Translation, imperialism, and national self-definition in Russia

Public Culture

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 49-73

  Wachtel, Andrew ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0033406464     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-11-1-49     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. In both cases, by the way, the feelings were exaggerated. Russia was not nearly as militarily powerful as Russians thought, although this was not generally recognized until the humiliating defeat in the Crimean War of 1853-55. Nor was her cultural production as negligible as many Russians feared - after all, by the 1830s Russian literature had already produced Pushkin and Gogol, and in music Mikhail Glinka. What counts, however, is contemporary perception, for it is from these attitudes that national images are formed.
2. Classic treatments of the clash between Westernizers and Slavophiles include Isaiah Berlin, "A Remarkable Decade," in Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 114-209 (the essay dates from 1955, however), and Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). More recent work that places this conflict in the context of Russian national definition includes Liah Greenteld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 189-274: Andrew Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); and Amy C. Singleton. No Place Like Home: The Literary Artist and Russia's Search for Cultural Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
3. Classic treatments of the clash between Westernizers and Slavophiles include Isaiah Berlin, "A Remarkable Decade," in Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 114-209 (the essay dates from 1955, however), and Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). More recent work that places this conflict in the context of Russian national definition includes Liah Greenteld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 189-274: Andrew Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); and Amy C. Singleton. No Place Like Home: The Literary Artist and Russia's Search for Cultural Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
4. Classic treatments of the clash between Westernizers and Slavophiles include Isaiah Berlin, "A Remarkable Decade," in Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 114-209 (the essay dates from 1955, however), and Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). More recent work that places this conflict in the context of Russian national definition includes Liah Greenteld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 189-274: Andrew Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); and Amy C. Singleton. No Place Like Home: The Literary Artist and Russia's Search for Cultural Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
5. Classic treatments of the clash between Westernizers and Slavophiles include Isaiah Berlin, "A Remarkable Decade," in Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 114-209 (the essay dates from 1955, however), and Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). More recent work that places this conflict in the context of Russian national definition includes Liah Greenteld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 189-274: Andrew Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); and Amy C. Singleton. No Place Like Home: The Literary Artist and Russia's Search for Cultural Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
6. Classic treatments of the clash between Westernizers and Slavophiles include Isaiah Berlin, "A Remarkable Decade," in Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 114-209 (the essay dates from 1955, however), and Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). More recent work that places this conflict in the context of Russian national definition includes Liah Greenteld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 189-274: Andrew Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); and Amy C. Singleton. No Place Like Home: The Literary Artist and Russia's Search for Cultural Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
7. This similarity, by the way, helps to explain the fact that many Slavophiles started out as Westernizers, and vice versa.
8. According to Greenfeld's analysis, after an initial period of optimism, cultured Russians came to recognize "their absolute impotence in the competition with the West" by the late eighteenth century. At the same time, "unable to tear themselves away from the West, to eradicate, to efface its image from their consciousness, and having nothing to oppose to it, they defined it as the anti-model and built an ideal image ol Russia in direct opposition to it. Russia was still measured by the same standards as the West (for it defined Western values as universal), but it was much better than the West. For every Western vice it had a virtue, and for what appeared as a virtue in the West, it had a virtue in reality" (Nationalism, 254-55).
9. For the classic study of this ideological formation, see Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicolas I and Official Nationality in Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959).
10. Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, 124.
11. For good examples of analyses of this kind, see Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).
12. For good examples of analyses of this kind, see Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).
13. The attitude can be best seen, perhaps, in Thomas Babington Macaulay's flippant comment that "a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia." Quoted in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 86.
14. André Lefevere, Translating Literature (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992), 119.
15. In the Soviet period, of course, there were times when certain writers, notably Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, and Joseph Brodsky, were allowed to publish only translations and did so in order to survive. Although such cases are famous, they mark the exception rather than the rule, particularly because, at least in the case of Pasternak, translation was clearly of central creative import for the poet as well.
16. Quoted in Frederick T. Griffiths and Stanley Rabinowitz, Novel Epics: Gogol, Dostoevsky and National Narrative (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 1.
17. This connection was explicit in the Muscovite period in the belief codified in the spurious genealogy provided by Metropolitan Makarius that "the rulers of Moscow were heirs of an imperial line that extended all the way back to the Emperor Augustus," Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribner's, 1974), 233.
