Translation and the making of modern Russian literature

Abstract

Translation and making of modern Russian literature, by Brian James Baer, New York, NY, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, 224 pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 978-1628927986The birthplace of Russian poetry, according poet and religious philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev, was Vasilii Zhukovsky's 1802 of Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Thus opens Brian James Baer's incisive monograph on nearly 200 years of Russian and Soviet translation, drawing our attention graveyard as melancholy point of origin, and as fundamentally constitutive of Russian literary creativity - and by extension, identity - in context of Romantic cult of originality. Baer writes:Russia's belated entry into European cultural scene following Peter Great's policy of forced Westernization in early eighteenth century, which resulted in an intense accumulation of cultural capital - accomplished largely through translations and adaptations - occurred at precisely time when Romanticism was positing original genius as defining characteristic of literary texts - and of nations. (3)While imitative and synthetic nature of Russian culture sounds a familiar story, shifting lens focus on forces us, as Baer puts it in one cogent formulation, to rethink nature of identity itself in nonessentialist, fundamentally relational terms (15). His archly intelligent critical take makes a vital intervention at heart of Russian literary studies, undermining any illusions of a stable national canon and simultaneously calling into sharp question what it is that we talk about when we talk about Russian literature.Baer's accomplishments in Translation and Making of Modern Russian Literature are many. He moves with dexterity from discussions of respective strategies of nation versus empire, reading several works of Russian literature as staging essential incompatibility of two (9), questioning why seminars on nineteenth-century Russian culture fail make mention of Mikhail Mikhailov, whose translations of Heine and of US antislavery poetry played such an enormous role in political life of Russia in 1860s and in consolidation of radical left (14). Equally probing are his points about critical silence on generation of Russian women who wrote in French and on invisibility of (female) translators generally (see especially Chapter 4, Refiguring Translation, 87-113). The book even darts into twenty-first century with an astute analysis of popularity of - a white-washed and de-sexed - Oscar Wilde in post-Soviet Russia; and an equally sharp critique of Liudmila Ulitskaya's novel Daniel Stein, which was taken as a postmodern paean tolerance and inclusion by readers of English translation, but thinly disguises both homophobia and Russian essentialism in Russian original (19-20).If anything, main thesis argued in Translation and Making of Modern Russian Literature is convincing enough tempt readers expand it globally, especially given epigram by Tomas Venclova that the literature of most nations begins with translation (1) and nods World Literature via references David Damrosch, Emily Apter, and Pascale Casanova. …