К истории сборника «Грузинские романтики» (1940)

Abstract

The paper reconstructs the history of the publication of the collection of poems “Georgian Romanticists” (1940) published by Yu.N. Tynyanov, N.S. Tikhonov, M.L. Lozinsky using memoirs, letters of the translators and archival materials. Also, the creation of the myth of Georgian Romanticism is traced, as being apart from the literary reality, which was in no way connected with the European Romanticism, but corresponding to its specific Russian version. Particular attention is paid to the role of B.L. Pasternak who, refusing to participate in this collection, familiarized the Russian reader with Georgian poetry by creating his own alternative “canon” of Georgian lyricists and took key positions in this field. By using materials of the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (1934) and the First All-Union Conference of Translators (1936), which secured Pasternak’s fame as the “number one” translator of Georgian poetry and approved his principles of poetic translation which ignored the form of the original, the author outlines the context in which the collection “Georgian Romanticists”, entirely based on the theoretical foundations formulated by M. L. Lozinsky, looked as a manifesto of “accurate” translation, as a collective declaration of the translators that directly opposed the officially adopted translation strategy.