18. In this context it is worth noting that a certain paradoxical combination of respect for the languages of other cultures with an inability to find any worth in the cultures themselves is characteristic of orthodox Christianity. As opposed to the Roman Catholic Church, which insisted until very recently that liturgy was to be in sacred languages (Latin, Greek, or Hebrew), the Eastern Orthodox branch generally tolerated the use of the local language. When the Russian church itself became a missionary church, this same practice was followed. Thus, for example, St. Stephen, who converted the Permians (a Finnic tribe), is praised in his vita as "writer of books" and "the creator of Permian letters" (Serge Zenkovsky, Medieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles, and Tales [New York: Dutton, 1963], 208), although there was no question of those "letters" being put to use to preserve or advance Permian culture itself.
19. Mikhail Lomonosov, Rossiiskaia grammatika: Izbrannye proizvedeniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: 1986), 195. Translation mine. The work was written in 1754-55.
20. "Epistola o stikhotvorstve," in Russkaia poeziia 18ogo veka, ed. G. Makogonenko (Moscow: 1972), 173. Translation mine. The "Epistle" dates from 1747.
21. "Epistola o stikhotvorstve," in Russkaia poeziia 18ogo veka, ed. G. Makogonenko (Moscow: 1972), 173. Translation mine. The "Epistle" dates from 1747.
22. Quoted in Griffiths and Rabinowitz, Novel Epics, 7.
23. Nikolay V. Gogol, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, vol. 6, (Moscow: 1984), 193, 194. It is quite ironic, of course, that the translation Gogol praised so highly was done from a German translation of the Odyssey rather than from the Greek. But since Gogol himself was unacquainted with Greek, he was ill-equipped to perceive the irony.
24. See, for example, S. S. Averintsev, "Razmyshleniia nad perevodami Zhukovskogo," in Zhukovskii i literatura kontsa XVIII-XIX veka, ed. V. Iu. Troitskii (Moscow, 1988), 255-74.
25. Quoted in Katya Hokanson, "Literary Imperialism, Narodnost' and Pushkin's Invention of the Caucasus," Russian Review 53 (1994), 34.
26. In his youth, Pushkin was called "the African" by his school chums. Later in life, he mentioned the fact of his African ancestry in his poetry and wrote (but never finished) a prose work entitled "The Blackamoor of Peter the Great" about his maternal great-grandmother.
27. Hokanson, "Literary Imperialism," 20, 21. It is worth mentioning that the desire expressed by Gogol to identify a national poet whose work would somehow stand for the entire country's spiritual strivings was a typical one for European romantic culture. It was precisely in this period that one finds the creation of the cult of Shakespeare in England and of Goethe in Germany. Less-developed countries tended, in this as in other areas, to follow suit; thus, the 1840s and 1850s saw the apotheosis of Mickiewicz in Poland, Petöffi in Hungary, and Njegoš; in Serbia. Only in Russia, however, was the national poet praised for his ability not to epitomize but to transcend his native culture.
28. Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 33.
29. "Utopicheskoe ponimanie istorii," Diary of a Writer, June, 1876 (F. M. Dostoyevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, vol. 23 [Leningrad: 1972-1990], 47). Translations are mine.
30. "Utopicheskoe ponimanie istorii," Diary of a Writer, June, 1876 (F. M. Dostoyevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, vol. 23 [Leningrad: 1972-1990], 47). Translations are mine.
31. See, for example, the following quote from the August 1880 Diary: "The fourth estate is coming, it is knocking and banging on the door, and if the door is not opened, it will break it down. It does not want the former ideals and rejects all previously existing law. It will not make compromises or concessions and buttresses will not save the building. Concessions only make them more fired up and they want everything. Something is coming that no one can imagine. All their parliamentarism, all the governmental theories now professed, all the riches that have been accumulated, the banks, science, the yids - all of this will crash irreversibly in a moment." (Dostoyevsky, "Dve polovinki," 167-68).
32. Quoted in Hokanson, "Literary Imperialism," 23-24.
33. See, for example, Katya Elizabeth Hokanson, "Empire of the Imagination: Orientalism and the Construction of Russian National Identity in Pushkin, Marlinskii, Lermontov, and Tolstoi" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1994).
34. Gogol, Sobranie, 200.
35. It is curious that Gogol's metaphorical appeal to the existence of an idyllic national childhood appears before any expression of a Russian ideology of actual childhood. When the Russian view of childhood crystallized, however, it agreed exactly with Gogol's version. Andrew Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford, Calif,: Stanford University Press, 1990) provides more details.
