Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature

Brian James Baer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781628928013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Russian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Brian James Baer explores the central role played by translation in the construction of modern Russian literature. Peter I's policy of forced Westernization resulted in translation becoming a widely discussed and highly visible practice in Russia, a multi-lingual empire with a polyglot elite. Yet Russia's accumulation of cultural capital through translation occurred at a time when the Romantic obsession with originality was marginalizing translation as mere imitation. The awareness on the part of Russian writers that their literature and, by extension, their cultural identity were "born in translation" produced a sustained and sophisticated critique of Romantic authorship and national identity that has long been obscured by the nationalist focus of traditional literary studies. By offering a re-reading of seminal works of the Russian literary canon that thematize translation, alongside studies of the circulation and reception of specific translated texts, Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature models the long overdue integration of translation into literary and cultural studies.

1

Reading Between, Reading Among: Poet-Translators in the Age of the Decembrists

Translation as a technic of promising novel connections can promote the formation of new publics attuned to other modes of publicity that often exceed the borders of the imperial public sphere.

Vincente Rafael (2007:242)

If a reliance on translation problematized Russia’s Romantic nation-building project in the years following the Napoleonic Wars, it also offered unique opportunities for artistic expression, for intercourse with other cultures and ways of life, and for world-making. The translation of poetry was particularly important in the turbulent Age of the Decembrists, given the potential of poetry both to evade censorship and to foster solidarity. As the Czech poet Miroslav Holub put it, “Poetry was the language, poetry was the communication, not only because it could be more loaded with hidden meanings than prose. Poetry was higher above the heads of censors, but it was not so much found in the words as in the suggested tacit solidarity, in the silence between words, between lines and between poems” (Holub 1994:5). This chapter explores the role of translation among Russia’s Decembrist poets [poety-dekabristy] as a prime example of the phenomenon of productive censorship and of all that can be gained in translation.¹

Indeed, one of the defining features of Russian culture in the Age of the Decembrists was the attention paid to issues of translation. As the Soviet literary critic Ol’ga Kholmskaia put it, “Characteristic of the first third of the nineteenth century was an unusually keen interest in theoretical issues related to literary translation. Journals of the time were filled with articles and notes on recently published translations, while translators themselves affixed forewords to their translations, in which they polemicized with their opponents and defined their own positions” (Kholmskaia 1959:305).

The use of translation as a venue for the discussion of politically risky subjects and for the creation of solidarities under conditions of censorship was not, however, invented in the Age of the Decembrists.² Already in the late eighteenth century, for example, the writer and dramaturge Denis Fonvizin translated into Russian the Neo-Confucian text Ta Hsüeh (from a French translation), which “provided a language in which to articulate the reflections on imperial legitimacy and political opposition that had preoccupied him since the late 1760s” (Burson 2005)—that is, a somewhat safer way to speak truth to power. A century later, members of the Russian freemason movement, which swept the Russian elite in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and promoted progressive Enlightenment values of freedom and democracy, translated works not only by the organization’s founder, John Mason, but by other politically progressive writers, such as the Americans Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, as well as politically charged poems that exposed the injustice and tragedy of aristocratic privilege, such as Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village.”³ Schiller mania gripped the progressive Russian elite in the early nineteenth century, inspiring multiple translations of the German author’s work, especially those focused on Romantic ideas of political equality and freedom, such as the tragedy Don Carlos. That being said, the use of translation to imagine new worlds and to create the communities necessary to bring those worlds into being was, one could say, perfected in the Age of the Decembrists.

Reading under conditions of censorship

Much of the research and commentary on censorship in the contemporary West has focused on the most repressive aspects of the practice: censorship as silencing, erasure, and blockage.⁴ This focus is, perhaps, not surprising, given the general consensus in the West that freedom of speech is a basic human right. In countries outside the developed West, however, freedom of speech may not be an expectation for most citizens. In fact, as Leon Twarog points out, “Tsarist Russia developed its system of censorship in the late eighteenth century when most of the other countries of Western Europe were already free of censorship” (1971:99). In such societies, where modern literature developed under the shadow of censorship, we find not only blatantly repressive practices but also what Francesca Billiani has referred to as, following Foucault, productive censorship (2007:10). This term refers to the phenomenon of authors, translators, and readers who develop often elaborate means of evading censorship both within texts themselves, in the form of Aesopian language and intertextual references, and outside texts, through the invocation of certain background knowledge.⁵ In Russia, Nabokov notes, “the censor’s task was made more difficult by his having to disentangle abstruse political allusions instead of simply cracking down upon obvious obscenity” (1981:4). That task was further complicated in the case of translated literature, where knowledge of a foreign language was necessary in order fully to decode the meaning behind translation shifts, as well as “the silence between words, between lines, between poems” (Holub 1994:5).

