Russomania: British Modernism and the Translation of Russian Culture

这项研究全面描述了英国人对俄罗斯和苏联文化的迷恋的广度和深度，追溯了从19世纪80年代到20世纪40年代它对英国文学和知识分子生活的变革影响。考虑一段漫长的现代主义时期，一方面可以追踪俄罗斯文化在维多利亚时代晚期关于英国文学未来的辩论中的地位，另一方面可以追踪英国人对苏联现实主义和反现代主义的反应--以及考虑当时政治变化的影响。尽管在过去的50年里，人们对这个主题的关注令人惊讶地很少，但在我们现在所说的现代主义研究的早期阶段，对英国作家与俄罗斯文学接触的研究对理解20世纪早期文学的发展做出了重要贡献：海伦·穆奇尼克的陀思妥耶夫斯基的英国声誉，1881-1936(1939)、吉尔伯特·菲尔普斯的《英国小说中的俄罗斯小说》(1956)和唐纳德·戴维斯的《俄罗斯文学与现代英语小说集》(1965)都主张俄罗斯文学对英国现代主义，特别是对现代主义小说的中心地位。但这些描述受到了限制，因为他们致力于一种完全具有作者影响力的文学模式。这项研究认为，俄罗斯文化最重要的影响不在于文体的借用，而在于塑造现代主义文学实验的决定性问题：语言与行动的关系(抽象与具体)，作者与受众的关系(个人与大众)，以及文学作品与生活经验的关系(现实主义的本质)。这些问题不能从狭隘的文学框架中理解，也不能用作者影响的二元被动模式来理解。相反，这个项目的方法来自对翻译的研究，被理解为一种将社会和政治联系和影响记录在翻译文本中的“文化政治实践”(Venuti，1993)。翻译是权力关系的纽带，这一定义不仅为分析本研究所涉及的文学翻译提供了工具，也为分析更广泛的文化交流提供了工具。因此，俄罗斯文化从其各种源语文本翻译成英国文化的目的语被认为是一个动态的事件，从中可以读到20世纪早期文化政治的叙事。虽然该项目的重点是英国的翻译、传播和接受过程，但与俄罗斯来源及其俄罗斯接受的比较是论点不可或缺的一部分。通过提供俄罗斯和英国之间文化交流的动态历史，该项目有助于目前人们对两国关系日益增长的兴趣。

This research provides a comprehensive account of the breadth and depth of the British fascination with Russian and Soviet culture, tracing its transformative effect on literary and intellectual life in Britain from the 1880s to the 1940s. Consideration of a 'long modernist' period makes it possible to track the place of Russian culture in, on the one hand, late Victorian debates about the future of English literature, and on the other, British responses to Soviet realism and anti-modernism-as well as to consider the impact of the political changes of those years.Although there has been surprisingly little attention to this subject in the last fifty years, in the early phase of what we would now call modernist studies, research into British writers' engagement with Russian literature made an important contribution to the understanding of early twentieth-century literary developments: Helen Muchnic's Dostoevsky's English Reputation, 1881-1936 (1939), Gilbert Phelps's The Russian Novel in English Fiction (1956), and Donald Davie's collection, Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction (1965) all argued for the centrality of Russian literature to British modernism, especially to the modernist novel. But these accounts were limited by their commitment to an exclusively literary model of authorial influence. This study argues that the most significant impact of Russian culture is not to be found in stylistic borrowings, but in shaping the defining questions of the modernist literary experiment: the relation between language and action (abstraction vs. the concrete), the relation between writer and audience (individual vs. mass), and the relation between the literary work and lived experience (the nature of realism).These questions cannot be understood in a narrowly literary frame, nor by using the binary and passive model of authorial influence. Instead, this project derives its methodology from studies of translation, understood as a 'cultural political practice' that inscribes social and political affiliations and effects in the translated text (Venuti,1993). This definition of translation as a nexus of power relations provides a tool with which to analyse not only the literary translations with which this study is concerned, but also the broader cultural exchange. Thus, the translation of Russian culture from its variety of source texts into the target language of British culture is conceived as a dynamic event, from which a narrative of early twentieth-century cultural politics can be read. Although the emphasis of the project is on the process of translation, dissemination and reception in Britain, comparison with Russian sources and their Russian reception is integral to the argument. In providing a history of the dynamics of cultural exchange between Russia and Britain, this project contributes to the current increased interest in the relationship between the two countries.