A View from the East: The Russian Reception of Under Western Eyes

Abstract

ACCORDING TO the influential Russian literary critic Dmitri Urnov, in the West Joseph Conrad has become an idol, a classic - a business, raw material [a] cridcal industry (1977: 6). In Russia, by contrast, Conrad's works are not among the classics, which often occupy a specially designated space in public libraries. Although all of his completed works have been translated and the Russian press acknowledged his work as early as 1896, only a year after his literary debut, his fiction not reprinted or republished as regularly in Russia as it in the West. Nor it studied on twentieth-century British literature courses, with the result that several generations of Russian university graduates have received degrees in English without having encountered his writings.Urnov suggests that Russian readers generally consider Conrad's fiction as literature for young people, as it describes adventures and the sea (1977: 3). Conrad not popular among Russian youth, however. The critic V. Kantor remembers that between the ages of ten and twelve, when he was reading and rereading books by Stevenson, Kipling, and London, his mentors gave him books by Conrad, assuring him that they were fascinating adventures about the sea. He would turn over the pages, try to read them, and put the books away. Kantor remembers that Conrad's fiction the sea, the storms and the typhoons, but we did not feel that adventurous principle that does not let you close the book until you have read the last page (33). In a work of fiction, a teenager looks active, energetic, fascinating action, but Conrad's unreal stories, Kantor maintains, are rather realistic, meticulously realistic. Conrad is compelled to describe and explain everything, explain how and why one circumstance results from another. In his youthful years, the critic concludes, he and other Russian young adults found such a manner of writing unsatisfactory.For the Russian reader, Conrad lost between the worlds of adolescence and adulthood. His political novels are overlooked, and his Russian novel, Under Western Eyes, has been almost completely ignored since 1925. However, larger issues than the sea have influenced the fate of Conrad's oeuvre in Russia, and this especially true of Under Western Eyes. Urnov, who wrote the only Russian monograph on Conrad from the perspective of a member of the Soviet critical establishment, would not have been able to identify Russian and Soviet censorship as the major barrier to a fuller appreciation of the writer's achievement.In Russia, the history of the canon one of censorship. A work of fiction can not become part of the canon if it prevented from being freely circulated, and Russian censorship has been the longest lasting and most comprehensive censorship of the twentieth century. Its origins can be traced back to Catherine the Great's concern about harmful foreign publications, such as Rousseau's Emile (1762), which resulted in a 1763 decree that called a stricter supervision of booksellers and forbade them from dealing in works against the law, good morals, Our Person, and the Russian nation which are forbidden in the whole world (Choldin 1985: 18). After the Pugachev Rebellion that shook the foundations of autocracy, the Empress ordered all private printing presses to be closed down and established censorship offices in Moscow and St Petersburg, as well as in the port cities of Riga and Odessa (Ibid. 19).Most of Conrad's works were written while Russia was operating under the cast iron introduced in 1826, which had a number of articles that restricted the circulation of foreign publications, and that was in effect, with minor changes, until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The statute was produced under Nicholas I, whose reign was marked by reactions to the 1825 Decembrist Uprising, the 1930 Polish Insurrection, and the 1848 revolutions in Europe; in response to growing political unrest, the authorities tightened censorship regulations. …