The study of productive censorship reorients scholarly attention by focusing on the role of readers for, without readers to decode embedded allusions, an author or translator’s work is like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest.⁶ People who live or have lived under harsh censorship conditions understand well the important role of the reader. Nabokov, for example, opens his book of lectures on Russian literature with an essay entitled “Russian Writers, Censors and Readers” (1981:1; italics mine), in which he notes: “For just as the universal family of gifted writers transcends national barriers, so is the gifted reader a universal figure, not subject to spatial or temporal laws. It is he—the good, the excellent reader—who has saved the artist again and again from being destroyed by emperors, dictators, priests, puritans, philistines, political moralists, policemen, postmasters, and prigs” (11). And, while the gifted reader may belong to a universal species, the Russian reader of the past, Nabokov asserts, “in sentimental retrospect, [ … ] seems to me to be as much of a model for readers as Russian writers were models for writers in other tongues” (11). Insofar as conditions of censorship schooled the Russian reader in the hermeneutic arts, there may be more to Nabokov’s statement than simple patriotism.

In his study of Aesopian language in Soviet literature, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Russian Literature (1984), Lev Loseff also points out the essential role of the reader under conditions of censorship. Through the decoding of Aesopian texts, the “shrewd reader” constructs herself as more intelligent than the censor (read: the government), whom Nabokov described as possessing “one outstanding virtue—a lack of brains” (1981:4). Although an unjust characterization of Russian censors in many cases—after all, the Russian poet Fedor Tiutchev was a censor for many years—Nabokov’s remark alludes to a point that Loseff develops more fully.⁷ The act of “besting the censor,” Loseff argues, functions not so much to relay information—for what “information” does a poem contain?—but rather, in more anthropological terms, as a kind of social ritual through which individuals, in this case, readers, are initiated into a select interpretive community (Loseff 1984:222–223). Similarly, Leo Strauss suggests that his classic study of censorship and philosophy, Persecution and the Art of Writing, be placed within the sociology of knowledge (1952:7). My approach in examining the Russian reading public during the Age of the Decembrists as an interpretive community that reproduced itself through the encoding and decoding of Aesopian language, covert allusions, and intertextual references in both original and translated tests is rather a foray into the sociology of group formation. More important, I would argue, than the subtlety and baroque style generated by productive censorship (Stavans 2005:19–20) are the alternative, and at times oppositional, interpretive communities generated by practices of encoding/decoding, which underscore the world-making potential of translated poetry in the Age of the Decembrists.

What binds these interpretive communities are the hermeneutic strategies and approaches they share. Studies of literary production under conditions of censorship suggest that readers develop particular hermeneutic strategies and approaches to produce unofficial readings. Two works, in particular, have contributed to our understanding of the particular hermeneutic practices that develop under conditions of censorship. One is Lev Loseff’s On the Beneficence of Censorship and the other is Annabel Peterson’s Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (1984). Loseff describes works written and read under conditions of censorship as characterized by the presence of what he calls screens and cues. The screens deflect the attention of the censor away from politically daring or oppositional meanings while the cues help the “shrewd reader” to construct those very meanings. Patterson, like Loseff, attempts to codify the “highly sophisticated system of oblique communication, of unwritten rules whereby writers could communicate with readers or audiences (among whom were the very same authorities who were responsible for state censorship) without producing a direct confrontation” (1984:53; italics added).

While Loseff discusses pseudo-translations as a kind of screen, neither he nor Patterson discusses the specific role of translated texts in these literary economies shaped by political censorship. This is somewhat surprising given that the double-voicedness of translated texts complicates the question of authorial responsibility for the text, offering some degree of protection. In this way, we could say that the status of a text as a translation is itself a kind of screen. This is something Efim Etkind implied when he noted that many Soviet writers exploited translation work in order to express their own aesthetic and moral concerns: “During a certain period, particularly between the 19th and 20th [Party] Congresses, Russian poets were deprived of the possibility of expressing themselves to the full in original writing and spoke to the reader in the language of Goethe, Oberliani, Shakespeare, and Hugo” (Etkind 1978:32)—in other words, through their translations.⁸ And so, I will attempt below to adapt Loseff’s and Patterson’s very useful descriptive categories to the reading of translated literature in early nineteenth-century Russia to show how the study of translated texts not only confirms their descriptive models but also expands them.

Patterson describes four elements as central to the system of oblique communication that developed in early modern England. First, she notes the role of timing, that is, “the importance of an exact chronology to determine what any given text was likely to mean to its audience at the time of its appearance” (1984:55). Consider the case of Pushkin’s review of the memoirs of the notorious French police informer Vidocq, which functioned as a covert attack on the contemporary Russian publisher and censor Faddey Bulgarin. As Sydney Monas describes it, “Vidocq and Bulgarin were so successfully equated that a Petersburg bookseller offered a portrait of Bulgarin for sale over the title ‘M. Vidocq.’ Before the police could interfere, his entire stock was sold out” (Monas 1961:211).

