Russomania: British Modernism and the Translation of Russian Culture

这项研究提供了英国人对俄罗斯和苏联文化着迷的广度和深度的全面描述，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。考虑到“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晚期关于英国文学未来的辩论中的地位，另一方面，英国对苏联现实主义和反现代主义的反应，以及考虑那些年政治变革的影响。尽管在过去的50年里，在我们现在称之为现代主义研究的早期阶段，对这个主题的关注少得惊人，但对英国作家与俄罗斯文学的接触的研究，对理解20世纪早期的文学发展做出了重要贡献：海伦·穆奇奇的《陀思妥耶夫斯基的英国声望，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·戴维的《俄罗斯文学与现代英国小说》（1965）都认为，俄罗斯文学对英国现代主义，特别是对现代主义小说具有中心作用。但这些描述受到了局限，因为它们只致力于文学模式的作者影响力。本研究认为，俄罗斯文化最重要的影响不在于风格上的借鉴，而在于塑造现代主义文学实验的决定性问题：语言与行动之间的关系（抽象与具体），作家与观众之间的关系（个人与大众），以及文学作品与生活经验之间的关系（现实主义的本质）。这些问题不能在狭隘的文学框架中理解，也不能用作者影响的二元和被动模型来理解。相反，该项目从翻译研究中获得其方法论，被理解为一种“文化政治实践”，将社会和政治关系及其影响铭印在译文中（Venuti,1993）。将翻译定义为权力关系的纽带，不仅为分析本研究所关注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文本翻译成英国文化的目标语言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述。虽然该项目的重点是在英国的翻译，传播和接受的过程，比较俄罗斯的来源和他们的俄罗斯接受是不可或缺的论点。该项目提供了俄罗斯和英国之间文化交流的动态历史，有助于当前对两国关系的兴趣增加。

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.