The “Americanization” of Russian life and literature through translations of Hemingway’s works

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Burak
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Significant Extent ◽  
Male Population ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
Soviet School ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Literature ◽  
Style Of Writing ◽  
The Way

The article analyzes the reasons for Hemingway’s powerful impact on the Soviet culture from the 1930s through the early 1980s. I suggest that this influence was created not so much by Hemingway himself as by the way his works were translated and presented to the readers in the Soviet Union. In particular, the article examines the style of translation employed by a cohesive collective of Russian-Soviet translators (the Kashkíntsy) in their translations of Hemingway’s works that came to be identified with the “Soviet school of translation.” The translators used a distinctive set of linguostylistic means consisting, to a significant extent, in enhancing the expressive properties of the Hemingway originals in their Russian translations. The resultant translated texts not only affected the behavior of a significant part of especially the male population of the Soviet Union but also set the stage for establishing a distinctive “American style” of writing within the mainstream Soviet literature. In other words, the Soviet translators collectively invented Hemingway’s style that made their translated texts sparkle in Russian.

scholarly journals Doffing "Mankurt's Cap": Chingiz Aitmatov's The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years and the Turkic National Heritage

1987 ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Joseph P. Mozur
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
National Heritage ◽  
Soviet Literature ◽  
The Way

The appearance of Chingiz Aitmatov's I dol' she veka dl itsia den' (The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years) in December 1980 created a major literary sensation in Moscow. There was something in the novel for everyone, and reviews in the Soviet Union. the Western press. and in emigre periodicals were overwhelmingly positive. Soviet critics especially welcomed the novel for its timely appearance after a serious discussion about the crisis of the genre "novel" in contemporary Soviet letters. As such Aitmatov's novel was singled out as the work pointing the way Soviet literature should go in the 1980s.

Exporting Soviet Culture: The Case of Agitprop Theater

Slavic Review ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 324-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Mally
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
New Methods ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Global Influence

In this article Lynn Mally examines the efforts of a Comintern affiliate called MORT (Mezhdunarodnoe ob“edinenie revoliutsionnykh teatrov) to export models of Soviet theatrical performance outside the Soviet Union. Beginning with the first Five-Year Plan, MORT was initially very successful in promoting Soviet agitprop techniques abroad. But once agitprop methods fell into disgrace in the Soviet Union, MORT abruptly changed its tactics. It suddenly encouraged leftist theater groups to move toward the new methods of socialist realism. Nonetheless, many leftist theater circles continued to produce agitprop works, as shown by performances at the Moscow Olympiad for Revolutionary Theater in 1933. The unusual tenacity of this theatrical form offers an opportunity to question the global influence of the Soviet cultural policies promoted by the Comintern. From 1932 until 1935, many foreign theater groups ignored MORT's cultural directives. Once the Popular Front began, national communist parties saw artistic work as an important tool for building alliances outside the working class. This decisive shift in political strategy finally undermined the ethos and methods of agitprop theater.

The Voices of Samizdat and Magnitizdat

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Komaromi
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Audio Tape ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
Presence And Absence ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Gulag Archipelago ◽  
The Way

This chapter treats “samizdat” (self-publishing) and “magnitizdat” (audio tape self-publishing) in the late Soviet Union via the concept of the “voice.” Komaromi discusses a select set of examples including guitar poetry; Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Evgeniia Ginzburg’s camp memoirs; poetry at Maiakovskii Square; and the texts of Leningrad second culture. These examples facilitate exploration of the way samizdat and magnitizdat related to official culture, even as they expanded the range of late Soviet culture far beyond what was allowed in print. They also make it possible to analyze the way samizdat and magnitizdat voices mediated between silence and speech, matter and spirit, presence and absence, and the individual and the collective, creating new ways for Soviet citizens to express themselves and be heard by one another.

The Transfiguring of Context in the Work of Abram Terts

Slavic Review ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 965-977
Author(s):  
Beth Holmgren
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Knife Edge ◽  
Literary Achievement ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Literature ◽  
Alter Ego

In particular, I am very interested in the problem of prose, prose as space.Andrei SiniavskiiIn 1974, soon after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, the literary scholar Andrei Siniavskii once again deferred to his created alter ego, the writer Abram Terts, to pass provocative judgment on the Soviet literary scene. The essay ascribed to Terts, “Literaturnyi protsess v Rossii,” reviews unofficial Soviet literature to highlight its artistic (rather than moral) appeal. As Terts reads it, the punitive context of this literature—established by Stalin and enforced to a less rigorous extent through the Leonid Brezhnev era—inadvertently guaranteed art and the fate of the artist richness and power: At this moment the fate of the Russian writer has become the most intriguing, the most fruitful literary topic in the whole world; he is either being imprisoned, pilloried, internally exiled, or simply kicked out. The writer nowadays is walking a knife-edge; but unlike the old days, when writers were simply eliminated one after another, he now derives pleasure and moral satisfaction from this curious pastime. The writer is now someone to be reckoned with. And all the attempts to make him see reason, to terrorize or crush him, to corrupt or liquidate him, only raise his literary achievement to higher and higher levels.

