A Russian lesson for the twenty-first century

Abstract

Abstract In 2019, Yuval Harari, an Israeli historian and bestselling author, appeared in the center of a media debate provoked by the discovery of considerable differences between the English text of his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century and its Russian translation. A comparative study of the English and Russian texts of the book featured in this paper revealed five major issues which turned out to be sensitive for the Russian censorship, namely, homosexuality, liberalism, U.S.S.R.–U.S. “tug-of-war,” Putin and Putin’s Russia, and Putin’s aggression against Ukraine and Georgia. It is in the presentation of these topics that Yuval Harari’s English text suffered essential transformation and reduction in the Russian edition. The conducted analysis contributes to the long-lived debate about the author’s and the translator’s responsibility before their readers, and the boundaries, beyond which mutilation of the source text no longer allows regarding the resulting text as a translation. The author argues that the escalating information wars targeted at people’s minds in the twenty-first century impose ever-increasing requirements to authors and translators of such books as Yuval Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century in terms of intellectual integrity and professional ethics.