his subsequent exile to Siberia. Through an examination of surviving manuscripts pertaining to the unfinished translation, including notes and records made by Shpet for his introduction and annotations, the article reveals Shpet’s original interpretation of Sterne. The reading that emerges is strikingly different from Viktor Shklovsky’s influential portrayal of Sterne as a proto-Futurist who subverted the generic conventions of the novel. Shpet reads Sterne as a peculiar, “anachronistic” author, a belated Renaissance humanist, who fled the realities of his own time by immersing himself in the literary forms of the past.

Peter Budrin is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. His current research focuses on educational and cultural institutions that functioned as zones of intellectual autonomy in Soviet Russia. His upcoming monograph explores the Soviet reception of the eighteenth-century British writer Laurence Sterne.

This article explores the first translations of W. H. Auden into Russian in the context of the cultural projects of the Stalinist USSR in the 1930s. During this period, ideological differences across the borders were sometimes even more perceptible than linguistic ones, requiring translations to be cultural as well as intralingual. The poetry of the “early” Auden, an acknowledged modernist and successor to T. S. Eliot, was enigmatic in a densely modernist sense and yet characterized by an acute social awareness. In translating Auden’s controversial poetic persona for a Soviet readership, reviewers and editors of periodicals, as well as the editor and translators of The Anthology of New English Poetry, chose different strategies: while the former discussed Auden as a “revolutionary poet,” the latter attempted to translate the modernist. Juxtaposing these two facets of the Russian Auden, the article analyzes the translations in the anthology in order to demonstrate how D. S. Mirsky, as the compiler and editor of the book, mediated Auden’s reception in the USSR.

Elena Ostrovskaya is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. She has published various articles on the history of literary translation in the USSR in the 1930s and canon-formation. She is co-author, together with Elena Zemskova, of the article “From International Literature to World Literature: English Translators in 1930s Moscow.”

This article analyzes the novella Stereoskop (1905), written by the art historian Aleksandr Ivanov, who was closely associated with the Russian Symbolists. I argue that through the metaphor of stereoscopy Ivanov expresses two fundamental concepts introduced in Symbolist aesthetics: the ability of verbal art to become reality, and the significance of tradition that underlies the very originality of a literary work. Ivanov realizes the metaphor of stereoscopy by creating his novella as a literary analogue of a real optical device—the double “stereo photo” inside the “viewing instrument.” He forms the “double photo” for his Stereoskop by re-recreating Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman (1833), “Queen of Spades” (1834), and “Monument” (1836) and Gogol’s “Portrait” (1842)—the works of authors who both believed in the power of the word, thought about this power through visual metaphors of sculpture and paintings/icons, and profoundly influenced the Symbolists. Placed in Stereoskop, this photo of the “literary past” (Pushkin’s and Gogol’s works) and the photo of the “literary present” (Ivanov’s own work) appear to the readers as a three-dimensional fictional world. By directly addressing the readers, referring to well-known Petersburg landmarks with “photographic” accuracy, and engaging with the readers’ senses, Ivanov additionally simulates the visual experience of looking into a stereoscope. As it mimics the construction and the functions of a real device, Stereoskop demonstrates the two concepts of Symbolist aesthetics “in action”; the novella becomes a nearly tangible “optical instrument” that contains the immortal world of cultural memory and actively encourages its readers to explore it.

Ekaterina Shubenkina is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California, a dissertation fellow of the Early Modern Studies Institute (2021–22), and a recipient of the Josephine De Karman Fellowship (2021–22). Her research interests include the history of visual culture, the social history of literature, and the history of education.

The plot of Andrei Bely’s magnum opus, Petersburg, turns on a certain “terrible promise” made by a young student of Neo-Kantian philosophy. Despite its important function for the plot, no critical literature has examined the promise itself, perhaps because viewed from within the framework of the Russian Symbolist project writ large, the significance of a promise appears not only irrelevant to but even essentially in conflict with its concerns. This paper attempts to complicate the predominant account of the modernist aesthetics of Petersburg and of Bely’s theory of Symbolism on which it is based. I argue that the promise, as a fundamentally communicative speech act, makes visible the ethical and intersubjective aspects of Symbolist creation. I read the promise through the critical lenses of Stanley Cavell, J. L. Austin, Elizabeth Anscombe, and finally Mikhail Bakhtin to articulate the ethical and creative dimensions of the promise as a performative speech act, and consequently I propose a reevaluation of Symbolist zhiznetvorchestvo: the force of “living speech” does not inhere in the free play of a singular creative consciousness, but in its speaking in the world, in its capacity to generate and structure relations between speaking subjects.

Benjamin Stein recently received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation examined failures of communication in Russian Symbolist and British Modernist novels. He lives in Baltimore.