No abstract

In 2009 one of the largest Russian museums, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, joined with the Tate and the British Council to begin to organize a Russian exhibition of Blake’s works for the first time ever; it opened in November 2011. The British Council also suggested that a new translated edition of Songs of Innocence and of Experience should be published on the occasion. The Russian State Library for Foreign Literature partnered with the council to organize the workshop of translators and publish the book. The publication is unusual for Russia in that it is based on an earlier boxed small-format edition issued by the Folio Society (1992), later republished unboxed by Tate Publishing in 2006 and 2009. For the first time in Russia, this edition reproduces the illuminated prints of the Songs, and all translations are new, the result of a competition among members of the translation workshop. The translations judged most successful were included alongside the images, with introductions by Richard Holmes and Gregory Kruzhkov as well as critical commentary by Sasha Dugdale. The translations presented in the book represent a modern vision of Blake and successfully compete with a number of classical translations of Blake into Russian, such as those by S. Ya. Marshak, S. Stepanov, and others.

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of introducing Shakespeare into the reading canon of the Soviet Russia in 1930s. It also demonstrates the role of the new translations in this process. The authors explore the reasons for placing Shakespeare at the center of the canon: the approval of his work by Karl Marx, the Soviet appropriation of the highest achievements of world culture, the interpretation of Shakespeare as a Realist writer. The need for a new ‘Soviet Shakespeare’ led to the development of a concept of equirhythmic, “accurate” translation, invented by G. Shpet and A. Smirnov, the editors of the Academia publishing house. The implementation of this concept in the 1930s by A. Radlova, M. Lozinsky, and M. Kuzmin was protested by critics, especially K. Chukovsky; their translations were declared formalistic and were banned in later Soviet Union. In the new canon of the post-war ‘Soviet Shakespeare’ “creative” translations prevailed over “accurate” ones.

The article is devoted to a scantily explored aspect of the Russian reception of William Blake: the justification of the poet in Soviet criticism as a ‘revolutionary Romanticist’. The purpose of the article is to characterize strategies for understanding the heritage of William Blake by Soviet critics. Soviet Blake was officially ‘born’ in 1957 – after the World Peace Council’s decision on celebrations of the poet’s bicentennial. Blake, with a reputation tainted by the Symbolists, needed serious justification in Soviet literary criticism. The arguments for his justification were the revolutionary pathos of his poems, his democratic background and his humanism. It was important to emphasize Blake’s proximity to the working class. To introduce Blake into the literary field of Soviet criticism, it was necessary to justify his religiosity; the key to this justification was his humanism and the democracy of his faith. Blake’s prophetic poems were interpreted as the product of creative decline generated by the poet’s tragic social loneliness. Soviet criticism condemned Balmont’s translations and praised Marshak’s ones. Making Blake primarily a revolutionist, Soviet critics came to unexpected comments close to vulgar sociologism. In Soviet criticism, Blake was a missing link in the development of the ‘revolutionary’ chain of anti-tyrannical poetry. The author of the paper collects and classifies references to Blake in Soviet literary and artistic criticism, introduces some little-known facts of reception, classifies and generalizes the Soviet view of Blake as a ‘revolutionary Romanticist’, characterizes the genesis and content of this approach. The author applies the cultural-historical and comparative-historical methods as well as the principles of receptive aesthetics.

No abstract