Chinese Criticism of Humanism: Campaigns Against the Intellectuals 1964–1965

1966 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 68-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. W. Fokkema
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Party Leader ◽  
Western World ◽  
Old Russian ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Humanistic Spirit ◽  
Soviet Literature ◽  
Story Writing ◽  
Communist Countries

During the heyday of the Hundred Flowers period the Chinese literary rebels sought their models outside China. They understood that, if liberalisation were to have any chance at all, it should reach China via the communist countries and not via the Western world. Therefore many Chinese writers studied Soviet literature, and made no secret of their admiration for those Soviet writers who had presented unorthodox views, or views that, though correct in the Soviet Union, seemed to be unorthodox in the Chinese context. Zoshchenko, Ehrenburg, Galina Nikolayeva, Ovechkin and Simonov were admired by the very Chinese writers who were later labelled as major “rightists,” such as Liu Pin-yen, Ch'in Chao-yang and Huang Ch'iu-yün. Several liberal Chinese writers also readily adopted the Soviet habit of extolling the Russian classics as literary models. Thus, in 1956, during the Chinese commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Dostoyevsky's death, one Chinese critic spoke of “humanism” (jen-tao-chu-i) as one of Dostoyevsky's contributions. Feng Hsüeh-feng praised the humanistic spirit of the old Russian literature and criticised contemporary Chinese works as untruthful. Hsiao Ch'ien, another major “rightist,” in an essay on short story writing advocated the style of Chekhov and I. A. Bunin. One dogmatic Party leader, moreover, was criticised by the non-conformists for having a low opinion of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.

Traveling Policies: Hijacked in Central Asia

2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iveta Silova
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
Local Policy ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Way

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Central Asian education reform discourses have become increasingly similar to distinctive Western policy discourses traveling globally across national boundaries. Tracing the trajectory of ‘traveling policies' in Central Asia, this article discusses the way Western education discourses have been hybridized in the encounter with collectivist and centralist cultures within post-socialist environments in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. In the context of international aid relationships, the article considers different motivations and driving forces for reforms, the way pre-Soviet and Soviet traditions are affirmed within the reforms, as well as how these reforms speak back to Western reform agenda. Emphasizing the historical legacy of Soviet centralist traditions, this article reveals how traveling policies have been ‘hijacked’ by local policy makers and used for their own purposes nationally.

Empire and Ethnicity

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Geraci
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Territorial Integration ◽  
The Way

Drawing on a lively recent historiography stimulated by the fall of the Soviet Union, this chapter considers various ways in which Russia/USSR can be regarded as an empire and goes on to explore the relationships between Russians and the myriad other ethnic groups within the Empire’s borders. After showing how those borders expanded and contracted between 1552 and 1991, the chapter discusses the resultant territorial integration and demographic intermingling. The bulk of the chapter concentrates on four fundamental shifts that changed the way Russia’s rulers and elites viewed the Empire’s diversity and rationalized imperial rule between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Arguing that authorities viewed the Empire and its population through four successive ideological lenses—Christian, civilizational, nationalist and Marxist—the chapter concludes by suggesting that the post-Soviet Russian Federation remains an empire, or at least that its imperial legacy remains crucial to its identity.

scholarly journals Urban Societies in Europe since 1945: Toward a Historical Interpretation

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
MORITZ FÖLLMER ◽  
MARK B. SMITH
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Alternative Communities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Eastern And Western Europe ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
The Way

How can we write the history of urban societies in Europe after 1945? This article offers an interpretative overview of key developments in both Eastern and Western Europe, while also discussing some key conceptual issues. Along the way, it takes stock of the relevant historiography (much of which is very recent) and introduces a selection of papers from a cycle of three international workshops held between 2011 and 2013. The papers range geographically from Britain to the Soviet Union and cover topics as diverse as post-war reconstruction and alternative communities in the 1970s. Their respective approaches are informed by an interest in the way societies have been imagined in discourses and reshaped in spatial settings. Moreover, the papers move beyond case studies, urban history's classic genre, and can therefore facilitate synthetic reflection. It is our hope that, in so doing, we can make urban history more relevant to contemporary European historians in general.

What Faith the God-Contemporary? Chingiz Aitmatov's Plakha

Slavic Review ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-226
Author(s):  
Anthony Olcott
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
The West ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Soviet Literature

Chingiz Aitmatov has long been a powerful figure in Soviet literature, but few critics in the west or the Soviet Union have treated him as a serious writer. Many of the reasons why Aitmatov's reputation is not commensurate with his achievement are clear enough; the few westerners who have bothered with Aitmatov tend to agree that he offers "a somewhat new mix from the old patterns of Soviet literature with an admixture of Central Asian lore, but the game he is playing is as old as socialist realism itself.

scholarly journals Situation of Tatars and other Muslim minorities in communist Bulgaria

2021 ◽  
pp. 20-32
Author(s):  
Eldar Kh. Seidametov ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
The State ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The People ◽  
The Government ◽  
Muslim Minorities ◽  
The Way

The article examines the situation of the Tatars and other Muslim minorities in Bulgaria during the communist period. The policy of the state in relation to Muslim minorities after the proclamation of the People`s Republic of Bulgaria and the establishment of socialism in the state according to the Soviet model, when the political, economic and social models of the USSR were imported and introduced without taking into account the national characteristics of Bulgaria, are analyzed. As in the Soviet Union (especially in the early stage of its formation, religion was banned and this applied to all confessions without exception. The Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) made every effort eradicate religious identity and, in particular, Islamic identity. It was planned to replace the religious ideological fragment with a socialist one, and then, on its platform, form and stimulate the development of the national, modernist and Soviet identity of Muslims. Moreover, the emphasis was also placed on improving the way of life and the material situation of the Muslim population, which, according to the Marxist theory of culture, should have contributed to a more effective formation of socialist consciousness. The ruling party saw in the Muslim religious consciousness and rudiments of the Ottoman past, an obstacle on the way of socialist progress and formation of socialist consciousness. Emasculating elements of the religious worldview from the mind of people, the BCP set itself the task of creating a modern, secular, socialist personality. To this end, in 1946–1989 the government implemented a number of economic, educational and cultural establishments.

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