36. Dostoyevsky, "Nechto o Peterburgskom Baden-Badenstve," Diary of a Writer, July-August, 1876 (vol. 23, 58).
37. For the best short treatment of this subject, see George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 207-15. See also Marina Yaguello, Lunatic Lovers of Language: Imaginary Languages and Their Inventors, trans. Catherine Slater (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991), 15-22.
38. For the best short treatment of this subject, see George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 207-15. See also Marina Yaguello, Lunatic Lovers of Language: Imaginary Languages and Their Inventors, trans. Catherine Slater (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991), 15-22.
39. Velimir Khlebnikov, "To the Artists of the World!" in The King of Time, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 146.
40. Khlebnikov, King of Time, 147.
41. Khlebnikov, King of Time, 149.
42. In this area Khlebnikov's utopian projeet overlaps with that of the Russian composer and mystic Seriabin, who attempted to create an instrument to link musical sounds with appropriate colors, Khlebnikov was enamored of Scriabin.
43. The Russian text for this section of the manifesto is cited from Khlebnikov. Tvoreniia (Moscow: 1991), 623. The English translation is mine.
44. Nikolai Trubetskoy, The Legacy of Genghis Khan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 221.
45. Aleksandr Blok, The Twelve and Other Poems, trans. Jon Stallworthy and Peter France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 161-62.
46. Osip Mandelshtam, "On the Nature of the Word," in The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979), 125.
47. Joseph Stalin, Works, vol. 4 (Moscow: 1953), 168.
48. According to the American scholar Lauren G. Leighton: "Translations outnumber original works in Soviet publishing. . . . According to official statistics cited by Antokolsky in a speech on Soviet translation, 44.6% of all books produced in 1953 [a fairly xenophobic year, it might be added] were translations of foreign fiction. . . . A. Leytes once surveyed the leading journal Novyi mir (New World) for the year 1953 and found that its issues contained twenty-five original poems and forty-nine poems translated from eighteen languages" (Two Worlds, One Art [Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991], 17-18).
49. Even though the idea of permanent revolution was later denounced in favor of the concept of "a revolution in one country," the belief that the whole world would eventually follow Russia's path to Communism was never abandoned. Nor could it have been, because to have done so would have been to abandon the basic historical belief of Marxism - that all societies must inevitably pass through the same stages on the way to Communism, the final and most perfect one.
50. Quoted in Russkie pisateli o perevode, ed. Iu. Levin and A. Fedorov (Leningrad: 1960), 588. As Leighton puts it: "Gorky's World Literature belongs among the most ambitious Soviet Great Projects. The goal of the newly founded Soviet school was the translation of all world literature - every world classic in all languages of all times, peoples and cultures" (Two Worlds, 7).
51. Quoted in Russkie pisateli o perevode, ed. Iu. Levin and A. Fedorov (Leningrad: 1960), 588. As Leighton puts it: "Gorky's World Literature belongs among the most ambitious Soviet Great Projects. The goal of the newly founded Soviet school was the translation of all world literature - every world classic in all languages of all times, peoples and cultures" (Two Worlds, 7).
52. Ironically enough, although the ostensible purpose of translation was propagandistic, at certain periods translated literature was the one area in which Russians could avoid reading socialist realism. Thus, for example, the translation of J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959) opened the door for an entire generation of Russian experimental writers in the early 1960s.
53. The Soviet Linguistic Controversy, trans. John V. Murra, Robert M. Hankin, and Fred Holling (New York: King's Crown Press, 1951), 7.
54. Quoted in Leighton, Two Worlds, 19.
55. Dmitry Shostakovich, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, ed. Solomon Volkov, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Harper and Row, 1979). This book itself, by the way, may be a similar type of mystification, for it is uncertain that Volkov ever really interviewed Shostakovich for it. However, like many of the other anecdotes in the book, the story about Dzhambul appears to be true even if Shostakovich never told it.
56. Quoted in Yaguello, Lunatic Lovers, 176.
57. Yaguello, Lunatic Lovers, 70.
58. Yaguello, Lunatic Lovers, 79.
59. See, for example, the collection entitled Tvorchestvo narodov SSSR (Moscow: 1937) that includes Russian versions of poems dedicated to the "Stalin Constitution" translated from Armenian, Lezgian, Georgian, Kazakh, Farsi, Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Uzbek. Also included in the same volume are excerpts from Kazakh, Kirgiz, Kalmyk, and Kurdish epics.
60. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 46.