Translating queer texts in Soviet Russia

Abstract

This article contributes to recent scholarship on censorship and translation by exploring the phenomenon of productive censorship, or the artful evasion of censorship restrictions by authors and their readers, in the context of Soviet Russia. Specifically, the work of three homosexual-identified literary translators – Mikhail Kuzmin, Ivan Likhachev and Gennadii Shmakov – is examined in order to demonstrate how, under conditions of institutionalized homophobia, they were able to circulate translations of texts that were open to queer interpretations. Queer readings of works by such authors as William Shakespeare, Charles Baudelaire, Constantine Cavafy and James Baldwin were enabled by a variety of factors including biographical information about the source text author, sub-cultural interpretive traditions, and access to alternative interpretations, often from abroad. One effect of successful evasion of this kind is to establish alternative interpretive communities within the official literary culture.