One can relate the element of timing to the hermeneutic strategy of drawing historical parallels between a literary work and contemporary events. Having grown up “amid the phantasmagorial stage set of Petersburg classicism, where the emperor played Augustus, and where one’s very sense of self and gentlemanly status depended on one’s participation in a system of signs that was deliberately foreign” (Greenleaf 1998:54), the Russian reading public of the time was, one might say, schooled in the art of historical parallelism by the regime itself. Alexander I, who quite consciously cultivated parallels with Augustus and the Roman Golden Age, unwittingly handed the educated Russians of his day a two-edged sword. During the hopeful, liberal years of his early reign, historical parallels with the ancient world seemed to work in Alexander’s favor. In the more repressive years following the Napoleonic Wars, however, it provided Russians with the tools necessary to interpret this shift in less favorable historical terms: Julius the Senator becomes Julius Caeser, the tyrant. Lotman notes that Aleksandr Pushkin’s exclamation “Here is Caesar—so where is Brutus” “was easily deciphered as the program for a future act” (Lotman 1984:88). Kondraty Ryleev, who would become a leader of the Decembrists, was known as the Brutus of the Decembrist movement, and in his short story “The Dagger,” Pushkin celebrates the great assassins of history: Brutus, Marat, Charlotte Corday, and Karl Ludwig Sand (Leighton 1994:15, 20).

The role of timing is evident, too, in Mikhail Mikhailov’s (1829–1865) decision to translate Schiller’s drama Love and Intrigue, which featured a scene in which 7,000 German peasants are sold into the US army—those who objected were shot. As Mikhailov’s Soviet biographer comments, “This scene had special significance for the translator who was filled with indignation against the selling of Russian peasants into the army. This scene tied the entire tragedy to Russian reality” (Fateev 1969:182).

Second, Patterson suggests that “provocation is given, or signification promoted, by some kind of a signal in the text itself” (Patterson 1984:55). This is what Loseff refers to as a “cue.” Key words or references to key figures or places, such as Byron or Greece, were popular political cues in the Age of the Decembrists. As early as the late eighteenth century, US abolitionist literature functioned as a covert way to address—in a public forum—the problem of serfdom in Russia. The politically progressive publicist and translator Mikhail Mikhailov’s translations of Longfellow’s antislavery poems are exemplary in this regard. It is very likely that Mikhailov’s decision to translate the title of Longfellow’s antislavery cycle Songs on Slavery as Songs of the Negros [Pesni negrov] was a way to deflect the censor’s attention from a reading that would implicate the Russian institution of serfdom while making the text available to like-minded progressives. This particular signal, or set of signals, can be traced back to the first Russian translations of Auguste Von Kotzebue’s drama The Negro Slaves.⁹

Critical literature, including introductions, notes, and reviews about literary works and translations, also contained the necessary signals to prompt a subversive reading of a literary work. As General Beckendorff, the head of the Ministry of Police, commented to Count Lieven, the head of the Interior Ministry, which was then in charge of censorship, regarding an article by the literary critic Ivan Kireevsky, “The Nineteenth Century”: “One has only to apply a certain amount of attention to perceive that the author, discussing literature as it were, has something quite different in mind: that by the word enlightenment he means liberty, that the mind’s activity means for him revolution, and the skillfully contrived middle ground nothing if not a constitution” (quoted in Monas 1961:154). Discussion of literature—domestic and foreign, in translation and in the original—came to serve “as a vehicle for social and moral criticism” (166), especially when works by a foreign author were banned but works about that author were not. And so, while advocating for socialism outright could endanger a critic, doing so by praising the works of George Sand or the natural school of Gogol was easily done (194). Indeed, critics often worked hand in hand with writers and translators to encourage, or signal, subversive readings. This was the case with Mikhailov’s popular translations of the works of the German poet Heinrich Heine. In order to avoid censorship, Mikhailov made sure to dilute his selection of Heine’s more politically charged verses by including a good number of his early nature poems. Progressive critics, however, in their reviews of the volume drew the attention of their readers to the political poems, describing Heine not as a romantic but as a “negator,” without specifying exactly what he was negating (Fateev 1969:175).

Another hermeneutic signal or cue, which is, perhaps, unique to literary translation, is repetition. (A parallel phenomenon among writers might be the repeated return to a theme.) When translators pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Born in Translation
• 1. Reading Between, Reading Among: Poet-Translators in the Age of the Decembrists
• 2. The Translator as Forger: (Mis)Translating Empire in Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time and Roziner’s A Certain Finkelmeyer
• 3. The Boy Who Cried “Volk”!: (Mis)Translating the Nation in Dostoevsky’s “Peasant Marei” and Iskander’s “Pshada”
• 4. Refiguring Translation: Translator-Heroines in Russian Women’s Writing
• 5. Imitatio: Translation and the Making of Soviet Subjects
• 6. Reading Wilde in Moscow, or Le plus ça change: Translations of Western Gay Literature in Post-Soviet Russia
• 7. Unpacking Daniel Stein: Where Post-Soviet Meets Postmodern
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint